Topic: Miner cartel, Bankster cartel, or an altcoin? Your choice? - page 24. (Read 33250 times)

After getting some sleep, I was able to figure all of this out. There was a key insight about preventing reply attacks missing from my analysis yesterday, because I tried to work beyond the point of consciousness while in a sleep deprived delirium. Now I see the light. I will elaborate next post.

@rpietila, I've just read your post now and it wasn't part of my epiphany. I ask you to please point me to a summary of your plans and analysis. I don't have time to go digging around. With no disrespect intended, as I remember you bought $100,000 of Bitcoin at $10 and you pumped Monero up to a huge bubble then it sold off. What else have you accomplished of significance that should motivate me want to expend time digging around through all your writings trying to figure out the significance of CK? Don't you have it summarized some where? I'm interested of course, but my time is such a scarce resource. Apologies for the conspiratorial wanderings of my prior post. I think it was due to the delirium and I should have slept first, but I was so curious and didn't want to take a break to sleep. My mistake.

Read my recent posts with the intention to understand, so you will.

I have nothing against MPEX nor Mircea himself. We have complementary missions, and mine is also activating big time and if anyone wants to make the 1) most money in the 2) shortest time, and with the 3) least effort ever possible in all of my career (which includes what happened to Bitcoin and to Monero in their revaluation booms), he should obey the following advice:

1) Start reading my posts, because the old posts contain wisdom, and new posts reveal further instructions.

2) Buy item CK in CryptoKingdom with whatever you can afford, until I announce that you should no longer buy it.

MPeX disclaimed support of Blockstream when I had asked him about it. At the time, it confused me because I didn't know all of the facts. Now I understand that Core has to adhere to small blocks else he will carry out his threat.

I'll reply to your other post after I sleep. I can't hold my eyes open any longer.

Too much James Bond 

But there won't be a BU fork.  BU is not what the miners want.  They only have BU to stop segwit, that's all.  Miners want to keep the current protocol.  I don't see what is going to stop people to keep the current protocol.  The only thing they have to do is NOT upgrade.  Even with the segwit code inside, it will never get activated.  The miners will continue making their block chain.  

So whoever is going to yell "new PoW algorithm" is going to have to convince people to upgrade, while the miners are continuing to make bitcoin work as it is working now.

Contrary to a fork with same hash function, where the market cap determines the miner's preferences, if you cripple miners on one chain, you force them to keep on the other one.

So the market cap is not a way to kill a chain in the case of different PoW functions: the miners keep with the chain they can still mine.  

As such, a split is unavoidable, and if the PoW fork comes, original bitcoin (without BU or whatever) will continue to exist.  I don't see how you can kill that chain, when wallets are functioning, miners are mining, just by creating a fork with a different mining function.

Moreover, people will have both coins after the fork.  Why should they sell their "true old bitcoins" to acquire the new PoW coins only ?  The smartest move is to sit this out with the normal bitcoin, and profit from the "free money" on the new chain.

ETC bis.

Who is Mircea Popescu??

First time, I've seen this document where he promises to do what I just deduced upthread that he would do:


The code he is referring to is here:

http://thebitcoin.foundation/index.html

So MPeX and his WoT are the masters of Bitcon. Bitcon is not a decentralized currency.

This presents a slight problem for any altcoin that attempts to challenge Bitcon. MPeX and his rich friends will attempt to attack it in order to protect their monopoly over cryptocurrency.

The more wealthy he and his bankster WoT become, the more enslaved we become. I don't like this arrangement.
[Edit: being very sleepy I didn't really think out the above statement well. I am retracting it because if any altcoin can be attacked then it isn't decentralized and thus isn't an improvement on the power vacuum that is Bitcoin.]

Note back in 2013, MPeX sent me (@AnonyMint) a PM. It was something about his enemy @rpietila who he refers to as "tortilla". Since then Risto has had his laptop hacked, been put in a mental ward and subjected to forced medications, etc.. I don't know what to think of all that.

