On 30/04/14 00:26, Mike Hearn wrote:
These parties wouldn't generally consider themselves attackers
Of course not, attackers rarely do :)
If Bitcoin works correctly nobody should have to care if they consider
themselves attackers, defenders, or little green men from Mars. There
are
On 30/04/14 00:13, Mike Hearn wrote:
I do think we need to move beyond this idea of Bitcoin being some kind
of elegant embodiment of natural mathematical law. It just ain't so.
I haven't seen anybody arguing that it is.
Bitcoin is the elegant embodiment of /artificially contrived/
I think we're going around in circles here so this will be my last message
on the thread unless someone comes up with something new.
On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Gareth Williams gac...@gmail.com wrote:
If Bitcoin works correctly nobody should have to care if they consider
themselves
On 30/04/14 00:13, Mike Hearn wrote:
Every time miners and nodes ignore a block that creates formula() coins
that's a majority vote on a controversial political matter
Actually, there's one more thing I'd like to add. Apologies to the list,
but it bears repeating:
* rejecting a block at
On 30/04/14 23:55, Mike Hearn wrote:
If Bitcoin works correctly nobody should have to care if they consider
themselves attackers, defenders, or little green men from Mars.
One last time, I request that people read the white paper from 2008
before making statements like this. If the
On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 11:00:06PM +1000, Gareth Williams wrote:
On 30/04/14 00:13, Mike Hearn wrote:
I do think we need to move beyond this idea of Bitcoin being some kind
of elegant embodiment of natural mathematical law. It just ain't so.
I haven't seen anybody arguing that it is.
Perhaps I missed it somewhere, but I don't recall it ever being a goal of
Bitcoin to act as a stable long-term store of value.
- Jameson
On 04/30/2014 01:06 PM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 11:00:06PM +1000, Gareth Williams wrote:
On 30/04/14 00:13, Mike Hearn wrote:
I do
I do think we need to move beyond this idea of Bitcoin being some kind of
elegant embodiment of natural mathematical law. It just ain't so.
Every time miners and nodes ignore a block that creates formula() coins
that's a majority vote on a controversial political matter, as evidenced by
the
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 7:13 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote:
It only works if the majority of hashpower is controlled by attackers, in
which case Bitcoin is already doomed. So it doesn't matter at that point.
These parties wouldn't generally consider themselves attackers— nor
would many
These parties wouldn't generally consider themselves attackers
Of course not, attackers rarely do :)
But they are miners who are taking part in malicious double spending. That
makes them attackers. If miners don't exist to stop double spending, what
do they exist for?
I mean, this is
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On 04/29/2014 02:13 PM, Mike Hearn wrote:
I do think we need to move beyond this idea of Bitcoin being some
kind of elegant embodiment of natural mathematical law. It just
ain't so.
I think everybody understands that Bitcoin has a positive net
On 27/04/14 11:42, Christophe Biocca wrote: This seems like splitting
hairs, no? A block isn't a guarantee (it can
get orphaned). And as a user of bitcoin (as opposed to a miner), this
change cannot affect any payment you ever receive.
Disagree. Maybe we just have a fundamental disagreement
That moves us away from a pure trustless system built upon a small
democratic foundation (as something of a necessary evil in an imperfect
world where humans run our computers and use our system) and toward a
democratic system.
You don't have to agree, but I hope you can understand the
Agreed. I'm a pragmatist, certainly not anti-change (or even anti-zero-conf.)
Useful and non-controversial hard forks don't keep me awake at night :) I
support your general position on zero-conf payments (that they're useful and we
should make them as reliable as practical.)
But the very
On 26/04/14 01:28, Mike Hearn wrote:
When you have a *bitcoin* TXn buried under 100 blocks you can be damn
sure that money is yours - but only because the rules for interpreting
data in the blockchain are publicly documented and (hopefully)
immutable. If they're mutable then
This seems like splitting hairs, no? A block isn't a guarantee (it can
get orphaned). And as a user of bitcoin (as opposed to a miner), this
change cannot affect any payment you ever receive.
