Topic: Moving towards user activated soft fork activation - page 5. (Read 24442 times)

It it safe to say absence of evidence is evidence of absence?

Or it is more safe to say you don't understand basic freshman-level predicate logic, and thus have no business concerning yourself with high order affairs such as computer science and distributed systems?

+1

Good to see some military metaphors used to describe the situation, and exactly on point!

It's naive to assume that state actors are not involved in bitcoin in a major way. Personally I believe the Chinese govt. is subsidizing the miners, possibly even precisely to prevent a 51% percent attack from US banks? Makes sense to me. As far as US government involvement, normally that would be done via US multinational corporations and Wall Street financiers, who are in fact "hiding in plain sight" in bitcoin. Wall Street wants to control bitcoin for their own profit, but will do the bidding of the Fed when the phone call comes in.  A Faustian bargain? There could well be financial execs "committing suicide" in their cars again... It will get more interesting in the next few years...


Looks like iceTARD has finally seen the light - you're right, Core could get fired if they get too uppity.  UASF could be the straw that broke the camel's back...

Final note - this thread is almost devoid of technical debate on the UASF proposal. Is it safe to say that technically it's complete crap?

Fixed it for you.  Bitcoin mining is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

I wish you could understand the difference between

A. signaling readiness for a new feature, and
B. voting for a new features

I know it's all very subtle and you don't do nuance, but please stop spreading the lie that miners are in charge of Bitcoin.

They are not and never will be.  That's not how any of this works.

Just because there are armed guards in front of the bank it doesn't mean those armed guards make executive decisions for the bank.

They are just hired muscle and may be fired if they forget their place and get uppity.

How about that you are both wrong?

I've been hearing this argument for a long time.
"If a government or a big financial corp wanted to destroy bitcoin, they'd just buy a lot of mining equipment".

I believe first time I read it, it was gmaxwell calculated how cheap it would be to conduct 51% attack... it was ages ago.

Well, then my question is: why haven't they destroyed bitcoin yet, this way?
You really think they would not want to?

They failed to destroy Bitcoin because it is not only about buying mining hardware, just like wining a war is not just about buying weapons.
There is a shit loads of logistics involved with using these weapons while there is a lot of human factor involved and the situation on the battle field is changing constantly.
The governments and the big corps are too slow to follow this battle.
They don't have an organisation in place that could handle manufacturing and deploying mining equipment quickly enough and then maintaining it (undisturbed) for long enough. And they have too much corruption inside.

The only way it can work now is because it is distributed and each mining operation is independent.
Some of them are actually secret.


For the big organisations that would want to get rid of bitcoin, it is much easier to corrupt people and conduct propaganda campaigns in the media.
And that's what they do.

Mining is the most important (and the most resilient) point of resistance of Bitcoin, against the governments and the financial oligarchy.

And yet you started by saying that miners would never attack Bitcoin because of rational self interest?


Knowing you, you will pretend this conversation never took place at some time in the future. You will just reiterate that miners are only incentivised towards co-operative behaviour, as if we're all living in a Bitcoin bubble where everyone thinks it's wonderful, if it suits your purpose.


Why do you make contradictory statements as and when they suit your argument du jour?

No, you are misrepresenting what I am saying. I am saying that there is no reason for a malicious miner to execute a complex attack against Bitcoin because a malicious miner could execute a much simpler attack if they wanted to harm Bitcoin.

I am also saying that it would not make sense for an entity to act maliciously towards Bitcoin via mining because doing so would force them to act economically irrationally.

A Bitcoin competitor who is caught trying to actively harm Bitcoin would lose the trust of their customer base, and this damage would far exceed the potential gains from having one less competitor.

1. Quickseller says "all miners are perfect economic actors who only behave with rational self-interest towards the Bitcoin network"

2. I say "That's wrong, what about a malicious miner scenario"

3. Quickseller says "I'm not wrong, what about a malicious miner scenario"



Exactly how stupid do you think everyone is?   Can I have my 90 seconds of skim-reading back?

