Topic: Why pruned node is full node ? (Read 551 times)

It's sad to see another perfectly fine thread wreaked by someone who can't control themselves and stay on topic.

Bitcoin is the most distinguished example ever representing the solidity of Karl Marx's Labor Theory Of Value.

To be more specific, bitcoin is very special in terms of being the only single commodity ever that from the first day of production and being introduced to the market has two potentially important impact on economics: 1) Re-enforcing Gold Standard advocation 2) Representing the most obvious example of LTOV, the most concrete example of an abstract economic concept: value.

Bitcoin is the purest form of value realized ever in history. You and I could easily patch bitcoin core code to start a brand new blockchain with an alternate Genesis block as its root and get the same utility level of bitcoin by running the code on our laptops, generating tones of worthless shitcoins within days the utility would be the same but the value is extremely low because the work is low and it won't get better until the difficulty is
getting harder and the average value stored in the coins supplied is increasing, without more work, more hash power there will be no value.

It is not wasted, people won't go mining coins if they are not considered somehow useful. Cryptocurrency is about storing work, hence value, in a digital form to be considered money that passes a few famous tests^*:

• Fungibility: Uniform distribution of value among all of its units, i.e. interchangeability.
  
• Durability: resistant against environmental effects while in circulation.
  
• Portability: easily carried.
  
• Cognizability: its value must be easily identified and confirmed by the public.
  

 
^*There is another property called  "stability of value" which I deliberately removed from the list for some reason.

You could easily double-check on such coins to confirm that they would all pass this test.
So, the work is not just 'wasted' and to be more specific:
People typically don't do irrational, stupid choices when it comes to economics and if they do they will fall short of being viable for being part of the "average socially required work for producing a commodity" the way that Labor Theory Of Value defines it solidly.

@Doomad, we are not derailed:

Greg correctly brought up concerns about 'trusting in miners' as a result of promoting lite node ideas and emphasized on verifying the full history as an ultimate security measure then I objected (correctly, IMO) by stressing on the critical importance of PoW as the most characteristic property of bitcoin it is where the train goes and it should go if we want a deep understanding of the concept: a full node.

On the other hand, I could admit that I'm showing some symptoms of Bernie Sanders Consistency Syndrome 

It's not intentional, I swear 

Consider moving this to a new topic, then.  The topic started as pruned/full nodes, yet once again, you've somehow managed to drag it back to your favourite whinge of ASICs and pools.  Via any means necessary, right?

You are 100% correct as far as we are talking about the actual bitcoin on the ground and it is very embracing.

We have two bitcoins: 1) Actual Bitcoin, 2)Pure Bitcoin the former is the one we have in hands as a blockchain and a protocol initiated by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 and is improved and maintained cautiously by bitcoin core devs and the latter is the theoretic framework for a technology suggested again by Satoshi in the White Paper in 2008 and is discussed and enriched by many authors since then. They are strongly related but not the same.

Actual Bitcoin is being put in trouble by centralization in mining mainly because of pooling pressure flaw which I've analyzed thoroughly 2 years ago in this forum it is the basic driving force that triggers such concerns.

As far as we are discussing Actual Bitcoin and not bitcoin as a technology and a framework, i.e. Pure Bitcoin, I'll vote for UASF sword and most of the measures Greg and his friends have been taking to keep pool operators and ASIC manufacturers inline, the problem for me starts when he tries to make a theory out of it! There is no theory for damage control and white hat hacking, it is just damage control nothing more!
 
Bitcoin technology should not be poisoned by shallow ideas emerging from current stupid mining scene of bitcoin neither in affirmative nor in negative form, pools and ASICs are poisonous entities and we should keep the theory not contaminated, pure.

In theory, we don't need pools as an obligatory consequence of mining variance because mining variance is not inherently built into PoW idea, hence there is no threat of banding together at all in a pure, ideally refined Bitcoin world and there is no need for a 'Do not Trust Miners' amendment to Bitcoin constitution.

that still doesn't mean it is not wrong specially when you are trying to apply the model to something like bitcoin which is not compatible with the theory.
i see your point though but i can not see how "bitcoin value is determined by the average amount of work needed to produce it". all i can accept is that the amount of work is only determining part of the value not all of it, or more accurately it contributed to bitcoin value. the main part is still determined by the utilities that bitcoin provides.

a ton of energy is being wasted mining hundreds of shitcoins, so they do need a lot of work and they still remain useless (without utilities). even for non-mineable coins there is still a lot of computing power, storage space,... are being wasted keeping the useless network going.

if this theory were correct and "utility had absolutely nothing to do with value" then if i were to spend a million dollar on mining equipment to mine a dead altcoin that died due to lack of utility the value of that altcoin should become a million dollar. but that is obviously not true, i would only be burning money on something without utility without creating any value whatsoever.

