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Does anyone here use Bitcoins?
Stoic Joker:
Personally I wish the Son-of-a-Bitch would have kept his freaking teeth shut. I was about to do a selloff, but now I can't without screwing myself through the floor.
-Stoic Joker (January 15, 2016, 11:30 AM)
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The SOB is not being paid by the banksters. Yep. Them. Literally.-Renegade (January 15, 2016, 11:06 PM)
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ftfy - Fun and games aside.. I've been working towards something for the past 3 years that I was finally going to pull the trigger on for my birthday Tuesday. I was willing to take a small loss to get the project off the ground, but now it's simply not going to be possible for the foreseeable future - until these idiots finish their petty little pissing contest.
I'm going to stop here...before I devolve into a tirade of profanity. because I am currently at a level of anger that can only be adequately described as unhealthy.
wraith808:
I should have posted this before, but here it is:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/413pwp/mike_hearns_latest_blog_post_was_a_strategic_move/
-Renegade (January 16, 2016, 02:33 AM)
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THanks for that. AFter your prior post on the recommendation to attack bitcoin in any way possible, that's what I figured this was. But it still sucks.
Edvard:
OK, so what I get from this is that he's a goon either way, and really shouldn't be spouting off without being prepared to answer the questions arising from his claims, but he raises some himself that I'm not finding good answers for:
1- Is it true that raising the blocksize limit is bad, and more specifically, in the way that Maxwell says it is? [EDIT] Partially answered, see below.
1a - By the way, why the holy-ever-lovin is Maxwell even deving for BTC if he "proved bitcoin impossible"?
2- Are dissenting opinions really being wholesale censored by those who side with Bitcoin Core over those who disagree? Ignoring that which you don't feel like answering is one thing, attempting to answer regardless if the questioner takes it is better, actively killing the conversation with censorship is just... really bad.
3- Any clue as to who systematically DDOS'd XT nodes? If it were banks or governments, I'd think they would go after Core as well. Excuse me for reading things plainly, but it seems like a clear-cut case of killing the competition. Please prove me wrong.
Also, this should improve the temperature of the conversation around scaling and relevant to question #1.
https://medium.com/@ryanshea/the-scaling-announcement-bitcoin-core-should-have-made-146790f755df#.inxhnxuig
To Maxwell's (and other devs) credit, there IS a commitment to incremental capacity increases that has been in place since Dec 7, 2015:
https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases
FWIW, I have read through a few of the commit logs on Bitcoin Core's Github, and for all the criticism that Mike Hearn heaps on Greg Maxwell, he doesn't seem to be JUST an engineer/coder; he actively thinks about how people and developers are going to actually use/abuse the systems as they get implemented. Such as:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2738
Also, the discussion here is better than the actual post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/41ipu0/some_advice_for_everybody_at_this_point_in_time/
IMO, commenters are right in saying that the prime directive of Bitcoin is not as a drop-in replacement for the economic exchange as we know it today (though it may become a large part of it in the foreseeable future), but a system outside/alongside of it, with the primary aims being anonymity and security in financial transactions between people. I agree with Mike Hearn on one point:
When misinformed investors lose money, government attention frequently follows.
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if only to say that in that context, people who use Bitcoin as an investment probably shouldn't be. Yes, I understand the ups and downs of Bitcoin value can be played just like the stock market or other investment venture, and many people have. Some have done well and others have lost their shirts. So far, it seems most of the players involved understand the risks of doing such business with a new system outside of authoritative oversight, but I sincerely believe that doing such should be actively discouraged, as it only takes one idiot with less sense than the amount of money they lost for Bitcoin to come under very unwanted scrutiny. So far it's been fortunate; most of those buying in seem to be in it for the technical and socio-economic merits (even 'investors'), not for any notion of convenience or stability. But I wonder if a "tipping point" may come before it is fully mature; where enough clueless users join up expecting it to be some magically 'better' transaction system with no notion of how the thing actually works, then complain when the value dips.
Of course, IMHO, YMMV, 2c, etc...
Deozaan:
If you read the article, some people ask some really good questions of him... that he doesn't answer.
Mike, How were you able to sell your coins if your claim “Couldn’t move your existing money” is true?
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-wraith808 (January 15, 2016, 02:07 PM)
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Simple. Right now, because of the low blocksize limit, transactions with higher fees are accepted/added to the blockchain by miners while transactions with lower fees are delayed/ignored. You can easily move your money if you're willing to pay exorbitant fees.
Just a couple of months ago I could make transactions for a couple of cents. Now I've heard the average transaction fee is about 10 cents. While still relatively low, there is no reason for artificially increasing the fees by keeping the blocksize limit small as the miner reward of 25BTC is still pretty significant! Even when it halves to 12.5BTC (scheduled to happen in about 6 months) that's ~$4,750 every ten minutes at the current exchange rate.
I think someone who quits an open source project to work for a company that does basically the same (centralized blockchain) should not comment on their previous "employer". It’s the lowest thing you can do, you lost all credibility and if I were an employer I would never hire someone who just talks crap about an ex-employer.
