The whole BU drama appears to be nothing but smoke to allow the manufacturer (Bitmain?) to enjoy an unfair advantage over the competition for as long as possible. Greg Maxwell is working on a BIP that would render the advantage useless.
Pretty disgusting to see all of this opposition being down to money being made but I had been thinking this and it's a known point that money is usually the point behind most arguements. In this case, that wonderful point stands true.
All you communists are going to be pushed onto to Litecoin with your fellow communist/fascist @gmaxwell, where you belong. Bitcoin will remain immutable and reliable protocol where the free market is free to compete in all its ugly but efficient glory.
Will be interesting to see the public reaction of the patent holders of the ASICBOOST exploit - since G. Maxwell's post makes it clear they were made aware of the hardware exploit. If I was Jihan and company I'd stop screwing around deleting tweets (as reported on reddit) and be lawyering up right now.
You're hoping China will enforce a Western patent, which then means China's government can have a monopoly on covert boosting.
Jihan Wu has tried to defeat patents. I have to congratulate him on that aspect. Also he has defeated Blockstream's attempt to turn Bitcoin into a communist/socialist/experimental clusterfuck and made Bitcoin more immutable. The guy is becoming a hero.
I hope he wasn't stupid enough to really believe that BU was a sound direction forward. I think likely he was just bluffing. He apparently did try to prevent Litecoin from getting SegWit also, so not sure if this means he has a covert boosting for Scrypt also (which seems unlikely).
A judgement against them in the US would destroy their business, they wouldn't chance it.
That is far from certain also.
I expect support for this improvement to be beyond overwhelming, but we'll see.
I think you better scurry off over to Litecoin where you belong. You are soon going to find out that Bitcoin is immutable. Satoshi (Nash) designed it that way. If you want your democratic communist/socialist clusterfuck, then you'll have it on Litecoin, except the Chinese are going to be your bosses. Well they already are aren't they.
I think it is cut and dry. A proof of work is supposed to prove work, if you come up with a shortcut that is an attack-- normally it's not a major attack because the defacto algorithm gets updated with that technique and the playing field is level again. In this case it can't be particularly because the covert technique strongly interferes with the operation of the protocol.
Lets consider a hypothetical. Say someone found a way to mine with 50% of the power usage but it required that they only mine empty blocks (or, perhaps, blocks with just a couple transactions). If left unaddressed this would significantly disrupt the network. Would you not consider it an attack?
The free market has to deal with patents. They are part of the landscape. Putting some humans in charge of deciding what is fair and not fair competition is turning Bitcoin into a government.
The intent of the protocol is the protocol, not your misinterpretations of what the game theory should be. If the protocol could be changed every time someone discovered a proprietary (secret or otherwise) advantage, then we've reduced Bitcoin's value to that of a bankrupt democracy. The protocol trusts the free market to work it out. Now I do happen to believe Satoshi's design is a winner-take-all, but making tweaks as you propose with this BIP will not fix the fundamental winner-take-all economics. So we might as well leave Bitcoin's protocol as it is, so it can be a known stable thing. Small blocks are fine. You can scale on Litecoin, we've worked to active SegWit for you there. The door is open, take it.
