Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 01:57:14PM -0700, Mark Friedenbach wrote: On 03/24/2014 01:34 PM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote: I'm here because I want to sell corn for bitcoin, and I believe it will be more profitable for me to do that with a bitcoin-blockchain-based system in which I have the capability to audit the code that executes the trade. A discussion over such a system would be on-topic. Indeed I have made my own proposals for systems with that capability in the past: http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/31322676/ There's no reason to invoke alts however. There are ways where this can be done within the bitcoin ecosystem, using bitcoins: http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/32108143/ I think that's fair, so long as we limit bitcoin-development discussion to issues that are relevant to the owners of the hashrate and companies that pay developer salaries. What I'm asking for is some honesty that Bitcoin is a centralized system and to stop arguing technical points on the altar of distributed/decentralized whatever. It's pretty clear if you want decentralized you should go with altchains. Bitcoin is not a centralized system, and neither is its development. I don't even know how to respond to that. Bringing up altchains is a total red herring. This is *bitcoin*-development. Please don't make it have to become a moderated mailing list. When I can pick up a miner at Best Buy and pay it off in 9 months I'll agree with you that bitcoin *might* be decentralized. Maybe there's a chance this *will* happen eventually, but right now we have a couple of mining cartels that control most of the hashrate. There are plenty of interesting alt-hash-chains for which mass produced, general purpose (or gpgpu-purpose) hardware exists and is in high volume mass production. -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
I think that's fair, so long as we limit bitcoin-development discussion to issues that are relevant to the owners of the hashrate and companies that pay developer salaries. What I'm asking for is some honesty that Bitcoin is a centralized system and to stop arguing technical points on the altar of distributed/decentralized whatever. It's pretty clear if you want decentralized you should go with altchains. I'm here because I want to sell corn for bitcoin, and I believe it will be more profitable for me to do that with a bitcoin-blockchain-based system in which I have the capability to audit the code that executes the trade. On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 04:53:48PM -0700, Mark Friedenbach wrote: This isn't distributed-systems-development, it is bitcoin-development. Discussion over chain parameters is a fine thing to have among people who are interested in that sort of thing. But not here. On 03/23/2014 04:17 PM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote: I find it very irresponsible for Bitcoiners to on one hand extol the virtues of distributed systems and then in the same message claim any discussion about alternate chains as 'off-topic'. If bitcoin-core is for *distributed systems*, then all the different altcoins with different hash algorithms should be viable topics for discussion. -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
On 03/24/2014 01:34 PM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote: I'm here because I want to sell corn for bitcoin, and I believe it will be more profitable for me to do that with a bitcoin-blockchain-based system in which I have the capability to audit the code that executes the trade. A discussion over such a system would be on-topic. Indeed I have made my own proposals for systems with that capability in the past: http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/31322676/ There's no reason to invoke alts however. There are ways where this can be done within the bitcoin ecosystem, using bitcoins: http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/32108143/ I think that's fair, so long as we limit bitcoin-development discussion to issues that are relevant to the owners of the hashrate and companies that pay developer salaries. What I'm asking for is some honesty that Bitcoin is a centralized system and to stop arguing technical points on the altar of distributed/decentralized whatever. It's pretty clear if you want decentralized you should go with altchains. Bitcoin is not a centralized system, and neither is its development. I don't even know how to respond to that. Bringing up altchains is a total red herring. This is *bitcoin*-development. Please don't make it have to become a moderated mailing list. -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