What altcoin. All the big money will stay on the small block fork with the new PoW hash, because BU is technologically incompetent and the Bitcoin whales are in MPeX's WoT. MPeX probably controls a million BTC himself. Plus his bankster friends.

BU's altcoin will be sold off and the Chinese mining cartel will then own a shitcoin.

MPeX is capable of this. He couldn't win against Ethereum, because he didn't have the whales of Ethereum on his side. He does have the whales of Bitcoin on his side.


Money talks. The whales will decide. The miners don't have liquid assets, they have only debt and sunk costs, thus the mining cartel are just slaves to the whales.

I am looking at Litecoin for now. Its value in fiat is stable enough for me to buy and hold, there is no downside threat and Segwit might get activated in the network.

I understand now why MPeX (with the support of the banksters) want very small blocks. That is because they want to control the blockchain, and so as long as they can keep our transactions off the blockchain by making it too expensive for us, then we won't be able to interfere when they need to change the PoW hash to spank some slave mining cartel that is disobeying their masters (because we won't control any significant amount of on chain tokens).

MPeX is going to destroy the Chinese mining cartel. Watch.

The plan is to put all of us off chain on LN with centralized hubs controlled by the banksters.

MPeX hates democracy and stupid average people. He doesn't want us making the decisions on choosing the protocol of the blockchain.

Now it is all very clear to me. This is why he wasn't afraid to tell the SEC to go fuck themselves. This dude is connected in high places. He probably wasn't joking when he claimed he ended Hillary Clinton's presidency bid.

https://youtu.be/Df5S-iZ9Z50?t=1938

Certificate Authorities ? 

You can stop him not me, as it wasn't my thesis. But actually he is correct in a way but still wrong for the reasons I stated— correct because of what I wrote far upthread of this discussion where I pointed out that miners can sign the block summary and uphold a reputation with each other. Miners won't want to violate their reputation.

But yeah, all of his thesis only works with centralization and trust. It isn't Satoshi's system any more. Like I said, BU + Chinaman aren't too smart.

MPEx has been doing other things^TM waiting for these idiots to shoot themselves in the foot so he can mine all the BTC on the minority chain with a new PoW hash and make himself even more wealthy than he already is.

P.S. I've only slept a dozen hours in the past few days because of all this, but I don't feel so fatigued so my health must be improving. I probably shouldn't be writing technical posts in a sleep deprived cognitive state 8 hours past my bedtime.

Yes, that is the point.  For transactions, you don't need such a severe consensus.  This is the "error" in block chain systems, I realized that a while ago.  ANY pile of non-contradictory transactions is good enough, they don't need to be fully ordered, they only need not to be contradictory.  Block chains are too severe a system and impose too much conditions that are not necessary in order to get the "token right to spend" right.  
We are not writing a book, where everyone has to agree on every place of every word.  We are just having transactions that need not to be contradictory, and not "erasable".  But "erasable" is a strange notion in a broadcasting system.  Block chain systems are systems that write books.

You can relax a lot of conditions and still have a correct "transaction of right to spend" system.  In fact, you can relax a lot of consistency requirements.

Uh, I stop you right there.  If you don't have the full block, you cannot verify the correctness of the block summary.  Building upon a non-verified block header is just as risky as waiting for the full block to arrive.   This would be an amplified version of selfish mining: make wrong blocks, and mine the headers, until you "win".  Once your erroneous block header is included in the main chain, and everybody is mining upon it, *don't send the corresponding full block yet*.  Pretend slow connection.
Switch off your mining gear, let it cool down, don't waste electricity.  Wait until your bloc header is seriously confirmed.  Now, switch on your gear again.  Now, mine a whole chain with *correct blocks* secretly, starting from the point before your false block header in the main chain.  While "outside", they have 50 blocks, 100 blocks, I don't know, the longer the merrier, until miners become suspicious of your non-published block.  And then, publish the wrong block.  People will refuse the wrong block, and hence, its (rightly) corresponding header, INVALIDATING ALL PUBLIC BLOCS SINCE.
Now, you can publish YOUR chain (shorter, sure, but correct!) and win all the fees and rewards of those blocks you made on your own, say, 25 of them.

