Topic: Reminder: zero-conf is not safe; $1000USD reward posted for replace-by-fee patch (Read 18240 times)

That's even worse. A group doesn't even have to takeover the network, only the guardian of the button. The benevolent dictator is not a solution to this.

I think the vehement opposition to admitting the issue is because when the dust settles, the solution will be that there is no safe economic model that allows miners to do anything other than mine for bitcoin. The idea that miners will gradually switch to fees to continue making money to pay for their investment will be the undoing since the alternative is for all the miners to become obsolete once all coins are mined or all clients to be able to collect fees.

I have explained a few times, here and on reddit, how a miner or cartel that controls the majority of the hashpower could in fact force a change in the protocol against the will of all other players.  

The procedure that the miners would use to achieve that is not complicated, but understanding it requires a bit of social intelligence: the ability to put oneself in other people's place, and think of how they would actually act in response to one's actions and changed circumstances -- rather than how one would like them to act.

Most bitcoiners just refuse to understand the procedure ("it is impossible to make someone understand something when his revenue depends on him not understanding it").  The few who do understand believe that they can counteract it by the "big red button"defense: let the whole network mine the cartel's version, while the faithful bitcoiners will throw their bitcons away, create a new premined altcoin that can be mined only with CPUS, and declare it to be "the" true bitcoin.


Yes, clients can get and recognize "the" valid blockchain as long as they can contact only one honest node; and the verification can be optimized, as you say, if one of the contacts is honest and is aware of the "false" blockchain(s) that other nodes(s) may be serving to unwary clients.

But that will not prevent the miners from imposing a protocol change, because they will do it in the open and there will never be any question about which is their "reformed" chain and which is the "orthodox" one.  In fact, clients would have to upgrade to the miner-provided software to be able to receive and interact with their branch of the fork at all; and would be forced to do so in order to regain control of their coins.

Miners dont really control the  protocol like that.

Broken clients would recognize their fake blocks, but only until we fix the broken clients:

https://gist.github.com/justusranvier/451616fa4697b5f25f60

This is the crux of the issue that I have real concerns about but  I don't think it is as trivial as wait until miners go out of business. That's just a boom/bust cycle waiting to oscillate.

I also think the current lack of real opposition to Bitcoin is down to the old financial institutions seeing that the current trend is pushing Bitcoin into a centralized system. They will just step in at some point and start buying up the infrastructure since whoever controls the miners; controls confirmations and therefore the money flow. How would users fare with 3 of the largest mining pools all owned by Goldman Sachs saying they want to make bitcoin inflationary? How would you stop it?

Same thing as Merriam-Wester: "a false or unfounded report or story; especially :  a fabricated report."

Um.  Perhaps we have miscommunicated here.  If you are not talking about ducks, then what the heck do you mean when you use the word 'canard'?

There are a lot of sketches and ideas for its parts, but not a design for the whole that is expected to work.  

I have asked several times to Adam, Luke, adn other "new core devs" to provide a simple but 'complete' example of how a week of "life under LN" would be like for, say 3 consumers, 3 merchants, and one hub.  The discussion invariably ends at that point.  Because, when one tries to think how the pieces would fit and spin together, one sees that they wouldn't.

Not to mention that the LN woudl be the exct opposite of what bitcoin was supposed to be.


The problem with Sidechains is that the definition is (and must be) so vague that anything can be said to be a sidechain.  I have read the whitepaper carefully, and concluded that the old sofa in my living room is a sidechain.  (In fact, the proof of that is trivial.  The proof that it is a good sidechain requires a bit more argument. I hope to post the proofs eventually.)  

The point is that a sidechain is supposed to be designed, implemented, and managed independently of bitcoin; and therefore cannot be trusted to behave in any specific way, except that it cannot break bitcoin -- which no one is supposed to be able to do anyway.  

And, anyway, the core devs themselves admitted that sidechains will not solve the scalability problem.  


RBF and CPFP are not solutions to scalability, or ingredients of the "overlay network".  They are part of the "fee market" concept that the "new devs" claim will make a block size increase unnecessary, even undesirable.  

Yes, unfortunately there are already implementations of RBF; and Peter Todd convinced F2Pool to go ahead and implement his favorite brand of RBF, that makes it easy to do double-spends of 0-confirmation payments.  (Until others warned F2Pool of the risks, and they pulled back.)  

