Topic: Is POW systematically doomed to get a huge monster in its midst? - page 7. (Read 2674 times)

I think it would be useful to summarize and highlight our areas of disagreement.

1) Schelling point threshold for a SegWit rollback.

I take the position that this will not be reached if Core slowly solidifies towards immutability over time which remains a probable outcome. You have stated that you view reaching such a Schelling point as a risk not a guaranteed outcome so we may agree here.

2) Powerlessness of nation-states due to jurisdictional arbitrage.

I think your analysis overestimates the power of bitcoin and underestimates the resiliency of human error. The fiat system may be slapped down as you predict but that process will likely give rise to something much worse. Jurisdictional arbitrage offers only partial and incomplete protection.

I don't believe Bitcoin is going to be boldly slapping down anyone. Instead it will succeed by failing to die. Any person who is wealthy and has no fear of governments is taking an unwise position.

I highlighted how I believe this will play out here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.35427611

3) The definition of theft.

Failure to secure ones money or failure to anticipate a theft vector does not mean the taking is not a theft. If I leave a pile of money unguarded on my front porch it may indeed be stolen and I may have no recourse but my failure to secure it does not mean the taking would not be theft.

Theft is and will be the primary concern of the wealthy which is why they would never support a transition to a system grounded in theft when superior solutions/transitions are possible. To borrow your language the Schelling point for such a transition would never be reached as there are other lower energy Schelling points that would be hit first and transition the system.

Because it doesn't make sense that the entire lineage of transactions would be at risk if it contains a single SegWit transaction on it, no one would be safe from that at this point, unless you haven't touched your coins since august 2017. As a matter of fact, I looked at the chat logs in which the guy you mentioned hangs out and looked for SegWit stuff, I haven't seen any mentions of an address being at risk if the coins are sitting on a legacy format address whose private keys you control and said tx being matured by a reasonable number of blocks, even if it has a previous lineage of SegWit transactions:


Those are some big claims which would require further proof for me to believe. Where are you getting from that the Rothchilds have massive BTC stacks, exactly? And where are you getting from Core is Rothchilds funded? It's a valid theory but I don't see enough proof to confirm.

Translation:  Some hardline traditionalists are running some outdated code because groupthink.  Now they talk shit about hypothetical SegWit theft whilst further isolating themselves from the rest of the community because they're too butthurt to accept reality for what it is.  While it would be more fruitful to make constructive contributions, they instead opt to spit venom in the face of the wider community.  They can keep believing the rest of the world will come around to their way of thinking eventually, but if their prognostications of mass-theft were to come true, their delight would be short-lived when it transpired that their vast holdings suddenly lost a noticeably large proportion of its functionality and value.  What purchasing power do you think you'll have when no one wants to use Bitcoin anymore?

SegWit is optional, so feel free not to make use of it.  But don't wish upon it to lead to a major security breach unless you want this little cryptocurrency experiment of ours to end.  No one will take crypto seriously for the next 100 years if Bitcoin were to fail in such a spectacular fashion.  Your riches won't be much use to you when you're dead, so it seems pretty self-destructive to want to make them worthless while you're alive.  As I stated in the other thread, you can't simultaneously have Bitcoin as a global reserve currency and have SegWit balances being stolen, causing everyone to think the network is insecure.  That's a clear logical fallacy.  You can root for one outcome or the other.  Not both.

Why though? If you move coins from a SegWit address to a legacy address, those coins have already been spent. Any attempts to "harvest" anyone-can-spend transactions after they've been moved to a legacy address would result in an invalid transaction.

I would like if you can address my post here related to how fiat overlords can manipulate the market as will as long as:

1) The dollar is accepted in any market
2) Millions of people are under constant threat to accept the dollar to pay taxes
3) The dollar is backed by 1) 2) and an huge army

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/why-do-some-people-believe-that-only-the-nodes-miners-run-matter-4416188

My point is, they can fork Bitcoin and pump it above BTC's the fool the public into thinking their fork has more market confidence than BTC, and assuming BTC whales already sold BCash , they have no longer influence on BCash and therefore BCash could be pumped to any value for as long as fiat overlords can keep printing money at will and people accept it (change BCash with any other fork they would decide to support, but BCash seems the most relevant one)


In case SegWit actually gets destroyed, you would just need to be holding your keys on legacy addresses before it happens. Just move your coins to legacy addresses, wait a safe amount of blocks and you are set, so it's not that big of a deal in this regard, price wise it will probably be a disaster.

Going back to this, I believe even the smartest developers in Bitcoin does not have the correct solution to the problem. No one does. What you are posting are all your "theories", and how do we know that they will work in practice?

Plus there are some developers that "theorized" that low fees will centralize mining more because there will be less incentive to do it leaving mining to only a few.


In theory or in practice?

I will admit that I may not be as smart as most of the people who visit the forum. But if you think you are then how do you plan to fix it if the Bitcoin community were to ask and to depend on you?

Would having a "tail emission" like Monero help fix that problem? Not that it will happen in Bitcoin, just asking.