I told you recently that I got pessimistic about decentralization.  I think you're seeing my issues.  


But this is political history all over !  This is also an argument for my "immutable and frozen protocol" definition of decentralization.  "the community" never chooses.  If a "collective decision" is taken in a community, it is always a majority over a minority, because 100% consensus is impossible to achieve over anything else than "the past agreement".  If even one person is "the minority", then that person is the victim of the majority.  

If people join a decentralized system, they join, knowing the rules of the system - the protocol.  In principle, it means they agree on those rules ; otherwise they wouldn't join.  So there's 100% consensus of the community on the existing rules, at least at their moment of joining.  Of course, you can join, but with the idea that you know how it would be improved if changed.  True.  But you had the choice between joining, or *creating* the better, improved system, and in the end, you joined.  So *everybody* in the system agreed with the existing protocol.  100% consensus, at least at a given moment.  One can consider the initial protocol as the contract everyone signed up to when joining.  At least, that were the rules of the system, they were clear for everyone joining.

Change implies losers and winners ; every change will modify the economic expectations of the participants in different ways.  Rationally, you would expect the winners to push for the change, and the losers trying to stop it.  However, as you pointed out several times yourself, *knowing* that you are a winner or a loser is not free information.  So those that are *certain* to win, can convince others to join them, even if they will be losing.  The intelligent loser in change can be put in minority if an elite (those sure to win by the change) can convince a crowd (the people lacking intelligence, information and/or time to see all the implications) to a majority, vindicating the intelligent minority.  The minority's "agreement on the protocol" is baffled by the elite leading a majority.  This is why "totalitarianism" is not on the side of immutability, but on the side of change: a minority had agreed with a majority over a contract (the initial protocol) and that contract is *unilaterally* changed by the majority, and shoved down the throat of the minority.  

Of course, in a "police-less" system, nobody can "protect" the minority against "breach of contract".   The only thing that can protect the minority is the impossibility to achieve majority, and to keep with the initial 100% consensus agreement: immutability.  This protection has to be an emergent dynamical phenomenon as nobody can impose it with violence.

And this is why truly decentralized systems have to remain strictly immutable, and why no leadership should emerge.

Leadership always corrupts, even "democratic" leadership (or even: most probably, democratic leadership !).  Democratic leadership is much more dangerous than "enlightened genius" leadership, because there where "enlightened genius" leadership has a serious chance to become corrupted, democratic leadership is 100% sure to become corrupted, simply because intelligence (in the broadest sense of understanding the full implications of the system and the change) is not distributed uniformly over the voters.  Proof: look at a random post on bitcointalk !

Suppose that I were the "democratically chosen bitcoin leader".  Suppose that voting is stake-proportional (right now, it is hash power proportional).  If I were an early stash holder having sold my former stash, I would propose to allow all spent transaction outputs that are less than, say, 5 transactions away from their coinbase, to be triple-spendable.  As such, I would multiply the bitcoin stash by (3+6+18+52+162) = 241.  I could invent a story that this has to do with too much bitcoin adoption, and the fact that poor people cannot buy a bitcoin any more, and that this is against the principles of bitcoin for everyone blah blah blah, denying the fact that bitcoin has fractional units ; I could point to the mean early adopters having too much coins and the need to create more coins, equally etc.... I could point out how unfair it is that your average Indian or African cannot obtain a bitcoin, that there should be as many bitcoins as humans at least.  I could even get useful idiots of development work campaigning for me, the man "who democratized bitcoin".  I could "explain" that my proposal is just and right, because bitcoin's spread is fair, and the inflation is going to compensate the creation, so "no-one is getting free money, we're just shifting the digital point" etc...
It would take a minimum of intelligence (above the average voter threshold) to understand the idiocy of my statement.  And I would get the votes of all intelligent early adopters who understand that they are the big winners of this system, given that the big coin bases were long ago and they are the guys getting the most out of it !

