Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
I would like to chime on on the user experience of the SPV client (in particular MultiBit). Without exception, everyone that I have introduced Bitcoin (which is a lot of people) have expected an instant-on experience. It has to clobber PayPal and credit cards or people won't give it a second look, let alone a second chance. SPV clients deliver on that expectation. Once the user has the great initial wow! moment then their interest in Bitcoin is reinforced and they tend to explore further, particularly into the economic theory behind it. Many decide to install the full node out of a sense of community contribution to the security of the network. Having a hybrid mode of SPV first then full node second should be something that a user has control over - it is their computing resources we are using after all and Bitcoin should not be perceived as a drain. On 5 December 2012 07:50, Wladimir laa...@gmail.com wrote: Jim, Most of those issues don't have to do with the SPV versus non-SPV problem. First person doesn't understand what Bitcoin is supposed to do (he's confusing mining and running a node). An information problem that could be solved by explaining what is going on. Another one seems to have a problem with DEP. That's probably an issue with his OS configuration. The third one is confused about the fees. Again, an information problem. Only the fourth one is concerned with synchronization. The other ones could happen with any client, as they're either based on misconceptions about bitcoin as a whole or computer problems. This doesn't in any way make switching to another, reduced security model client preferable. Let's first try to improve the Bitcoin experience with full security model, and if that somehow turns out to be impossible it's always possible to recommend some other client based on the 'user type'. I don't agree that this point is now. Anyway, security and stability of the network is of utmost importance to do anything in the future, better to grow organically than explode. Many initiatives are underway to improve the Satoshi client (for example to have Bitcoin-Qt behave as SPV client during initial block download, and as full node after that), but as usual in open source development, many of us are doing this basically for fun in our free time it does not always go as fast as users would like. I wish there was a straightforward solution for that, yeah pooling together our development on one or two clients instead of a zillion different ones could help, but everyone has more fun working on their own client that's just how things go :) Wladimir On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 6:38 AM, Jim Nguyen jimmy.w...@gmail.com wrote: Gavin's grandma needs to be able to use bitcoin. Here is a real world sampling of the types of people wanting to use bitcoin but are having some difficulty which I have collected from Facebook. Should we listen to the end user? :-P *what is the intention of Bitcoin? Is it supposed to be - eventually - for dummies like myself or is it just for those individuals who are code and algorithm writers? I downloaded a wallet but how do I know if I need more software or a massive computer system to solve the problem for the next block? With all the talk of mathematical problem solving on a world wide network of computers I can't see a small laptop figuring out anything thus not gaining any bitcoins. Why should I be interested in this if it appears it's just for computer scientists?* *hi, instaled bitcoin qt, but after it dowladed all the stuff, now i get DEP protecction from windows, and it tells me bitcoinQT need to run with DEP on, dont let me make an exception for it, nor work it i turn DEP only for sys, so hwat i should do?* *hi, i'm new to bitcoin, i got a bunch of free bitcoins from a bunch of the free sites. how come when i tried to send my bitcoins to myself, it says the fee exceeds the balance? I thought there was no fees?* *Is there a way to speed up the process of synchronisation with the network? It has been taken ages on my MAC.* *Any help would be nice* * * *and more...* Sorry if this doesn't belong to the bitcoin-development email list. I just see this as end-user/customer data gathering to refine the requirements, since this is software engineering...isn't it? Jim On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: Our divergence is on two points (personal opinions): (1) I don't think there is any real risk to the centralization of the network by promoting a SPV (purely-consuming) node to brand-new users. In my opinion (but I'm not as familiar with the networking as you), as long as all full nodes are full-validation, the bottleneck will be computation and bandwidth, long before a constant 10k nodes would be insufficient to support propagating data through the network. Not so— a
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
