Topic: The consensus dead end. - page 3. (Read 1356 times)

Bitcoin as Global Truth

I should expand on something that I said earlier:


The phrase “global truth” was not intended as an ideological statement.  A monetary system perforce requires that if Alice makes two transactions doubly-spending the same coin to Bob and to Charlie, then there must emerge a single global truth about who gets the money.  Otherwise, the money is worthless:  Who wants money that 99.9% of people believe you have, and 0.1% of people believe really belongs to someone else?

A useful lay definition:  The Bitcoin consensus is a single global truth of who has what money at each point in time.  The truth must be absolutist, with zero tolerance for any deviations:  Either Bob has the coin, or Charlie has the coin—either-or, with no room for any disagreement.

Bitcoin achieves a single, global, unanimous Consensus of absolute Truth, even in the face of Byzantine faults—although it does so probabilistically.  In the above example, as the number of confirmations of the winning transaction increases, the probability approaches 1 that absolutely 100% of honest nodes will reach the same conclusion about who has the coin—either Bob, or Charlie.  And each additional confirmation exponentially increases the security of this automagical unanimous agreement.  Satoshi knew this; see §11 of the Bitcoin whitepaper.

In the context of Bitcoin, that is the meaning of “consensus”.  And...


Bitcoin reaches this Truth with no central authority:  Nobody in the world has an override button for ruling in favour of Charlie over Bob, or vice versa.

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Much mischief is done by the ambiguity of overloaded words.  Another example is “entropy”.  The word “entropy” has multiple distinct technical meanings in multiple fields, and multiple distinct meanings within the fields related to cryptography; if you confuse different types of “entropy”, then you will break your random number generator.

You understand the distinction here, but I think I really need to drive the point home for the public benefit:

In the context of Bitcoin, “consensus” is not how people agree to the rules, but how nodes agree on a global state based on the rules that everyone already agreed to.  This is not simply my opinion:  It is the meaning of the word “consensus” in the context of distributed systems architecture.

Compare and contrast the problem formulation in this excellent paper:


Indeed.


Good idea.

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Quote from: Metal Brain on April 22, 2021, 09:17:58 AM

A previous poster on here said the NSA created the backbone of the bitcoin network with backdoor vulnerabilities. Perhaps they don't need to go through the expense of a 51% attack. They can pull the plug whenever they want. Heck, the establishment probably created it and own most of the bitcoin and are just doing a big pump and dump scheme.

Are you sure that “a previous poster” isn’t you? 

You created your account after that “previous poster’s” first crap on this thread had been ignored for almost two days.  You bumped it, then started spreading more crap in the guise of asking questions.  You have only posted on this thread.  Now, you are not-so-subtly calling attention to utter crap from “a previous poster”—and in the same breath, you have overtly started to parrot the “previous poster’s” party line.  I think that I can call this one.

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Quote from: DooMAD on April 20, 2021, 07:52:25 AM

Quote from: pooya87 on April 20, 2021, 02:09:11 AM

Quote from: btc-room101 on April 18, 2021, 08:20:37 AM

of course NSA could crack this stuff all along.

Any proof or is it just the tinfoil hat talking?

Pretty sure that applies to every post this user has ever made.  I don't think I've ever witnessed them utter a word of sense in all 294 posts.

Pretty sure he’s trolling.  Like posting a comment about Microsoft Linux on Slashdot in 1999, and waiting for a dozen people to correct that in gruesome detail.

Or on second thought, he looks like a scammer...



I should have checked his trust page before I wrote all of this (instead of afterwards, when I went to tag him).

Quote from: btc-room101 on April 18, 2021, 08:20:37 AM

quantum-computers are way off, but 2^256 will be cracked soon with off the shelf hw.

Quote from: btc-room101 on April 22, 2021, 03:46:34 AM

The so called block-chain, is just what we call a linked-list in computer science, 70 year old tech nowadays.

Yup, grade F transparent troll.  Yawn.  He may have better luck spreading rumours that nullius works for the NSA.

(From my desk in Fort Meade.)

Alright, let's see.

If the consensus rule was 5 minutes between blocks, then currently the blockchain would be weighting much more than now, around the double amount. For example, if it was 1 minute instead of 10 and each block weighted 1MB, just like now, then the blockchain would be around 3 TBs (assuming that most of the blocks aren't empty).

— So what, BlackHatCoiner? Does it matter the size of the blockchain?

Yes it does. The heaviest the chain, the hardest it is to retain the decentralization. Compared to every other altcoin, Bitcoin is the "most decentralized one". What I mean by that:  It has, by far, the most offered-distributed effort. This is why I quoted-marked that little part. You can either say that something is centralized or decentralized, but this is how I measure the decentralization.

I'm pretty sure that "they" have much better solutions. You just have to understand what you're attacking. In this case, I wouldn't say that going against Bitcoin is the first thing on their list. As for the quoted part, what does it have to do? You don't really believe that Bitcoin will replace dollar's position, do you?

Yes, the hash function, Bitcoin uses, was firstly introduced by NSA. If you understand the way a hash function works, you can gently defy that previous poster's propaganda spread.

Some Bitcoiner refer https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Principles_of_Bitcoin when talking about what define "Bitcoin".


I think you meant "doubling the transaction rate will halve transaction fees".

"This opens another discussion, again. There are surely altcoins that process transactions faster, such as Litecoin with 2.5 minutes per block. The fact that someone chose 10 minutes back in 2009 isn't a non-sense randomly-made decision."

What is the advantage to choosing 10 minutes instead of a faster rate?

I don't think you understand what is beneficial to central bankers. It is beneficial to sabotage Bitcoin even if it costs them billions they will never recover. Destroying competition by wasting billions is not a waste if preserving the dominance of the US dollar will insure 100's of Trillions will keep rolling in from the inflation tax. You need to remember the US dollar is the world reserve currency. They are taxing 80% of the world with inflation!

A previous poster on here said the NSA created the backbone of the bitcoin network with backdoor vulnerabilities. Perhaps they don't need to go through the expense of a 51% attack. They can pull the plug whenever they want. Heck, the establishment probably created it and own most of the bitcoin and are just doing a big pump and dump scheme.

This is not entirely true. If the reward from my work isn't enough to provide me profit then I'll stop mining. But, if many people do that then the difficulty will decrease and this will result on making mining more profitable for me. Thus, it turns out that the total units of bitcoins you're rewarded don't have to do with your profit. We may see huge fluctuations of difficulty in the future. Recently, if I'm not mistaken, around 20% of the total power consumption for mining was lost. Cheers to the miners that will work within the next difficulty adjustment's period.

As I said, the fee is based on the amount of transactions in the mempool. Whether the reward gave 50 BTC or 0 BTC, the current transaction median fee would be the same.

Of course and they will. The cryptocurrencies you mentioned (BCH & LTC) are much more useful if you want to broadcast enormous transactions with low fees. You should consider, though, that if many people think same-like, their usefulness will be ruined.

This opens another discussion, again. There are surely altcoins that process transactions faster, such as Litecoin with 2.5 minutes per block. The fact that someone chose 10 minutes back in 2009 isn't a non-sense randomly-made decision.

If they invested all that fortune on performing such powerful attack, then they could stop Bitcoin. It's pretty simple if they just extend the chain with empty blocks. But it's not beneficial for them! Despite the cost of the miners that should work consecutively, they should do that for every altcoin existing! As said by Wind_FURY it's a game theory and they ought to play by the rules. It'd be better for them if they helped the network and got rewarded in bitcoins.

The design-decisions made by the Bitcoin Cash developers, to make blocks bigger, centralize the network, to maintain lower fees will be self-defeating. Block rewards are going to zero, and blockchain networks creating big blocks are killing POW blockchains main value-proposition. Censorship resistance.


Game Theory. The Federal Reserve System would learn that there’s more incentive to be honest, and be rewarded in Bitcoin.

In all of NSA history, the NSA has never made an algo public, where they didn't have the backdoor keys (DES, AES, ... nada one algo every, their entire mission is to tell corporate USA how to encrypt, but only strong enough so that the un-educated can't break ).

Both SECP256k1, and SHA256 are NSA, they are the backbone of BITCOIN

Now of course, the entire reason the BITCOIN PONZI scam has continued for 10+ Years, is that wink-wink, nod-nod, everybody knows the emperor has no clothes, but the prices continues to rise

This is common human trait, but when bitcoin does go down, then the facts will become common knowledge

SHA-256 is the hash, or trap-door function that is used for mining, and obfuscation of public-keys

Secp256k1 is the elliptic-curve used by bitcoin to generate public-keys, from private-keys, and message verification used in transactions.

The so called block-chain, is just what we call a linked-list in computer science, 70 year old tech nowadays.

...

Consensus in BITCOIN comes form the 51% rule in the Satoshi white-paper, it says' that so long 51% or more of the miners are running the same software, then there is consensus, of course if +51% collude, then fairness is lost. China OWNS +67% of all bitcoin mining, China could order all bitcoin miners in China anytime they wish to all run the same software, supplied by the CCP-PBOC. This will happen in time. China also make +90% of all ASIC-GPU miners on earth, which all calls home, thus in reality CHINA owns all crypto mining on earth.

Lot's people all over the world run node, and full-nodes, which process the block-chain. Consensus rules are applied here to follow the rules, the assumption is that +51% of those running a full-node, are using the same software consensus rules.

Most important is that MINERS make BLOCKS, thus they're really in charge of the 'consensus', because they decide what goes into the block, thus the miners in CHINA could easily black-list any address, where the IMF doesn't have a KYC for that high-value address.

Because CHINA has had more than 51% of the mining for years, it can be said that consensus is an urban myth propagated by pumpers and bullshitters. Everybody knows CHINA owns BITCOIN, but so long as they're getting rich, it goes un-said. But be certain when the plug is pulled, all our HODL-ers will become "China Haters" over-night.

A 51% attack is unlikely, but if there is less incentive to mine the that could change. Since the burden of incentivizing is going to be increased transfer fees, the already high bitcoin transaction fees will become too high. At some point in time (I'm not sure when since I don't know if doubling the transaction rate will double transaction fees) people will look for a cryptocurrency with lower transaction fees. I think that will be Bitcoin Cash. Litecoin does not limit as much inflation, but that would be my second choice. It can process transactions faster. If reaching consensus proves too difficult for bitcoin to evolve Litecoin could prevail over Bitcoin Cash.

That assessment is based on the transaction fee you told me though. You said it was about $15. Is that for all transactions or is that relative to the amount of the transaction? If it is the latter I might reassess that. If it is the former it is not practical for small transactions. Isn't that a problem?

If the shareholders of the Federal Reserve System (known for hating competition and waging war costing trillions  to protect the petrodollar) decided to invest billions or even trillions to do a 51% attack to sabotage bitcoin and were successful, what is the worst that could happen?

You should quote a certain part of my message, because it's too long to understand where that question refers to.  No, I'm definitely not talking about a 51% attack.

That's a discussion that broaches a lot of people. You'll only read opinions since there is no one who can define what is Bitcoin. I personally define "Bitcoin" a computer program that is compatible with those consensus rules. Any other program that defies them should not be called "Bitcoin".

It depends on what kind of cryptocurrency you wanna know. There are the centralized ones, such as XRP or stable coins, and the decentralized ones that are consisted by a peer-to-peer network. It's obvious that once you have a third party, the fees are much cheaper. That's the price of decentralization.  

Not all cryptos have maximum block weight equal with 1MB, so no. You shouldn't compare it with Bitcoin. Altcoins offer you a nearly-zero fee, because of the transaction rate. Check monero for example. I haven't seen more than 500 transactions on the mempool. If the entire world started using monero, its median fee would increase. As said by Satoshi, it's an open market competition. Although, comparing to 2009, there aren't any nodes that will process your transactions for free. At least, not that I know any of.  

On Bitcoin there's no middle man, like never. All the transaction fees go straight to the miners.

Are you talking about a 51% attack?
I'm not sure what you mean by no bitcoin. Do you mean it would morph into something else or cease to exist?

Do you know which cryptocurrency has the lowest transaction fees? Are they only low because of a low transaction rate and they could get as high as bitcoin if they reached that transaction level? Does all the money from transaction fees go to the miners? Is there no middle man?

No, the article isn't wrong, at least from the part you quoted. I'll give you a short answer that may be disliked, but it's true:  If a Bitcoin node changes a consensus rule, it automatically stops being a Bitcoin node. By that, I mean that IF the majority of the nodes decided to switch from 21,000,000 to 42,000,000, they'd stop being the majority.

Note that this is very significant. No one can actually do something to Bitcoin, whether if it's the majority or the minority or all the nodes! There are some rules you have to follow. If you don't, you're not running Bitcoin!

Yes, the chances of switching that 21M cap aren't 0%, obviously. But, the article doesn't mention that if such thing ever happened, Bitcoin wouldn't change. Nodes would simply follow different rules, not the Bitcoin's ones. Thus, there wouldn't be any Bitcoin node running and so on, no Bitcoin.

The transaction fees don't have to do with the consensus ^(completely). They're calculated by the amount of transactions in the mempool.

Sorry, gotta go. I'll answer the remaining questions when I come back.

Of course there are transaction fees right now, and they're really high. At the moment, the median fee is around 225 sats/byte (~$15).

No one! It's an open market competition. As I said, each block's weight can be up to 1MB. If there's only 1 transaction on the mempool, then the miner could include it without having any fee. You could of course give him a tiny amount just for the incentive. It's on miners' fate if your transaction will be included in a block or not.

Now, consider that if the miners have 100,000 transactions on their mempool, they can't include them into one block and thus they'll have to pick what is the most profitable for them. If 99,000 of the transactions offer 1 sat/byte and 1,000 offer 2 sat/byte, they'll prefer the ones that'll bring them more profit. Same thing would happen if someone broadcasted a transaction that pays 10 precious satoshis per byte. It goes on and on.

I can't answer you with certainty about the first one, maybe someone else can, but as for the other question:  There won't be any changes to the consensus. Technical changes may occur to improve Bitcoin, but there won't be any consensus rule changed.

Here is an excerpt from the link below:

"But there's a catch to this figure. Namely, there's no hard cap on the number of tokens that are in circulation. Rather, it's computer code and community consensus that determine this cap. Although it's unlikely that consensus would be reached to increase the 21 million token cap, the possibility of this happening is not 0%."

https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/06/25/3-reasons-bitcoin-is-fundamentally-flawed-as-an-in.aspx

You said that was not possible. Are you sure that old article is wrong?


Will consensus determine how much the transaction fees will be in the future?
Are there transaction fees now? If so, who determined how much they would be?

Is reaching consensus a difficult thing to achieve? Is there good reason to believe bitcoin will evolve from consensus to adapt well to changes when they are needed?

Pretty sure that applies to every post this user has ever made.  I don't think I've ever witnessed them utter a word of sense in all 294 posts.

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Help secure the chain.  Most people do that by running a non-mining full node.  You'll then check every block conforms to the consensus rules which your chosen client enforces.  The alternative is to become a miner.  However, mining likely isn't an option unless you have a fairly significant sum of money you don't mind putting at risk, because you'd have to buy specialist hardware and return-on-investment is not guaranteed.



Getting off-topic with this part, but the network will run purely on transaction fees after coin emission ceases.

Consensus is a general agreement. Rules that you have to follow such as 21,000,000 coins, halving every 210,000 blocks, block generation every 10 minutes on average etc. If you don't follow these rules, you're not part of the Bitcoin's block chain.

I guess you mean Bitcoin's? By running a node that is compatible with Bitcoin's consensus rules. Here's a bitcoin client: Bitcoin Core.

Miners' incentive will then be the transaction fees. It'll always be profitable for some nodes to support the network. We may see huge increases of the median fee in the future. We may also not. Lightning Network solves the scaling problem to an extent and I hope that from now up to 10 years, there'll be a serious LN adoption. It'd be great if half of the mempool transactions were broadcasted to open or close a channel.

If you're a beginner to Bitcoin (or don't how LN works), here's a nice thread about the basics of LN: Basics of the Lightning Network.

No and no. I answered you above why.

secp256k1 is the curve used in Elliptic Curve cryptography and SHA256 is the hash algorithm.
You can't "crack" the curve, you have to break the cryptography algorithm that is ECC. And if ECC is broken changing the hash algorithm doesn't change anything!
Also there is no SHA1024! If SHA-2 algorithm is broken and became weak then a new version of it should be used not necessarily a bigger digest size. ie version 3 or 4 of SHA not same SHA-2 with 1024-bit digest size.

Any proof or is it just the tinfoil hat talking?

How does this consensus thing work?

How would I become a part of this consensus?
How is the incentive for mining going to be preserved after the coin creation is not enough? Can consensus create more coin for mining incentive? Without mining bitcoin will collapse, right?

Model T, Model A are long gone, now you have Tesla.

BTC is the Model A of crypto.

In the next few years secp256k1 will be cracked, and BTC either move from sha256 to sha1024, or it becomes a training wheel tool for kindergarten crypto

In the next few years, many crypto's will step forward to replace BTC, with larger ECDLP fields, quantum-computers are way off, but 2^256 will be cracked soon with off the shelf hw.

IMHO forever given sha256 and secp256k1 are both NSA, they just wanted to know how long before they're were cracked, of course NSA could crack this stuff all along.

Most corporations and NSA look out 15+ years past what the public see's, always been this way. I remember when the FFT was top secret in big-oil, and was in use in 1950's, but not published until 1960's.

BTC is training wheels for people to learn crypto, when the CIA-NSA is ready to deploy USA-Crypto, you can be sure it will be rock hard, unless they want to back door you.

Quantum Computing is still largely BS, sure kangaroo also seems to be the best to date, its still essentially too slow, a better approach is endomorphisms and there are 1,000's for the secp256k1 field

The developers does not decide what changes will be implemented, they just commit the changes and the full nodes decide if they want to run the updated protocol or not. So consensus to run the new protocol changes are reached when the majority of the full nodes are running the new software.  

The process to accomplish this is very difficult, so the developers cannot simply make changes as they want and think that it will be accepted by the majority of the full nodes.

The changes are also scrutinized from developers from all over the world, so we have good "Peer review" to see if exploits are not going into the backdoor. (remember the Gavin & Mike Hearn backdoor attempt)  

Yep, some miners have been known to announce an incompatible chain before it launches.  An unplanned fork probably wouldn't survive for long in the wild.  It's not generally a choice you would make without thinking it through and committing to your decision.  If miners did spend a week or two mining a new chain only for it to subsequently die, that's potentially a large amount of wasted resources.

With a large network like Bitcoin, the decision usually happens before there are two incompatible chains. Incompatible changes get activated when a certain activation threshold (with respect to mining power) is reached. Miners commit to these changes (or not), and other users get to decide whether they buy the mining rewards from these miners, thereby supporting the change with their money.