Topic: One Trillion dollars marketcap: How does it escalate technical challenges? (Read 388 times)

Thank you friends @Karartma1 and @Heisenberg_Hunter  for very insightful comments, kudos 

I support @Kararma1 concerns about mining, solo mining to be exact, as being a very important security insurance we need NOW and his/her great reminder of the need for STRATEGY. Kudos again my friend.

I'm also strongly believe in @Heisenberg_Hunter's idea about how important it is to have more and more devs onboard and I appreciate his/her spirit and commitment.

@ETFbitcoin also deserves a lot of credit for the fair treatment of the issues discussed here and bringing up important topics at the same time.

I've to chew something discussed here a bit more and will be back very soon, hopefully, with some value to add.

Good thread at a much needed time which could be discussed only in a board like this. Well, recently I have been thinking how a protocol which is still pretty new and not hundreds of thousands of devs working on it is handling trillions of dollars which is surely a hectic burden on the minimized developer community. We never really know how many bad actors are watching the code and trying to find a bug in the source code and we should not regret the fact that if a critical issue is found in Core, devs announce them only after a patch has been produced but what if the malicious actors has exploited the bug before?

As @ETFbitcoin said, scalability still pose a major problem : what if I don't really have money to open a channel in LN? Exorbitant mining fees and extremely slow on chain confirmations will pose a threat if more and more countries start adopting bitcoin as a currency. Yes, we are here to discuss bitcoin as a currency rather than a digital gold concept and that's what satoshi envisioned and that's what developers are working towards too. We all accept that Core implementation is dominating the network and very few open source developers are working on Core software full time! We do say we are a decentralized network but still only a very few developers are getting in for meaningful contribution so every trillion dollars relies upon them which shouldn't happen.

To prevent this issue, onboarding new developers should happen from time to time and this should be a necessity for the future trillions. As of 2018 reports we have 20-22 million software developers in the world but only less than 1000 have contributed to the open source money. Third World countries still have handful of newbie developers who are searching for job for $300pm job and they could probably bring meaningful contributions and find bugs better than the senior devs.

BTCrink is a great attempt to onboard new people working on Core, but we need more and more attempts in third world countries where even $300-$500 per month is more than enough to fund great devs working on full time for Core. Onboarding more can bring not only new approaches to scalability issue but would have faster code improvements. Recently Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z are giving 500 bitcoin for Bitcoin Development in Africa and India but this shouldn't end up with centralized shit cunts like exchange owners! But I firmly believe onboarding more and more can bring a refreshing change!

Interesting thread with many great insights 
In the good old days when I was able to mine bitcoins I felt so fortunate as I could earn a small reward and I could contribute to the safety of the network. This is one of the main reason why paying the fees shouldn't be seen as something bad but that's an integral part of the whole game.

I wish we could be able to mine again and I would argue that  what we need the most is not only technical excellence but also some good strategy because bitcoiners should think of supporting the network again.

It's good to have our own node but since war is coming from the mining side we need to find ways to outnumber the newcomers.
How? I honestly don't know. But I would certainly pay a small crowdsourced sum to know that I support a mining pool which cares about people's privacy.

Si vis pacem, para bellum

It’s why exchanges, merchants, and other services should be together in support in building, and development of the Lightning Network.


Regulatory intervention, we already know, censorship threats, we can circumvent, what other adversary behaviors does Bitcoin have? Miner co-opting the protocol? I believe BIP148 showed they follow the economic majority.

I'm afraid that P2Pool has failed its mission as a historical fact, and it is not going to improve ever because of the core idea suffering inherent flaws.
I'm not aware of any serious critical review of P2Pool, actually I didn't bother looking for such reviews because once I started learning about it (with good faith just like you), I became deeply disappointed in the very first steps.

For P2Pool, the idea is to run a separate p2p network with lower difficulty than the actual Bitcoin network where miners adjust the coinbase transaction such that it allocates rewards to (multiple) peers on a Pay-Per-Last-N-Shares, PPNLS, convention. Obviously shares have to be propagated to and  verified by all participating miners.

Although P2Pool is a highly crafted protocol with lots of built-in mechanisms to resist malicious actions and attacks, it fails to help with pooling pressure flaw in bitcoin because of one brutal fact: it is not scalable!

Current implementation sets a rough 20 times constant as the order by which the actual Bitcoin network difficulty is considered to be lowered while bad news is: you can't touch this number to cover actual small/medium size miners, they need ways more reduced difficulties to keep paying their costs, for current network, difficulty should be adjustable in ranges between 10,000 up to 1,000,000 and further for any practical purpose. Unfortunately, P2Pool can't approach anything like that, 20 times difficulty reduction is the best it can offer!