I was under the impression that connectedness was the real metric of concern I think the real thing we need full nodes for is sockets where by socket I mean resources needed to serve another node. Last year we actually ran out of sockets and it took forever for new nodes to connect because so many existing nodes were full. We don't want to be in that situation again. So we need full nodes, nobody disputes that. The question is, if you have a node on your average desktop machine that gets switched off at night, has a stupid virus scanner that insists on checking every database write, has users who go from a bit of light word processing to watching HD video and expect no stutters or slowdowns - how valuable is such a node, really? Also has to be weighed against the risk of eventual user frustration when they discover Bitcoin is slowing their computer down and go around telling their friends how much it sucks. Ultraprune+LevelDB+other optimizations are great. They aren't game changers for two reasons: 1) Eventually network traffic should increase to use up the additional performance unlocked by optimizations 2) Users demand instant on not just at first start, but any time they open their wallet. I don't think it ever makes sense for a regular end user to have their wallet integrated with a full node because it means if you get an email saying oh hey I sent you the money and you start your wallet so you can see it/spend it, you still have to wait a while until it catches up from whenever it was last quit. I've done this a bunch of times and it really sucks to wait. The only time it makes sense to have a wallet integrated with a full node is if that node never shuts down, ie, it's a merchant node. If a casual user has to be using an SPV wallet all the time no matter what, then it's not a big leap to simply have both an SPV client and a full node running in parallel for users who want to support the network. And how do we recruit such users? Well I've got nothing against light wallets noticing that the system seems to have high uptime, external connectivity etc and putting a notice on the screen asking users to take part. For Windows users you could have a one-click install that sets up a background service (I think .NET OneClick makes this possible), so getting a full node is totally easy and transparent. Going back to the Tor analogy, whilst I agree with Gregorys arguments that they aren't quite the same, the Tor guys have wanted to automatically opt users in to being relays for a while. But the technical complexity of doing it well is really high. It's still on their wishlist even though Tor is quite old. A good first base to reach is simply having accurate recommendations. If users start complaining that they were asked to run a full node but when they did, performance suffered unacceptably, then we know we need better heuristics before automatically opting users in. -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
On 5 December 2012 19:43, Gary Rowe g.r...@froot.co.uk wrote: I would like to chime on on the user experience of the SPV client (in particular MultiBit). Without exception, everyone that I have introduced Bitcoin (which is a lot of people) have expected an instant-on experience. It has to clobber PayPal and credit cards or people won't give it a second look, let alone a second chance. SPV clients deliver on that expectation. Once the user has the great initial wow! moment then their interest in Bitcoin is reinforced and they tend to explore further, particularly into the economic theory behind it. Many decide to install the full node out of a sense of community contribution to the security of the network. Having a hybrid mode of SPV first then full node second should be something that a user has control over - it is their computing resources we are using after all and Bitcoin should not be perceived as a drain. Hybrid SPV sounds like a good idea to me. Allows it to work out-of-the-box, then slowly gets up-to-speed with the full network - working low priority, or even not at all, if it detects a slow system or network link. Another idea is always distributing the client with a checkpoint that is only days old, then starting by pulling in more recent blocks, so it can transact. Following that, it will pull in progressively older blocks as time permits. -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote:
The alternative, I guess, is to make Bitcoin-Qt have an SPV mode. I'm
not convinced this is the best use of time, but if somebody steps up
to do it, that could also work.
I strongly believe that if community leads with client software which
is not a full _capable_ node (e.g. which can begin life as a SPV node
but at least eventually become full if the system resources permit)
then Bitcoin will fail, or at least fail to be anything but the
world's most inefficient centralized payment system. Obviously SPV
nodes are excellent tools for getting bitcoin into less capable
systems, but they aren't a general replacement for the software the
participants in Bitcoin run.
— Because the properties promised by the system can not be upheld if
there is only a fairly small number of self selecting nodes enforcing
the rules. If we wanted a system where its security against theft,
denial of service, and non-inflation were governed by the consensus of
{mtgox,blockchain.info, deepbit, bitpay, slush, btcguild, bitminter}
we could have something infinitely more scalable by just using
something OT like with a simple O(N) consensus between these parties.
No disrespect intended to any of these services— but a system whos
rules were only enforced at the good graces of a small number of
interested parties is not what the users of bitcoin signed up for.
People obviously care about supporting the goals and security of a the
system they use but actions speak louder than words. If a
non-validating node is promoted then we're telling people that it's
not important that many people run them. If running a full node
requires using different software (with a different interface) or a
much more painful initialization than another promoted option then it
will be correctly perceived as costly. If people perceive it to be
both costly and not important then rational participants will not run
it. The result will be fragile to non-existent security, where
dishonest or exploitative parties benefit from running all the full
nodes until they start ripping people off and shift the equilibrium
just a little towards running costly nodes.
