Re: [Bitcoin-development] Cartographer

2014-12-29 Thread Thomas Zander
On Sunday 28. December 2014 18.25.29 Mike Hearn wrote:
 Lately we have been bumping up against the limitations of DNS as a protocol
 for learning about the p2p network.

Can you explain further where limitations and problems were hit?

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Cartographer

2014-12-29 Thread Peter Todd
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A big one is the privacy is way too good: every DNS request goes through 
multiple levels of caching and indirection, so there's no way to figure out who 
made the request to subject them additional targeting.

A connection-oriented protocol gets rid of all those protections, giving us 
seed operators monetisation opportunities like selling usage statistics, 
per-client targeted results, etc. We recently got rid of all the call-home 
functionality that previously gave this type of insight; a connecyion-oriented 
seed protocol gives us this right back.

There's also this pesky problem of ISP's censoring DNS results with dumb 
automated systems to block malware - easily fixed with Gregory Maxwell's 
suggestion of permuting the results with XOR - but that kind of end-user driven 
solution really misses out in the needs of other Bitcoin stakeholders like law 
enforcement and marketing companies.


On 29 December 2014 09:47:29 CET, Thomas Zander tho...@thomaszander.se wrote:
On Sunday 28. December 2014 18.25.29 Mike Hearn wrote:
 Lately we have been bumping up against the limitations of DNS as a
protocol
 for learning about the p2p network.

Can you explain further where limitations and problems were hit?
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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Cartographer

2014-12-29 Thread Mike Hearn

 Can you explain further where limitations and problems were hit?


Well, look at the feature list :)

The biggest need from my POV is querying support. It's awkward to try and
retrofit flexible key=value pair queries onto DNS, it just wasn't designed
for that. With HTTP it's easy. This will become more important in future as
the protocol evolves. For example, some nodes will soon stop serving the
block chain because they start pruning. Today this is managed with a hack:
pruning nodes just stop providing *all* services to the p2p network. This
takes them out of the DNS seeds entirely. But they can actually still
provide download of the parts of the chain they still have, and they can
provide transaction filtering and relay support, along with misc other
things.

With the current DNS protocol you get an all or nothing choice - so
probably seeds that only support it will elect to only show nodes that have
the entire block chain, because that's what Bitcoin Core would find most
useful. SPV wallets have slightly different needs.

In theory you could come up with a pile of hacks to specify what the client
needs in the DNS query, but then you have a v2 protocol anyway and might as
well go the whole way.

Additionally, with DNS it's awkward to provide extra data in the responses
beyond IP address and it's VERY awkward to sign the responses. Signing the
responses has a couple of benefits. The biggest is, in future it'd be nice
to have an authenticated and encrypted network, to raise the bar for sybil
and MITM attacks. DNS seeding can't be upgraded to support that with any
reasonable level of effort. And DNS is awkward to configure/set up.
Actually DNS is just awkward, period.

The second benefit of signing is it provides audibility. If you see a seed
give bad answers, you can now prove it to other people.

There is also the previously discussed issue that DNS seeds sometimes get
blocked by aggressive networks because they start serving IPs that are
infected with malware i.e. they look like fast-flux sites.

Using a simple HTTP based protocol fixes all of these problems in one go.

Now, re: privacy.

Firstly, Peter, get help. I'm serious. You are starting to sound like an
auto-generated parody of yourself. When you can't debate something as
boring as HTTP vs DNS without trying to raise an angry mob using bizarre
conspiracy theories, that's not normal.

I don't think the DNS has caches issue is worth worrying about for a lot
of reasons:

   1. Full nodes try as hard as they can to open ports and advertise their
   IP addresses to everyone. Even if you change the defaults to disable that,
   you're about to connect to a bunch of random computers with no reputation
   anyway.

   2. Lists of stale IP addresses are hardly useful to regular people and
   network operators can identify Bitcoin users by looking for traffic on port
   8333, so it's unclear what threat model is being addressed here.

   3. The biggest users of the seeds are all SPV wallets. Every single one
   of these already phones home to check for online updates.

   4. DNS proxying only hides part of the IP address. If you're serious
   about this you want to be doing lookups via Tor. Whilst it's possible to
   use the DNS seeds via Tor in a reasonable way with exit diversity (and
   bitcoinj does), doing it requires low level Tor protocol programming
   
https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj/blob/42f9d7c193fcd56fda7691b0ea934bae9d23f2d6/core/src/main/java/org/bitcoinj/net/discovery/TorDiscovery.java#L260
   that is out of reach for most implementors. An HTTP lookup is trivial with
   any HTTP stack that supports SOCKS.

   5. ISPs also deploy transparent HTTP caches. The Cartographer protocol
   uses HTTP with inline signing so responses can be cached, once the right
   headers are being set.

tl;dr it's unclear that DNS caching actually solves any real privacy
problem but regardless, you can get the same distributed caching with HTTP
as with DNS. So in the end it makes little difference.

I believe that Cartographer is a better protocol all round and there are no
costs beyond the one-time upgrades, but even if for some reason you
disagree with the five privacy points above, I think the benefits still
massively outweigh the costs.
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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Cartographer

2014-12-29 Thread Thomas Zander
On Monday 29. December 2014 11.30.42 Mike Hearn wrote:
 With the current DNS protocol you get an all or nothing choice

Its a seed. Not the protocol itself.

 Firstly, Peter, get help. I'm serious.
I think most would agree with me that, Mike, this answer is not just a little 
over the line, its unacceptable behavior in any collaborative group.
Please be respectful and avoid ad-hominem attacks.

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Cartographer

2014-12-29 Thread Peter Todd
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On 29 December 2014 12:49:45 CET, Thomas Zander tho...@thomaszander.se wrote:
On Monday 29. December 2014 11.30.42 Mike Hearn wrote:
 With the current DNS protocol you get an all or nothing choice

Its a seed. Not the protocol itself.

 Firstly, Peter, get help. I'm serious.
I think most would agree with me that, Mike, this answer is not just a
little
over the line, its unacceptable behavior in any collaborative group.
Please be respectful and avoid ad-hominem attacks.

Yes I agree, Mike shouldn't be making ad-hominim attacks by calling people a 
parody

You'll note my response however carefully avoiding talking about the person who 
originated the idea, and merely stuck to criticising - via parody - the idea 
itself.

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Cartographer

2014-12-29 Thread Btc Drak
Mike,

In all seriousness, are you on the payroll of the NSA or similar to
repeatedly attempt to introduce privacy leaks[1] and weaknesses[2] into the
ecosystem not to mention logical fallacies like ad hominem attacks;
disruption[3] and FUD[4]?

Why do you answer objections by hand waving and misdirection as opposed to
sound technical reasoning? Remember how hand waving ended for you the last
time with your p2p getutxo pull-request[5] and the public flogging the
ensued because you refused to accept your implementation was not only
flawed but critically vulnerable to attack[6].

Given your intelligence, education and experience, it would seem logical
that your behaviour is not random or irrational, but in fact calculated and
planned.

references:
[1]
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2byqz0/mike_hearn_proposes_to_build_vulnerable/
[2]
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qmbtu/mike_hearn_chair_of_the_bitcoin_foundations_law/
[3]
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/28zts3/mike_hearn_interview_quotes_progress_on_the/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMIzMVABFxQ
[5] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4351
[6]
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2eq8gi/getutxos_a_convenient_way_to_crash_bitcoind/
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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Cartographer

2014-12-29 Thread Mistr Bigs
As an outside observer, I have to say I also found Peter's sardonic message
tone inappropriate for furthering the discussion.
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[Bitcoin-development] BIP: Voluntary deposit bonds

2014-12-29 Thread Sergio Lerner
I propose to allow miners to voluntarily lock funds by letting miners
add additional inputs to the coinbase transaction. Currently the
coinbase transaction does not allow any real input  to be added (only a
pseudo-input).
This is a hard-fork, and we could include it the next time a hardfork is
made.
The modifications to the code are minimal (no more than 12 lines
modified where IsCoinBase() is called), and they generally involve
removing code, not adding.

Why ?

Because sometime in the future (maybe 5-10 years) we may have to deal
with problems of securing the blockchain, as the subsidy is lowered. We
don't want the number of confirmation blocks to be increased in
compensation because Bitcoin won't be able to compete with other payment
networks.
Then by having this hardfork now, we will be able to soft-fork later to
any rule we may came come up with involving deposit bonds,
proof-of-stake, and the penalization of double-mining (mining two blocks
at the same height) to prevent short-range attacks.

Can it hurt?

No. I doesn't not change the incentives or the security in any way, as
adding additional inputs to the coinbase transaction would be voluntary
until the time for a soft-fork comes.
We shouldn't hard-fork for this change only, but maybe we could do this
change when the next hard-fork is scheduled (when we increase the block
size?).

Regards, S.









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Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP: Voluntary deposit bonds

2014-12-29 Thread Mike Hearn
Could you explain a bit further Sergio? I'm not sure I fully understand the
proposal.

How does adding inputs to a coinbase differ from just having pay-to-fee
transactions in the block?
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Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP: Voluntary deposit bonds

2014-12-29 Thread Luke Dashjr
On Monday, December 29, 2014 7:21:02 PM Sergio Lerner wrote:
 I propose to allow miners to voluntarily lock funds by letting miners
 add additional inputs to the coinbase transaction. Currently the
 coinbase transaction does not allow any real input  to be added (only a
 pseudo-input).

This is something I've wanted since 2011, but hasn't been a priority.

 Because sometime in the future (maybe 5-10 years) we may have to deal
 with problems of securing the blockchain, as the subsidy is lowered. We
 don't want the number of confirmation blocks to be increased in
 compensation because Bitcoin won't be able to compete with other payment
 networks.
 Then by having this hardfork now, we will be able to soft-fork later to
 any rule we may came come up with involving deposit bonds,
 proof-of-stake, and the penalization of double-mining (mining two blocks
 at the same height) to prevent short-range attacks.

I'm not sure this increases the priority of it.

If someone feels it's worth the time, I'd suggest coding up a branch that 
hardforks it in at some far-off block height. Even if it doesn't get merged 
right away, at least the code will be available for testing and ready to go 
when/if that time comes.

Luke

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP: Voluntary deposit bonds

2014-12-29 Thread Justus Ranvier
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On 12/29/2014 09:10 PM, Mike Hearn wrote:
 How does adding inputs to a coinbase differ from just having
 pay-to-fee transactions in the block?

If a miner includes pay-to-fee transactions in a block, those fees
could be claimed by another miner in the case the first miner's block
is orphaned.

Inputs to a generation transaction can not be similarly poached.

That difference makes some services possible that would can not be
safely achieved with pay-to-fee transactions.

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP: Voluntary deposit bonds

2014-12-29 Thread Luke Dashjr
On Monday, December 29, 2014 9:10:20 PM Mike Hearn wrote:
 How does adding inputs to a coinbase differ from just having pay-to-fee
 transactions in the block?

Pay-to-fee transactions can be stolen by another block at the same or 
greater height. Additional inputs to the generation transaction are tied to 
that block alone.

Luke

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP: Voluntary deposit bonds

2014-12-29 Thread Gregory Maxwell
On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 7:21 PM, Sergio Lerner
sergioler...@certimix.com wrote:
 I propose to allow miners to voluntarily lock funds by letting miners
 add additional inputs to the coinbase transaction. Currently the
 coinbase transaction does not allow any real input  to be added (only a
 pseudo-input).
 This is a hard-fork, and we could include it the next time a hardfork is
 made.
 The modifications to the code are minimal (no more than 12 lines
 modified where IsCoinBase() is called), and they generally involve
 removing code, not adding.


If the motivation is purely enabling different rules in a soft-fork
than I think nothing needs to be done.

Instead of providing inputs to a coinbase: you provide an unusual
anyone can spend transaction in the block which pays to fees; and
simultaneously add a soft-forking rule that makes that anyone can
spend rule no longer anyone can spend.

To make that more concrete.  E.g. You make your anyone can spend
output   PUSHhash of coinbase output script_pubkeys OP_NOP3.  Now
this anyone can pay transaction is really just a coinbase input.

The construction is reasonably efficient, and also more flexible-- in
that it could control the data under the hash in more flexible ways
than available in the existing sighash flags.


As an aside, I'm not sure that I agree with the claim that making
coinbases have inputs is a simple modification... as we use one of the
inputs already as the special coinbase field and at least that must be
special cased.

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