And Luke has just released his own fork of the core, that implements CPFP and also a relay node filter that discards transactions that he considers "spam" (mostly, SatoshiDice and the like).

Why not do a cursory google search before making trivially disprovable assertions?

https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning

https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements

RBF was just a paper napkin when the OP was posted.  Now it's real.



Sorry, I'm terrible at puzzles and riddles.   

Why the hell do you keep talking about ducks???

The USA has many incomparably excellent schools, most of which are in the private sector.  Excellent schools in the public sector owe their excellence to the involvement of private parties (PTA moms, alumni associations) and excel despite their handicap.

The 'poor underfunded schools' canard is bogus.  We lavish money on failing "Taj Mahal" schools (and especially on their corrupt top heavy admin layers).

Anyway, I was hoping you would respond less to the OT digression about schools and more to my ultimate point:

Oh, yes, I will be the first to acknowledge that USA's current educational system is an utter piece of crap. 

It seems to be the first thing gutted when money is needed elsewhere, the thing most inconsistently supported, and the thing subject to absolutely the worst planning and analysis in the US government (except for perhaps the SEC).  Most damning of all, it is terribly ineffective.  US graduates are generally lower in quality of learning than people who attended school in the third world, and completely inadequate for the personnel needs of our own high-tech businesses. 

We can examine school systems from all over the world of that actually work. We should use that information to fix our own.  But we don't.  Education in the US has been the victim of many different idiots with "solutions" that are simple, easy to talk about, and wrong.

The first one is not mine; I got it from /r/bitcoin.  Thanks for the other...  


"New" in the sense that they took control of the "reference" implementation after Gavin stepped aside.


I was referring to replace-by-fee, child-pays-for-parent, and other tools that they have developed for the "fee market".

I understand that BIP66 fixes a malleability bug and a security risk, but I got the impression that it got implemented now because it was necessary for those tools to work.


AFAIK, Gavin has been discussing the block increase with the other devs for a long time.  He implemented a 20 MB prototype, tested it on the test net with full load, and wrote many blog posts about it.  He sought the main affected parties -- major miners, exchanges, and payment processors, etc. -- and got their support (something that the "new devs" apparently are not willing to do).  But since the "new devs" were bent on the "let it clog" plan, he brought the issue to the general bitcoin public (something that the "new devs" did not do) and went on to support the BitcoinXT code fork.  Which is what any dev is supposed to do when he is unhappy with the evolution of an open source project.

I am not a fan of Gavin; I cannot forget that he supported the Bitcoin Foundation well after it started to smell bad, and apparently still likes the title of "Chief Scientist of TBF" even though he is not being paid by them.  But I cannot have any respect for the "new devs" for their use of ad-hominem and vague technical FUD to prevent a block increase; and for their stated plans to push all person-to-person traffic off the bitcoin network and appropriate the experiment for their company's use.  I cannot understand how the bitcoiners could be happy with that plan...

The Lightning Network is is still in the paper napkin stage, and "Sidechain" is just another word for "something".  But what is certain is that the "overlay network" will have a few large "hubs", and  individual users would have to open accounts with those hubs and lock all their circulating bitcoins in those accounts.  I have a hunch about the names of the first two hubs: one will start with "C" and end with "e", while the other will end with "e" and start with "C"...

I've been involved with small and big L Libertarianism for over 20 years.  Not once have I heard or read anyone propose we all go out and start tearing up the roads, because Death To the Oppressive Orwellian CalTrans or start digging up pipes because Death To the Totalitarian Fascist EBMUD.

Scale matters (the poison is in the dose), and most libertarians are most opposed to Federal provision/regulation of goods/services, but not so much State/local policies (because it's much easier to choose/move between jurisdictions competing for residents than nations).

Your position would be stronger if you at least acknowledged (even implicitly) the smoking crater of ignorance, thuggery, and epic waste our failed public schools have become.

As for "stuff that's cheaper and more efficient when provided by government," the vast majority of people believe that set includes all manner of things which stand to be radically disrupted by Bitcoin, with central banking and its monetary fiat policies being the prime example.

Quick, let's get the government to ban full RBF, because 0-conf tx are a Public Good and double-spending "is a form of payment fraud, exactly like check kiting!"  

Politics is unproductive here.