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-wraith808 (January 15, 2016, 02:07 PM)
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This isn't a question.
You do realize that these messages are poisonous to Bitcoin… And that, especially coming from you, this might be a nail in the Bitcoin coffin. I mean, it’s a little petty to spread these articles to destroy the confidence in Bitcoin, just because things didn’t go the way you wanted it to go. There would’ve been better solutions… I’m just saying, we all have a problem now… I hope Bitcoin won’t respond too much to this article..
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-wraith808 (January 15, 2016, 02:07 PM)
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This also isn't a question.
That said, I read Mike's post not as being harmful to nor as a condemnation of Bitcoin, but as a condemnation of the Bitcoin Core developers who, it appears, are doing their very best to bring down Bitcoin from within. People who believe in Bitcoin still believe in Bitcoin. They just have very little to no confidence in the Bitcoin Core devs.
My opinion is that I agree with a lot of what Mike Hearn stated about the current problems with Bitcoin (Core). However, I disagree with his final conclusion that BTC is dead/failed.
People got sick of the Bitcoin Core devs strong-arming their ideas on the entirety of Bitcoin through ignoring the community at best and censoring/silencing opposing viewpoints at worst. It's the Core devs who are/were "killing" BTC, but the beauty of an open source project and a distributed blockchain is that you don't have to stick with a tyrannical leadership. Finally, a group of people organized a fork called Bitcoin Classic which is rapidly gaining traction/popularity/acceptance and looks like it will be the dominant fork of BTC relatively soon.
The data show consensus amongst miners for an immediate 2 MB increase, and demand amongst users for 8 MB or more. We are writing the software that miners and users say they want. We will make sure that it solves their needs, help them deploy it, and gracefully upgrade the bitcoin network’s capacity together.
We call our code repository Bitcoin Classic. It starts as a one-feature patch to bitcoin-core that increases the blocksize limit to 2 MB.-http://bitcoinclassic.com/
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As stated, they're taking action to double the blocksize limit ASAP (within a few months) and then gradually increase it on an ongoing basis thereafter.
There's also strong community opposition to Replace By Fee (RBF) which makes it incredibly easier for people to rip other people off and basically cripples the ability for BTC to be used in commercial transactions (i.e., paying for goods in brick & mortar stores). Core is trying to ramrod this into the client despite the strong opposition to it, and has already committed some RBF code to the repository. Classic may remove this "feature" (though at this time AFAIK they will not commit to anything until they've finished the one-feature patch to increase the blocksize limit). For an explanation of what RBF is and why it's a bad idea, see the long description below:
Long explanation of RBF To explain what RBF is, I have to explain a bit about how BTC transactions work (which I'm sure many of you already know, but just to cover all the bases...)
The gist of it is that when accepting BTC payments, to be sure someone doesn't "double-spend" the money, you should wait for at least 1 confirmation (meaning the transaction is on the most recent entry in the blockchain ledger) which takes about 5-10 minutes at best or much, much longer given the current issue with high fees and the blocksize limit being nearly reached. To be "ultra-safe" it is recommended to wait for 6 confirmations which takes about an hour (~50 minutes) longer than the first confirmation.
To backtrack slightly, a "double-spend" is when someone makes a transaction paying one person, and then almost immediately (before the first confirmation) makes another transaction paying another person (possibly even themselves). In such a scenario, only one of these transaction will come out the victor and be added to the blockchain (i.e., only one will be confirmed). Typically the first transaction, chronologically speaking, is the one that is confirmed. But there are ways to make the 2nd transaction the one that confirms. I may be wrong about this, but I think you would basically have to send the transactions to two different miners and hope the miner who got the 2nd transaction is the first one to confirm it.
Either way, this means the transaction that didn't go through is effectively void and the recipient didn't actually get paid. I've heard that this is relatively easy to do if you know what you're doing, but probably it's beyond the ability of the casual/usual BTC user. This is why it's recommended to wait for at least 1 confirmation, to assure that you get your BTC. On the other hand, imagine going to the drive-through and having to wait 10 minutes or longer after you paid to get your coffee. Nobody would do that! Thus, some businesses accept the relatively small risk of double-spends by delivering the goods without waiting for the first confirmation. This is called zero confirmation (or some variation of 0-conf). It makes more business sense to accept the risk of the occasional double-spend (losing money on the sale) because the convenience of 0-conf brings much more business in than it loses to double-spends.
Enter RBF: Replace By Fee allows a person to easily replace a 0-conf transaction with a NEW transaction, and as long as it has a higher fee than the old transaction the miner's software would be instructed to ignore the first transaction and only accept the second transaction. This sounds like and is proposed as a great idea if your transaction gets stuck in limbo forever because your initial transaction didn't include a high enough fee, but this is wrong for two reasons:
1. Transactions shouldn't be getting stuck due to low fees. There's no reason for fees to be so high. The only reason the fees are so high is because Core won't increase the blocksize limit. Increasing the limit will allow more transactions to go into the block, reducing the amount of fees required to be included. Core is artificially increasing the fees and then proposing RBF as a solution to the problem they're creating.