It sounds to me that you're insisting that you're asking people who
oppose degrading our recommendations to commit to a costly rushed
development timeline. I think this is a false choice.
There is no set timeline for the adoption of Bitcoin— man has survived
eons without Bitcoin just fine— and there are many practical reasons
why slow adoption is beneficial, including reducing the harm users
experience from growing pains. By allowing things to mature at their
own pace we can preserve the principles that make the system valuable.
If the new user experience is sufficiently bad (and I agree it's bad,
esp with the current release versions of Bitcoin-Qt) then that should
justify more support of work that improves it without compromising the
system. If it's not bad enough to apply those resources, then it's not
bad enough to justify compromising it: as this sort of change is hard
to reverse.
--
LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial
Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support
Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services
Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers
http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d
___
Bitcoin-development mailing list
Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
Alan's UTxO meta-chain proposal becomes vastly easier to do now that ultraprune is merged. That would allow the Satoshi client to know it's wallet balance and operate with a =SPV level of security during the initial block download, and keep them on the path of becoming a full node. If users can see their balances, send and receive transactions, and otherwise go about their business (except for mining) during the initial block download, would that not address your concerns? IMHO the only time bitcoin.org should recommend a SPV-only client is when it is dynamically when it is being accessed from a mobile device, but that's a separate issue. Mark On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: At the moment if you visit bitcoin.org then you're recommended to download the full client. I think we all agree that at some point we need to start presenting users with something more like this: To get started, download wallet apps A or B. If you'd like to contribute your computing resources to the Bitcoin network and have a fast computer with an unfiltered internet connection, download: - for desktop machines, Bitcoin-Qt - for servers, bitcoind Obviously not that exact wording. I personally feel it's a bit early for this, but it's true that users are being turned away by the fact that they're pointed to Bitcoin-Qt by default, so having some kind of roadmap or plan for changing that would be good. I think MultiBit is maturing into a client that I'd feel comfortable recommending to end users who take the fast-start path, though it still has a few serious lacks (encrypted wallets aren't released yet, bloom filters will help performance a lot, needs to catch up with some newer features). But there doesn't have to be a one true client. The alternative, I guess, is to make Bitcoin-Qt have an SPV mode. I'm not convinced this is the best use of time, but if somebody steps up to do it, that could also work. MultiBit has some unique features that are quite useful like integrating charting and exchange rate feeds. What does everyone think on this? -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
...or should we be directing people to a (vetted) list of cloud services - I think this has a significantly lower entry cost than any client. I know the mybitcoin debacle has clouded (pun intended) people's views of these providers, but blockchain.info (for example) really does seem quite well engineered, and satisfies many of the features in particular a very low cost of entry, cross platform support and what appears to be very good security (e.g. two factor) Will On 4 December 2012 17:46, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: At the moment if you visit bitcoin.org then you're recommended to download the full client. I think we all agree that at some point we need to start presenting users with something more like this: To get started, download wallet apps A or B. If you'd like to contribute your computing resources to the Bitcoin network and have a fast computer with an unfiltered internet connection, download: - for desktop machines, Bitcoin-Qt - for servers, bitcoind Obviously not that exact wording. I personally feel it's a bit early for this, but it's true that users are being turned away by the fact that they're pointed to Bitcoin-Qt by default, so having some kind of roadmap or plan for changing that would be good. I think MultiBit is maturing into a client that I'd feel comfortable recommending to end users who take the fast-start path, though it still has a few serious lacks (encrypted wallets aren't released yet, bloom filters will help performance a lot, needs to catch up with some newer features). But there doesn't have to be a one true client. The alternative, I guess, is to make Bitcoin-Qt have an SPV mode. I'm not convinced this is the best use of time, but if somebody steps up to do it, that could also work. MultiBit has some unique features that are quite useful like integrating charting and exchange rate feeds. What does everyone think on this? -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 1:57 PM, Mark Friedenbach m...@monetize.io wrote: Alan's :( UTxO meta-chain proposal becomes vastly easier to do now that ultraprune is merged. No, not really. Somewhat easier due to some structural changes, but it still needs to invent and get consensus on a normative data structure and people need to write implementations of the required operations on it (implementations probably required to prove performance for consensus). We still have to sort through the tradeoff of making a _single_ data structure the normative merkle tree representation for the UTxO set to the preclusion of other implementations— including ones which are asymptotically faster, such as a straight hash table. There are also issues that need to be sorted out like key structure— the most useful index for validation is txid:vout keyed, but Alan wanted 'address' prefixed, which is not friendly for validation but enables robust query by address— a query that the referce normal bitcoin software doesn't even optionally support right now. Any disagreements on this point must be hammed out because the structure would be normative. That would allow the Satoshi client to know it's wallet balance and operate with a =SPV level of security during the initial block download, and keep them on the path of becoming a full node. If users can see their balances, send and receive transactions, and otherwise go about their business (except for mining) during the initial block download, would that not address your concerns? The above said, that is all good stuff too. And I do thing starting fast with reduced security (be it to SPV+ or SPV) is a good idea. -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
It sounds to me that you're insisting that you're asking people who oppose degrading our recommendations to commit to a costly rushed development timeline. I think this is a false choice. Hardly. I don't have any particular timeline in mind. But I disagree we have forever. New ideas have a certain time window to take off and become credible. If they never overcome their problems in that time window, eventually people just give up and move on. Does anyone take desktop Linux seriously anymore? No. The year of desktop Linux is a joke. People took it seriously in 2001 but despite great progress since, the excitement and attention has gone. There were steady improvements over the last 10 years but nobody is creating desktop Linux startups anymore - Bitcoin shouldn't go the same way. It's unclear we need to have every man and his dog run a full node. Tor is a successful P2P network where the number of users vastly outstrips the number of nodes, and exit nodes in particular are a scarce resource run by people who know what they're doing and commit to it. The Tor guys could have said every node should be an exit if possible, but that would have been a short term optimization at the cost of long term stability, and anyway doesn't seem to have been necessary so far. Even with no incentives, they were able to obtain the resources they need. So why should Bitcoin be different? If there are a million users supported by 50,000 full nodes, that wouldn't sound unhealthy to me. We can easily send a clear and consistent this is important, please help message without complicated auto-upgrade/downgrade schemes that risk annoying users. -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 3:58 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: It sounds to me that you're insisting that you're asking people who oppose degrading our recommendations to commit to a costly rushed development timeline. I think this is a false choice. Hardly. I don't have any particular timeline in mind. But I disagree we have forever. New ideas have a certain time window to take off and become credible. Marketing initiatives have limited windows. This matters, perhaps, when you're some VC pumping cash into a startup with the hopes of being the next stockmarket pump and dump darling. Outside of that people use whatever they use because it works for them. And by the numbers Linux desktops are more common than they've ever been— and certainly Linux kernel _systems_ half the people I know have one in their pocket and its hard to go more than a few hours without touching one. To some extent the Year of the Linux desktop is a bit like the Year of being able to turn lead into gold ... we can turn lead into gold now, but the particle accelerators, atomic power, and atomic weapons enabled by the same technology are far more interesting due to the particle realities of this. So we didn't get the ubiquitous Linux desktop: We got the ubiquitious Linux server, the ubiquitous Linux-kernel smart phone, the ubiquitous Linux television, media player, HVAC controller, etc. instead. Desktops— well, that didn't meet people's hopes though I think not for the lack of marketing on the part of Linux, but because Apple stepped up and produced middle ground products that attracted a larger audience. Especially as MSFT dropped the ball. They did some things better, had a running start, and had a non open source software business model which made reaping rewards easier. But I don't see how any of this has anything to do with Bitcoin... Except for the point that if Bitcoin doesn't become the money system everyone uses and instead becomes the money system infrastructure all the systems people use depend on— just as Linux has with the desktop, where it might not be on the desktop but its in router firmware, cloud servers, and just about everything else— I wouldn't consider that much of a loss. time window, eventually people just give up and move on. Does anyone take desktop Linux seriously anymore? No. The year of desktop Linux is a joke. People took it seriously in 2001 but despite great progress since, the excitement and attention has gone. There were steady improvements over the last 10 years but nobody is creating desktop Linux startups anymore Bitcoin already missed its first— and perhaps only— fad window in any case. Today people say Bitcoin? Thats still around? I thought it got hacked. ... thanks to compromised centralized services. It's unclear we need to have every man and his dog run a full node. Every man and his dog? Perhaps not. But as many as can— probably so. If we depend on the organic need for full nodes to overcome cost and effort to run one there will always be major incentives to let someone else do that, and the system would have its equilibrium right on the brink of insecurity. Perhaps worse, since insecurity is most obvious retrospectively. Security doesn't make for a good market force. Tor is a successful P2P network where the number of users vastly outstrips the number of nodes, and exit nodes in particular are a scarce resource run by people who know what they're doing and commit to it. Tor is a distributed but controlled, by a small number of directory authority operators, system. It is a good system. But it has a trust model which is categorically weaker than the one in Bitcoin. If you want something where a majority of a dozen signing keys— hopefully in the hands of trusted parties— can decide the state of the system you can produce someting far superior to Bitcoin— something that gives near instant non-reversable transactions, something that gives good client security without the complexity of a SPV node, etc. But that isn't Bitcoin. Even with no incentives, they were able to obtain the resources they need. And yet every tor user— if the have the bandwidth available can be a full internal relay and the software nags them to do it (and also nags them to act as invisible bridges for blocking avoidance), and every user is technically able to run an exit (though they don't bludgeon users to do that, because of the legal/political/technical issues involved). To do any of this doesn't require a user to switch to different software, and the tor project has previously opposed client only software. So why should Bitcoin be different? It's less different than you make it out to be— but it _is_ different. Bitcoin is a distributed currency. The value of bitcoin comes from the soundness of its properties and from the persistence of its security. If the integrity of the distributed ledger is disrupted the damage produced, both in funds stolen and in undermining the
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
Jim, perfect idea with some logo indicating wallet compatibility! This should cover BIP32 + some mnemonic algorithm for easy transferring of wallets across various clients. Btw I asked ThomasV for making BIP from his mnemonic algorithm and he agreed, so I believe some proposal will be here pretty soon. slush On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 7:56 PM, Jim jim...@fastmail.co.uk wrote: Also, as BIP32 support is added to clients and codebases then the actual variant of software to use to access your wallet will become relatively less important. Combined with a standardised seed - passphrase algorithm the user can just type in their long passphrase into any BIP32 compliant software and click/ buzz/ whirr : there is their wallet. We should have a little logo for HD wallet compliance ! :-) -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 5:44 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: Greg's point looks like it's veering towards we don't want to grow the network unless we're going to get more full nodes out of it. No… There is no fundamental completion between taking what actions we can to maximize the decentralization of the network and making the software maximally friendly and painless to get started with and use. It's possible— not even deep rocket science— to create software that accommodates both. And because of this, I don't think it's acceptable to promote solutions which may endanger the decentralization that makes the system worthwhile in the first place. If the current experience is so poor that you'd even consider talking about promoting directions which reduce its robustness then thats evidence that it would be worth finding more resources to make the experience better without doing anything the that reduces the model, even if you've got an argument that maybe we can get away with it. If there isn't interest in putting in more resources to make these improvements then maybe the issue isn't as bad as we think it is? I think it is very much in everyone's interest here to encourage new users to start using Bitcoin, even if they don't support it. Absolutely— and yet that has nothing to do with promoting software to users which only consumes without directly contributing and which doesn't even have the capability to do so even if the user wants to (or much less, is indifferent). -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
Our divergence is on two points (personal opinions): (1) I don't think there is any real risk to the centralization of the network by promoting a SPV (purely-consuming) node to brand-new users. In my opinion (but I'm not as familiar with the networking as you), as long as all full nodes are full-validation, the bottleneck will be computation and bandwidth, long before a constant 10k nodes would be insufficient to support propagating data through the network. In fact, I was under the impression that connectedness was the real metric of concern (and resilience of that connectedness to large percentage of users disappearing suddenly). If that's true, above a certain number of nodes, the connectedness isn't really going to get any better (I know it's not really that simple, but I feel like it is up to 10x the current network size). (2) I think the current experience *is* really poor. You seem to suggest that the question for these new users is whether they will use full-node-or-lite-node, but I believe it will be a decision between lite-node-or-nothing-at-all (losing interest altogether). Waiting a day for the full node to synchronize, and then run into issues like blkindex.dat corruption when their system crashes for some unrelated reason and they have to resync for another day... they'll be gone in a heartbeat. Users need to experience, as quickly and easily as possible, that they can move money across the world, without signing up for anything or paying any fees. After they understand the value of the system and want to use it, they are much more likely to become educated and willing to support the network with full node. -Alan On 12/04/2012 07:27 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 5:44 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: Greg's point looks like it's veering towards we don't want to grow the network unless we're going to get more full nodes out of it. No… There is no fundamental completion between taking what actions we can to maximize the decentralization of the network and making the software maximally friendly and painless to get started with and use. It's possible— not even deep rocket science— to create software that accommodates both. And because of this, I don't think it's acceptable to promote solutions which may endanger the decentralization that makes the system worthwhile in the first place. If the current experience is so poor that you'd even consider talking about promoting directions which reduce its robustness then thats evidence that it would be worth finding more resources to make the experience better without doing anything the that reduces the model, even if you've got an argument that maybe we can get away with it. If there isn't interest in putting in more resources to make these improvements then maybe the issue isn't as bad as we think it is? I think it is very much in everyone's interest here to encourage new users to start using Bitcoin, even if they don't support it. Absolutely— and yet that has nothing to do with promoting software to users which only consumes without directly contributing and which doesn't even have the capability to do so even if the user wants to (or much less, is indifferent). -- LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: Our divergence is on two points (personal opinions): (1) I don't think there is any real risk to the centralization of the network by promoting a SPV (purely-consuming) node to brand-new users. In my opinion (but I'm not as familiar with the networking as you), as long as all full nodes are full-validation, the bottleneck will be computation and bandwidth, long before a constant 10k nodes would be insufficient to support propagating data through the network. Not so— a moderately fast multicore desktop machine can keep up with the maximum possible validation rate of the Bitcoin network and the bandwidth has a long term maximum rate of about 14kbit/sec— though you'll want at least ten times that for convergence stability and the ability feed multiple peers. Here are the worst blocks testnet3 (which has some intentionally constructed maximum sized blocks),E31230 : (with the new parallel validation code) - Verify 2166 txins: 250.29ms (0.116ms/txin) - Verify 3386 txins: 1454.25ms (0.429ms/txin) - Verify 5801 txins: 575.46ms (0.099ms/txin) - Verify 6314 txins: 625.05ms (0.099ms/txin) Even the slowest one _validates_ at 400x realtime. (these measurements are probably a bit noisy— but the point is that its fast). (the connecting is fast too, but thats obvious with such a small database) Although I haven't tested leveldb+ultraprune with a really enormous txout set or generally with sustained maximum load— so there may be other gaffs in the software that get exposed with sustained load, but they'd all be correctable. Sounds like some interesting stuff to test with on testnet fork that has the POW test disabled. While syncing up a behind node can take a while— keep in mind that you're expecting to sync up weeks of network work in hours. Even 'slow' is quite fast. In fact, I was under the impression that connectedness was the real metric of concern (and resilience of that connectedness to large percentage of users disappearing suddenly). If that's true, above a certain number of nodes, the connectedness isn't really going to get any better (I know it's not really that simple, but I feel like it is up to 10x the current network size). Thats not generally concern for me. There are a number of DOS attack risks... But attacker linear DOS attacks aren't generally avoidable and they don't persist. Of the class of connectedness concerns I have is that a sybil attacker could spin up enormous numbers of nodes and then use them to partition large miners. So, e.g. find BitTaco's node(s) and the nodes for miners covering 25% hashpower and get them into a separate partition from the rest of the network. Then they give double spends to that partition and use them to purchase an unlimited supply of digitally delivered tacos— allowing their captured miners to build an ill fated fork— and drop the partition once the goods are delivered. But there is no amount of full nodes that removes this concern, especially if you allow for attackers which have compromised ISPs. It can be adequately addressed by a healthy darknet of private authenticated peerings between miners and other likely targets. I've also thrown out some ideas on using merged mined node IDs to make some kinds of sybil attacks harder ... but it'll be interesting to see how the deployment of ASICs influences the concentration of hashpower— it