I don't follow the devs mailing list unless it's linked via some controversy, so I possibly have a skewed idea of what goes on in it. So they discuss ideas, unless they think it's a dumb idea, then they laugh at Mike Hearn? The other thing that gave me a bad impression of the devs was following the Counterparty OP_RETURN issue, where I fully agree with Bitcoin Boom's post above.

As for bitcoin being able to copy any idea, that's true in theory but some things take longer to implement than others. For example an asset exchange. Are you going to rely on the colored coins project? I'm not sure it's current status, but it took years to get anything worthwhile going, and counterparty and mastercoin are further alone and much better supported. If the killer app requires an asset exchange, bitcoin will be glad that those two are around.

Plus, what if the killer app required 1 minute block times? What if the killer app required instant transactions? What if the killer app required a social network on top of the blockchain. What if the killer app required anonymous transactions in the core? Heck, what if the killer app required an OP_RETURN of 80 bytes? Like I said, I expect any killer app to be on bitcoin (most development, most supported), but you can't just assume that every useful altcoin feature can be instantly copied into the bitcoin core.

Flavor of the month altcoins are often one dev making a clone, then trying one new thing to see what happens. It's hardly surprising that many of them fail to maintain a market cap in the tens of millions.

You are on the correct mailing list. Obviously there are a lot of butthurt counterparty developers who are mad that they don't get to freeride on Bitcoin's security.

Dumb ideas get criticism. This is not the same as insults. Very few insults are actually posted. There are occasional morons who get called out who have no business posting on there, but that's rare.

Yes, if the killer app requires 1 minute block chains, Bitcoin does not serve it well. But virtually no applications would ever require this. Things like frequently updating payment channels can handle this just fine if you need fast transactions. Same with the "instant transaction", which cannot be solved in a decentralized manner anyway, other than something like Bitcoin already has solved.

Using Counterparty or Mastercoin does not help Bitcoin at all. It just makes the blockchain bigger, and is actually harmful if either take off. This is the definition of a harmful parasite. There is no benefit to Bitcoin, a lot of harm, and it gets its strength from Bitcoins. Simply asserting it's good for Bitcoin does not make it true. It is like a cancer cell, one that is so attached to its host it cannot be attacked without harming the host itself. The OP_RETURN proposal was given to at least limit the damage, and that was rejected by the parasitic coins simply because they didn't get their way.

Bitcoin boom fundamentally does not understand the technical details of the differences. He is posting some incorrect information about how pruning works and the implementations. The multisig transactions can get pruned out of the UTXO (and do), simply by having users lock them up in multisig and spend later. OP_RETURN just buries coins such that they cannot come back, and users can just throw that information away instantly.

I'm not talking about flavor of the months. I'm talking about the "innovative" ones that just go nowhere. The 2.0 coins (NXT, Mastercoin, Bitshares). NXT has been gaining ground, but the rest are duds.

All of the above can be done with Bitcoin. Sure, they don't rely on polluting the blockchain with every bid and ask ever (that's a feature, not a bug, though), but it can be done.

Parasitic is accurate and intended to be derogatory. That is the definition of something feeds off of a host while providing no value (and even harm). Sounds accurate to me.

Counterparty putting nodes on the network is great, but irrelevant. If the KKK started a childrens charity, it wouldn't discount their hatred.

First, it should be noted that it seems the push-back from OP_RETURN at 80 bites came from the miners ultimately, not the Bitcoin core development team. At least that's my understanding of it as of now.

You can tell me I'm incorrect on the other issues, but you (admittedly) have little technical understanding of what you are talking about. That doesn't make it so. The problem was Counterparty would have to implement their own data storage mechanism, then store hashes in the blockchain with OP_RETURN. Obviously this complicates Counterparty, so they avoid it. Keep in mind the equivalent of giving OP_RETURN to begin with was basically putting up a wall for kids to spraypaint so they don't graffiti the whole town.


Fees are always in the hands of miners. There is nothing in the protocol about required fee sizes. There is an incentive problem in Bitcoin in that all data in the blockchain is required by full nodes, and only miners benefit by including extra data. This means anyone wishing to use a full node will suffer whenever extra data is in the block chain that provides no value to him. In most cases, having random data that is not used for transaction validation (the benefit of most full nodes) is harmful, and he pays the cost of storage and transmission of this data with no benefits. This is why the space is limited to the bare minimum required.

100% incorrect. The data never can be pruned from the blockchain if you ever wish to run a full node. The blockchain is permanent. You are confusing this with the Unspent Transaction Outputs. This stays in memory until spent. Using Multisig without spending causes this to grow, in a very limited boundry. Fortunately, someone in Counterparty figured out you can just spend these multisigs and it clears out. OP_RETURN and multisig data lives forever in the block chain. The OP_RETURN can be pruned out of local storage if you want to just be a leeching full node, where you only store parts of the blockchain you want, but don't serve up all the blocks. Putting an incentive against running a full node does not help Bitcoin.

