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Topic: Moving towards user activated soft fork activation - page 10. (Read 24460 times)

legendary
Activity: 3472
Merit: 4801
- snip -
I think in a proposal like this everyone will agree.

If you think EVERYONE will ever agree on anything, you have a VERY optimistic view of the world.  There are too many people with to many agendas to ever get everyone to agree on any protocol changes.  The best you can hope for is to get a significant enough majority to agree to force the minority into submission.
legendary
Activity: 3430
Merit: 1142
Ιntergalactic Conciliator
the question is why we cant get a two step consensus with segwit now and a hard fork later? Especially for the next hard fork step we can all agree that will trigger if only 99% of miners support it and 80%+ nodes and with some months preparation.
I think in a proposal like this everyone will agree.
legendary
Activity: 4228
Merit: 1313
Are we stuck with Bitcoin as is forever, and the only scaling solutions must be built on top of the current utterly fixed ruleset?

Probably.

I agree.  Likewise, given the difficulty of changes now as shown by segwit and block size changes, any further changes will be even more difficult to get consensus.  And this isn't necessarily a bad thing, changes should be very difficult to make barring something catastrophic (e.g March 2013).  Think about changing tcp/ip.
legendary
Activity: 3472
Merit: 4801
Are we stuck with Bitcoin as is forever, and the only scaling solutions must be built on top of the current utterly fixed ruleset?

Probably.
sr. member
Activity: 314
Merit: 251

Wrong

If I was an organisation like Western Union or the IMF (who can print fiat money, so it's essentially cost free to them), I would set up a mining farm, sell all the BTC for profit, and block any attempts to upgrade the Bitcoin network. I'd design a hard fork that screws Bitcoin up, and employ loads of trolls to promote it.

Bad actors can and do mine BTC. You're very naive

With your logic no group can be trusted to make network improvements that aren't intended to harm the network.

Nodes can be faked or spoofed, miners can hard fork to bad outcome, users really don't give a crap, they just want faster tx.

Are we stuck with Bitcoin as is forever, and the only scaling solutions must be built on top of the current utterly fixed ruleset?
legendary
Activity: 3430
Merit: 3080
miners as a whole have very real incentives to do what is best for Bitcoin, including when deciding if they will signal for a particular fork/proposal, and if/when there is a serious threat to their ability to continue mining bitcoin (such as a serious threat to change the PoW), they have substantial incentives to not act in Bitcon's best interest (they have incentives to act in a way so that they can continue mining bitcoin, even if this means acting in a way that will damage Bitcoin over the long term).


Wrong

If I was an organisation like Western Union or the IMF (who can print fiat money, so it's essentially cost free to them), I would set up a mining farm, sell all the BTC for profit, and block any attempts to upgrade the Bitcoin network. I'd design a hard fork that screws Bitcoin up, and employ loads of trolls to promote it.

Bad actors can and do mine BTC. You're very naive
copper member
Activity: 2996
Merit: 2374
and why a whole blockchain system has to wait when or if Jihan wake up in a good mood, [...]
One thing that is left out of your argument, and left out of the argument of many of the so called 'Bitcoin experts' is that the miners as a whole have very real incentives to do what is best for Bitcoin, including when deciding if they will signal for a particular fork/proposal, and if/when there is a serious threat to their ability to continue mining bitcoin (such as a serious threat to change the PoW), they have substantial incentives to not act in Bitcon's best interest (they have incentives to act in a way so that they can continue mining bitcoin, even if this means acting in a way that will damage Bitcoin over the long term).

When a person buys mining equipment, they are essentially paying a bond to the manufacturer that they will use their mining equipment in a way that is not harmful to Bitcoin over the long run. The reason for this is because ASICs have no other use than for mining Bitcoin (the actual use of Bitcoin ASICs is slightly more broad, however I do not see any reason why any other crypto would want to use the same PoW as Bitcoin as this would likely expose them to significant security vulnerabilities), and that mining equipment will have net revenues that will only recuperate the cost of purchasing said mining equipment over very long periods of time (it is also noteworthy that, as a general rule, as mining equipment has recouped a larger percentage of it's purchase cost, it will have less of an impact on the overall network due to both advances in technology and additional purchases of other mining equipment).

Mining pools provide their services of pooling resources together in a way so that variance is reduced, and recently either take a stance on various political issues, or allow individual users to take a stance on various issues. For the most part, pools collect fees in exchange for this service. If a pool is acting in a way that is contradictory to the long term interests of Bitcoin, then miners will point their equipment elsewhere. 