I am sorry, but I am not wrong.

First of all, neither Western Union, nor the IMF can do anything that remotely resembles printing money. Any entity that can "print money" freely would do just that, and buy up assets for their own benefit, not use that printed money to harm a perceived competitor of theirs.

Your scenario is very sensational, however it is simply not realistic.

If an entity wanted to harm Bitcoin, they would not ned to bother blocking a proposed network improvement, they could simply buy up sufficient mining equipment to be able to prevent transactions from confirming, and/or cause the orphan rate to be uncomfortably high, especially by orphaning long chains of blocks, and/or abandoning the long standing principle that the first seen transaction is the valid transaction, and that conflicting transactions should be ignored, subject to certain limitations. This entity could harm Bitcoin even if the PoW is changed, it would simply be more expensive, although if the PoW is changed for this reason, it is likely that confidence in Bitcoin would have likely declined sufficiently so that not many people would use it anymore.

It is not possible for an entity to both mine bitcoin to harm Bitcoin and mine bitcoin that results in profit (from that mining activity). If the miners are collectively harming the network, then presumably, the price of bitcoin would decline, rather substantially, and the time it takes for a miner to recoup his investment in mining equipment is a long time, with higher amounts of revenues at the beginning of a miners' useful life.

I would be interested in seeing these mods too. 

Q.E.D.

Thank you for that sanity check - I was beginning to think I was alone in my horror about UASF. Everything I've read indicates it would be a disaster technically, and it's also a violation of fundamental bitcoin concepts and consensus. So bad that it's literally an anonymous proposal.

Funny, I was just wading through a thread about John Nash - game theory etc. I almost came to the conclusion that bitcoin is in a Nash Equilibrium. This could mean that bitcoin development is DONE. 0.12 from now to eternity! I guess I could live with it...

Alright, I've been giving this a ton of thought and and both for and against UASF.

No offense meant to the OP, but it absolutely is dogshit, conceptually. Devs on this thread could instantly see that. It took me -slightly- longer.

The worst part, I'm convinced, is what the BU community can do in response. Since UASF tells everyone to pick a side by X date or be left behind in a hostile manner, the BU team has NOTHING TO LOSE by Hard forking on that date. It would be extremely dumb of them not to.

So basically, UASF forces a hard fork, the most horrible outcome for bitcoin's price. Hopefully no one wants that here.

There is something to be gained by it's existence though.  Remember your Nuclear cold war tactics? Nuclear Proliferation and Mutually Assured Destruction? UASF can act as a threat to counter BU. I say it should be developed if for no other reason than if they're going to HF anyway, we can scare them back in line with UASF.


Like with the cold war, we really should be thinking about hiring a UN-certified Negotiator though. Is protecting $20 Billion not worth their price? 

this idea is awesome. is OP one of LTC devs ?

Well, first off I did post a copy/paste of some obvious major issues that could arise.

Secondly, when you want to do something, the onus is on YOU to do a detailed analysis and determine that it would be safe. It's not like you do it unless someone raises an objection, that's madness!

When the non-mining nodes an some of the miner nodes accept a soft-fork block, the miner nodes blocking the change will stay in the current network and mine their own chain.

but we talk here for a soft fork and not a hard fork. nothing will happen. the not upgrade nodes or miners will still works as ti nothing happens to the network.

In this case the hash rate will adapt within a short amount of time to usual hash rate target.

you need and a miner to support it so it can add your segwit transactions to blockchain. of course if this miners has very low hashrate you will need very long until your segwit transaction to add to blockchain until this miner find a block.

Here is a question. Suppose that something like BIP65 (CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY) never went through and that only 10 users wanted it an not the majority of the network. Could those 10 users still make the changes to their software necessary to get their clients to work with CLTV? The rest of the network would still verify those transactions since they redefine OP_NOP2 and find them valid (like old clients do for BIP65). Would this make any sense? Is it UASF?

I see, the "no one should ever have left the oceans" argument. q.e.d.