I saw his post from the context of "don't trust ANYONE", including miners. Bitcoin's design was made for a hostile environment.


Haha. Or extremitism in its most needed form.


Yet, they can also band together, play politics, and push their agenda on the network.

Wrong proposition. Bitcoin solves the trust problem by shifting it from single points of failure to a public, open class of actors that are bound to a protocol and strongly encourages them to follow a trustworthy line of behaving: miners. It is just void to announce miners as a class to be not trustworthy. "Don't trust miners!" it is what Greg says and it is absolutely wrong in any hypothetical context.

It is extremism in its worst and most naive form, no matter how much popular such memes are. Bitcoin is not an ideology made of memes and slogans it is a very dangerous direction, taking bitcoin as a sect of enthusiasts and believers in a 'vanity fair' of slogans.

As a 'believer' in this slogan, "Don't trust, verify", why should anybody release any asset in exchange for bitcoin even after few confirmations? How his or her full node's verification process is supposed to resist against an untrustworthy mining scene? huh? You can verify and verify and verify again but miners can simply defraud you by colliding on a few blocks re-org.

As such a believer, how could you ever help you or your friends from being the victim of a censorship attack by miners?

See? It is just a popular meme, nothing more.  

Miners are not a simple group of people! They are bound to a protocol that makes them, as a whole, the source of trust. Without putting trust in miners there will be no single bitcoin transaction effectively processable.

But you should care exactly because it is not about simple reasoning!

I'm not here to teach Marx or political economics rather I'm warning you and people like you that it is not your job to invent the field from ground zero. It has been a while, like two centuries, that economists have been really busy proposing models and debating about what is the source of the value of commodities in the context of a bigger question: What the hell is going on in a Capitalist economy? It is why it is called political economics and it is why you are so confused and misguided about the subject: It is a sensitive, political debate. Bitcoin is political too! Isn't it? It is about resistance, isn't it? Otherwise, why should anybody try to establish or participate in a movement for an alternative monetary system or even be optimistic about it?

I'm a fan of you though   and I feel an obligation to do my best for you, so, let's address some points:
NO! It is not! Value is a quantity, not a quality. One may propose air, fresh, high-quality air is an invaluable substance.

A centralized altcoin needs zero work, this is what makes it worthless and not the state and the quality of being centralized. It is absolutely possible for a centralized altcoin to have some utility and to be useful.

Pegged coins are an important example of zero-value-still-useful digital assets: A company may tokenize its shares through a smart contract, a game service provider may sell its service by means of "coins" that represent your points in the game, etc. They are useful tools for specific purposes but they do not carry any value as they are not produced by labor even if you may buy or sell such coins.

Bottom line: LTOV is a model, a very powerful model that can help us to understand and to distinguish bitcoin. Once it is adopted properly it will act as an anchor in the chaotic debates and inevitable flow of misrepresentations and panic.

I believe you took gmaxwell's post in the wrong context. In Bitcoin, everyone should assume that ANYONE can be a hostile/bad actor.


I believe the market/community have historically done some part in that.


Don't trust, verify.


 

Miners are people with their own self-interests. Let them do their work, but don't trust them.

that is pure nonsense and i don't care who came up with the theory. for a simple reason: the work simply exists because of the utility! in other words if there were no utility there were no work to be done. for example a lot of work is done to extract, smelt, melt, mold,... gold because there is a utility (aesthetics, electronics,...).
and in your example about air you are confusing the difference between price and value even though you explain it in literary next line. air has utility so it is valuable, the fact you call it "vital" means it has a huge value. its price however is cheap (free) because of its supply and ease of access. on top of that you are doing a ton of work every day to get air, each time you inhale and exhale that is a lot of "work" because you want that "utility".

ps. a quick google of criticism of this theory returns a ton of flaws about it!

p.ps. this theory makes zero sense when used for something like bitcoin. however, it could make a lot of sense when used for a product. lets say a carpet. the utility of the carpet is to be thrown on the floor! but the value of it could be determined by the amount of work that went into it, for example a high quality hand made carpet that took a year to create is worth a lot more than a machine made carpet that took less than an hour even if the utility of both were the same and even if they looked the same. but you can't use the same analogy for bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. for example even if a centralized altcoin had 10 times more work than bitcoin, it still remains without value because it is centralized.