I'm sure I could get a majority vote over that.  By doing so, I would entirely "undo" the distribution of bitcoin, and reward the early adopters.   I would crash the bitcoin price, but that would be largely offset by the seigniorage created in the hands of the early adopter elite.  By the time the people realize I had them, destroyed their system and got a larger share of the market cap than I had earned in the market, I would be lying on the beach of my private island, slurping a cocktail served by a few local beauties


Yes.  If ethereum would have had a non-Turing complete language in which contracts were always provable of finite state tree, ethereum would have been the perfect smart contract system.  The main property of a contract is that it is CLEAR and unambiguous.  That cannot be achieved in Turing complete languages.  
The solution would have been to delegate all needs for Turing complete operation to oracles outside of the system, not part of the smart contract as such.  Those ACCEPTING such a dangerous contract, would at least KNOW they were doing so.
And people who are not totally reckless, would require to see the full state tree of the contract, which is feasible in a sufficiently limited language.  Ethereum confused "web application development" and "contract writing", and made a mess.  

I understand that such a complex system requires continuous "maintenance", developers and hence leadership.  Which is why it cannot be a decentralized project.  But it is exactly this complexity which makes it also not working correctly.  

Bitcoin (the protocol, not the software) was the simplicity itself.  All the technical modifications to the protocol were in fact projections for future use which never came !  The basic usage of bitcoin was "direct transactions", and "multisig transactions, eventually with a timer".  That's it.  All the rest were in the dreams of people that never got there.  THAT protocol could have remained immutable.  I don't know whether the 1MB limit was SOLD as a spam measure but was conceived as something to guarantee the fees, or whether it was just "idiot leadership".  I don't know whether the slow difficulty readjustment was conceived to avoid people forking, or also just "idiot leadership".  But in any case, these measures shaped bitcoin in what it is in a far more important way than one would have naively thought when they were proposed.



Right

I can't remember exactly where we discussed the following issue upthread over the past days (I think perhaps it was with @jbreher).

Andrew Stone makes the point that given the sending of block summaries (e.g. "x thin") independent of transactions (i.e. the propagation delay to review block announcements becomes very low), then the limitation of the system is not orphan rate due to propagation time, instead the limit is bandwidth of the network to relay transactions. So he argues in this case the miners whose bandwidth connections can't keep up with the transaction rate with "big blocks" (but note that the block announcements are not "big" with "x thin") will then produce empty blocks (rather than waiting for transactions to propagate) so that their hashrate isn't wasted. He makes this point that this creates a hashrate weighted vote on what the blocksize should be. And so in effect is saying that the bandwidth limit of the network will set a bound on the blocksize. He then stretches this further and claims it will create a fee market. He also mentioned @Peter R's research paper which I had previously showed to be flawed with the help of @dinofelis and others.

The flaw in Andrew Stone's analysis that empty blocks produce less revenue than full blocks. Thus those miners whose bandwidth connections can't keep up with the others, will have lower profitability and thus over time end up with less and less of the hashrate of the system as those miners who are disproportionately more profitable (i.e. relatively more so than the proportion of their hashrate) will be able to purchase disproportionately more hashrate sooner. In essence he has an analogous flaw as @Peter R's, in assuming that all miners have the same hashrate and connectivity attributes. And separately another flaw in his analysis is a cartel of colluding miners would not delay sending the transactions to the non-colluding miners.

