Topic: The BTC price is too high for it's current security model - page 3. (Read 4588 times)

Oh god, not this guy again.  I posted a single economic analysis of current BTC status in the thread below, you didn't like the result, and now you're on some kind of crusade against me for not saying BTC will be worth $10 billion each before 2015:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7888383

As for trying to portray me as some kind of "Catcoin enthusiast", that was an era when there was only one new altcoin every week or so, and generally everyone would mine the hell out of them on launch day since everything was profitable and post in their threads.

Does this comment look like I really care about Catcoin?


^ If that's not the golden age of scamcoins, I don't know what is

Honestly, your posts don't make much sense to me. I notice that your profile joined this forum right about the last bubble and you first interest was in CatCoin. Did you miss the BTC train or something?

You seem to be preoccupied with matters that don't matter. Do you think anyone in the Speculation forum cares which crypto will "win" 50 years from now when the dust settles? No. We care about which coin is winning now. Most of us will be so educated and ahead of the curve if another coin challenges Bitcion or if there is a major problem that develops with Bitcoin, that it won't matter. We will always be early adopters.

Your 51% attack issues don't matter for bitcoin now and they won't be the deciding factors 50 years from now.

Dear Apies, you can't solve social problems with technology.

Trying to work out whether more feasible to adapt to an existing chain or new one atm.



Ask Othe about that part, his idea.  He'll either be around a VTC or Bloatero dev channel.

Hmm. People join up with pools primarily to reduce their variance; any old chip can theoretically find a block, but most people would rather have $1 for "sure" than a one-in-a-million chance to win a jackpot, even if the jackpot is paying a little better than the "sure" thing on the game-theoretical average. Faster blocks can reduce this pain point, but not eliminate it; unless you're fundamentally changing the proof of work mechanism, you'd need something like a thousand blocks a second to sufficiently level things out for a "citizen" miner. And faster blocks have staleness problems, too.

New ideas that solve problems with Bitcoin are why anyone bothers with altcoin projects. Seems worth discussing, at least.

Also curious what you mean by this.

I guess that's why they're called speculators.  People make the assumption, or gamble, that these problems will be solved, or don't know the problems exist in the first place.  

Someone asked earlier, well, how does this help if you don't have a solution.  I actually do, but it's nothing compatible with the standard BTC protocol and makes concessions in other areas.

If you want to control things like mining pool centralization it has to be done at the protocol level and can't just rely on the honor system, that's just not going to work.  Someone who disagrees with me thinks you can enforce p2pool on the protocol level by using latency as a greed incentivizer.  I prefer actual hard locks, but whatever.

Maybe its the reason why bitcoin is 600, not above 5k. The price is defined by how much people are willing to pay, and now its no much less than 600.


Even not being decentralized, it still is better than fiat in some sense, and not controlled by states or big corporations, so still better than fiat.
And from the end user side, taxes are small and money transfer is quicker, think most people just don't care or don't take time to think about all the decentralization stuff and risks.

The reason behind this statement is two words, distributed consensus.

You see Bitcoin speakers, PhD lecturers, and even Bitcoin janitors like Gavin use phrases like this all the time, especially while trying to debunk security models of other systems like proof of stake.  The following is one such example from a Gmaxwell link by Andrew Poelstra, created only two months ago titled "Distributed Consensus from Proof of Stake is Impossible":

https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

The problem with articles like this isn't the assumption that every theoretical form of proof of stake is broken, we'll just assume that statement is fact for now, the problem is that applying the same scrutiny to the current Bitcoin PoW security model gives you similar results.  You really have to go through some mental gymnastics to refer to a system controlled entirely by 1-4 pools as "distributed consensus".  

Earlier today, someone insisted to me that technically anything involving two parties counts as distributed.  In the case of Bitcoin, using textbook definitions like this obviously doesn't work, since both parties would be at best case 50% each, and attacks can occur with much less hash rate.  Defining at what point the Bitcoin network actually is distributed is a tricky thing.  For the context of computers, one very important phrase or requirement of distributed computing is the independent failure of components.  Some people might argue otherwise, but for my personal defintion, I'm going to argue that the system should still actually function with a single component failure in distributed computing.  

Back to the example above, most people would not consider two pools with 50% hashrate a valid consensus model for Bitcoin.  Let's assume, only for the sake of example, three pools with 33% each was acceptable.  Since we can't allow the network to fall to two pools, due to being an invalid security model, with three pools we are at the lowest state of functionality with no redundancy.  Even though the network technically functions in the example, we now have to add another pool, bringing the total to four, just to reach the lowest common definition of distributed computing by having a single increment of redundancy, or how I interpret the textbook definition, "independent failure of components".

Have we really even reached a textbook example of redundancy yet in the example?  The answer is an obvious no.  If all it takes is two out of four pools in the example to collude to bring us to an invalid security model, we obviously have no redundancy, or independent failure of components.  This also happens to be the current state of Bitcoin in the real world.  It's not even about Ghash bordering or exceeding 50% hash.  Even if they're vastly below that number, the possibility of the top two pools operating under coercion or collusion still means we have no redundancy, or real distributed computing.  

Even if you completely ignore the existence of Ghash, the number two and three pools operating together could even qualify as a system with no redundancy under many situations.  In other words, people really need to stop praising Bitcoin for it's security because it currently doesn't exist.