Plus I believe Bitcoin will anyway need to increase the blocksize in 10 years. That can also help in driving down the fees, right? There must be something.

What kind of attack are you talking about?

I know that SegWit addresses dont have a private equivalent. A SegWit address is based on a public address, but you cant recover the private equivalent from it. This gave me the impression this address is a third type of address in the same family (public, private and SegWit). Because of the lack of clarification from both the developers and the community, most of my stash is currently in standard adresses.

Are you saying there is a risk in keeping bitcoins in SegWit addresses? What kind of risk would that be?

Maybe I misunderstand your post, but LN does not settle on-chain every 10 minutes. Otherwise, what would be the point?

Making transactions on LN only requires 2 on-chain transactions: Opening the channel and closing the channel. Everything inbetween takes place off-chain, no matter whether the channel is upheld for 10 minutes, 10 days or 10 weeks. You might require additional on-chain transactions to "refill" your LN channel, but for the most part you don't need to hit the blockchain until the final settlement (ie. closing) transaction.



LN requires a transaction malleability fix, SegWit being one possible solution. LN is possible without SegWit as long as you implement an alternative transaction malleability fix.

I mean on-chain fees. With LN it's still settled on chain every 10 minutes, and if mainstream use goes up I can see filled blocks worth of LN transactions settling and no one complaining about fees. I see many cool LN applications coming in the future that will drive usage, simple stuff like this is an example:

https://satoshis.place/

That's a lot of money already on these pixels. Imagination is the limit with 0 fee instant transactions.

LN can work without SegWit, but it's sort of a crippled version. With LN you can also make passive income, kind of like "PoS for Bitcoin", so it's another reason for them to just let things develop and enjoy the free money. But still, in case something wrong happens, moving your SegWit addresses into legacy addresses (before it happens) should be enough.

Slightly OT, but seeing how you described the weaknesses of various alts rather well -- what hedges within crypto are left in an adversarial environment such as this? Or are you simply trying to spread your risk as widely as possible without having to resort to fiat?

Why did TPTB allow segwit at all if they don't like it? I assume that they could have stopped it, but trying to fit this in your theory... it was to:

1) Set an example: Attempts at modifying Bitcoin, even if through soft-forks, will not be tolerated.
2) To accumulate more BTC: By means of expropriation (the so called "segwit booty") and profiting through US government based futures (CME) shorts in the process.

They also think they can get away with it and pump it back to ATH even after such a disaster happening and regaining confidence on it being a global store of value. This is where we differ, as some pointed out, I think the damage would be too much. By 2019 there will be more segwit activity than legacy. It could end up being an inside job that ends up not being profitable. It may be more profitable to simply keep milking transaction fees through LN becoming mainstream (without segwit LN doesn't reach it's full potential), and assuming TPTB controls mining, their funds would be safe while still having the power of stealing coins at will if needed. In any case, we will find soon, since the longer it takes for them to execute that theoretical attack the bigger the disaster would be and therefore it may not even be worth it for them anymore, so these expecting it to happen may sell and lose their position as nothing happens and price keeps going higher (again, this is also assuming it happens around the time you are proposing, that's somewhere next year, and it cannot take longer than that).

@anunymint:

After looking through more of your past posts (both here and on Steemit / Medium) I think I now better understand your line of thinking.

While in my opinion some of your high-level conclusions are rather speculative leaps and while I doubt that the narratives you've been building necessarily reflect reality, I see now that there's more substance to your arguments than I initially expected. Going into detail about my points of disagreement would derail this thread and probably be a fruitless exercise for both of us, but I'll definitely keep a closer eye on your writings.

It's not clear to me that satoshi willingly set 1 MB as something that was part of a bigger plan involving a dead end which would force a settlement network to take place, I believe the official statement (that is, that he lowered the 32 MB limit to 1 MB to avoid spam, temporarily). This doesn't mean I buy into the "blocks-as-big-as-needed" approach by altcoin scammers, neither im saying we need a blocksize increase.

Basically, it was set to 1MB, and by the time one wanted to increase it, it was too late, as attempts would result in ugly uncoordinated splits generating altcoins as a result. Once he set 1MB it was set in stone, the question is if he was aware of this or not back then. I believe people often overrate satoshi's long term thinking on his own creation, he was discovering what it would become along the way, with the rest of the people involved since the early days, or maybe you are right and it was part of the plan, but im not willing to clam I knew his intentions with 100% certainty.

It's worth noting that Hal Finney was aware of the "settlement network fate" back in 2010, I don't know if any other big names saw that as well. It very well could be that Hal was satoshi and he knew, but didn't want to claim that as satoshi; then again that's all speculation.

ok, I will try to reply to you another and the last time.
Miners, have no power over bitcoins, they can not control it in any way, you keep talking about miners zionist oligarchy, that can start mining an altcoin and steal segwit or p2sh because they say that trb is the real bitcoin. But they can't, they can not impose nothing. they can try to manipulate the market, but they can't win.