The above causes trust to be placed onto the manufacturers of mining equipment, however the manufacturers of mining equipment have incentives to act honestly (as defined as selling their equipment at a price that is not below fair market value), because they are essentially paying a bond in the form of the costs of manufacturing their equipment (generally fairly low), and the costs of R&D of their equipment (generally fairly high). Some mining manufacturers will use their own equipment, which results in them paying the above "bond" to themselves, however they would still need to pay the "bond" described in this paragraph, and has incentives to earn at least as much mining revenue (plus capital costs - eg, interest) as they would get if they had sold the equipment to the public. Mining manufacturers also will care about Bitcoin over the long run, because in order to recoup the R&D costs of designing/manufacturing mining equipment, they need to sell their equipment over fairly long periods of time.

The engineers that are hired by the above mining equipment manufacturers have fairly transferrable skills, and if they are not offered a high enough salary by a mining manufacturer then they will simply find work elsewhere. The market for these kinds of engineers is generally very competitive.

It is for the above reason why the miners as a whole will act in the best long term interest of Bitcoin, and can be trusted to do as much. The scope of when a miner should signal for a particular proposal is entirely up the individual miner, and the claim that miners should signal for a particular proposal when they are ready to implement said proposal is made by those with self-claimed expertise of Bitcoin, with self-appointed authority over Bitcoin, and contradicts with the above, as this does not necessarily mean that a miner would be acting in the best interest of Bitcoin if a proposal was not in the best interest of Bitcoin.

Node count is very easily faked, and it is fairly easy to fake economic activity, so it is very difficult to use either of these as a means to measure if a proposal should be implemented (the same is true for essentially every other measurable indicator). As a result of my above argument, a better measure to determine consensus is signaling from the miners, more specifically, that the miners are signaling for a proposal that is (a) in the long term interest of Bitcoin, and (b) in the miners' good judgment, there is a consensus for a particular proposal -- if both of these criteria are not met, then a proposal should not be signaled for. I would argue that this would roughly fall in line with Satoshi's whitepaper and early statements, as his whitepaper made statements assuming that miners would act in their own economic best interests.



Before something like this is added for any particular softfork, I'd like to see a detailed investigation into how much of the economy is committing to support it; how much is actually doing verification rather than just blindly trusting miners; the popularity and expected behavior of each end-user wallet software; etc.
At the end of the day, this is essentially 'proof of bitcoin.org/bitcointalk.org and I would note that both domains are heavily accessed partly because they are sites that Satoshi originally built and posted on.
legendary
Activity: 1988
Merit: 1012
Beyond Imagination
Anyone can make a soft fork and split the chain with the minimum hash power, no need to ask for anyone's permission, but how high is the chance of surviving?

Short term wise the value will crash to the corresponding hash power cost, due to arbitraging (if it costs $100 to mine one segwitcoin but the market price is $1000, then everyone will borrow coin to sell and mine them back to cash in $900 profit immediately, so I guess before this even happens the price will already crash to the mining cost)

Long term wise the hash rate and value might rise if the demand for this chain is growing. But remember that there is another chain with larger hash power thus higher value existing, and I think most of the demand for bitcoin is investment/value storage, so it is not a guarantee that hash rate will rise on the chain that has less hash power/value

legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1002
eh wut super  Huh

and its not about "economic" nodes, its about full nodes.


there will be no softforked segwit with a 95% threshold but rather a softfork ending in hardfork.
legendary
Activity: 1456
Merit: 1000
Proof of work = one cpu one vote.

That was the original design intent for the network.

The introduction of pools + ASICs has changed the nature of the system design.

So the original concept design was around a majority decision making process. Lots of different people voting with their nodes.

With large mining farms, the majority of hash power can be considered irrelevant as the original design also suggested that using IP addresses as a way to identify the longest chain was easy to sybil.

If the network wasn't so heavily biased towards pools and big central mining farms, a majority vote of the miners would be appropriate. But that is not the case at this present time.

The problem with having fixed rules is that the network isn't fixed. People innovate and the nature of the network changes. There should be a way to come to consensus on what the overriding principle should be and then make a judgement call on a case by case basis. While this can be gamed by politics, it makes sense to try and find a mechanism that adapts with the times.

Perhaps an agreed network governance process should be considered which regularly takes a view on such matters before any such voting is required. This should stop voting rules being tailored to suit a preferred outcome.

But at this time, it makes more sense to seek a super majority of the economic nodes (where most of the 'effort is') than the mining nodes - which are mostly just SPV's anyway.

Having said that, i'd edge for a segwit hard fork if at all possible. But if not, a softfork it is.
legendary
Activity: 3430
Merit: 1142
Ιntergalactic Conciliator
I'd like to see a detailed investigation into how much of the economy is committing to support it; how much is actually doing verification rather than just blindly trusting miners; the popularity and expected behavior of each end-user wallet software; etc.

sounds terrible, keep your auditing and lobbying and polling for incorporated statists(tm)(r).

nobody ever really knows in the bitcoin.

its all greed and mystery.