On Saturday, March 22, 2014 8:47:02 AM Peter Todd wrote: To make a long story short, it was soon suggested that Bitcoin Core be forked - the software, not the protocol - and miners encouraged to support it. There's been at least one public miner-oriented fork of Bitcoin Core since 0.7 or earlier. Miners still running vanilla Bitcoin Core are neglecting their duty to the community. That being said, the more forks, the better for decentralisation. Luke -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 03:08:25PM -0400, Peter Todd wrote: On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 10:08:36AM -0500, Troy Benjegerdes wrote: On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 04:47:02AM -0400, Peter Todd wrote: There's been a lot of recent hoopla over proof-of-publication, with the OP_RETURN data length getting reduced to a rather useless 40 bytes at the last minute prior to the 0.9 release. Secondly I noticed a overlooked security flaw in that OP_CHECKMULTISIG sigops weren't taken into account, making it possible to broadcast unminable transactions and bloat mempools.(1) My suggestion was to just ditch bare OP_CHECKMULTISIG outputs given that the sigops limit and the way they use up a fixed 20 sigops per op makes them hard to do fee calculations for. They also make it easy to bloat the UTXO set, potentially a bad thing. This would of course require things using them to change. Currently that's just Counterparty, so I gave them the heads up in my email. I've spend some time looking at the Datacoin code, and I've come to the conclusion the next copycatcoin I release will have an explicit 'data' field with something like 169 bytes (a bakers dozen squared), which will add 1 byte to each transaction if unused, and provide a small, but usable data field for proof of publication. As a new coin, I can also do a hardfork that increases the data size limit much easier if there is a compelling reason to make it bigger. I think this will prove to be a much more reliable infrastructure for proof of publication than various hacks to overcome 40 byte limits with Bitcoin. I am disclosing this here so the bitcoin 1% has plenty of time to evaluate the market risk they face from the 40 byte limit, and put some pressure to implement some of the alternatives Todd proposes. Lol! Granted, I guess I should disclose that I'm working on tree chains, which just improve the scalability of blockchains directly. I'm think tree-chains could be implemented as a soft-fork; if applied to Bitcoin the datacoin 1% might face market risk. :P Soft-fork tree chains with reasonable data/memo/annotation storage would be extremely interesting. The important question, however, is how does one build a *business* around such a thing, including getting paid as a developer. What I find extremely relevant to the **bitcoin-dev** list are discussions about how to motivate the people who own the hashrate and bulk of the coins (aka, the bitcoin 1%) to PAY DEVELOPERS, and thus it is good marketing FOR BITCOIN DEVELOPERS to remind the people who profit from our efforts they need to make it profitable for developers to work on bitcoin. If it's more profitable for innovative developers to premine and release $NEWCOIN-blockchain than it is to work on Bitcoin-blockchain, is that a valid discussion for this list? Or do you just want to stick your heads in the sand while VC's look to disrupt Bitcoin? -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
This isn't distributed-systems-development, it is bitcoin-development. Discussion over chain parameters is a fine thing to have among people who are interested in that sort of thing. But not here. On 03/23/2014 04:17 PM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote: I find it very irresponsible for Bitcoiners to on one hand extol the virtues of distributed systems and then in the same message claim any discussion about alternate chains as 'off-topic'. If bitcoin-core is for *distributed systems*, then all the different altcoins with different hash algorithms should be viable topics for discussion. -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
On 3/22/14, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: There's been a lot of recent hoopla over proof-of-publication, with the OP_RETURN data length getting reduced to a rather useless 40 bytes at the last minute prior to the 0.9 release. I'm not against about miners accepting transactions that have longer data in non-utxo polluting OP_RETURN than whatever is specified as standard by the reference implementation, maybe it should be risen in standard but I think it was assumed that the most common case would be to include the root hash of some merklized structure. My only argument against non-validated proof of publication is that in the long run it will be very expensive since they will have to compete with transactions that actually use the utxo, a feature that is more valuable. But that's mostly speculation and doesn't imply the need for any action against it. I would strongly opposed to against a limitation on OP_RETURN at the protocol level (other than the block size limit itself, that is) and wouldn't mind if they're removed from isStandard. I didn't payed much attention to that and honestly I don't care