seems like there has already been a substantial move away from the largest pools. Less hashpower consolidation makes attacks like this less worrisome. (2) I think the current experience *is* really poor. Yes, I said so specifically. But the fact that people are flapping their lips here instead of testing the bitcoin-qt git master which is an 1-2 order of magnitude improvement suggests that perhaps I'm wrong about that. Certainly the dearth of people testing and making bug reports suggests people don't actually care that much. You seem to suggest that the question for these new users is whether they will use full-node-or-lite-node, but I believe it will be a decision between lite-node-or-nothing-at-all (losing interest altogether). No. The question that I'm concerned with is do we promote lite nodes as equally good option— even for high end systems— remove the incentive for people to create, improve, and adopt more useful full node software and forever degrade the security of the system. Waiting a day for the full node to synchronize, and then run into issues like blkindex.dat corruption when their system crashes for some unrelated reason and they have to resync for another day... they'll be gone in a heartbeat. The current software patches plus parallelism can sync on a fast system with luck network access (or a local copy of the data) in under an hour. This is no replacement for start as SPV, but nor are handicapped client programs a replacement for making fully capable ones acceptably performing. Users need to
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
Gavin's grandma needs to be able to use bitcoin. Here is a real world sampling of the types of people wanting to use bitcoin but are having some difficulty which I have collected from Facebook. Should we listen to the end user? :-P *what is the intention of Bitcoin? Is it supposed to be - eventually - for dummies like myself or is it just for those individuals who are code and algorithm writers? I downloaded a wallet but how do I know if I need more software or a massive computer system to solve the problem for the next block? With all the talk of mathematical problem solving on a world wide network of computers I can't see a small laptop figuring out anything thus not gaining any bitcoins. Why should I be interested in this if it appears it's just for computer scientists?* *hi, instaled bitcoin qt, but after it dowladed all the stuff, now i get DEP protecction from windows, and it tells me bitcoinQT need to run with DEP on, dont let me make an exception for it, nor work it i turn DEP only for sys, so hwat i should do?* *hi, i'm new to bitcoin, i got a bunch of free bitcoins from a bunch of the free sites. how come when i tried to send my bitcoins to myself, it says the fee exceeds the balance? I thought there was no fees?* *Is there a way to speed up the process of synchronisation with the network? It has been taken ages on my MAC.* *Any help would be nice* * * *and more...* Sorry if this doesn't belong to the bitcoin-development email list. I just see this as end-user/customer data gathering to refine the requirements, since this is software engineering...isn't it? Jim On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: Our divergence is on two points (personal opinions): (1) I don't think there is any real risk to the centralization of the network by promoting a SPV (purely-consuming) node to brand-new users. In my opinion (but I'm not as familiar with the networking as you), as long as all full nodes are full-validation, the bottleneck will be computation and bandwidth, long before a constant 10k nodes would be insufficient to support propagating data through the network. Not so— a moderately fast multicore desktop machine can keep up with the maximum possible validation rate of the Bitcoin network and the bandwidth has a long term maximum rate of about 14kbit/sec— though you'll want at least ten times that for convergence stability and the ability feed multiple peers. Here are the worst blocks testnet3 (which has some intentionally constructed maximum sized blocks),E31230 : (with the new parallel validation code) - Verify 2166 txins: 250.29ms (0.116ms/txin) - Verify 3386 txins: 1454.25ms (0.429ms/txin) - Verify 5801 txins: 575.46ms (0.099ms/txin) - Verify 6314 txins: 625.05ms (0.099ms/txin) Even the slowest one _validates_ at 400x realtime. (these measurements are probably a bit noisy— but the point is that its fast). (the connecting is fast too, but thats obvious with such a small database) Although I haven't tested leveldb+ultraprune with a really enormous txout set or generally with sustained maximum load— so there may be other gaffs in the software that get exposed with sustained load, but they'd all be correctable. Sounds like some interesting stuff to test with on testnet fork that has the POW test disabled. While syncing up a behind node can take a while— keep in mind that you're expecting to sync up weeks of network work in hours. Even 'slow' is quite fast. In fact, I was under the impression that connectedness was the real metric of concern (and resilience of that connectedness to large percentage of users disappearing suddenly). If that's true, above a certain number of nodes, the connectedness isn't really going to get any better (I know it's not really that simple, but I feel like it is up to 10x the current network size). Thats not generally concern for me. There are a number of DOS attack risks... But attacker linear DOS attacks aren't generally avoidable and they don't persist. Of the class of connectedness concerns I have is that a sybil attacker could spin up enormous numbers of nodes and then use them to partition large miners. So, e.g. find BitTaco's node(s) and the nodes for miners covering 25% hashpower and get them into a separate partition from the rest of the network. Then they give double spends to that partition and use them to purchase an unlimited supply of digitally delivered tacos— allowing their captured miners to build an ill fated fork— and drop the partition once the goods are delivered. But there is no amount of full nodes that removes this concern, especially if you allow for attackers which have compromised ISPs. It can be adequately addressed by a healthy darknet of private authenticated peerings between miners and other likely targets. I've also thrown out some ideas on using