The link you've provided does not contain any theory at all, some intuitive shallow suggestions mainly focused on bitcoin price and not its value. Please be more cautious here: I'm speaking about a well-established solid theory of value which is capable of doing the job for bitcoin community to explain the most critical points about bitcoin as a PoW cryptocurrency, the original one. There is absolutely no competing alternative able to address such a diverse range of problems and urgent requirements from resisting PoS scams to refuting environmental accusations.

Well, let's begin with your above claims about the Labor Theory of Value:
I checked the naive conservations you have linked regarding this theory and became very disappointed by them.
Why in the hell a programmer with zero knowledge in economics should ever try to comment on a sophisticated subject such as value on which a giant figure like Karl Marx has disruptively worked and there is an entire history of fake and failed alternatives that have not been approved to be competent? It is not our job to invent economic theories or talking nonsense like the one you have linked "something doesn't have value because of the labor needed to produce it, labor is expended because the thing is expected to have value." The most stupid thing one could have ever said regarding such a topic.

Once again: we better pull off from economics, it is very terrible habit which an undereducated figure like Vitalik suffers from too: re-inventing economics!

Bitcoin is exceptionally new phenomenon and economists have a lot to do about it but we don't need to re-invent the science to grab why bitcoin has value and PoS shits lack it for instance.

For educational (and not debating purposes) I briefly explain what Labor theory says and how it helps understanding bitcoin:

1- Unlike naive common sense that relates value to the qualities present in a commodity, LTOV is smart enough to understand that the utility that an object provides has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with its value simply because value is a quantity and not a quality!
The fact that the air you breath is vitally important (and beyond, essentially critical) does not imply that it has any economic value at all, actually, it yields no value, zero, as far as economics is involved!

2- There is a difference, a categorical difference, between price and value. Price is experimentally and concretely determined by supply and demand and is represented by the amount of money required for buying commodities while value is an essential, abstract yet quantitative measure embedded in a commodity: the force behind price fluctuations.

3- LTOV explains value as the average, cumulative, socially required work for producing a commodity. Obviously, it is NOT the historical cost of production for an instance of a commodity, unlike what most naive and confused objections you linked suppose.

4- Bitcoin value (not its price) is not explained or explainable by any theory other than LOTV. I'm not talking about its price, there are tons of people interested in what happened or going to happen (typically in short terms) to bitcoin price using both fundamental and technical analysis techniques on a daily basis, but there is no single scientific, well-established theory other than LOTV that is capable of describing bitcoin value.

5- According to Labor Theory Of Value, LOTV, Bitcoin Value is roughly determined by the average amount of work (energy consumption, rents, wages, asset depreciation, ...) globally needed to produce it. Without such a strong, abstract notion of bitcoin value, there is no way to refute claims about PoS and fiat currencies as having the critical property of being a store of value (which they haven't because they are made out of thin air with no or very little work) it would be also impossible to address environmental concerns about bitcoin energy consumption.

6- Of course, to be an object of economics, i.e. a commodity, the "thing" under discussion should provide some utility and for this to happen there are qualities to be approved but it is not what an economist is mainly interested in because you can't compare commodities based on their qualities. Such a comparison is not an economic practice for the least, comparing oranges and apples is possible but it is not what an economist does.

Some conclusions and important points:
i) LOTV is not a joke for technicians to become bored with. It is a very strong, well-established theory in political economics that happens to be very powerful in describing why bitcoin is a true store of value and why it is not a stupid internet scam based on conventions and consensus in a bunch of enthusiasts!

I urge you and other bitcoiners with zero or little scientific research/background in political economics (who have not read Karl Marx's book, Das Kapital, for instance) be more cautious and not saying superficial stuff like "what if I break a diamond to many pieces by doing hard work with negative gain in value!". It is not that easy piece of cake to swallow recklessly, believe me.

ii) Neither consensus nor protocol fidelity could be considered as a source of bitcoin value or has anything to do with it, they are necessary qualities that a cryptocurrency should encompass to be eligible for being studied as a commodity by an economist.

iii) The surge in bitcoin price is not a hoax, it is not a bubble and more importantly, it is not because of any meaningful improvement in its utility (i.e. because of soft forks and bug fixes), it is simply a direct consequence of the surge in production costs, its value to be precise. Any other description just ends in a vague, meaningless series of claims and unprovable arguments about how good or better bitcoin is or was in a specific period of time. It would be anything other than science.

iv) Scientific theories in general and economic theories specifically are not required to be true. There is no truth behind any scientific model, they are just models, useful models that are capable of making sense out of the chaotic nature of their objects and the available data. LOTV is a useful and beautiful theory for modeling the bitcoin ecosystem and it would be just a shame trying to reject it and leaving the community with no defense against adversarial discourses like PoS and the energy consumption debate, just because we are not comfortable with bumping mining pools and ASIC manufacturers.

