Topic: SegWit losing Bitcoin Unlimited winning -> Moon soon - page 8. (Read 13507 times)

Yes, and the clarification was helpful.


Fair enough, solid point.


Chalk it up to experience

@miscreanity, even if your $988 is violated and we move lower, it could still be an accurate channel if we view BTU+BTC as a combined price. We may end up getting BTU for free which we can trade for BTC. However, it appears BTU is not going to add the necessary replay attack prevention in order to get listed on the exchanges. BTU appears to understand that their coin will be sold off as an inferior altcoin if they add replay attack prevention. Seems like they are already admitting defeat and acting desperate maniacal now.

Although nobody likes the current problem with the 1MB blocks, an unlimited blocksize is not a viable technological solution. Sorry but incompetents aren't going to be trusted to lead Bitcoin. Roger Ver and Julian Wu are not competent enough to pull off what they attempted.

And your proof is? So your opinion is more correct than my opinion, except I have a correlation and you have only an opinion. Besides, didn't you read my reply to @miscreanity where I disavowed having any such power that you are insinuating that I claimed to have.

You don't consider that maybe I posit a different sort of power...

I think you are letting your ego fool you into thinking correlation = cause and effect.

Well yes there is a natural Invisible Hand outcome (if natural is what you mean by free market), but the fee market will be centrally controlled by a cartel extracting the maximum the market will bear instead of a competitive, decentralized market where demand curve meets supply curve (see @Peter R's video for an excellent visual explanation), thus not a free market in that sense of my interpretation of the meaning of the term free market. But that can't be avoided with Satoshi's PoW design no matter which direction we choose (centralization it is an insoluble attribute of Satoshi's PoW concept because of optimal mining strategies give disproportionate rewards greater than their percentage share to those who have greater share of hashrate and/or faster propagation). The reason everyone is fighting is because PoW has no decentralization future (no matter what we do and it can't be fixed, not even with SegWit). We'll need to find something else other than PoW before we all lose our idealism, but (D)PoS and Byzantine agreement (e.g. Tendermint, Casper, etc) are also centralization. So nobody has a solution to offer (I am not going to promote my work here right now).

So we are in agreement on the outcome, just a different interpretations of the definitions of terms.


Just because it was time for someone to write the posts I did, doesn't mean that my posts didn't help convince a lot of people who were scared and read this Speculation forum. Others have been writing similar points, but afaik (?) not directly refuting the math of @Peter R and BU's white paper.

I agree it was naturally time and also naturally time for someone like me to be motivated to take their head out of the programming cave sand and say, "hey n00bs, enough is enough on these incorrect technology arguments from Roger Ver, here are the bottomline facts". I mean really Tone Vays is not the best technically qualified person to be matched up against Roger Ver in a debate, nor the best (most succinct, direct to the winning salient point, etc) debater.


I do seem to have an uncanny timing lately eh? (probably just blind luck or am I just by very naturally well in tune with the biorhythm of the community since I have 1% of all posts on these forums?)


Core is simply a manifestation was has to happen in order to motivate what ever comes next.

I happen to believe a solution is coming, but you know I am very biased. I better put my head back in the sand and continue working on what I believe is that solution so it might be ready when it is really  absolutely needed.

We'll get 2 Mb soon and hopefully that will give us a little bit of time yet... hopefully creative destruction is underway...

And I agree we can move above $2000 with Core...

I agree that the BU FAQ is incorrect - there always has been a fee market and always will be a fee market, no matter how slack it may be at any given point. The only time it is readily apparent is when there is extreme stress on the system.


There is no free market limit on block size and no fee market, yet miners will enforce the highest level of fees x volume the market will bear? Unless my interpretation of what you stated is mistaken, this appears to be a contradiction.

Miners are the fee market makers, but they are beholden to market forces external to Bitcoin. The free market still determines the limits one way or another, directly or indirectly.

Finally: yes, centralization is still inevitable with either BC or BU.