enough. Maybe this encourages miners to adopt their own policies, which could be good for things like replace-by-fee, the rational policy for miners, which I strongly support (combined with game theory can provide instant transactions as you pointed out in another thread). Maybe the right approach to keep improving modularity and implement different and configurable mining policies. All these methods have some overhead compared to just using OP_RETURN and thus cost more. I thought the consensus was that op_return was the right way to put non-validated data in the chain, but limiting it in standard policies doesn't seem consistent with that. Finally I'll be writing something more detailed soon about why proof-of-publication is essential and miners would be smart to support it. But the tl;dr: of it is if you need proof-of-publication for what your system does you're much more secure if you're embedded within Bitcoin rather than alongside of it. There's a lot of very bad advise getting thrown around lately for things like Mastercoin, Counterparty, and for that matter, Colored Coins, to use a separate PoW blockchain or a merge-mined one. The fact is if you go with pure PoW, you risk getting attacked while your still growing, and if you go for merge-mined PoW, the attacker can do so for free. We've got a real-world example of the former with Twister, among many others, usually resulting in a switch to a centralized checkpointing scheme. For the latter we have Coiledcoin, an alt that made the mistake of using SHA256 merge-mining and got killed off early at birth with a zero-cost 51% attack. There is of course a censorship risk to going the embedded route, but at least we know that for the forseeable future doing so will require explicit blacklists, something most people here are against. The proof of publication vs separate chain discussion is orthogonal to the merged mining vs independent chain one. If I remember correctly, last time you admitted after my example that merged mining was comparatively better than a separate chain, that it was economically harder to attack. I guess ecological arguments won't help here, but you're confusing people developing independent chains and thus pushing them to a less secure (apart from more wasteful setup) system design. Coiledcoin just proofs that merged mining may not be the best way to bootstrap a currency, but you can also start separated and then switch to merged mining once you have sufficient independent support. As far as I can tell twister doesn't have a realistic reward mechanism for miners so the incentives are broken before considering merged mining. Proof of work is irreversible and it's a good thing to share it. Thanks Satoshi for proposing this great idea of merged mining and thanks vinced for a first implementation with a data structure that can be improved. Peter Todd, I don't think you're being responsible or wise saying nonsense like merged mined chains can be attacked for free and I suggest that you prove your claims by attacking namecoin for free, please, enlighten us, how that's done? It should be easier with the scamcoin ixcoin, with a much lower subsidy to miners so I don't feel bad about the suggestion if your free attack somehow works (certainly using some magic I don't know about). -- Jorge Timón http://freico.in/ -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 04:47:02AM -0400, Peter Todd wrote: There's been a lot of recent hoopla over proof-of-publication, with the OP_RETURN data length getting reduced to a rather useless 40 bytes at the last minute prior to the 0.9 release. Secondly I noticed a overlooked security flaw in that OP_CHECKMULTISIG sigops weren't taken into account, making it possible to broadcast unminable transactions and bloat mempools.(1) My suggestion was to just ditch bare OP_CHECKMULTISIG outputs given that the sigops limit and the way they use up a fixed 20 sigops per op makes them hard to do fee calculations for. They also make it easy to bloat the UTXO set, potentially a bad thing. This would of course require things using them to change. Currently that's just Counterparty, so I gave them the heads up in my email. I've spend some time looking at the Datacoin code, and I've come to the conclusion the next copycatcoin I release will have an explicit 'data' field with something like 169 bytes (a bakers dozen squared), which will add 1 byte to each transaction if unused, and provide a small, but usable data field for proof of publication. As a new coin, I can also do a hardfork that increases the data size limit much easier if there is a compelling reason to make it bigger. I think this will prove to be a much more reliable infrastructure for proof of publication than various hacks to overcome 40 byte limits with Bitcoin. I am disclosing this here so the bitcoin 1% has plenty of time to evaluate the market risk they face from the 40 byte limit, and put some pressure to implement some of the alternatives Todd proposes. -- Troy Benjegerdes 'da hozer' ho...@hozed.org 7 elements earth::water::air::fire::mind::spirit::soulgrid.coop Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, nor try buy a hacker who makes money by the megahash -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