V) Bitcoin mining scene has gone through two major disasters: ASICs and pools, I understand, we have a problem here but the solution is not what Vitalik and Ethereum are heading toward it: getting rid of miners and PoW. I've been working on it for a long time and I'm more than ready to discuss these problems extensively and with a productive, solution-oriented approach but I'm not ok with the phase you are in right now: denial!

I don't believe in making excuses like "users and full nodes are very important" to downplay mining and PoW or counting too much on a UASF based future as a decent approach to the crisis in the bitcoin mining scene. We need to address that crisis and improve that scene.


finally:
As of your extensively presented concerns about miners not breaching the protocol (or not being aligned with UASF plans):
No matter how bad is the situation with pools and ASIC manufacturers, as long as they are not suspected to collide for double-spending or censorship attacks we are good! And here comes the point: User wallets, being or not being full nodes, can't do anything useful to prevent such attacks! Your agenda, your covert agenda to be more specific, is getting rid of miners, let's be honest, but it won't succeed because of what bitcoin is all about: Proof of Work. It should be improved and replaced by an alternative agenda, IMO, getting rid of pools.

I'll come to this part of your post more extensively later.

The only theory, huh?  Can't say I'm convinced on that one.  Are you sure you don't mean the only one that reinforces your preconceived notions?  Because there's a world of difference between the two.  I'd say there are enough theories in this topic alone to refute that.



Regarding making progress, maybe it's you who needs to take a few steps in our direction in order to see the bigger picture?

Gregory,
Thanks for your patience and for spending time to give a somehow reasonable answer to my criticism. I say somehow because although I found your comments rational enough to be considered reasonable, I don't think you have made any progress compared to your previous position.

Unfortunately, I'm too busy right now but will give my answer within next few hours.

Cheers

Miner's incentive to follow a rule comes from nodes validating and enforcing that rule-- making violating it a losing proposition.  Having some number of thin-client wallets not validating is fine (or at least a reasonable risk for transactions lower in value than the income of a couple blocks), so long as many (esp economically significant ones) nodes are validating.  If ordinary nodes by and large do not validate that incentive substantially goes away. Today the incentive exists: Nodes validate, invalid blocks get ignored. But to argue that nodes need not validate because miners are incentivized is literally incoherent reasoning.

Applying your logic, someone might ask "how is it possible that bitcoin can ever be stolen by computer hackers or crooked exchanges? Wouldn't people be better off if thefts were not allowed (even by people possessing the correct private keys) and Bitcoin more valuable as a result?" -- and the answer to that is "Maybe, but no one is checking for that".  If no one is checking for it, then it won't be prevented no matter how abstractly 'good' we might think it is.  In fact, even if some miner were checking for that, all they'd accomplish by themselves is forking themselves off. For a rule to have a reliable effect in Bitcoin (and not actually act as a vulnerability that could be exploited to split the network) its enforcement must be more or less omnipresent. (And because of the omnipresence requirement, this "no thefts rule" would be unworkable, but even if it wasn't unworkable-- it still wouldn't happen unless it work a rule of the system.) 

Trying to argue that "work" alone is all that matters is like saying the worlds most valuable novel should be the one a mentally disabled person spent 40 years painstakingly writing-- He worked very hard at it, harder than anyone else by far!  Bitcoiners have been bored of confused people who have fallen for the obviously incorrect labor theory of value since at least 2010. Quite bored. Very bored, so very very bored. (There are much better quotes on this subject from #bitcoin since that's where most noobs with confused ideas value comes from work asked questions, but there are no public archives of that channel.)

Sure, work makes it potentially expensive to substitute history: that's what what lets the Bitcoin network act as a distributed timestamp server.  But without semantics timestamps alone are not terribly useful, no matter how expensive they were to create.  Nodes collectively enforcing the rules create the semantics that make Bitcoin useful and valuable.  One of the valuable effects of nodes enforcing rules is that people usually won't want to throw away expensive mining on invalid blocks (but they might, if the gains are great enough or by mistake), so a blocks' mere existence is weak evidence of its validity. But that only holds so far as the threat of validation is meaningful and only in so far as the block was expensive to create relative to the amount of trust you're putting into it as a signal (and, of course, plenty of invalid blocks have been created over time-- but full nodes aren't fooled.).

Every one of the zillion and one spinoffs of bitcoin (like bcash, bitcoin scam version, etc.) with a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's work are able to exist for this same reason-- their nodes have their own rules, their nodes enforce their rules, Bitcoin blocks don't satisfy their rules, and as a result their nodes don't give a darn about Bitcoin's work even though Bitcoin has 12 times more work in total. Similarly, even if they had more "work" than Bitcoin-- Bitcoin would happily ignore them.