Show me a single episode where miners was imposing something. Simply they can't. they tried to stop segwit, they tried to promote bitcoincash, they tried to vote for segwit2x. They failed every time. Miners have no voice because they are slave. They can not go against the market, they can only mine our chain. If you think they are free to hardfork you are wrong, they have bills to pay every month so they have to be fair to not lose their money.

Now you say... miners can control sha256 market, but that's wrong too. They can't, they have to sell asics to produce
asics at a lower price. if they will choose to not sell sha256 asics they will be less competitive.
Sha256 asics are very easy to be designed, there are not so many secret improvements that can be done, so anyone with a little amount of money can call tsmc or samsung or intel or any other fundry and have his chip  done. For the same reason tsmc can not refuse to produce wafers as their work queue cannot be empty.

thats to say asics have to be sold to crowd. People has thousands of way to get very cheap energy, because energy is distribuited everywhere, the real cost is when you need to concentrate a big amount of energy. Also some people can consider to mine at loss, because they don't care as they have others sources of income.

So mining oligarchy have to compete with crowd.

Now you say pow is flawed because miners will never reach consensus without block reward. But that's wrong too. if miners don't cooperate to produce a longest chain they will waste energy for nothing giving away fee reward for a stupid uncooperative war where only one can win(the one with most hashpower).

Now you will say me that crowd are easy to be manipulated with media. That's the only true thing you say, and it is the only real power zionist have. Media manipulation is where blood is needed. Now crowd have access to a decentralized source of informations, everyone can open a blog and no one can realistically do anything to stop information flow over the internet, new generations are able to use tor, search hiddens services, browsing freenet, i2p and so on, and zionist have no power against this. new generations don't need a crappy centralized bitcoincash socialnetwork.

cryptoanarchy work forbidding zionist and making them and their strategies obsolete.

this is my opinion today, I don't think I'm right or I have every answer, I study everyday and I will keep studying and researching, so, tomorrow, I can have a totally different opinion.
My suggestion is always trust no one, DYOR.

I'm sorry for this OT, please don't read.

POS don't work, in teory and in pratice, it was established since 1998. No matter which esoteric algorithm you try to find. POS don't work and will never work because security have to come from external source. It cannot came from the same currency pos is trying to protect.

To secure the blockchain you need something coming from outside. POW is secure because wasting energy is not free. More energy is wasted and more secure it is. Energy is not free. If energy become free, pow will fail, but I trust energy will never be free because of thermodynamics.


media privileging bitcoin is something related to network effect and hype. Media work for money, not for the truth. So they will never be neutral, neutral media cannot be sold. Media are doomed by marketing, and will never be fair.

I think bitcoin is the best and the only currency with some sense, but not because of media, but because its development don't care so much about marketing. Bitcoin developers always put decentralization and long term view at the first place.

I think this entire thread is a fake to sell some, not working, esoteric solution. Actually bitcoin pow is not centralized, it is very far to be centralized and I hope it will never be centralized. No one can stop you from buying an asics and start mining, no one can stop you from manufacturing your personalized asic, no one can force you to use a specific pool. Of course there is a very little number of big pools, but thats don't matter, miners can switch pool in any moment and the big pool can loose his power in few seconds.

You have to consider that we are reaching a physics point in asic optimization where it is very hard to improve performances. Antminer s9 was around for some time, reaching the state of the art in chipmaker industry. So asics lifetime is increasing giving space for concurrent manufacturer. Asics are good because they are easy to be produced so entry barriers for new manufacturer are low.

Someone think about mining becoming an oligarchy, but is false. Oligarchy have to mine at profit to keep is power. When crowd are free, they are stronger than any oligarchy, they can mine at loss, only for fun or only to help decentralization killing any oligarchy.

Bitcoin and cryptography are helping a lot of people to become free, to forbid governaments from their life.
You have to be a free thinker and DYOR to use bitcoins, or you will die scammed. That's an unstoppable revolution and will change people minds. Sadly, as any revolution, it need his blood. In this revolution blood is your money when you get scammed by shitICOs, shitcoins, shitcloudmining, or any shit berichfast scam.

hmm ok someone creates a POS system, which makes it easy for someone to create their own token, then same issues like now, too many token are being created.

next problem with bitcoin is basically the still unsolved question: why is the media privileging bitcoin why does it support an established group, and disadvantages the others, why not be neutral as they are supposed to be?

I can not understand why you think pooled mining is so evil. Of course there are few big pools, but starting a new pool is not so difficult or expensive, it is more a marketing than a technology issue. Hundreds of miners can switch to a new pool at no cost if the pool they are using start becoming evil. However having 51% of the hashpower doesn't mean the pool will start to be evil. Can you remember deepbit? or cex? both gained more than 51% but none of them tried to doublespend or attack the network or be evil. Both are death now because miners naturally switched to others pool to prevent centralization.

Finally someone telling truth! Wei Dai proposed a PoS like system in 1998 (bmoney v2)