Topic: Wonder who this solominer is? 88.6.216.9 - page 15. (Read 60498 times)

Wow, and I nearly got crucified by just bringing up that thought in the past... 

The Bitcoin game is after all a game with many players, if one becomes the only viable player, there would soon be no profitable game anymore.

It's really hard to even discuss the topic "Can the bitcoin algorithm be broken?" because that's like blasphemy and could weaken the trust in bitcoin.
Nobody who broke that algorithm would immediately post their Eureka! moment.

But I'm glad that it gets discussed once in a while.

And if someone figured out a way to cheat, it doesn't automatically mean they completely "solved" SHA256. Even if you find a way to save some magnitudes of time, they'll be king.

You do realise that if they've "solved" SHA1 they're onto something much bigger than this, right?

It's an amusing conspiracy theory, I give you that.

Implausible but not impossible? I don't think anyone figured out how to cheat, but we really wouldn't know would we?  If I had figured out how to bypass the proof of work and produce as many blocks as I wanted, I would do all I could to keep doing it as long as possible.  Try not to raise difficulty too much, and not to appear to be more than 15-20% of the network - suspicion and hostility seem to grow exponetially the closer you get to 51% - and I wouldn't want to drop the price.

muyuu,

the problem is not that miners do some work to test if transactions have been included in solved block or not, it is not even asking miners to do some more work for free: if a miner does not want to do some more work he can quit.

the problem is how to avoid that a big enough miner, who mines empty blocks only, is able to disrupt the bitcoin network.

given that the bitcoin network exists to handle transactions, if a block does not contain at least 20% (just to give a number) of waiting transactions it should not be accepted.

if this lowers all miners income, this is not a big issue, because it is just the price to pay to keep bitcoin healthy.

I'm not againt botnets, I'm against botnets who try to jeopardize the bitcoin network.

spiccioli.

yes, throttling ensures he can keep it going..  too many too fast will send btc value to zero in a hurry

However if someone has broken SHA-256 and can solve 3 blocks per hour with a handful of computers why not buy 10 handful of computers and solve 30 blocks per hour?

He wants money but only the amount of money that 1.4TH/s "effective" produces.  Not less money and not more money he has just decided that is the right amount.

Seems implausible at best.  If nothing else one would expect greed to creep in.  If you had a method to print $750 per hour you wouldn't be tempted to "boost" that to say $1000 per hour or $1250 per hour?  Nope. Not going above $750 per hour.  Also not going lower to reduce suspicion, and not going to include tx which really makes me stand out.

Isn't this just a 'guess' since hashrate is calculated based on block solving rate?  If someone has bypassed the proof of work, we would be calculating the hashrate incorrectly. 

Not only this, but botnets cost money to rent, and my guess is that he shows up occasionally because the botnet operator is selling it to other "customers" for things like spam as well. Whether the botnet owner is the one that is mining, or whether the miner is just someone paying the botnet owner for processing time, I don't know.

nobody bypassed that issue.  The miner likely has 1.0 to 1.4 TH/s of hashing power.  Nothing indicates he has bypassed the proof of work.  If he has why stop at 1.4 TH/s "effective hashing power".  Why not 10 TH/s and make 8x as much.

He is a big miner.  It would be like saying Deepbit solved 3 blocks last hour so they must have broken SHA-256.

IMO  we have all bypassed the real issue here.

this 'miner'  has solved 3 blocks in less then an hour.  so what he has not included transactions...... 

I am a noob when it comes to understanding the exact process of solving a block.  all I know is that with my 40g, it takes on avg 2 days....

The real question is, has someone figured out a way to circumvent the 'proof of work' that every one else is doing?

Are they just throttling the blocks so they don't get too many too soon?  I noticed that the difficulty magically went down for the last 500 blocks of the last change to keep diff about where it is now..

if it is a bot..  it would have to be multi million cpus... and some gpus?  i dont know.  if it is a bot, they have not bypassed the proof of work..


thoughts?

I know many bitcoiners are bitcoiners in the first place because of hatred towards banks. But that was not the point at all.

It's not being like banks. It's that banks address the same concerns when they process transfers:

- they want to collect a fee
- they don't want to discourage transfers as that means no fee
- they know they can collect more when transfers are bigger, because it means more money is involved
- they try not to over-collect over a point as their cost is the same and big players can start looking for different channels

So basically trying to collect in a similar way to banks is not being like banks. It means banks have to address the same problem.

I came with the transfer fee scheme (as usually happens in Europe) and DeathAndTaxes countered with a check fee scheme. Checks are not the same as typical checks are all within a quantity big enough that's worth to go and collect, and not so big it's crazy to pick such amount of money in cash. So a fixed scheme suits that well.

Bankers also pee and sleep? do you sleep or do you try to avoid behaving like a banker?


This involves dealing with network implementation concerns. Thing is, it's not really trivial to determine if a miner has not seen a transaction or he has simply ignored it. It's probably a feasible mechanism within some accepted % error.

All this extra networking work would not be compensated though. Remember miners have no obligation to include transactions. I can understand big miners will try to use this opportunity to enforce some fees, and rightly so. You are basically asking the miners to do extra work to guarantee that freeloaders can continue to use their work for free, and that they will compete with botnets and "free electricity dorms" with no compensation whatsoever.

I understand this point. But having a change address vs "stupidly" sending it back to you makes a negligible difference if tracking difficulty. In fact, you are making sure that even the most trivial tracker counts on it. But fair enough, it adds no KB since a change address is needed anyway (I'd say you also make it impossible to have a trivial % fee system, as a side effect, but let's forget about that).