Bitcoin had a high-volume low on the 18th and broke up through an hourly downtrend on low volume over 9 hours ago. It broke up through a second downtrend only a few hours later, again on low volume. I bought at $988 based on the charts, before reading your BU critique. It was time.

Additionally, the markets have risen at times when both BC and BU were gaining. They've likewise fallen in a similar manner. While your analysis is important, I am far more inclined to think that forces external to Bitcoin have a much greater weight on price than the BC/BU issue.

As for the BC/BU debate generally... due to centralization, I expect Bitcoin to rapidly become a beast of coercion and control instead of the territory of freedom that held for several years. Regardless of technical merit on either side, the actions of "core" have been beyond reprehensible. A doctor with the greatest ability and skill eventually amounts to nothing if his bedside manner is derogatory and dismissive. The core team chose to stand on a platform of abuse and control and that has resulted in market forces ultimately resisting the proposed solution.

From what I see the price is headed higher despite the division, not because one side or the other is gaining. For every person engaged in the debate, there may be a hundred using the system that remain unaware.

Let's put that to a test right now. I am going to refute you and let's see if the market is paying attention, because miners damn well better be paying attention.

Perhaps you haven't noticed that before I made my shocking math post, the Bitcoin price was declining, since I made my post then the BTC price has risen 5% and miner support for BU has declined. I think the market is paying attention and that is why I am following up with more explanation (when I should be sleeping instead because it is 2:30am where I am and I am on medications).


One thing is very clear, and that all those strategies were already in play. What unlimited block sizes bring that is new is they hand another club membership tool for the large pools and mining farms to use against those who don't adhere to their cartel.


But it is instantly the case when the block size is unlimited and transaction fees can be as small as any level of spam one wants to incentivize (or even miners paying themselves the transaction fees so they can spam the other miners will huge block sizes with the disproportionate profits going to those with more hashrate, faster propagation, and secret signing agreement cartels).


Incorrect. I refer you to the research on optimal mining strategies. You are behind the curve of the current knowledge of the experts in the field.

its reassuring knowing all these crackpot theories of DOOM will be put to the test.

Here is another way to realize how ridiculous @Peter R's (Bitcoin Unlimited's) thesis is.

Let's assume every miner had the same hashrate and the same propagation delay, i.e. perfect equality, and so the equilibrium block size was established at rate at which the waste costs of orphans for the entire system was balanced with what the market was willing to pay for transaction fees. But every miner would have an incentive to have a higher share of the hashrate and a faster than average propagation delay, because those who did would win a disproportionate share of the rewards (if you don't understand why then you need to study the original selfish mining paper and the followup on optimal mining strategies).

So the natural market outcome is that miners would sign their blocks with a public key representing their reputation to not send invalid blocks. So then miners (pools) would be economically incentivized to trust each other and send only the signed block headers so they can begin mining on the new blocks as fast as possible with only constant factors of propagation (independent of block size). Of course they can still propagate the block data for verification but propagation delay no longer matters. Miners who didn't participate would be less profitable and lose share of hashrate over time. So then you end up with no free market limit on block size, i.e. no fee market. Once again a power vacuum ensues and there must be winner-take-all power-law aggregation of economies-of-scale. This is why Satoshi's PoW is flawed as a decentralization paradigm.

Q.E.D.

It doesn't matter whether you choose SegWit/Core or Bitcoin Unlimited, both are centralized control paradigms. But Bitcoin Unlimited means massive chaos and market confusion (thus probably a cratering price which destroys many miners) until the power structure takes form that takes control over the chaos (which will then be no better than Core because again a monopoly over block size and extracting maximum transaction fees the market will bear). At least with Core, we already have the banksters in control and leading us over the cliff. Continuity is what the miners need right now, until someone invents a real solution. So the miners will reject Bitcoin Unlimited unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot with chaos and cratering price. I think the market will quickly rally behind the most continuous path and reject the copycoin, same as it did for Ethereum Classic. If you don't actually bring a solution for anyone, then don't go fucking up the market and creating needless chaos, because the market will reject it.