So we can conclude that BU's supporting research is only valid when there exists already a mining cartel. In effect, their research logic is a circular logic that says if we have a mining cartel, then the blocksize will be limited by the bandwidth in the network. Well yeah duh. No great insight there.

Additionally Andrew is incorrect to conflate a fee market with a limitation of TPS due to bandwidth. There is no upper bound on fees. The mining cartel can demand what ever level of fees it so desires, although it must be at least high enough to not allow more TPS than the bandwidth of the network.

Finally Andrew states that no altcoin can do better than the network bandwidth limit. That is because Satoshi's design is orphans all the partial orders except one. But that isn't the only possible design.

It is also interesting to note that if Core had capitulated to larger block size, then this standoff might have been averted and the fact that Bitcoin is controlled by a mining cartel might have remained ignored. And per my prior post, the existence of a mining cartel is a big deal, as it threatens the 21 million coin supply limit. Core could have even adopted "x thin" and achieved a much larger effective block size with better propagation than the 1 MB blocks before "x thin". So Core was obviously fooling us.

So it really had come down to a struggle over which centralized entity was going to control the blockchain. Core's business model required they be in control. The mining cartel requires they be in control. Per my prior post, neither of them can be in control and the entire thing dies now. Well maybe not. Maybe we'll find some way to sugar coat a turd and keep in the back of the refrigerator.

Now let's go fix it.

Yes, because the "leaders" of that system are worse than an enlightened dictator for life who created it.  A decentralized system has no reason to centralize but towards the most vile power hungry bastards.  A dictator for life is tempted to become a vile power hungry bastard but started out at least as a creative mind, so by the time he becomes totally corrupt, there's a useful period (unless the corruption was there from the beginning, I don't know why DASH comes to mind ).


Indeed.

These btc whales that were lucky enough to enter bitcoin very early..they gained also some respect with that. But in the end, some will lose everything and they'll regress back to random joes. Some very average people now have alot of power thanks to bitcoin. Hope they will be the ones left bagholders not random poor people that naively buy their dumps.

@dinofelis, Bitcoin is declaring to the world, that it has no immutability.



That is all fine and dandy until they collude together in a 51% attack to change the protocol.

Satoshi designed the system to be immutable (or die, i.e. a poison pill protection). That means when miners attack it with a HF, then it ideologically dies for many of the hardcore Bitcoiners because the 21 million coin limit is no longer surely going to protected. Miners have every economic incentive to mine more than 21 million coins.

The miners are demonstrating they can organize a 51% attack and are swallowing the poison pill. They are likely destroying their investment sunk costs by demonstrating that the 21 million coin limit can be subverted (whether they promise not to is entirely irrelevant). Unless a new class of Bitcoiners will prefer Bitcoin over altcoins for other reasons (what the heck would those reasons be when Bitcoin can't do instant transactions, can't do blockchain apps well, can't do on chain anonymity well, etc), even though Bitcoin loses its immutability that imparted it special status from Satoshi.

Appears to me that Satoshi wanted Bitcoin to either be replaced by something better or die. Bitcoin was the pot-of-gold he put out to incentivize the free market to find a better mouse trap than he could accomplish. It was a masterful strategy.

The miners made the mistake of not realizing this and so now they are stuck in a quagmire which has no solution. There is nothing they can do which won't destroy their ability to recover their sunk costs (and they probably deserve it any way, because apparently they are too stupid to realize and I intuitively expect they are likely involved in some corruption). One the clones of myself wrote about this back in 2015 (<---click this because I can't quote from that locked thread easily) when having a discussion with BU's core developer Andrew Stone (alias @thezerg) and the alleged HashFast scammer @cypherdorc, and the linked discussion warned everyone that it was impossible for Bitcoin to scale decentralized.

Andrew Stone admits it was those interactions which caused them to start Bitcoin Unlimited, ignoring all my warnings (not be truculent but so now they are getting precisely what they deserve for being stupid and defiant).

Here is another sample of the interactions which I can more easily quote: