Topic: The consensus dead end. (Read 1444 times)

I created a thread called "high transaction fees" and it was deleted, disappeared, censored or what ever you prefer to call it. I mentioned that earlier in this thread as well. Go back and look.

I don't appreciate a cad like you implying I am lying. I am telling the truth, so go stuff it! JERK!

I have not seen you talk about bitcoin transaction fees even once. You only mention the word "transaction fees" then talk about the shitcoin known as bitcoin cash. Obviously when you talk about altcoins your topic belongs to altcoin board and will be moved which doesn't seem to have happened to you so I don't know what "censor" you are talking about: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/high-transaction-fees-5332700

I created a thread about transaction fees and bitcoin cash and to my surprise and disappointment it was censored. That angered me very much and that is what led to me posting on here about it instead. It was a last resort. Blame the jerks who complained about my thread and got it deleted. It didn't have to come to this.

Thank you for the information. That might give me the info I was seeking. BTW, remind others on here from time to time that censoring threads without just cause is not a solution. It spilled over to your thread and it was completely avoidable.

I wish you all well.

It adds an extra level of complication for the average user (IMO) and it is accepted by dramatically few stores. These are the only disadvantages I observe with LN. It's under development, but it's being implemented.

Here's some nice links to watch:

• Basics of the Lightning Network
• The Lightning Network FAQ
• Electrum Lightning Network walkthrough _{(if you're using electrum)}

I'd please you, now, to stop double posting and derailing this thread with posts related to forks of Bitcoin. The main topic of this thread is the consensus' future, or as I call it, the dead end. We've already gone way too off-topic. You're free to create a thread explaining why Bitcoin Cash is a better option than Bitcoin.

There must be a downside or everybody would use the lightning network.

What is the catch?

Would you mind quoting me, to see where exactly did I say that?

Everyone can pay 1 satoshi for an off-chain transaction, as long as they'll pay two on-chain transactions for opening and closing a channel. This means that unlimited transactions between two parties can be made, by only broadcasting two transcations.

And it gets better! Lightning nodes can connect with each other forming a network of users that transact off-chainly. Not strictly to two parties!

When there is no coin to mine from bitcoin you will have the same problem. All incentive will be transaction fees.
What then?

So you a newbie want to argue the case for BCH as a superior coin to BTC.

What happens if a larger BTC miner wants to attack BCH today.  How would BCH defend itself.

BCH has 2.48 eh

BTC has 161.23 eh

bitmain has enough firepower to 51% BCH right here right now.

no known entity has enough firepower to do that to BTC right here right now.

BTW I am pro pow and don't care very much as to what pow coins win.

Anyone that fears  bch winning can simply buy 1 bch or 5 bch from their btc holdings.

Why not hold

10000 Doge
      10 LTC
        1 Eth
         3 BCH

and 1 BTC.

or whatever ratio you want.

I can argue against

the ETH ------ Mr V dies  this make a war for Eth control
the BCH ------ Bitmain attacks it and double spends it to death.

With that above easy to happen

DOGE/LTC
BTC

are not that subject to 51% attacks as of today.
and none of them care about a death of any individual.

So why not hold some
 DOGE
 LTC
 BTC

Especially if you mine it.

All I am asking for is your sources of information. If you cannot provide any why should I believe you? Would you take my word for it if I made assertions?

Black hat said at least $5 transaction fee for $100. If there is an exception he omitted he should own up to it and provide that source of information instead of pretending he gave me a different figure.

I've told you where you can find it.  If you're incapable of locating the code repositories for the very project you claim to be knowledgeable about, that looks far more suspect.  

EDA:  https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/search?q=emergency+difficulty+adjustment&type=
Miner tax/IFP:  https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/search?q=infrastructure+funding&type=

“Black hat” had also told you to read what is the Lightning Network. Did you?

No source of information then.

To the last poster: You could find a source of information written by a reputable computer scientist. Your unwilling to do so is suspect. Perhaps people are just making up crap to obfuscate.

You can find two of the three, the EDA and the miner fees, within the BCH open source code itself.  If you can't read code, you're going to have to take someone's word for it.

@Metal Brain,
You need to study more about what cryptocurrency is and what it is not. Unlike what you think it is not about low fees, never ever, it has nothing to do with cheap transactions, cryptocurrency is about immutability and censorship resistance, i.e. security.
A shitcoin with zero fees can't compete with bitcoin, it just can't because it is not secure, period.

I once paid 1 satoshi for a LN transaction oversea. One! Can you do this with Mastercard?

If anybody here had the desire to buy cannabis seeds from a foreign country for $100 dollars and you had the choice between spending bitcoin or using a Mastercard which would you choose? And don't give me an irrelevant lecture about how Mastercard is not decentralized, it is a stupid point. You cannot buy Mastercard coin. DUH!

All that matters here is how much it is going to cost you above that $100 to make the transaction to a foreign country. I think I paid about a 3% fee to Mastercard because it was a foreign country.

 This is about buying stuff, not speculating. Which would you all choose? Be honest.
Is it starting to sink in yet? Leave your "group think" behind for a minute and think about saving money.

What is your source of information?

Excuse my skepticism, but assertions are not evidence that what you are saying is true. You could have been misinformed for all I know.

How is implementing an emergency difficulty adjustment because the network was too weak to survive its own launch an improvement?  Having to cheat to hit the difficulty target is effectively an admission of failure.

How is a miner tax to fund development an improvement?  I suppose if they are incapable of attracting sufficient developer talent with ethos and principles alone, it stands to reason money is the only avenue open to them.

How is falling victim to a successful hashrate attack by voluntarism.dev an improvement?  I don't understand how anyone could still have faith in a chain that has proven it cannot maintain its alignment of incentives.

These aren't "tradeoffs".  More like a cheap knockoff.  These are signs of a compromised and vulnerable chain.  

False argument. Once fresh coin supply ends, Bitcoin Cash with its big block structure either loses hash rate or saturates blocks with cheap transactions, in the later case it eliminates small miners and falls in the centralization hole.
For bitcoin, it is a whole different story as it needs to develop its fee market for high value transactions for surviving without escalating the centralization problem.

Don't get me wrong, it is not good news for Bitcoin to lose the small transaction market segment, but it is not a catastrophic threat, and we have time for dealing with it, actually, this trend enforces more scaling solutions to emerge either minor improvements like Taproot and Schnorr signatures or more disruptive and radical ones (hopefully).

On the other side of the island, in BCH camp they do not feel any pressure for smart scalability solutions because they are ok with large blocks and small fees, totally ignoring the centralization consequences of this scenario.

Bitcoin has the same problem once there is no more coin to mine. Transaction fees have to increase with both bitcoin and bitcoin cash in the long term. The other posters are continuing to be dishonest in calling bitcoin cash centralized. It is not completely centralized. Why are other posters on here so eager to lie about bitcoin cash? Can't they defend bitcoin without lying?

If people continue to lie they have already lost the debate. If they want to compare how decentralized bitcoin is relative to bitcoin cash that is fine, but falsely claiming bitcoin cash is centralized amounts to propaganda. Lying is an admission of failure and desperation.

Small transactions with bitcoin are impractical. It is a problem that will not go away. More decentralization also makes changes to correct that problem less likely to happen. The notion that consensus will solve everything in the future is a guess at best. Can enough people agree? Bitcoin hard forking into bitcoin cash is an example of the difficulty of bitcoin consensus to be reached.

Bitcoin was the first created cryptocurrency based on crude guesswork. Bitcoin cash was an improvement on the flaws of Bitcoin, although not perfection as tradeoffs are necessary. The assertion that bitcoin is more stable in the long term than bitcoin cash is ridiculous nonsense. The success of both in the long term is dependent on adjustment of transaction fees. Too many people here seem to be in deep denial of that.

It all comes down to which can evolve with the necessary changes better. A less centralized coin is probably the best bet. Decentralized sounds good until we find out consensus fails to be reached in the future. That is NOT a trivial issue, no matter how much bitcoin loyalists downplay it.

Which forces the Bitcoin Cash miners to mine smaller blocks, but the worse situation is, the mining cartel controls what size of blocks to mine, which could become an attack vector. It was smart for the Core developers to keep the limit, and keep the block size regulated.

Indeed. I believe a capped supply PoW chain can only survive by developing a fee market, which requires constraining the block size. This also help decentralization as smaller chains require fewer resources to run a full node.

A simple tail emission allows a chain to remain secure without the challenge of developing a fee market.

Good point and it needs to be understood in the lights of centralization problem.

BCH folks could argue that it can handle more transactions and once it is adopted, there would be enough fees accumulated for miners to compensate for higher difficulties and more security which is a wrong argument because more transactions means larger blocks and large blocks are not feasible for consensus to be reached unless the number of parties involved is reduced properly. The fact that currently BCH is not experiencing a considerable force towards centralization compared to Bitcoin is merely a result of another fact: its blockchain is not loaded.

So, for BCH it is the dilemma:
As a coin with capped supply and halving, it desperately needs more transactions to survive while due to its basic design flaw as a big block coin it is doomed to centralization once it achieves high transaction levels.

I think Bitcoin Cash is not sustainable as the block subsidy keeps halving and there's not enough low-fee transactions to compensate, making the block reward too low to provide the necessary security...

I don't have anything to respond you. It seems that you're prejudiced about Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Although, I'll have to inform you that there's something unique on Bitcoin. That something is what makes it special and different from any other cryptocurrency. It has everyone's agreement.

Bitcoin Cash overtook Litecoin in market cap for 10th place.
As it moves up to 9th and then 8th maybe the people here engaging in "group think" will see I am right.
Hypothetical vulnerabilities are far from convincing. That is true of all cryptocurrencies.

I'll let Bitcoin Cash's performance speak for itself. While most people on here will let themselves be fooled by their confirmation bias support group the smart people will buy Bitcoin Cash before it moves up to the top 5 in market cap and eventually #2

Are you all waiting for it to be too late? Every transaction leads to an increase in market cap. Low transaction fees lead to more transactions. Hello! Ignore flawless logic at your own risk of losing out on a great deal.

Bitcoin Cash is NOT centralized. It is merely less decentralized than Bitcoin. The lying and the condoning of that lie says a lot about the lack of honesty from Bitcoin loyalists on here. You can resume your groupthink or you can buy Bitcoin Cash and get a great price. You all like money, right?

Decentralization in the context that it’s better for the network to scale out to overshoot security, and strengthen Bitcoin’s main value proposition. Censorship-resistance.


Because attackers probably think it’s not worth to attack it.


Laughable.

That's the case for Grin, with its pure linear emission of 1 per second forever.


Not the case for Dogecoin, which had a 20x bigger reward in its first year, so that inflation was down to 5% for the 2nd year and is now closer to 3%.

Interesting argument.  Have to agree with you that down the road the flat 1 block per minute add very little new coins percentage wise.


Disagree a bit with the BTC lost coin concept as I suspect much like abandoned bank accounts there will be claw back on abandoned coins.

Maybe 2059 or 2049 Any 2009 abandoned address will kick back into awards pool.

But I do like the idea that 1 year of added Doge Coins in 100 years is just 1 % inflation compared to 1 year of added Doge coins now is over 12% (A quick estimate  off top of my head)

It's very different from fiat, as it is disinflationary. And not that much different from Bitcoin, as I argue in

https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-supply-1169a188d153

It just has a much slower emission, taking 81 years to reach 1% inflation, compared to 16 years with Bitcoin.

I doubt it, altcoin such as NANO are far more attractive to people which have far lower block time (means faster confirmation) and very low fee.

Additionally, 51% attack also possible Bitcoin Cash and other PoW-based cryptocurrency. If Bitcoin actually attacked by 51% attack, i expect most PoW-based cryptocurrency (especially if it's use SHA-256) will lose it's popularity.

Or inflationary such as DOGE vs Noninflationary BTC

at OP I have a sticky on methods that can be used to create high fees for BTC

BTC has simply morphed into a 10000 USD T-Bill it is a store of value.
Possibly due to the fact that the mining of golden Astroids is technically feasible.
Thus gold may become very common more like Copper.

So anyone with large gold reserves and steady income coming in may want to divest into BTC to store large wealth.

DOGE can handle some aspects of being a dollar bill so to speak. Its inflationary nature is much like that of a Dollar bill. It does 10 blocks in ten minutes which allows for it to handle 10x the transactions that BTC can handle (on the blockchain)
It is very well protected by hard iron gear.

To me BTC will simple not move small numbers on the blockchain. Yeah some multiple layers will allow for it to move so to speak but it won't be a 'true' cash.  Much like you do not go into a grocery store with a 10,000 dollar t-bill or a 10,000 dollar savings bond.

It is obvious that others have caught on to moving wealth with Doge. As it is now a 31 cent coin.
It does not half and is more like the Dollar bill than BTC is.

We already have centralized currencies that are working A LOT better then centralized cryptocurrencies. The existence of a centralized cryptocurrency makes no sense.

So does PayPal and VISA and ...

3 major security flaws:
EDA: difficulty manipulation
Fork at will multiple times to change the protocol without caring what everyone else thinks
Successful 51% attacks to reverse blocks that the centralized controllers of bcash didn't like.

This is not a coin comparison topic but Cardano also has a lot of traces of centralization. Starting from its ICO-premine.

NANO does not limit inflation like Bitcoin Cash does. Another poster here seems to think decentralization is all good, but that may make reaching consensus more difficult and be a problem. Bitcoin Cash is better able to evolve from consensus without that difficulty. Despite Bitcoin Cash's being less decentralized no major security problems have been found to prove it is a problem in the short term. The long term future of all decentralized coin is in question in reality.
If decentralization is so important why is nobody mentioning Cardano? Cardano claims to be the most decentralized coin, contrary to what Black hat stated. Is it a false claim or is Bitcoin not really the most decentralized coin?

Destroy what? The total Hashing Power of Bitcoin assures that it’s the network/protocol safest to HODL value.


I HOPE Bitcoin Cash WILL have more than Bitcoin’s daily transactions to teach, and prove in practice, how flawed the design decisions were made.


Your opinon, but it chugs along and will live longer than Bitcoin Cash, simply because of the choices made by the developers.

Alternative to bitcoin (a decentralized currency with immutable blockchain) is not bitcoin cash (a centralized garbage with a mutable blockchain). Not to mention that it is the exact copy of bitcoin that suffers from the same scaling issues.
If people some day turn away from bitcoin they will seek an actual alternative that provides them with the same characteristics such as being decentralized, immutable and have a better scaling tactic.

If you think the only concern when it comes to using bitcoin versus mastercard is the fees then discussing things further with you is pointless.

It would destroy confidence in Bitcoin and that is enough. If you are talking about a hard fork say so. No need to beat around the bush.

The rising transaction fees are a problem. It is an effective limit on growth in the long term. Small transactions are already impractical. People will turn to Bitcoin Cash eventually. A 51% attack on Bitcoin isn't really necessary. Bitcoin will become weighted down by it's own increasing transaction fees. Fine for buying a Tesla, but anything less than $200 is just plain stupid. Might as well use your Mastercard. It will save you money.

Bitcoin is over rated.

I am claiming that it isn’t that simple, and it’s very impossible for Bitcoin with the current hasing power that’s securing it. How much would a bad-actor spend for one double spend, then get pushed out of the network? The bad-actors will be rewarded with Bitcoin if they were honest.





Then prove your 51% attack in practice.

Are you claiming a 51% attack cannot result in double spending? There are other concerns as well.

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/bitcoin/bitcoin-worst-case-scenarios-14467541

This forum seems to be plagued with "group think" and it is being enforced with censorship. I created a thread called "High transaction fees and how it could limit the growth of Bitcoin and it was deleted. Seems that one thread was a threat to peoples "confirmation bias".

This is just a confirmation bias support group and it is terrified of info about high transaction fees. That is the real fud.

What advantage does the shorter durations between blocks if it is less secure than Bitcoin? I don’t know the exact calculation, but one confirmation is worth how many confirmations in Litecoin? It’s about the assurances of settlement, not speed.


You say sabotage, but the Core developers have made the most conservative design-decisions. Hard forking to bigger blocks, and risking decentralization/security is the sabotage.


LAUGHABLE FUD.

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.

---

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, 08:17:58 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.

---

Quote from: DooMAD on April 20, 2021, 06:52:25 AM

Quote from: pooya87 on April 20, 2021, 01:09:11 AM

Quote from: btc-room101 on April 18, 2021, 07:20:37 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, 07:20:37 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, 02:46:34 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.

---

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.

If miners or anyone else for that matter run a different software that has different consensus rules and mine blocks that are incompatible with the majority then they will be on a separate chain (ie. an altcoin). Someone who is running a bitcoin client doesn't have to do anything because they won't receive such transactions since they will be rejected behind the scene right away for being invalid.

You are of course right, the usage of the word in this thread is a bit ambiguous/imprecise, mixing the "colloquial" with the "technical" meaning, but I think nevertheless the discussion here has to do with consensus.

The "global state" of the blockchain can be altered only following the strict rules of the Bitcoin protocol. Even if I don't double spend a coin and follow other basic rules of the Nakamoto consensus, I cannot simply come up with a new transaction format or use another hashing algorithm. I have to respect these rules and formats, and only then my messages (i.e. transactions) will be taken into account by the algorithm, and resolved according to the Nakamoto consensus.

Thus, hard and soft forks change not necessarily the general principle of the Nakamoto consensus, but other rules that are part of the Bitcoin protocol, which determinate the global state of the blockchain. Hard forks could in theory even change the general Nakamoto consensus principle, e.g. like Ethereum planned the transistion to Proof-of-stake. (Not that I think that would ever happen in Bitcoin.)

But maybe here we shouldn't talk about "the consensus" but about "protocol rules" or "consensus rules", or "how consensus rules are established".

It is a misconception to assume it was the decision of the miners (or the developers). When miners switch to a software update that is not fully compatible with respect to consensus rules, they think they can afford to do so because they expect they will still be able to sell the mining rewards. So people who criticize consensus rule changes should ask themselves whether they made sure they did not buy Bitcoins that came from these miners initially. If they did, they should admit that they actually paid for the consensus changes they criticize...

You want me to be out of consensus, and be part of that small minority that no one went into consensus with? No one will follow the big blocker agenda, for better or worse, right or wrong. The community simply doesn’t believe, and will never come into consensus that Bitcoin Cash is “the Bitcoin”, or that Bitcoin and Bcash “bilaterally split”.

The only person you’re in consesus with, with that post, is yourself. You believe you are right, but the community has moved on and it’s continuing on with the chain. You are an orphaned block insisting that the chain should be mined on top of you.

I swear, there is no facepalm gif large enough to express how utterly gormless you are. 

As always, you're the one who needs to learn to read.  Here is a larger font to assist you:


It doesn't matter if the only thing you care about is a particular feature activation that was being decided upon.  That's not the only reason you can be forked off.  How many more times do you need it to be said?  Most 5 year olds would have understood it by now.  The other network rules don't disappear just because you're looking at a certain possible rule change.  Why do you still think it's like an election where people can only pick from the preset outcomes on the ballot and we have to wait for a set date and time for the result?  You have seen with your own eyes that's not how it works. 

How can you possibly believe a proposed feature in the process of being decided upon would somehow magically grant immunity to being removed from the network for other reasons?  If a feature is being debated and a miner happens to start publishing invalid blocks at the time, do you think that miner stays on the network just because the feature hasn't activated yet?  Of course they don't.  Features don't change that.  You cannot argue that point and expect people to take you seriously.  THINK before you click reply.  If the network introduces a rule that bit 6 and bit 8 get disconnected, your precious feature activation does not factor into the equation.  Anyone flagging bit 6 and bit 8 goes bye-bye.  It's done.  History.  Accept the facts.  This is how it is.  "BEFORE ACTIVATION" is irrelevant.  Meaningless.  Not connected in any way, shape or form.  Other network rules exist as well and cannot be ignored.

*waits for franky1 to cry "bEfOrE aCtIvAtIoN" yet again because he can't comprehend*

That's some brilliant franky1 logic right there, heh.  You want to maintain that nothing changed but at the same time people got forked off?  Which is it?  If nothing changed, how did anyone get forked off?  No doubt that's yet another question you'll completely avoid so you can just repeat the same things you've already said another dozen times.    




There's that famous "should" again.  Where you think you get to set the terms and decide how it works.  Engage in wishful thinking all you like.  It doesn't work like that, though.  If enough people agree, that's sufficient.  If you think the rest of us need your permission to do something, you don't understand Bitcoin.
 It's as simple as that.  I'm not explaining how I think it should work.  I'm perfectly happy with how it does work.  Remember, you're the one who wants it changed.  You want us to bow to your wishes.  I like it how it is.  We bow to no one.  It doesn't have to be total agreement, otherwise nothing would ever get done.

I'm sure you would prefer a network where rules can't change without your explicit permission.  Anyone can see how that would appeal to your desire for absolute control.  It's just a pity you didn't realise that isn't how this system works.  If only you had done more research.    

What exactly do you think you're going to achieve here?  What do you think will be different next time?  Are you trying to guilt-trip everyone into enacting "scout's honour" going forwards?  Do you think all participants will naturally embody your absurd notions of playing nice?  

I cannot stop you from spreading FUD, and lies about Bitcoin and the Core Developers, but the community went into consensus to activate Segwit, miners followed. No one, in the end of the DRAMA, wanted to follow Gavin, Mike Hearn, Jeff Garzik. The community has spoken, the market has spoken, the miners have spoken through their actions.

I told you, I'm not wasting any further time explaining why you are wrong about SegWit activation.  There's no point.  For over three years you've been crying foul and for over three years not a single person has rallied to your lost cause.  And it's not like you'll ever understand, even if I explained it 1000 times.  Going forwards, I'm only interested in debating your utterly flawed concept of consensus.



Says you.  There are two fundamental flaws in your comprehension.  Activation and enforcement.  We'll start with the latter:

Clearly you have a problem with enforcement.  You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not in a position to enforce it.  People who are collaborating together, however, can enforce things.  If you work with people and build a network that is based on rules, the participants either follow the rules or they can be excluded from that system by the others.  Much like a society, but less restrictive.  Traditionally, if you break the law, you can be excluded from society in the form of imprisonment or, in some places, even death.  Thankfully, consensus mechanisms are not that draconian (so it's often baffling as to why you're such a whiny little crybaby about it).  Instead, you get to instantly form your own society if you disagree with our one.  The only downside is you don't get to take advantage of the existing infrastructure, the network effects or the security of the society you chose to leave.  You have to build that for yourself if you decide you can't work together with us.  The choice is yours.  And it's not a one-time deal either.  At any point you can re-join our network.  All you have to do is follow the rules (so stop pretending it's on par with a crime against humanity if someone did get forked off, you histrionic drama queen).  Our door is always open.

Now, onto activation.  Activation of a given feature (one that you happen to be totally obsessed with) is not the only occasion where the rules can change.  The "mandatory" part you keep moaning about wasn't even related to activation of the feature (also, you mean bit 6 and bit 8, but you keep saying bit 4, as if you somehow felt it necessary to further illustrate your lack of understanding).  You were so caught up in hating the feature, you mistook a totally different and unrelated change in consensus to be tied to activation of that feature.  But you still can't grasp that fact.  Consensus can change at any time, for any reason the majority deem appropriate.  The majority decide what the rules are.  Block by block.  The minority do get forked off if they don't follow the rules.  Again, if you want to take advantage of our security and our network effects, you follow our rules.  That is how the system you chose to be a part of functions.  

So, to ask the obvious question, why did you join this system if you are fundamentally opposed to how it works?  How misguided do you have to be to complain about an integral, crucial function that underpins the entire foundations of everything we've built?  It sounds as though you understand it so poorly that you believe it to be somehow immoral.  Even though it can't work any other way.  You do see how your position is completely untenable, right?  Logically, you can't take the stance that everyone has to agree when you can't eliminate free will.  What are you going to do?  Hold a gun to peoples' heads to make them agree?  How have you not thought this through to conclusion?  What are all these "scenarios" you run even for if they can't bring you to a rational conclusion?

Bottom line, if you can design a consensus mechanism that forces everyone to agree, feel free to publish it.  You can't stop other people from running incompatible code.  You can't stop me from deciding when someone else's code is incompatible.  You can't stop me choosing to disconnect or ban other nodes if they run code I don't approve of.  What you are proposing is quite literally impossible.  It could never exist.  Even if you were the most gifted programmer in the world, rather than the clueless, raving narcissist you are.  Accept the fact that you can't control people and move on.  Or cry harder.  Up to you.

And even if you had an answer to all of that (hint: you clearly don't), it has been explained to you on more than one occasion that if someone creates a Bitcoin fork and doesn't alter their new chain's network magic, this will result in replay attacks becoming possible.  Don't deflect from this issue as you've deflected every other time it has been raised.  Tell me, in no uncertain terms, how you would prevent replay attacks if a fork won't change it's network magic, since your glorious "everyone-has-to-agree-democracy" system won't allow disconnecting or banning nodes until you're personally satisfied that everyone is in agreement?  It appears that not only do you hate freedom, you also want to endanger the imaginary users of your imaginary totalitarian system.



That's not a "mindset".  That's actually the closest I've ever seen you come to finally understanding the basics.  

What group? “Core”? I believe the Core developers were neutral until the very last minute when some of them joined the grassroots movement that wanted the UASF. It was mutual consensus between different indivuduals/parties/groups.

Like Taproot, Core is neutral, but needs an aggressive call for LOT=true by the grasroots. Then Core can ignore, or join.

Just so you're not derailing yet another LN thread, replying to this here:


My loyalty is to freedom.  Yours is to fascism and thinking you can tell people what to do.  

I think consensus means those who choose to agree build a chain together.
You think it means "everyone has to agree because I say so".  Which not only sounds utterly childish, but is also demonstrably not the way in which Bitcoin works.  And each time you commit to that untenable position, you prove exactly why no one should ever take you seriously.  Please keep it up.

When I say "if you don't like it, you can fork off", I say it not as an instruction, but as a list of your available options.  It's merely a statement of fact.  If you want to run incompatible consensus rules, you don't have a choice in the matter.  That's just an explanation of how it works.  I don't get how you are still unable to comprehend that fact after all these years.  If you think you can run code that is not compatible and still remain connected to other nodes that deem your rules invalid, then you leave me no alternative but to question your intelligence.

Apologies, Lord Francis, we weren't aware you had decreed it had to be thus.   

I'm guessing if you had gotten the outcome you wanted, you wouldn't give the slightest toss who disagreed.  Worthless hypocrite.  You're clearly incapable of respecting consensus, yet you have the audacity to wade defiantly into this topic expecting people to care what your opinions are?  I suppose the balls must compensate for the total lack of brains.

There is hereby a failure of human language usage:  The word “consensus” is overloaded.

In Bitcoin, the word “consensus” has the very specific technical meaning.  It does not refer to an agreement amongst humans, as in colloquial usage.  Rather, it denotes the resolution of a synchronized state in a distributed system.

Compare and contrast other distributed consensus protocols such as Paxos (the Lamport consensus protocol, not the blockchain company).

In Bitcoin, the consensus means that all nodes arrive at the exact same conclusions about the current global state of the blockchain ledger:  The set of valid transactions that exist, the meaning of each of those transactions, and the order of those transactions.  It means that if Alice sends two transactions that attempt to spend the same coin, then every (honest) node in the world automagically agrees on the decision of which of the two transactions is valid, and which is invalid as a double-spend.  It means that if Mallory mines a block that violates consensus rules, all (honest) nodes file the block in /dev/null as if it never existed—regardless of the POW shown in its block header.  Etc...

The Bitcoin ledger is a single global truth.  Mutually untrusting nodes agree on this one truth, with no central authority to call the shots or enforce rules.  The only information available to each node is a bunch of blobs of data that the node receives from anonymous, potentially hostile parties.  And—the whole thing works!  It is so secure that the network can be trusted with a trillions of dollars worth of total value.

That is the meaning of the Nakamoto Consensus.

I already know.  I watched it happen in real time.  Right in front of my eyes.  We're all hoping that one day you learn, though.  Once the 80% lock-in threshold was achieved, the writing was on the wall and there wasn't much point resisting it anymore.  I know you're desperate for it to be a conspiracy and you're going to insist for the rest of forever that it was a conspiracy.  But it wasn't.  Even if nodes and miners were disappearing (and I'm still not convinced they were in the kinds of volume you're attempting to convince us they were), you still wouldn't be able to prove that they hadn't left voluntarily to join the BCH fork on 1st Aug 2017.  After all, why would anyone stick around on a network where they disagree with the ideology when they could just build upon that other blockchain instead?  (obviously you can't answer that one, because sadly you're still here on this chain for reasons I can't fathom)

Consider some actual evidence.  If you'd care to look up the historic BTC hashrate for May, June and July 2017, you'll see that the hashrate continued to climb throughout those three months.  No sudden large drops during July when BIP 91 locked in, so miners clearly weren't being forced off in droves as you so ridiculously claim.  It was only once the BCH fork launched on 1st August 2017 that there was a noticeable plummet in the hashrate.  Please present evidence to the contrary, assuming you have any.  Prove that miners were being forced off.  You can't.



Your interpretation of the data leaves much to be desired.  If it's so blatantly obvious that we're lying, please explain how it is that you're the only person who has arrived at this conclusion?  Where are all the people who believe your fantastical version of events?

//EDIT:  I'm weary of rehashing this over and over.  I'll continue any discussions about consensus in general, but I'm not wasting further time and effort on explaining SegWit activation.  It's history now and it's not going to change.

//DOUBLE-EDIT:
a) It certainly didn't occur before lock-in.
b) I'm still not convinced it happened at all.
c) Even if it did happen, Okay, Mr Almighty God-lord, ruler-of-all, whatever you say goes.  We'll just completely forget that freedom is a thing we're allowed to have.  

That's not how I recall history unfolding, unless your use of the word "enforced" was simply chosen in error.  "Pressured", perhaps, but "enforced", no.  The threat of a UASF was looming, but miners chose to "lock in" BIP 91 in July 2017.  

---

Uh-oh, even though they've had nearly four years to wrap their addled brain around the concept, some people are still unable to discern the difference between "bit 1" (signalling for BIP 141) and "bit 4" (signalling for BIP 91).  You can obsess over the percentage of bit 1 signalling for the rest of forever (and being the utter sadcase you are, I'm sure you will), but that's not the salient percentage in this conversation.



You're still conflating two separate issues.  What you're talking about began on 3rd August 2017.  AFTER BIP 91 LOCKED IN.  I don't know if your issue is literacy or just basic comprehension, but this has been explained to you before.  Several times.  Please take your Trump-esque "alternative facts" elsewhere, you dumpster-fire of a personality.

What's stopping people (like me) from making a PR to introduce their node with a domain as another DNS seed? One that has a very long uptime of course and is operated by someone who isn't rouge.

I agree, but address generation uses SHA-256 and checksum, so i doubt hash collision on RIPEMD-160 is enough to create same address from different key.


I doubt node from 2009 can even connect to Bitcoin network or other Bitcoin node.

That chart is saying exactly what I said.
SegWit activated through SegWit2x (aka NYA) when miners signaled for it using bit 4 an when the numbers reached more than 95% they also set their bit 1 (through BIP141 or SegWit) and signaled for both. Meanwhile UASF support remains close to 10%.

And you haven't been able to show us a single block that was rejected for not signalling SegWit before it was locked in to prove your claims. You keep playing with words.

No they weren't.

That's the definition but things didn't even get to that point since their deadline was never reached and not to mention that these nodes were the small minority.

First of all 2 competing blocks (or chains) is a chain split and has nothing to do with the fork being soft or hard.
Secondly there were no 2 "versions of blocks" back in 2017 unless you are counting the shitcoin forks such as BCH, BSV, BTG, BTX,... and 50 others as competing chains?

UASF nodes didn't ban other nodes, they rejected blocks. And the way I remember it their number was nowhere near 45%, I think you are confusing the hashrate signalling for SegWit with UASF nodes. Nodes signalling for BIP148 were barely 10% of the total nodes, the total was also no 10k it was closer to 200k.

Pure nonsense. The only time core nodes intentionally banned another node was the btc1 nodes which had nothing to do with UASF.

That's nonsense.
SegWit didn't activate by nodes it activated by miners when they reached more than 95% signalling and it was all because of the NYA also known as SegWit2x.

I disagree. "Opposition" didn't move to bcash, those who wanted to make some additional money did.

UASF has its usefulness but BIP148 is seriously flawed because it doesn't take miners into consideration at all.

I agree with you, don't get me wrong. I am very sure that it's nearly impossible to reverse a public key to private, I'm talking theoretically, what would happen in that case. It may be in 2040, or in 2140, but there will be sooner or later a year in which quantum computers or any other advanced technological creation constitutes a threat to the current hashing algorithms.

RIPEMD-160 is the one we should hope for. It's 2⁹⁶ times "weaker" than SHA-256.

True, it's ambiguous. But I don't blame that they'll change the "real bitcoin", neither that they'll increase the 21 million limit. I'm in favor of the bitcoin's principles, I'm just wondering how can they make such change. A bitcoin node should be running forever if possible. But any node that'd do that since 2009, would not follow the correct chain at the moment. The current chain would be considered invalid due to SegWit.

My conclusion is that the developers won't force you directly. But they will.

Possible doesn't mean it's probable.

1. Pollards kangoroo already exist, but it's not enough to brute-force private key generated with good RNG. You might able to solve private key which is part of puzzle or generated with weak RNG.
2. Quantum competing are decades away.


Let's hope SHA-256 is still strong enough in the next 20-30 years.


The term "real bitcoin" is ambiguous, what defines it? Some people might refer to Principles of Bitcoin, but few people going further such as for/against big block size limit and off-chain/side-chain network.

that's true but SegWit is still a lot of change in consensus rules not just simple expansions.

OP's concerns are mostly because he is comparing an upgrade like SegWit with a mandatory change that would for example remove RIPEMD160 from the protocol. if it is proven that RIPEMD is indeed weak then the change won't be as hard as any others before.

The sole fact of backward compatibility is enough to refute any claim about "consensus change". For the muliltisig opcode,  current Bitcoin supports old UTXOs with legacy format but doesn't allow new txns with such a format to be included in the blockchain anymore.

The point is what OP is worried about,  his assets being subject to uncertainty due to events like Segwit UASF, is absolutely void.

since SegWit did change some of the old consensus rules it is also a consensus change too. but since all the changes are backward compatible, that made the fork a soft fork.
one consensus rule that it changed for example was the dummy stack element for OP_CHECKMULTISIG that can no longer be anything except OP_0.

Satoshi chose 1MB as the block size limit (before there wasn't any limits) but look, it is obviously not feasible if we need to scale up. If you only consider the original consensus rules to be the only version of Bitcoin, then you would probably not be using the Bitcoin that you have today. Satoshi did lay the groundwork but it is obvious that not all of the choices that he made has actually made any sense at all.
Would it have made sense to be following the original Bitcoin with no block limits, an overflow bug, no segwit, no p2sh, etc? It was obvious that Satoshi didn't mean to leave Bitcoin as it is, there is a set of rules which probably won't garner any support or would redefine Bitcoin but it doesn't mean you can't improve Bitcoin.

---

I don't think this is really up for discussion, I don't think Bitcoin would've survived if it didn't evolve.

It seems that it's just my opinion, but I don't believe that users should have the freedom to choose what is defined as Bitcoin. They have the freedom to experiment with it, to use it, to create new things on top of it, but not to change it. Satoshi chose these consensus rules and every person who refuses to accept them is free to follow a different chain.

As for Satoshi:  It's not the fact that a "guy" decided what rules should be followed. That doesn't sound good. It's just the way the chain started. Every consensus change would be against the philosophy.

Percentage of blocks, Miners Activated Soft Fork.

I disagree. I think users should have the freedom to choose what is defined as Bitcoin. You don't use Bitcoin just because Satoshi said so; you use Bitcoin because you stand with the rules that governs it (21mil coins, non-reversibility, etc). Having a fork such as the one that you have described would definitely not be unpopular but people can just continue on the fork that doesn't implement the fix like how Bitcoin Cash is formed.

You don't have to. If you don't want to implement the fix or to not burn the old coins, then an altcoin would be forked from that, just like how ETH and ETC came about.

Threshold of what? Of nodes? How can you know the percent of nodes that agree with the new rule?

There are nodes. Bitcoin miners are bitcoin users. Every person that runs his own node, is a user. Indirectly, a person that runs an SPV node is also a user that trusts other nodes' information. The users are those who follow the consensus rules, the ones Satoshi had chosen. A change on a consensus rule confuses the people of what is the real bitcoin.

But this is not a majority decision. It's a consensus rule. Everyone is free to change any consensus rule they wish to, but they won't have Bitcoin. They'll have their own coin. If the majority wants 42 million coins, they're free to re-create bitcoin. They're free to leave it, but they can't announce it as the new "Bitcoin".

Actually ECDSA is indeed reversible. It's just currently infeasible. Hash functions such as "SHA-256" and "RIPEMD-160" are irreversible/one-way.

There will be ways to prevent attacks from quantum computers. The question is how they'll force every node to accept them.

FYI: Segwit was not a consensus change, rather it was a consensus expansion, legacy pre-Segwit full nodes could continue confirming and not forking off the legacy chain, nobody is able to touch one Satoshi of legacy wallets ever.

It was enforced by a User Activated Soft Fork, UASF i.e. forced by a majority of user wallets that adopted the soft fork, miners followed this majurity. It is called soft fork because its backward compatibility helped not to mandate a simultaneous global upgrade, letting nodes to adopt the feature whenever they wish to use it; it is user-activated because in the special circumstance that the upgrade was going to take place the community was undergoing a scaling debate which ended to bch hard fork and some mining pools were acting suspiciously.

I do agree that UASFs are not a perfect solution and shouldn't be weaponized by devs to do whatever they wish, but because of the centralized situation in the Bitcoin mining scene, we need such a measure to keep large pools inline.

Segwit makes use of weight to reduce transaction fee.

I do not know much about consensus, experienced members about it will answer that. But what I know is that segwit transaction begins with miners supporting it activation, while majority supported it and makes the activation successful.

Private key can not be reversed as it is a one way function. But you meant can it be brute forced through the use of quantum computing. According to what I learned, it is not early days quantum computers that can brute force the ECDSA, it will take time before this can happen, and before it will happen, there would have being layers of protection against quantum computing to brute-force bitcoin private key from public key.

Double hash/hash160 is used in a one-way-function to generate addresses from public key, it will be much harder for quantum computing to brute force private key from addresses. And know if this wants to become possible, before it becomes possible, there will be another layer added that will be impossible for quantum computing not to brute force the private key.

Segwit actually had a bunch of activation periods where miners are supposed to signal for the acceptance of Segwit and if the threshold of 95% is reached, then the rule would be activated 2 periods down. It was started after one of the difficulty periods and its support was implemented after 0.13.1.

See UASF (BIP148) and BIP91 with the reduced threshold. Bitcoin users are as important as miners; if you don't follow the users, then you're just mining on your own fork and the users are using another version which gives you zero economical benefits.
Segwit was a controversial change with differing opinions from different camps and that's why you have BCH. If it's something that puts the network (both users and miners alike) at risk, I can't see how they would oppose such a change.

Since 2009, some consensus rules have been added, for example SegWit. It surely does good, it's a solution for the block size limit, but I want to know how did that occur. In wikipedia it says that SegWit was activated on block 477120, but who begun that? Changes on consensus rules, as good as they are, are changes. If the majority of its users, change a consensus rule, they immediately stop being the majority. The follow their "Bitcoin".

The forum itself says on a quote that miners don't vote on changing consensus rules, only the order of the transactions. Seeing a change like that makes me wonder what else can the developers change. Should they have an impact on bitcoin? Whether if it's for good reason or not.

How did miners accept that change? They were not forced to update their bitcoin client.

-But why did you enter that title?
Well, I'm a little afraid of bitcoin's future and thus, my funds'. On the long term, one of these may occur:

• Public key to private key reversal. (I've heard that it may be possible to do that with quantum computing and pollards kangaroo method)
• Finding collisions for RIPEMD-160 hashes. Are we sure that 2¹⁶⁰ is strong enough? What if it becomes weak in the next 20-30 years?

Even if the first one can be faced pretty easily by simply creating outputs on addresses that have never spent, the second one requires consensus change. I don't know what they can change in that case, probably use of stronger cryptography, but they will have to change something! Otherwise, bitcoin will be useless. Changing a consensus rule, that important, would sour lots of people. And that's because that moment, the developers would have to "touch" people's money. It'd be a consensus dead end.