My problem with the current crop of "libertarians" is that they're advocating fundamentally unproductive stuff like destroying public infrastructure.  There's a lot of stuff that's cheaper and more efficient when provided by government, (like roads), and there's a lot of stuff that can't be provided by private firms because other private firms will fuck it up (like clean air and soil) and there's a lot of stuff that supports the economy at large in the long term but does not support any particular private company so private companies won't do it (like universal, USEFUL education). 

My problem with anarchists is that anarchy is merely a transitory state that is a prelude to warlords and petty criminal organizations taking over.  Much larger criminal organizations with subordinate warlords are much more efficient and less dangerous for the population, and eventually start to look like governments that provide actual services - but they take generations to evolve from the first generation of thugs that take over from an anarchy.

Libertarians are not anarchists.  They are in favor of government regulating force/fraud in markets, but not central planning to pick the winners and losers. 

To use a sports analogy, firms are the teams competing to provide the most value to the public, while a proper non-coercive government is the referee who maintains a level playing field.  When the ref gets bribed by one team to make bad calls, the fans in the stands lose.

If you could stop beating your anarchist strawman and pretending it's a victory over libertarians, that would be great.   

Heh, very droll.  Tres bot mots!   

Yes, I do understand the categorical but academic difference between a chain fork and a codebase fork.  I was intentionally conflating them to illustrate their functional equivalency insofar as adding to BTC's Mainchain additional parallel capacity.



I'm not sure from where you're getting this "new" adjective.  Adam Back is BTC's grandfather, if not (part of) Satoshi Himself.

Luke-jr as been around since forever.  Ditto Garzik, etc.  AFAIK, gmax is the newest kid on the block(chain).

The ad hom is irrelevant in any case, because the claim you infer from it, that "they have invented several spiffy gadgets to handle it that they are dying to use," is not accurate.  Sidechains and Lightening are spiffy to be sure, but we are seeing them being slowly deployed via the proper (IE whitepaper->peer review->prototype->testnet->listserve feedback->BIP) process, in marked contrast to the Gavinista's insurgent tactics of going straight to the drooling masses and inciting the mob to demand Action Now.

F2Pool is still the second-largest pool, after AntPool; in spite of RBF and their role in the "Fork of July" incident (and of them saying that, sorry, but they will not change their methods).

Define "fishy".  Most likely, a miner's cartel will use its power to increase their total revenue over some future time span.  That means more money for their members.  If the pool managers conclude that their plan is worth the trouble and risk, why would the pool members dislike it?


Those are "deep forks" that split before their genesis blocks.  

I meant a hard fork with network partition and coin split, like the Beast of Apocalypse of the Anagavinists.  The fork creates two independent bitcoins ("series A" and "series B"), each with its own set of miners and nodes, and with its own blockchain.  Each blockchain is invalid by the other coin's rule, but the chains share a common prefix that is valid for both.  So the history of both coins is the same up to the fork, and just after that each person owns the same amount of coins in the same addresses, on both chains.  Each person can move either coin independently by using the proper version of software and wallet.  

Each coin will have its exchanges and market price. The price (and therefore market cap) of the original bitcoin will probably be split among the two clones.   Then, those who don't like one of the coins can sell all their holdings of the same and buy more of the other coin.  One nice effect is that the nertwork capacity of each coin will be the same as that of the original bitcoin.  So the two coins together can support twice as many users; however, to send payments across the "ocean" between them, people will have to use an exchange or a broker.

Good that you agree about the block reward problem.  But you must have missed my preaching on /r/bitcoin about the illusion of the "fee market".

The "new devs" are impatient for the network to saturate so that the "fee market" will arise, and they have invented several spiffy gadgets to handle it that they are dying to use.  No matter how people explain, they don't want to understand that

* even 80% of saturation would render the use of bitcoin a nightmare, driving users away from bitcoin and stopping its growth well before full saturation.

* when the traffic will stop growing, say at ~80% of capacity in daily average, the "traffic jams" will arise erratically at peak hours and at random variations  of demand and supply;

* the queue lengths will vary pretty fast during a jam,  and will be emptied in a few hours;

* the fees will be useless outside of the jams;

* the right fees will be impossible to predict during a jam, because each jam will be different, the queue status will vary too fast;

* the right fee that you should use to be among the first 2500 entries of the queue that will get into the next block depends on the 3000 transactions that will be issued in the next 10 minutes, by 3000 clients who are trying to choose a fee that will put their transactions ahead of yours;

* twidding the fees will not reduce the average delay by one second, only make everybody spend more money and make the individual delays more unpredictable;

* many clients will end up paying much more than the standard fee, only to wait more than if the transactions were processed first-come, first served;

* most clients -- espcially those who issue important transactions -- have better things to do with their time than sit two hours watching the queues and playing the silly "fee hopscotch" game.