Some of the interpretation is already different for coinbase UTXO's
(need a valid height, locked for 100
Proving that you can convince the economic majority that the
interpretation of existing blocks is in any way up for grabs would set a
dangerous precedent, and shake some people's faith in Bitcoin's overall
robustness and security (well, mine anyway.)
Hmm, then I think your faith needs to be
On 25/04/14 20:17, Mike Hearn wrote:
Proving that you can convince the economic majority that the
interpretation of existing blocks is in any way up for grabs would set a
dangerous precedent, and shake some people's faith in Bitcoin's overall
robustness and security (well,
When you have a *bitcoin* TXn buried under 100 blocks you can be damn
sure that money is yours - but only because the rules for interpreting
data in the blockchain are publicly documented and (hopefully)
immutable. If they're mutable then the PoW alone gives me no confidence
that the money
On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 12:58 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote:
The complexity overhead is trivial - we already used coinbase scriptSigs for
voting on P2SH, I'm sure it'll be used for voting on other things in future
too.
We use coinbase sigs to gauge the safety of enforcing a soft fork
On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.comwrote:
This is not voting.
It absolutely is! It was widely discussed as such at the time, here is a
thread where people ask how to vote and the operator of Eclipse said he was
removing his vote for P2SH:
On Wednesday 23 April 2014 15:31:38 Mike Hearn wrote:
There _are_ consequences though: 95% of the time, you end up buying
something and paying for it.
Yeah, I was imagining a situation in which people who use Bitcoin regularly
do buy things they actually want, but wouldn't say no to
On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 1:39 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote:
It absolutely is!
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60937.0
May I direct your attention to the third post in that thread?
Luke attempting to ret-con the enforcement flag into a vote didn't
make it one, and certantly
Yes, you can reorg out the blocks and actually remove them, but I
understood that you were _not_ proposing that quite specifically. But
instead proposed without reorging taking txouts that were previously
assigned to one party and simply assigning them to others.
Well, my original thought
On 4/23/14, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote:
I guess word honest might have different meanings, that can be a source
of confusing.
1. Honest -- not trying to destroy bitcoin
2. Honest -- following rules which are not required by the protocol
I'm using it in the same sense Satoshi used it.
On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 1:22 PM, Jorge Timón jti...@monetize.io wrote:
I'm using it in the same sense Satoshi used it. Honest miners work to
prevent double spends. That's the entire justification for their
existence.
I thought the mechanism they used to prevent double-spends was proof of
On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 11:56:23AM +0200, Mike Hearn wrote:
... proposing the mechanism be used to claw back mining income from a
hardware vendor accused of violating its agreements on the amount of
self mining / mining on customers hardware.
I think this would not be doable in
On 4/24/14, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote:
No! This is a misunderstanding. The mechanism they use to prevent double
spends is to *ignore double spends*. The blocks they created indicate the
ordering of transactions they saw and proof of work is used to arrive at a
shared consensus ordering
Like I said before, that leads to the obvious next step of
deleting/stealing their coinbases if they don't identify themselves.
And as I said before, that's a huge leap. A majority of miners deciding
double spending needs tougher enforcement doesn't imply they also think all
miners should
And that's achieved through proof of work, not through miner's honesty.
You can't disentangle the two. Proof of work just makes a block chain hard
to tamper with. What it contains is arbitrary. Honest miners build a block
chain that's intended to stop double spending. Dishonest miners don't.
On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 10:47:35AM -0400, Christophe Biocca wrote:
Actually Peter, coinbase confiscations are a much worse mechanism for
enforcement of widespread censorship rules than simple orphaning. They
lose their power when the transaction miners are punished for can
build up over time
On 23/04/2014 05:51 p.m., Mike Hearn wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 10:44 PM, Adam Ritter arit...@gmail.com
mailto:arit...@gmail.com wrote:
Isn't a faster blockchain for transactions (maybe as a sidechain)
solving the problem? If there would be a safe way for
0-confirmation
Thanks Sergio!