PS: the only truly reliable and safest to some extend (not for the forkers obv) way to market pull such "improvement" is commit hardfork and see how the shitcoin goes.

just pick a day, and fork off. Smiley

and why a whole blockchain system has to wait when or if Jihan wake up in a good mood, or to be his panda happy or whatever to enable a tech improvement? if bitcoin ecosystem want it it can bypass him. And for sure he has more to loose than anyone else here.
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1002
I'd like to see a detailed investigation into how much of the economy is committing to support it; how much is actually doing verification rather than just blindly trusting miners; the popularity and expected behavior of each end-user wallet software; etc.

sounds terrible, keep your auditing and lobbying and polling for incorporated statists(tm)(r).

nobody ever really knows in the bitcoin.

its all greed and mystery.


PS: the only truly reliable and safest to some extend (not for the forkers obv) way to market pull such "improvement" is commit hardfork and see how the shitcoin goes.

just pick a day, and fork off. Smiley
administrator
Activity: 5222
Merit: 13032
This is a good idea, if done carefully. I really dislike giving miners any decision-making power, for the reasons you mentioned and also because they are employees of the network -- the only parties paid by the Bitcoin system. I proposed similarly forcing the P2SH softfork when miners were (for a time) blocking that softfork, though miners stopped blocking it before too long.

This has the potential to get messy, though. Without miners, you have to be really sure that a large majority of the economy is going to enforce the new rules, since otherwise a prolonged split could develop. There's a worrying situation today where both mining and verification is centralized, even though Bitcoin really requires that at least one of them is decentralized. So there'd still be the ridiculous need to engage in lobbying, though in this case it'd be with big centralized verifiers like BitGo and bc.i rather than with centralized miners. (Verifiers are a lot less centralized than miners, though, which makes somewhat better.) If the softfork activates without a substantial majority of the economy enforcing it, then it could end up splitting the network/currency long-term, which would be the same sort of disaster as a contentious hardfork. There are a lot of economic reasons why this is an unlikely outcome, but it could happen if the softfork isn't done carefully. Before something like this is added for any particular softfork, I'd like to see a detailed investigation into how much of the economy is committing to support it; how much is actually doing verification rather than just blindly trusting miners; the popularity and expected behavior of each end-user wallet software; etc.

Another consideration is that if miners are expected to keep producing very long invalid chains under the new rules, then this sort of softfork has almost exactly the same costs as a hardfork. So if this is considered a likely outcome, then it'd may be better to just hardfork and make some other useful hardfork changes at the same time.

The flag day would probably need to be at least 1 year in the future to be reasonably safe. 2 years would be better. Backports would be needed for all versions that are actually being used, including the #bitcoin-assets 0.3.x version. I wonder if there's any reasonable way to handle the (hopefully very unlikely) scenario where a softfork needs to be canceled partway into the wait time.
sr. member
Activity: 240
Merit: 250
Yeah I'm also a bit scared that it is like this... :/
legendary
Activity: 3430
Merit: 1142
Ιntergalactic Conciliator
Yeah, would also love to hear some opinions.. Maybe they are discussing it at the moment internally  about how to cope with the current situation and if a flag day is possible (and working).

i hope so. Because i am afraid that they avoid to take position to this. I have ask to slack and to irc and in irc i have ask gmaxwell what is his opinion in this and never get an answer even a single word from them.  
My most fear is that they avoid to do it because maybe they afraid that Jihan will get angry Tongue
sr. member
Activity: 240
Merit: 250
Yeah, would also love to hear some opinions.. Maybe they are discussing it at the moment internally  about how to cope with the current situation and if a flag day is possible (and working).
legendary
Activity: 3430
Merit: 1142
Ιntergalactic Conciliator
the strange to me is why three days after this proposal not a single bitcoin developer except from Jameson Lopp bitgo eng has not tell us his opinion about this.
It seems that all of them keep mysterious silent... Huh
legendary
Activity: 3430
Merit: 1142
Ιntergalactic Conciliator
i think is better this solution even if a small group of nodes will activate it.
hero member
Activity: 658
Merit: 501
We have reached 95% consensus among the miners many times in the past.

I don't see this as anything more than an attempt to activate a contentious fork.

There is good evidence that those opposing it are in the minority(Even many "Big Blockers" support segwit - Gavin/Garzik, ect...). Miners controlling most hashpower are only a handful of people and one miner Bitmain may control over 50% . Thus this proposal would not be about getting a lower level of consensus to activate a SF but an accurate and high level of 95% of the community. 95% hashpower doesn't necessarily mean 95% economic user support.
copper member
Activity: 2996
Merit: 2374
We have reached 95% consensus among the miners many times in the past.

I don't see this as anything more than an attempt to activate a contentious fork.
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