Fine by me if you want to make any extra obfuscation cost, as resources are not free. Just take the basic level obfuscation that comes from using a different change address, and anything extra make it cost. That's all fine. It will however result in most people minimising trying not to do any more obfuscation than that to avoid cost.

If you come with actual numbers we can make some calculations, but such a fee that would compete with block reward at this point is going to be really high and destroy small transactions. That was my main concern because it's the first conclusion one would make to a 0.1 fee or higher.

muyuu,

why do you want bitcoin to become more or less like a bank?

using fees to stop empty blocks is wrong and can become cumbersome.

instead, stop blocks that do not contain at least n% of waiting (at the time block is solved) transactions, where n can be based on the number of waiting transactions or their value (input+output).

this way you don't have fees and you can even mine empty blocks if nobody is doing transactions, otherwise you have to do you work and confirm them.

spiccioli

I have never been charged a % fee for a wire transfer, ACH, or check.  Not in my business or personal accounts.


No it wouldn't.  No reason fees would need to be larger than the minimum you are proposing.

Paypal for example processes ~ 100 tps.  At 100 tps and avg fee of $0.01 each that is $31 million paid to miners each year.  At something more modest say 0.015 BTC avg ($0.06 per transaction) that is $200M.  In today's hardware that buys about 200 TH/s of protection.

It must be based on KB to avoid spam.  KB is the only true cost to the network.  Charging it on anything else is just dumb.  So high KB low value transactions (which have high cost) are charged a low fee and low KB high value transactions (which have a low cost) are charged a low fee.


You always need a change address.  Stupidly sending it back to the input address doesn't take any less space.  Charging per kb already "solves" all potential complexity problems.  Larger = more complex.  It doesn't matter if it is because the person is cashing out 20,000 different inputs, sending it to 800 different people, obfuscating via multiple inputs or outputs, or using a very complex non-standard script.

The cost is per KB.
The price should always be KB.


Using same change address takes exactly the same amount of space.  Maybe you should read on how the protocol works before making suggestions to fix it?  You seemed totally clueless that a change address even existed 4 posts ago.

Banks charge for transfers exactly how I described:

- A minimum fee.
- A % fee for most cases (usually added to the minimum fee, but sometimes not if said % fee exceeds an amount) then...
- A maximum fee (because otherwise their clients would simply try their best to avoid transfers for such quantities and the processing cost for the bank is the same).

A purely fixed fee is simple and attractive to miners but it would make a sufficiently small transaction too expensive. Therefore this fee should be very small, which is why I'm talking about a minimum fee (say 0.01 or even less).

Basing it on KB would have a similar effect.

When I said obfuscation is not free in terms of resources, I meant that adding outputs means adding KB. Adding just 1 output is probably negligible, but then you're doing a really crap obfuscation job as adding 1 single address more to track is trivial. If you had to obfuscate/launder a significant sum in a big number of said steps, paying a fixed fee you'd be paying through your nose to have a decently sized tree.

The thing is, if you make it on KB in a trivial way, then most people will make their transactions the simplest they can. Which destroys anonymity as any extra obfuscation would cost you. Obviously this depends on how much do you plan to charge per extra byte, but in the end you might end up with something very similar to what I describe above, in practice ([min,%/some function,max] ranges).

Of course it is "free" (more accurately no more cost).  It takes you the same amount of computing power to process the transaction regardless of the amount.   % based fees will never be supported by a lot of Bitcoin members.   Bitcoin transactions are more like checks (or wire drafts) than credit cards.

No bank charges a % of the face value to process checks.  They either process them for free, for a flat fee, or (in the case of businesses usually) on a per item basis.  Processing a 1 bitcent transaction or a 1 million bitcoin transaction takes the exact amount of processing power, requires the same amount of bandwidth, and has the same amount of lifetime storage cost.  The idea that one should cost 10,000,0000x more is stupid.  A miner shouldn't be compensated more just because he got "lucky" and solved the block with a massive transaction.

There is absolutely no need for % based fees.  None.  Having to give up obfuscation in order to "gain" something which is utterly unnecessary is a bad trade.

THE CRITICAL RESOURCES IS KB.  The space in the blockchain determines the cost of the transaction as it will need to be stored and will exist as tens of thousands of copies forever.  Charging based on face value misaligns the cost to the network with the compensation gained.

I actually comprehended what I said before I even said it.

If you had comprehended what I said, you'd have noticed that I proposed a decentralized rule to temporarily delay accepting blocks that are conspicuously missing the bulk of visible valid transactions on the network.

I have good reasons to think that this is a botnet (described earlier), but I don't really care who or what is doing this.  I do, however, care that we are paying him for work that he isn't doing.

Transaction tracking is trivial anyway, and you'd always have the recourse of paying a %fee for obfuscation.

I was actually also thinking in adding a fee cap and a fee minimum. After all, what we want is some fee guarantee and also cheap transactions to be possible (would will be achieved by gobbling them up together, which would result in less blockchain bloat).

I think both pure % fees and fixed fees have serious caveats, therefore the solution would be having a range guaranteeing a minimum and a maximum fee, and some proportion to transactions so small ones are not strongly penalised. Do you want to heavily obfuscate? this is not free in terms of resources, so you pay the max (fixed) fee.

This.
Also sigops can be limited resource too, sometimes.

It can be changed but I would never support it.  Never.  Bitcoin isn't truly anonymous but the change function allows for psuedo-anonymous transactions.   Using same address for change return will make transaction tracking trivial.

% based fees aren't required and if that is the "price", it is a price too high.