Although that sounds logical to a n00b, who ever wrote that and believes that must have forgotten or flunked their high school (or perhaps as late as 2nd year university) probability and statistics math class. Reminds me of when I found a high school level probability error in the masternode security model in Dash's InstantX white paper, not to mention how egregiously flawed the Dash the Instant X design is. Evan Duffield replied, but then ran away. Even the economic arguments for Dash's flawed design were refuted. Note that Dash's required premixing (and even not premixing if not employing homomorphic encryption of transaction values, i.e Monero before RingCT) eliminates the possibility of merging UTXO balances and thus causes an exponential blowup in UTXO, which is an issue for scaling to trillions of microtransactions given that performance requires keeping UTXO in RAM.

The probability that another block solution will be found within the propagation time t (not to be confused with at the time t) is the Poisson process (λt)e^-λt where n = 1 (i.e. only one or more occurrences required). Which as λt becomes smaller than roughly ¹/₁₀₀ then e^-λt is closely approximated by 1 - λt or approximately 1. Thus, we can see the probability that another block solution will be found within the propagation time t approximates a linear proportion λt when λt is less than roughly ¹/₁₀₀.

So with a block period (aka block time) λ of 10 minutes and a propagation time t (for finding a second block) of less than 6 seconds (and propagation will usually be less than 600 milliseconds so that is even a more linear relationship at  ¹/₁₀₀₀), then presuming roughly (on average) that doubling the block size doubles both the transaction fees and the propagation time, then the miner has the same income on average with the largest possible block they can make because doubling the risk of another miner finding a block also doubles the miner's income per block statically speaking. If you don't understand this, then read it over and over until you grasp the mathematical (statistical) point that the quoted statement above is incorrect and there is no free market limit on block size and no fee market. The point being that yes the risk of another miner winning the block increases, but the miner's income commensurately (proportionally) also increases, so statistically the miner loses nothing by creating a larger block and thus is leaving tranactions fees on the table for some other miner to take if the miner doesn't make a larger block. However presuming some transactions pay less per byte than others (and higher valued transactions can afford to pay more per byte), the economic converse effect occurs wherein the miner has the incentive to make the smallest block possible or below the size where propagation latency is linearly proportional to block size (i.e. the latency that is a constant factor independent of data transferred), which is again not a free market limit on block size and not a fee market. So the same Tragedy-of-the-Commons occurs that has always been argued as the problem with unlimited block size, in that the power vacuum must be filled by a collusion of miners which pool their (at least 33% of the systemic) hashrate and selfish mine against the rest of the network enforcing a block size which maximizing their profit which is basically the highest level of fees x volume the market will bear. I had even argued (I claim successfully) against @ArticMine that Monero's algorithmically adjusting block size suffers from a similar Tragedy-of-the-Commons outcome (ultimately due to the power-law centralization of mining economies-of-scale). No matter how you slice and dice it, Satoshi's PoW will become centralized so choose your poison how you want to get there, Bitcoin Core (aka Blockstream) funded by banksters or Bitcoin Unlimited (with insufficient developer resources) lead by technical incompetents such as Roger Ver. This is why I designed (a yet unpublished) solution for blockchain consensus which is not PoW and not PoW (something totally new, which I am working on now).

Even if you try to argue that propagation out to the minority hashrate can take up to minutes, the most profitable (i.e. winning) economics models selfish mining wherein only the minimum propagation time to only 33% of the hashrate is relevant, thus it is likely to be (and currently is even to the average network diameter, i.e. the majority) less than 6 seconds.

Bitcoin has taken a big hit because of Bitcoin Unlimited. Roger Ver with his recent affiliation with the technologically flawed Dash (and his Dash pump) and attacking Bitcoin with big blocks is really trying to shake things up, but as I had explained Roger Ver is somewhat technically myopic. Also perhaps some people may be speculating Winkervoss twins might liquidate.