On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 5:13 PM, Sergio Lerner sergioler...@certimix.comwrote:
For more information you can check my post:
http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/5-sec-block-interval/
Also NimbleCoin is a new alt-coin that uses 5-sec block intervals, allows
100 tps and
On 4/24/14, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote:
You can't disentangle the two. Proof of work just makes a block chain hard
to tamper with. What it contains is arbitrary. Honest miners build a block
chain that's intended to stop double spending. Dishonest miners don't.
They're both engaging in
Casting that vote does them no harm.
Every time another pool joins the blacklist, there's no harm to them to doing
so.
I actually agree that this is a problem, but that's actually not
inherent in the proposed enforcement mechanism (just the current
voting rules).
Here's an alternate:
- To
Casting that vote does them no harm.
Every time another pool joins the blacklist, there's no harm to them to
doing so. At some point they will reach a majority
These statements do not follow from each other.
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On 04/24/2014 03:37 PM, Jorge Timón wrote:
The 21 million bitcoin limit is not important because of its exact
value, nor is it important because Satoshi picked it.
The 21 million limit is important because users hold bitcoin based on
the promise
On 25/04/14 00:28, Mike Hearn wrote:
Why are we here? We are here because we were brought together by shared
goals.
What are those goals? They were defined at the start of the project by
the creator of the project.
Why do we issue 21 million coins and not 42? Because 21 million is the
Lately someone launched Finney attacks as a service (BitUndo). As a
reminder for newcomers, Finney attacks are where a miner secretly works on
a block containing a double spend. When they eventually find a block, they
run to the merchant and pay, then broadcast the block. In a simpler variant
of
On Wednesday 23 Apr 2014 08:55:30 Mike Hearn wrote:
Even with their woeful security many merchants see 1-2% credit card
chargeback rates, and chargebacks can be disputed. In fact merchants win
about 40% of chargeback disputes. So if N was only, say, 5%, and there
was a large enough population
Just a few issues with the idea as it currently stands:
1. This provides a very strong incentive to always vote for
reallocating a block if it isn't yours, regardless of whether it's bad
or not (there's a positive expected return to voting to reallocate
coinbases from other miners). The incentive
On Wednesday 23 Apr 2014 12:45:34 Mike Hearn wrote:
OK, sure, let's say most Bitcoin users will be honest (we hope). But
unfortunately in a situation where fraud is possible users wouldn't
necessarily distribute evenly over transactions.
That's true, but even in the worst that that 5% hashing
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On 04/23/2014 07:55 AM, Mike Hearn wrote:
2. Miners can vote to reallocate the coinbase value of bad blocks
before they mature. If a majority of blocks leading up to maturity
vote for reallocation, the value goes into a pot that subsequent
blocks
This is outright ridiculous.
Zero-confirmation double-spending is a small problem, and possible
solutions are known. (E.g. trusted third party + multi-sig addresses for
small-value transactions.)
On the other hand, protocol changes like described above might have
game-theoretical implications
And it still would. Non-collusive miners cast votes based on the outcome
of their own attempts to double spend.
Individually rational strategy is to vote for coinbase reallocation on
every block.
Yes, in that case nobody will get reward. It is similar to prisoner's
dilemma: equilibrium has
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 5:34 PM, Kevin kevinsisco61...@gmail.com wrote:
I have some questions:
1. How can we work towards solving the double-spending problem?
We have this awesome technology that solves the double-spending
problem. It's called a blockchain. Of course, it only works when
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 05:41:26PM +0200, Pieter Wuille wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 5:34 PM, Kevin kevinsisco61...@gmail.com wrote:
I have some questions:
1. How can we work towards solving the double-spending problem?
We have this awesome technology that solves the double-spending
It's not necessary that this coinbase retribution be either
profitable or risk-free for this scheme to work. I think we should
separate out the different layers of the proposal:
1. Attacking the coinbase instead of orphaning allows for 100 blocks'
time for a consensus to be reached, rather than
What is the advantage of this proposal over just orphaning the block with
double spends?
There's currently a set of rules which government what constitutes a valid
block. Miners don't build on blocks that don't accord with those rules out
of fear that a major won't follow and they will waste
On 4/23/2014 12:04 PM, Christophe Biocca wrote:
It's not necessary that this coinbase retribution be either
profitable or risk-free for this scheme to work. I think we should
separate out the different layers of the proposal:
1. Attacking the coinbase instead of orphaning allows for 100
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On 04/23/2014 03:07 PM, Mike Hearn wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Justus Ranvier
justusranv...@gmail.comwrote:
If enough miners don't like a block that has been mined, they can
all work to orphan it without any change to the protocol
I've formulated my replies to you and this proposal in a more public
venue, where such discussions of existential changes to the protocol
more rightfully belong
I strongly disagree. It makes perfect sense to discuss changes here,
first, where there are lots of people who understand how the
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On 04/23/2014 05:47 PM, Gavin Andresen wrote:
And why do you think your blog is more public than this open,
publicly archived mailing list???
Non-developers are more comfortable using social media tools. Blog
posts can be shared, Tweeted, and
Non-developers are more comfortable using social media tools. Blog
posts can be shared, Tweeted, and commented upon using nothing more
than a web browser.
I don't think Twitter is an appropriate medium for discussing the details
of byzantine consensus algorithms.
I'm not going to bother
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On 04/23/2014 06:37 PM, Mike Hearn wrote:
If you want to try and argue that the development list is the wrong
place to discuss development, please do so on another thread (or
your blog). Let's keep this thread for discussion of the original
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 12:55 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote:
Lately someone launched Finney attacks as a service (BitUndo). As a reminder
for newcomers, Finney attacks are where a miner secretly works on a block
containing a double spend.
Hm? I didn't think this is at all what they did.
Cut it out with the ad hominem attacks please. If you cant be civil, please
go away until you learn some manners.
I think the issue being discussed is do you orphan an entire block causing
distress to users as well, or try to just cause distress just to the evil
miner? This discussion is about
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 8:57 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote:
Hm? I didn't think this is at all what they did. What they claim to
do is to prioritize transactions in their mempool from people who pay
them
That's the definition of a Finney attack, right? A tx is broadcast and
-development email list:
- Forwarded message from Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net -
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 09:55:30 +0200
From: Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net
To: Bitcoin Dev bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Bitcoin-development] Coinbase reallocation to discourage Finney
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 10:24 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.comwrote:
Right, this works in the Bitcoin network today absent any collusion by
the miners. You give one miner a transaction and you give every other
node you can reach another transaction.
Yes, but that can be fixed with
Isn't a faster blockchain for transactions (maybe as a sidechain) solving
the problem? If there would be a safe way for 0-confirmation transactions,
the Bitcoin blockchain wouldn't even be needed.
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 10:37 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 10:24
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Adam Ritter arit...@gmail.com wrote:
Isn't a faster blockchain for transactions (maybe as a sidechain) solving
the problem? If there would be a safe way for 0-confirmation transactions,
the Bitcoin blockchain wouldn't even be needed.
Large scale consensus can't
The memory pool is just talk. There is no expectation that the memory pool
has to satisfy some standard as to what will eventually exist in the block
chain, and there are any number of ways that people could communicate
transactions to one another without putting them in the memory pool. The
An interesting experiment would be a transaction proof of publication
chain.
Each transaction would be added to that chain when it is received. It
could be merge mined with the main chain.
If the size was limited, then it doesn't even require spam protection.
Blocks could be discouraged if
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 2:23 PM, Tier Nolan tier.no...@gmail.com wrote:
An interesting experiment would be a transaction proof of publication
chain.
Each transaction would be added to that chain when it is received. It could
be merge mined with the main chain.
If the size was limited, then
These sorts of proposals are all just ways of saying block chains kind of
suck and we should go back to using trusted third parties.
No.
Different approaches have different trade-offs, and thus different areas of
applicability.
Proof-of-work's inherent disadvantage is that it takes some time
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 10:39 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.comwrote:
You can see me proposing this kind of thing in a number of places (e.g.
http://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizards/2014-04-15.txt p2pool
only forces the subsidy today, but the same mechnism could instead
force
On 4/23/2014 2:23 PM, Tier Nolan wrote:
An interesting experiment would be a transaction proof of
publication chain.
What if a transaction could simply point back to an earlier transaction,
forming a chain? Not a separately mined blockchain, just a way to
establish an official publication
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