Topic: Taproot proposal - page 16. (Read 11516 times)

It wasn't because of the futures fake markets but because they saw that going ahead with the hard fork part of SegWit2x would split bitcoin and it was not in their best interest. Believe it or not miners have a bigger stake in bitcoin since they both invest in equipment and bitcoin at the same time. Unlike nodes ore regular users who many not even own any bitcoin (anything at stake).

Proposals should be discussed and then approved/rejected based on their merits not based on what the
market (day traders who only care about their short term profit) think. Keep in mind that it is very easy to manipulate the market price on a centralized exchange specially when not enough people turn to that option.

I suspect major mining pools are running their own custom implementations of bitcoin for broadcasting, receiving, and validating blocks. 

In 2017, there were many "futures" markets that allowed market participants to price the value of various fork-coins, and the owners of mining equipment ("hashers") likely saw that mining on the NYA/BTC1 would not be in their best interest.

The mining pools earn income from the blocks they mine, and they need to invest in infrastructure to allow their pool to operate. If a pool has fewer hashers, it will have less income. It is also trivial for hashers to move their miners to pools that are signaling for or against a proposal that is in line with the long-term best interest of bitcoin. If a pool is signaling for or against a proposal that is not in bitcoins best interest, it will lose customers.


I would have to disagree with the bolded part of your statement. The altcoins that can be mined using ASIC miners that can also mine bitcoin have a very low network hashrate as a function of the hashrate of the bitcoin network. If 1% of the hashers (measured by hashrate) currently mining bitcoin were to move to bitcoin cash, the difficulty would more than double, which means the price of bitcoin cash would need to more than double for the hashers to have the same amount of revenue. This is simply not something that will scale for enough hashers to oppose a bitcoin proposal whose failure would benefit bcash. Even if it did scale, once these hashers start mining bcash, any proposal whose failure would benefit bcash could subsequently be implemented.

I mentioned futures markets for various fork-coins above. Any futures market would need to either be centralized, or run on an altcoin blockchain, such as etherum in order to be reliable.

My position continues to be that it is best to get miners' consent prior to implementing a fork (soft or hard). If there is a BIP proposal that is receiving pushback from the miners (based on what they are signaling), or if the miners are signaling support for a "bad" BIP proposal, a good next step would be to encourage reputable exchanges to open futures markets for both "for" and "against" forks for a BIP, and hope that the result will change minds.

The argument is flawed because security of Bitcoin is not defined based on individual outputs but as a whole system. If some day the technology advances enough to be able to reverse a 256-bit public key to get its corresponding private key that means Bitcoin as a whole becomes insecure and whether or not Taproot is using public key is not going to change that.

I see, thanks for clarifying. I understand that from a press point of view it is very clickbaity and juicy to use such wording and avoiding to be specific. Shame on them as usual.
Now, whatever the way we should move on, let's get this upgrade on its way.

It doesn't look like anyone mentioned the article I just read by Mark Friedenbach, so I thought I would mention it here. If it was discussed, I apologize.

It's this one:
https://freicoin.substack.com/p/why-im-against-taproot.
He discusses Taproot and reasons why he is against its activation.

Mark fears that exposing the public key within the output on the blockchain downsizes Bitcoin's quantum protection. If and when quantum computers that are powerful enough to attack secp256k1 are created, they could (potentially) calculate the private key from a public key. The way Bitcoin works now, public keys are exposed when the coins are spent. With Taproot, they are exposed right away after an output is created.

According to Mark, it's quite possible that a quantum computer that can become a treat to Bitcoin can see the light of day by the end of this decade:

The article goes on to mention that 6.25 million bitcoins in 2019 were kept at addresses whose public keys are known. If the algorithm gets broken, it's those coins that become vulnerable. Another good reason not to reuse addresses. 

When Taproot gets activated (because I assume it will), what is currently being done on improving the security of the network where the public keys will become exposed as soon as an output is created (if I understood Mark's concerns properly)? Quantum computers could be something we have to worry about in 10-20 years, but what if the technology becomes available sooner? We will have Taproot, but how soon can quantum-resistant solutions be built?

Does Mark have valid concerns or is he wrong? I read somewhere that the exposed public keys with Taproot could get hashed preventing possible private key calculations in that way. Is that the way to go or what happens next?

It actually wasn't, the timing was just unfortunate. AJ and I agreed on the method to use, and the PR to close prior to the coin toss. However, it happened to be that I posted my comment with the resolution of that discussion at around the same time the coin toss occurred. Since that resolution was also what the coin toss came up with, it gives the appearance that this was decided by a coin toss, but it really wasn't.

I didn't know that one of the most interesting ways to find an agreement on how to possibly implement a bitcoin upgrade could have been the old fashioned coin toss!
https://www.coindesk.com/final-taproot-activation-specifics-chosen-bitcoin-blockchain-coin-toss
Is that really what happened? Isn't that awesome, uh?

The point you're trying to make is a valid one, but your expression of it isn't technically correct.  Miners can easily fake their 'support' for any flag, and they often have in the past-- e.g. signaling BTC1 when they weren't running it and had zero intention of ever running it.

So while it's true that miner signaling is sybil resistant,  the mining pools signaling flags don't necessarily have much skin in what they signal, so fairly little incentive to do so honestly.  This is particularly true because the parties with an investment in hardware are hashers (whom don't control the flags) and not pools (who do control the flags.  Many pools have significant altcoin investments and it's not too hard to imagine a kickback or altcoin play making fake signaling in a pool's interest.  Even hashers can move hashpower to altcoins that might gain value if Bitcoin had issues.

You could imagine a scheme where people pay _ethereum_ into a black hole to vote for bitcoin proposals. ... it would be an unfakable measurement, but if anything it would be anti-correlated with the wants and best interest of the Bitcoin community.

More generally,  we should always be careful when we're substituting what we can measure with what we need.  Measuring hashpower is probably only a reliable proxy when people haven't realized that they can game it, and we know for a fact now that they have.

The real unfakable metric is the eventual market price of the asset -- but we can't know that in advance, only make educated guesses.

This is speculation. What ultimately matters is the economic supermajority.



What if the miners hold the network hostage again by not signalling readiness for an upgrade the community wants?