P.S. I liked @gmaxwell's explanation of why cryptocurrency fundamentally must rely on cryptography.


Edit: @aklan made me aware of a Bitcoin Unlimited white paper, which I am reading now and will respond soon.

segwit's been solid and steady but hardly going crazy.

it's clear that the status quo is much preferred to any unlimited uncertainty. if it really did look like unlimited was gonna happen everything would turn to shit.

at the same time i dunno how much longer the status quo will remain attractive to newcomers. maybe we do need to swallow the uncertainty pain wherever it comes from to get some progress. 

I don’t know about that, BU is winning but then this opens the possibility of a hard fork, what will happen then? I think the price is going to plummet for a time, and for some that is going to be the opportunity of a lifetime and will try to get as many bitcoins as possible but I don’t know if we will be able to even get back to the prices we saw before.

who is paying you Roger , GAVINI, CIA, to destroy bitcoin
you will win an altcoins BTCun and destruction of cryptocurrency

Since the date you posted this BTC has struggled and now especially that the exchanges are talking about incorporating it. BU will crash the price even further I suspect. The miners will pull back then try again and pretty soon they should be crystal clear the market does not support it at all.

While Segwit was in the ascendancy BTC was hitting new highs, was resilient after the ETF was declined and was on track for moon.

It's strange to view any similarities in the code as theft of it.  Bitcoin code is open source, and there's always going to be amendments made based on what the new developers feel is needed at the time.  What people could argue is that BU's code is poorly developed, along with reasonable justifications why.

As you say miners wan't to earn the most possible, which is why it seems counter-intuitive that they are the ones pushing for the bigger blocks, unless it's long term thinking.

With scaling in place, a balance will be found between block size to keep orphans low and high transactions to keep the backlog low.

I think fees replacing block rewards was part of the vision from the start, but to do that it has to handle a lot more transactions than at present.

You are talking about long-term benefits of bigger block size for all the people of bitcoin ecosystem. But miners prefer smaller blocks as of now for their own benefits like they can enjoy higher transaction fees along with usual mining rewards.

Bigger locks will pick more transactions hence there will be no huge amounts of pending transactions so people will start enjoying lower tx fees. But miners will suffer high resources needed for their mining processes.
The mass adoption and price increase will not happen in a week nor month but miners need to face losses (compared to their today's benefits) till price increase will happen.

In future (after one or two halving) miners will start earning more tx fees than block rewards hence they will always aim for higher tx fees than higher bitcoin prices.

BU isn't going to produce "bigger blocks" tho..
BU is going to produce "slightly bigger blocks"


with BU, miners control block size collectively.
no way in hell will they collectively decided to create enough blockspace such that everyone can get in a block with a 1cent fee
thats nutty!

given today's TX demand, a blocksize of 1.2MB will maintain fee pressure AND generate 20% more TX fees pre block
this is what will drive blocksize growth! the growth in Fee Paying TX.
often poeple say TX demand is unbound, thats true, but 50cent Fee Paying TX is NOT unbound.
miners will look to maximize fee revenue by balancing the free market through minimal blocksize increases.

Core will be constantly pressuring miners to "keep blocks small Because Decentralization", this + the idea of maximizing fee revenue is going to prove IMPOSSIBLE for miner to ignore.

it will literally be  IMPOSSIBLE ... because step 1) they maximizes fee revenue 2) miners profitability goes UP 3) because its more profitable , more miners come online 4) more miners == less profitability 5) miners are now completely DEPENDENT on the fee market being optimized, they will need to make sure to keep fee pruess strong, and that means no unnecessary blocksize incress.

1.2MB 1.3MB  1.35MB 1.39MB

these are the increases to be expected

they need to collectively decide on blocksize, so... all that is require is a small % of hashing power to understand the profit in keeping blocks small and we'll have this optimized fee market.