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Roadmap to getting users onto SPV clients
Jim, Most of those issues don't have to do with the SPV versus non-SPV problem. First person doesn't understand what Bitcoin is supposed to do (he's confusing mining and running a node). An information problem that could be solved by explaining what is going on. Another one seems to have a problem with DEP. That's probably an issue with his OS configuration. The third one is confused about the fees. Again, an information problem. Only the fourth one is concerned with synchronization. The other ones could happen with any client, as they're either based on misconceptions about bitcoin as a whole or computer problems. This doesn't in any way make switching to another, reduced security model client preferable. Let's first try to improve the Bitcoin experience with full security model, and if that somehow turns out to be impossible it's always possible to recommend some other client based on the 'user type'. I don't agree that this point is now. Anyway, security and stability of the network is of utmost importance to do anything in the future, better to grow organically than explode. Many initiatives are underway to improve the Satoshi client (for example to have Bitcoin-Qt behave as SPV client during initial block download, and as full node after that), but as usual in open source development, many of us are doing this basically for fun in our free time it does not always go as fast as users would like. I wish there was a straightforward solution for that, yeah pooling together our development on one or two clients instead of a zillion different ones could help, but everyone has more fun working on their own client that's just how things go :) Wladimir On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 6:38 AM, Jim Nguyen jimmy.w...@gmail.com wrote: Gavin's grandma needs to be able to use bitcoin. Here is a real world sampling of the types of people wanting to use bitcoin but are having some difficulty which I have collected from Facebook. Should we listen to the end user? :-P *what is the intention of Bitcoin? Is it supposed to be - eventually - for dummies like myself or is it just for those individuals who are code and algorithm writers? I downloaded a wallet but how do I know if I need more software or a massive computer system to solve the problem for the next block? With all the talk of mathematical problem solving on a world wide network of computers I can't see a small laptop figuring out anything thus not gaining any bitcoins. Why should I be interested in this if it appears it's just for computer scientists?* *hi, instaled bitcoin qt, but after it dowladed all the stuff, now i get DEP protecction from windows, and it tells me bitcoinQT need to run with DEP on, dont let me make an exception for it, nor work it i turn DEP only for sys, so hwat i should do?* *hi, i'm new to bitcoin, i got a bunch of free bitcoins from a bunch of the free sites. how come when i tried to send my bitcoins to myself, it says the fee exceeds the balance? I thought there was no fees?* *Is there a way to speed up the process of synchronisation with the network? It has been taken ages on my MAC.* *Any help would be nice* * * *and more...* Sorry if this doesn't belong to the bitcoin-development email list. I just see this as end-user/customer data gathering to refine the requirements, since this is software engineering...isn't it? Jim On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Alan Reiner etothe...@gmail.com wrote: Our divergence is on two points (personal opinions): (1) I don't think there is any real risk to the centralization of the network by promoting a SPV (purely-consuming) node to brand-new users. In my opinion (but I'm not as familiar with the networking as you), as long as all full nodes are full-validation, the bottleneck will be computation and bandwidth, long before a constant 10k nodes would be insufficient to support propagating data through the network. Not so— a moderately fast multicore desktop machine can keep up with the maximum possible validation rate of the Bitcoin network and the bandwidth has a long term maximum rate of about 14kbit/sec— though you'll want at least ten times that for convergence stability and the ability feed multiple peers. Here are the worst blocks testnet3 (which has some intentionally constructed maximum sized blocks),E31230 : (with the new parallel validation code) - Verify 2166 txins: 250.29ms (0.116ms/txin) - Verify 3386 txins: 1454.25ms (0.429ms/txin) - Verify 5801 txins: 575.46ms (0.099ms/txin) - Verify 6314 txins: 625.05ms (0.099ms/txin) Even the slowest one _validates_ at 400x realtime. (these measurements are probably a bit noisy— but the point is that its fast). (the connecting is fast too, but thats obvious with such a small database) Although I haven't tested leveldb+ultraprune with a really enormous txout set or generally with sustained maximum