It is useless to point out to them that no business in the world, from lemonade stands to airline manufacturers, uses (or could use) anything remotely like this bizarre pricing mechanism.  It is useless to explain to them that the "fee market" will not be a "fRee market", because they have this silly libertarian definition of "free market" as "a market without government regulations".

Unfortunately, they are so detached from the real world, so fired up with the "fee market" fantasy, and so anxious to see their toys at work -- that they cannot even understand how that "fee market" will transform the act of paying something with bitcoin from a mildly complicated routine into an absolutely stupid, lengthy, incomprehensible and frustrating game.

They are like kids who set fire to the house because they want to play firemen and put the filre out with their water guns.


No it doesn't.  From the beginning, Satoshi himself was aware, and said so clearly, that the system would work only if a majority of the mining power acted according to their selfish immediate interest of maximinzing their revenue.  If a mining majority decided to do something else, all bets were off.  He was counting on mining remaining decentralized, so that such cartels could not form.


Bitcoin has been dead for more than a year, and was very sick before that.  What is still twitching there is a bizarre and terribly expensive payment system that resembles bitcoin, and works like it for some puroses; but with a crucial difference -- it depends on 5 people not having bad ideas.

There is still some hope though: if the price crashes to below 1$, all the industrail miners will go bankrupt, and bitcoin may then return to how it was in 2009, with mining well distributed through the remaining clients.

That, if the "new devs" can be stopped and the fire can be put out before the house burns to the ground.

Sorry, my mind exaggerated the memory it seems.  I cannot find his reaction to the first actual GPU miner (if there was one), but there is a well known plea of his, from Dec/2009, for a moratorium on such miners:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.54

You know what? I think they should - before some government does when we can't do anything about it. At least for a 48hr period to demonstrate the consequences and it is a real threat that needs to be addressed. Lock the main devs bitcoin addresses for a couple of days to focus their attention; first on the testnet then on the real net. Put out a public warning a week before and goad the devs to stop them if they can. Treat it as a white-hat DOS test with full disclosure.

Indeed, the only known possible counter to MPEX's Gavincoin Short tactic is MAD.  (Implying the only way to win is not to play.)


"Would be?"

There are hundreds of forks which already provide parallel capacity to augment the Main Chain, LTC being the most significant.


I do have a problem with "the 5$ cost of your transaction being subsidized by investors."

You must have missed my participation in the furious blocksize debate raging in cypherdoc's thread.

TL;DR:  My position is the network should be weaned off block subsidies ASAP, by allowing the fee market to mature (IE ossify) at 1MB by charging the highest price the market will bear, rather than continue (via larger blocks) the outrageous undercharging practice whereby users pay a nickle to use 5$ or more with of electricity/infrastructure/C&M/etc.

Sorry, it was my mistake to emphasize the value-transaction aspect of Bitcoin to the exclusion of its primary value-storage function.

Allow me to add:

bitcoin is working perfectly.  I can easily and securely and almost instantly store value equivalent to millions of dollars and access it anywhere anytime, all for about the price of a 1st class postage stamp.

The store of value function is why you are wrong about "most bitcoiners" not caring about "a protocol change imposed by a mining cartel."

Perhaps on a one-man-one-vote basis you are right, but the economic power majority of BTC (the whales) are most certainly directly affected by a 70%/5 pool coup attempt.

They simply won't allow it, and will prevent it via the mechanisms graciously explained by Holliday.

For someone who has studied BTC for so long and in such depth, your objections and concerns sound very much like the knee-jerk reactions of someone (very intelligent of course) hearing for the first time about Satoshi's whitepaper.

The system's design accounts for the scenario you believe "could" happen, and its incentive structure was calibrated to keep that theoretical possibility in the realm of imagination.

The 'ZOMGWTF if the top [n] pools collude - BTC is doomed!!1!' FUD has for years been rehashed and debunked.

And yet, there you are, proclaiming the Death Of Bitcoin^TM for what, the 51st time?