Please, by all means: ignore our well-reasoned arguments about externalized storage and validation cost and alternative solutions. Please re-discover how proof of publication doesn't require burdening the network with silly extra data that must be transmitted, kept, and validated from now until the heat death of the universe. Your failure will make my meager bitcoin holdings all the more valuable! As despite persistent assertions to the contrary, making quality software freely available at zero cost does not pay well, even in finance. You will not find core developers in the Bitcoin 1%. Please feel free to flame me back, but off-list. This is for *bitcoin* development. On 03/22/2014 08:08 AM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote: On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 04:47:02AM -0400, Peter Todd wrote: There's been a lot of recent hoopla over proof-of-publication, with the OP_RETURN data length getting reduced to a rather useless 40 bytes at the last minute prior to the 0.9 release. Secondly I noticed a overlooked security flaw in that OP_CHECKMULTISIG sigops weren't taken into account, making it possible to broadcast unminable transactions and bloat mempools.(1) My suggestion was to just ditch bare OP_CHECKMULTISIG outputs given that the sigops limit and the way they use up a fixed 20 sigops per op makes them hard to do fee calculations for. They also make it easy to bloat the UTXO set, potentially a bad thing. This would of course require things using them to change. Currently that's just Counterparty, so I gave them the heads up in my email. I've spend some time looking at the Datacoin code, and I've come to the conclusion the next copycatcoin I release will have an explicit 'data' field with something like 169 bytes (a bakers dozen squared), which will add 1 byte to each transaction if unused, and provide a small, but usable data field for proof of publication. As a new coin, I can also do a hardfork that increases the data size limit much easier if there is a compelling reason to make it bigger. I think this will prove to be a much more reliable infrastructure for proof of publication than various hacks to overcome 40 byte limits with Bitcoin. I am disclosing this here so the bitcoin 1% has plenty of time to evaluate the market risk they face from the 40 byte limit, and put some pressure to implement some of the alternatives Todd proposes. -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 10:08:36AM -0500, Troy Benjegerdes wrote: On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 04:47:02AM -0400, Peter Todd wrote: There's been a lot of recent hoopla over proof-of-publication, with the OP_RETURN data length getting reduced to a rather useless 40 bytes at the last minute prior to the 0.9 release. Secondly I noticed a overlooked security flaw in that OP_CHECKMULTISIG sigops weren't taken into account, making it possible to broadcast unminable transactions and bloat mempools.(1) My suggestion was to just ditch bare OP_CHECKMULTISIG outputs given that the sigops limit and the way they use up a fixed 20 sigops per op makes them hard to do fee calculations for. They also make it easy to bloat the UTXO set, potentially a bad thing. This would of course require things using them to change. Currently that's just Counterparty, so I gave them the heads up in my email. I've spend some time looking at the Datacoin code, and I've come to the conclusion the next copycatcoin I release will have an explicit 'data' field with something like 169 bytes (a bakers dozen squared), which will add 1 byte to each transaction if unused, and provide a small, but usable data field for proof of publication. As a new coin, I can also do a hardfork that increases the data size limit much easier if there is a compelling reason to make it bigger. I think this will prove to be a much more reliable infrastructure for proof of publication than various hacks to overcome 40 byte limits with Bitcoin. I am disclosing this here so the bitcoin 1% has plenty of time to evaluate the market risk they face from the 40 byte limit, and put some pressure to implement some of the alternatives Todd proposes. Lol! Granted, I guess I should disclose that I'm working on tree chains, which just improve the scalability of blockchains directly. I'm think tree-chains could be implemented as a soft-fork; if applied to Bitcoin the datacoin 1% might face market risk. :P -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org bbcc531d48bea8d67597e275b5abcff18e18f46266723e91 signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book Graph Databases is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Handling miner adoption gracefully for embedded consensus systems via double-spending/replace-by-fee
On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 02:53:41PM +0100, Jorge Timón wrote: On 3/22/14, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: There's been a lot of recent hoopla over proof-of-publication, with the OP_RETURN data length getting reduced to a rather useless 40 bytes at the last minute prior to the 0.9 release. I'm not against about miners accepting transactions that have longer data in non-utxo polluting OP_RETURN than whatever is specified as standard by the reference implementation, maybe it should be risen in standard but I think it was assumed that the most common case would be to include the root hash of some merklized structure. My only argument against non-validated proof of publication is that in the long run it will be very expensive since they will have to compete with transactions that actually use the utxo, a feature that is more valuable. But that's mostly speculation and doesn't imply the need for Well remember that my thinking re: UTXO is that we need to move to a system like TXO commitments where storing the entirety of the UTXO set for all eternity is *not* required. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean you can't have the advantages of UTXO commitments, but they need to be limited in some reasonable way so that long-term storage requirements do not grow without bound unreasonably. For example, having TXO commitments with a bounded size committed UTXO set seems reasonable; old UTXO's can be dropped from the bounded sized set, but can still be spent via the underlying TXO commitment mechanism. any action against it. I would strongly opposed to against a limitation on OP_RETURN at the protocol level (other than the block size limit itself, that is) and wouldn't mind if they're removed from isStandard. I didn't payed much attention to that and honestly I don't care enough. Maybe this encourages miners to adopt their own policies, which could be good for things like replace-by-fee, the rational policy for miners, which I strongly support (combined with game theory can provide instant transactions as you pointed out in another thread). Maybe the right approach to keep improving modularity and implement different and configurable mining policies. Like I said the real issue is making it easy to get those !IsStandard() transactions to the miners who are interested in them. The service bit flag I proposed + preferential peering - reserve, say, 50% of your peering slots for nodes advertising non-std tx relaying - is simple enough, but it is vulnerable to sybil attacks if done naively. All these methods have some overhead compared to just using OP_RETURN and thus cost more. I thought the consensus was that op_return was the right way to put non-validated data in the chain, but limiting it in standard policies doesn't seem consistent with that. Right, but there's also a lot of the community who thinks proof-of-publication applications are bad and should be discouraged. I argued before that the way OP_RETURN was being deployed didn't actually give any reason to use it vs. other data encoding methods. Unfortunately underlying all this is a real ignorance about how Bitcoin actually works and what proof-of-publication actually is: 14-03-20.log:12:47 gavinandresen jgarzik: RE: mastercoin/OP_RETURN: what's the current thinking on Best Way To Do It? Seems if I was to do it I'd just embed 20-byte RIPEMD160 hashes in OP_RETURN, and fetch the real data from a DHT or website (or any-of-several websites). Blockchain as reference ledger, not as data storage. Peter Todd, I don't think you're being responsible or wise saying nonsense like merged mined chains can be attacked for free and I suggest that you prove your claims by attacking namecoin for free, please, enlighten us, how that's done? I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on our interpretations of the economics with regard to attacking merge-mined chains. Myself, I'm very, very wary of systems that have poor security against economically irrational attackers regardless of how good the security is, in theory, against economically rational ones. Again, what it comes down to in the end is that when I'm advising Mastercoin, Counterparty, Colored Coins, etc. on how they should design their systems I know that if they do proof-of-publication on the Bitcoin blockchain, it may cost a bit more money than possible alternatives per transaction, but the security is very well understood and robust. Fact is, these applications can certainly afford to pay the higher transaction fees - they're far from the least economically valuable use of Blockchain space. Meanwhile the alternatives have, at best, much more dubious security properties and at worse no security at all. (announce/commit sacrifices is a great example of this, and very easy to understand) -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org bbcc531d48bea8d67597e275b5abcff18e18f46266723e91 signature.asc Description: Digital signature