In P2Pool, the so-called sharechain is supposed to generate a share every 30 seconds (in average) which is a complete block that needs both propagation and verification just like the original network blocks, as I've mentioned earlier. The 30 seconds round time is a direct result of the magical 20 times easier rule. The number, 20, is not an arbitrary number for P2Pool, it is the limit the protocol is bound to because it is not feasible to have any shorter round time.

Tragic, isn't it? But there is still  hope:
What about implementing the idea recursively, like in a hierarchical model, say in 5  layers redirecting miners to 2⁵ partitions having difficulty being reduced up to millions of times? Sounds nice, doesn't it? But here comes another bottleneck built into the protocol: reward distribution.

I'm not going to discuss more details here, the conclusion is obvious anyway: p2Pool is not ready for the job operationally, nor it is matured enough theoretically.


I started this to stress on the escalating consequences of the latest price rally, spotting the most critical challenges, it is ok to have separate threads for each issue, respectively and I think we have a candidate right now: centralized mining scene.

I generally meant those who will not work according to the rules of their own or some other government and will process every transaction. Since miners get part of their income from fees, and as the reward per block decreases every 4 years - those who check each transaction and reject them for some reason will certainly be left without part of the income. P2Pool is definitely an interesting idea for those who have the resources for something like that.

It may be somehow premature, but I'm concluding that the most concerning issue according to you guys is centralization of mining to be leveraged by governments for interventional purposes, most importantly censorship purposes. Yes?

That is greatly exaggerated.
The story starts with temperature dropping in winter this year (I believe -20 C was the lowest) consequently the usage of natural gasses shoots up as people use it to warm their homes, there is a shortage so the power plants switch to burning liquid fuel (more specifically mazut) which creates pollution to the point where the levels enter dangerous territory, power plants shut down part of their operation to help reduce the pollution, it causes blackouts.
Who is the easiest to blame? Bitcoin miners! And it is not all lies because there has been an increased number of miners in Iran and they have been putting some pressure on the network. But as I said it is greatly exaggerated.

Of course, this all seems a bit tragicomic, because what they are trying to do is centralize Bitcoin as much as possible to supposedly prevent illegal transactions. What seems to me is that the main reason for such actions is not ordinary users, but they are most bothered by transactions involving those countries that the US has under sanctions.

Given that Iran is currently the number one enemy of the US (which is actually ridiculous in every sense) - and the fact that some of their companies use BTC to avoid sanctions leads me personally to think that such moves are aimed at such countries. I recently read that Chinese miners are moving en masse to Iran, which has even cheaper electricity than China - and that they have already caused very serious problems with power shortages across the country.

I also think that US miners cannot do any serious damage on their own - but if their idea starts to apply in some other countries than some transactions could have problems with confirmations - at one point we could really have two types of miners - independent and those who would work according to state rules.

It is best to find a solution for the inevitable instead of hoping it doesn't happen.
For example if core v0.13 doesn't have the same bug as v0.14 running both or better yet running core and another implementation is a good option to avoid such disaster scenarios. Those with bigger stake in the game are already doing it by the way.

There was one bug in the bitcoin codebase once which was very critical but not exploited before it got patched. Infrastructure bugs are always scary.
Plus humans are pretty stupid (coders) etc. .
Best is to hope that humans don't commit code with scary bugs or that the bugs aren't discovered and exploited in time before they got patched.

When you want to move a hot frying pan, the correct way is to use its handle. If you ignore this and use the metal part you will burn yourself. That doesn't make frying pans less safe.
Similarly when you ignore the correct way of generating an ECDSA signature and reuse the same k that doesn't make ECDSA any less safe or private keys "less private", it is the same as posting your private key on the internet!

Yeah, absolutely Orwellian mining rules they have there. I now also remember that some weird blockchain company called DMG recently launched a mining pool where they classify all addresses and comply with OFAC ie blacklist addresses coming from Iran, Syria, Sudan etc etc. Notwithstanding that sending your money through a mixer easily evades all that.

But they also enforce full KYC verification on all their pool users so talk about shooting yourself in the user adoption foot 

Marathon was trying to shoehorn some other weird crap into the consensus like requiring KYC for all transactions with a USD value of >$3000. In fact they made a shell organization with DMG to "only process transactions that comply with American laws" (to use the vice article's words) and this was exactly what I was trying to remember.

And then there's this gem (same article):


No, that is a completely insecure way to construct signatures in the first place. I keep saying this over and over, you should never reuse the nonce for different signatures. Heck, even some android wallet users lost money in 2013 or so because their wallet software reused nonces in signatures.