The best interest is to not allow parasites. But, since it's hard to get rid of them all, putting a containment area is the best. Of course there's no way to force parasitic coins to be good citizens.

Keep in mind none of this is protocol changes. It's simply rules many miners on the network follow and many nodes follow. You could very well run nodes that propogate OP_RETURN with 80 bytes, and find miners willing to mine them. Or simply use some temporary storage to keep intended temporary data and not even pollute the blockchain at all. A solution does need to be reached, as those running full nodes are not going to be taken advantage of without it being in their interests (e.g. making Bitcoin more valuable through wider usage, thus increasing the value of their coins). Parasitic coins do not add value holders of Bitcoin.

Will the 30 000 coins from Silk road be sold over or under marketprice?

I mean, first I thought obv under. But to aquire thousands of coins in the open market (in a shorter time frame) you´ll have to push up the price.

To sell thousands you have to push down the price!

I wonder if they will be sold in batches (say 5,000 each) to find several buyers. Would not surprise me if that was the case. I think they go lower, but not by much, but it's also possible the price drops a bit by then.

They will be sold in nine batches of 3000 and one smaller with the remaining coins.

I'm locked out of my Blockchain account (two-factor authentication problem) and their support has been extremely slow to respond and not very helpful. Has anyone else experienced anything similar from them?

do people really believe this?

say in xx years bitcoin is successful beyond even the most fervent evangelist's expectations. what % of daily transaction do you guys think will take place in bitcoins?

Nooo, he is a troll.

TomCollins,

This can easily be taken the wrong way, and I don't mean it that way at all. But on here you seem to be one of the main bitcoin experts and definitely super involved/knowledgeable, and idk but I would assume heavily invested, yet how did you not know this info? The 3k chunks was definitely public knowledge by at least 6-7pm yesterday since that's when I found out.

It's not on my radar. I don't know when the local police auctions for crack houses is either or the details of how they sell cars. I suppose I could have looked, but was more interested in the later part of the post, about the price they will sell for. The batches was something that seemed obvious enough to speculate on and I was just wrong in the amounts of the batches.

You will soon find out there are a couple guys on here that I don't even know the right word for. "Know it alls" would be pretty close. And they have a skewed perspective on how things work.

1 specific issue is Tom has claimed it's pretty much impossible for an entity to gain 51% of the network because you would need to buy buildings and stuff and it would just be too hard and cost waaaayyyy too much money and the network is increasing so fast it becomes less and less of a chance each day. YET HERE WE ARE, PEOPLE ARE HAVING TO HOLD BACK SO THEY DON'T GAIN 51%. He's been 100% wrong about the issue but he'll somehow try and swing it likes he's not. I actually had him on block and somehow some drunk night I think curiosity got the best of me and I unblocked to see a response. Back on block he goes. I would advise anybody else to do the same.

Think that was aggo.

Also onemoretimes I wouldn't go talking given your last few posts. The only thing I'd warn a newbie to watch out for with TC (as he does have a lot of knowledge about bitcoin) is his view of what role it will play in society. IIRC he's a strong anarco - capitalist which obviously goes strongly with a certain narrative of bitcoin

just because it's not the same doesn't mean it isn't something that needs to be dealt with. i don't think the owners of ghash are stupid enough to do a double-spend because doing so would ultimately work against them for reasons that have been elucidated in this thread previously. however, it doesn't preclude the possibility of a malicious actor exploiting their hashing power to perform double spends for whatever reason and causing a mass loss of confidence in the protocol as a result. there are no guarantees that ghash is not going to get hacked or that ignorant employee of ghash is going to think he could do double spend and get away with it, etc.

to be fair, i think the discussion was "what would someone have to do to be able to perform a 51% attack for the purpose of the attack in and of itself?"

I'm not even one of the extreme ones who will think it will replace fiat and all that nonsense. I think it has a decent chance at being widely used in a currency collapse in a place like Argentina, but the chances it's widely used in the US is not big. That narrative got me into Bitcoin, but I'm old enough to know better than to be completely idealistic and not evaluate reality.

The thing is, the risk of having GHash at 51% isn't greatly different than having 2 pools at 30% or even 4 pools each at 20%. Malicious actors could exploit 2 people with little more effort than exploiting one. Sure, it's a bit easier with one point of failure than 2, and 2 requires coordination when working from the inside, but it's all roughly the same problem.

onemoretimes understands about 15% of what I post, so it's perfectly obvious he is missing the point here. GHash does not control that hashing power. It has people mining for them. The second GHash becomes a bad actor, a huge amount of that hashing power moves to another pool, and they lose control. A one-time 51% attack is bad but not devastating, like a sustained 51% attack would be.

He still does not understand how a pool works. Or he's actually got the intelligence greater than a potato and is spreading FUD.

I can see why people argue that Ghash having more than 50% won't be a real problem (here's Gavin Anderson's take: https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2014/0...alized-mining/), but there are smart guys who are worried about it.

Here's one of the bitcoin devs ,Peter Todd:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comm...coins_ghashio/

Peter Todd is a bitcoin dev, also heavily involved in the Mastercoin technology, and the guy who came up with the idea behind treechains. (i.e. someone smart who understands bitcoin inside and out)

Great posts by these guys. Peter and Gavin have a bit of a rivalry. Peter has a lot of concerns over centralization and Gavin typically dismisses them. Peter does state "this raises chances from 5% to 10% maybe", but has too much skin in the game to have all his eggs in the Bitcoin basket. Peter's been great at coming up with solutions to the problems he sees in the incentive structure. Unfortunately, it's going to be very hard to implement them until a real problem happens. Peter's work deals a lot at analyzing a system and seeing what will happen and is applying that logic to Bitcoin. The incentive structure of Bitcoin sometimes gets flawed such that it doesn't benefit the ecosystem well (mining being superior when done in pools, people running full nodes bear the entire cost with none of the benefit). A lot of people have Satoshi worship and just view anything Satoshi did as infallible, but Peter does a great job of finding the problems. He can be a bit rough around the edges and will call out terrible ideas (especially when Mike Hearn is involved), but everyone would be better off if they at least listened to everything he said.

oh yeah, i don't disagree with this at all. ghash could perform double spends at 30% of the hash rate if they wanted to. i am saying that the incentive system is clearly broken and needs to be restructured. it rewards pursuit of monopoly for pool owners. it rewards miners for perpetuation of these monopolies due to reduction in variance of block generation time at a larger pool. it also does not have any checks against centralization once this monopoly is reached. it is a self-perpetuating system the end result of which will always be centralization of mining, no matter how many times ghash caters to the cries of the reddit hivemind. and this is contrary to the purpose of bitcoin - decentralized trust.

the recent post by gavin was disappointing because he literally just said, "it's just an experiment, lol" without offering any real solution to the problem. andreas thinks there's nothing bad actors can really do before the network reacts. and these are all valid points in and of themselves, but they don't really address the issue. not to mention that nobody knows the scope of the damage that a double spend of a confirmed transaction will do other than the fact that it can be reacted to quickly.

Absolutely agree the incentive structure is messed up. It will be interesting to see if these withholding attacks make much difference to incentivize people to leave pools. I'm not even saying ghash doublespending at 30%, I'm talking about two seemingly distinct pools that really have 60% and are controlled by the same entity or are "influenced" or bribed by someone to do a double spend. This would be easier to blame on one bad actor and bad luck more than a malicious pool.

Gavin's dismissal of issues is a bit odd. There are a lot of people who do care. The thing is, if you are a long term believer in cyrptocurrencies, having Bitcoin drop in value while these issues are being figured out, might not be the worst thing, it will allow you to acquire now at lower prices. Andreas has addressed specifics a bit where it could be solved technically, but a lot depends exactly what the attack is doing.

Twobitidiot had a great post, he wanted a 51% attack so that we get this correct before there is more on the line. Either it gets solved and everyone is relieved or the issue is uncovered and we have to spend some time addressing a serious problem before Bitcoin grows too big to fail and people get hurt very badly.

Would a single double spend even be that bad? Look how much the federal reserve double spends and the USD is still the world reserve currency. It's just people trying to hold bitcoin to a standard that no modern currency even remotely approaches.

I have not the slightest idea why people here are so deathly afraid of 50% or 50+1% or 51% attacks.

They are purely theoretical and strictly academic in nature. No one has yet to successfully launch one.

You don't think the bitcoin Dev team has simulated what happens when a bad actor controls 51% of the network?? Antonopoulos pretty much has admitted they have and don't believe it to be a doomsday, game breaking issue. The worst they can do is to halt new blocks from being found. The blockchain is such that we can throw out anything they do.

Ghash.io and cex.io have already been caught double spending but people here would have you believe that once 51% is eclipsed that bitcoin is doomed.

From an academic perspective, yes, achieving 50% of the network is possible, but not a single entity has shown the ability to do that, in which if you were to execute a sustained and worthwhile attack, you'd need. Ghash.io as a pool is comprised of hundreds of indepedent mining operations, there are people who'd like you to believe otherwise.

I'm not sure any merchant right now waits for anything less than 6 confirmations. Think about that before you think about how easily one could execute a worthwhile double spend.

Bitcoin is a brand. Would you rather run around in a Lexus or a ford?

Of course switching to an altcoin would be technologically feasible. But if bitcoin were to ever fail in such a way we'd be set back as an industry for years if not decades.

Bitcoin will "fail" only to have alt1 be successfully shpvrd down peoples throats??? It doesn't work like that in business.