2. The even bigger problem is that the new RBF transaction could be to anyone, including the person making the payment. So with RBF a person could go into a shop, buy something, walk out with the goods, then make a new RBF transaction paying the money back to themselves, and basically get things for free.
In my opinion, a much better solution to the problem of transactions getting stuck in limbo forever is the following:
1. Increase the blocksize limit. As stated before, a higher blocksize limit means miners can fit more transactions into a single block, thereby reducing the artificial limitation on supply and therefore reducing the fees required to be included in a block.
2. Child Pays for Parent (CPFP).
A quick explanation of CPFP: If a transaction gets stuck due to a low fee, another transaction (made by the recipient of the "stuck" coins) which spends the "stuck" coins--and has a high enough fee to be included in the block--will pay for the stuck transaction to go through.
Deozaan:
1- Is it true that raising the blocksize limit is bad, and more specifically, in the way that Maxwell says it is? [EDIT] Partially answered, see below.
-Edvard (January 18, 2016, 03:24 PM)
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It's true you don't want to increase the limit by too much. Too large of a blocksize can result in DDOS of the blockchain (which is why the 1MB limit was added in the first place). It can also mean that miners with low internet speeds will have a hard time propagating the blockchain. It might take so long to download the latest transactions/blockchain that by the time a miner gets it and is ready to start mining a new block, there's already been another block added to the blockchain which needs to be downloaded and verified before work can begin on a new block. This way the miner is always trying to catch up to the latest version and never gets a chance to actually mine anything. Or another possibility is if a miner has solved a block and then has to upload a large amount of data on a slow connection, this could result in someone else solving the block independently before the miner's block propagates over the network.
That said, there's no reason why raising the blocksize limit at all is bad. This is why Bitcoin Classic is immediately increasing the limit to a conservative 2MB, and gradually increasing it thereafter.
2- Are dissenting opinions really being wholesale censored by those who side with Bitcoin Core over those who disagree? Ignoring that which you don't feel like answering is one thing, attempting to answer regardless if the questioner takes it is better, actively killing the conversation with censorship is just... really bad.
-Edvard (January 18, 2016, 03:24 PM)
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These links might answer your question:
* https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/search?q=theymos+censorship
* OMG I just discovered unreddit.com! It shows all the comments that have been deleted in a thread! Now you can see all the comments that theymos has been deleting from /r/bitcoin!
* Luke-Jr: "I am not aware of any evidence that /r/Bitcoin engages in censorship." LOL!
* https://twitter.com/rogerkver/status/688812282885713924
* https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/3ghx03/important_rbitcoin_is_being_censored_by_utheymos/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3hvz7x/bitcoindev_censorship_theymos_gets_called_out/
Also, this should improve the temperature of the conversation around scaling and relevant to question #1.
https://medium.com/@ryanshea/the-scaling-announcement-bitcoin-core-should-have-made-146790f755df#.inxhnxuig
To Maxwell's (and other devs) credit, there IS a commitment to incremental capacity increases that has been in place since Dec 7, 2015:
https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases
-Edvard (January 18, 2016, 03:24 PM)
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Their plan for "scaling Bitcoin" is to implement a feature called Segregated Witness (SegWit). But SegWit isn't all it's advertised to be. It's really just an accounting trick, or perhaps better described as a subsidy. It uses up just as much data as before (more, actually!) they just don't count it the same way under certain circumstances. Here's an explanation from someone who understands it far greater than I do:
> The size of of a Seg-Wit transaction is counted as 25% hence resulting in just under 4x the 1MB hard limit. Non witness data is counted the same as usual at 100% of it's size.
No, the size of the witness portion of a SegWit transaction is counted 25%. A SegWit transaction can be split into two parts: the transaction data (i.e. where the coins come from, how many coins, where they go to), and the witness data (the signatures and scripts you use to prove that you're allowed to spend the coins). It's only the second half of the transaction, the witness data, that gets the 75% discount. This means that transactions that have a lot of signatures (e.g. large multisig) benefit much more than typical transactions.
> Deploy segregated witness soft-fork April 2016 (tentative) resulting in a maximum blocksize just under 4MB if only segregated witness is used for transactions.... Reaching 4MB is unlikely as blocks are a mixture of both seg-wit and non seg-wit transactions.
Segregated witness is nearly 4 MB if only 15-of-15 multisig segwit transactions are used. If only segregated witness p2pkh transactions are used, the limit is 1.6 MB. if 100% 2-of-2 multisig with SW, then 2 MB. If a mix of SW transactions that resembles the current mix in terms of the amount of multisig is used, then 1.75 MB. If the current mix is used but only 50% are SW, then 1.375 MB.-https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3zuhnu/summary_of_major_blocksize_proposals/cypcobn
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Additionally, it's looking like SegWit is really complicated and changes things so much that "many reasonable people are skeptical that this roll-out can be accomplished in 9-12 months" yet the demand/need for a larger blocksize limit is here right now.
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