One way I've found to look at it that is really useful is to realize that Bitcoin's rules define what is work. Invalid blocks aren't work. This helps avoid nonsence questions like does "litecoin or bitcoin have more work?" Mu. Bitcoin has no work from the perspective of Litecoin and vice versa.  If you don't validate then you can't tell if work was done, though you can potentially approximate it if you validate a subset of rules. From that it should be clear that validating a subset is only a workable approximation when other parties are validating the rest.

In any case, getting back on-topic--  another point I should have pointed out is that even if a node has archival data, it won't necessarily serve it to you. E.g. if the node has run into its bandwidth limits it won't answer queries for historical blocks.  In Bitcoin it's normal to think about systems by their security properties as the main distinguishing factor, and pruning doesn't change the security properties of a node... it may not even change it's externally observable behaviour at all (e.g. if it was already not serving old blocks for bandwidth usage reasons).

You are going too far considering miners as being some fringe third party! You need to re-consider some basic points here, IMO but let's make it crystal clear: It is not about Ethereum vs Bitcoin. They got a LOT of bad ideas and bad practices out there in their community but a handful of good ones too, right? And we are not members of a sect looking for rivals and outsiders to unite against them anyway.

Ironically, you go all-in on one of their worst ideas in Ethereum camp: denying the very basic role of mining and miners, surprisingly in a PoW cryptocurrency!

The whole value circulating in bitcoin is because of what miners do and have done historically, I mean ALL of the value. Before rushing to the keyboard to refute me, take a deep breath and do some research about this concept: value! I've written some material in this forum a while ago, describing bitcoin based on the Labour Theory of Value which is the only theory that is able to describe why bitcoin yields value (just like gold) and why PoS coins do not (just like fiat currencies) ...
 
Looking from this point of view, it is wrong to take miners just like a third party in which one should not trust! It is totally absurd saying such things about bitcoin. Bitcoin is based on work, built upon work and work is what we trust in.

Your perception of what bitcoin is and what it is not, poisoned by how bad PoW status is right now with ASIC manufacturers and more importantly pools, is absolutely wrong. You got issues with Bitmain as a centralization threat to bitcoin? Well, you should! But it is just about how to improve PoW not to look at it as a not-so-critical aspect of bitcoin. It is how you are heading the wrong direction that eventually leads you to the same point that Vitalik and Ethereum are already there: let's get rid of miners and PoW!

Now, it is about spvs and light clients and pruning and you are saying things about how great it is to have a full node that validates everything instead of trusting on aliens like miners(!), deliberately forgetting about the basic fact behind bitcoin: it is all about the quantity of work backing a transaction, hear me? ALL!

Forging a bunch of transactions that make me rich costs me almost nothing and it is the quantity of work backing our claims that matters, bitcoin builds its security model around a very crucial game-theoretic assumption: Players behave rationally, seeking their best interest by comparing costs vs benefits of their moves.

Now, let's focus on this last point: As far as game theory or any mathematical approach involves Comparison is possible only when there is some quantitative index under discussion. Without quantities there is no mathematics and no game theory, hence no bitcoin problem to discuss.

So, saying things about how great is a full node security compared to a lite version, or how bad is relying on latest few blocks rather than the whole history, you need to compare some quantities and give a quantitive impression of how secure is the situation with each solution. Nobody can make bulk, vague claims about the security of each model.

Saying obvious things like 'Well, it is always better to have as much as security as possible' is not how engineers do their job. Of course, it is good to have a large luxury penthouse in Manhattan but it is not free both in terms of investment and maintenance bills. There is no such thing as absolute security in the universe nor a free of charge security, it is all about checks and balances, it has always been.

What am I doing now? Teaching ABC to Gregory Maxwell? Why am I in such an unpleasant position, exposing myself to his harsh rebuking habits? I don't know, but I'm ready to defend every single point I made here as long as it is about rational discussion and reasoning instead of personal attacks or bragging with etiquettes.  

Let's not forget the pools. And what keeps the pools "honest" is the competition and the fear. The fear that if they do something wrong they may get punished by losing the miners and getting out of business.

If you want to view it that way, OK.


But, what keeps the miners honest, besides the their incentive to do so? Who really secures the network?

Only a small subset of network nodes reliably relays transactions.

SPV clients don't contribute to the network's security, but every node communicating with the Bitcoin protocol is technically part of the network. Full nodes are the only ones securing it in regards to consensus rules.

An SPV client does some level of validation, like validating block headers for POW. The security model obviously depends on miner honesty.