Re: [bitcoin-dev] OP_CTV Workshop & CFP February 1st, 2020

[Jeremy via bitcoin-dev]

It's not too late to sign up  to attend the workshop; but we are
approaching capacity!

Please fill out the form if you'd like to participate as soon as possible
so that we can plan accordingly.

Feel free to forward this posting to people who don't follow this list but
you think should attend.
--
@JeremyRubin 



On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 5:58 PM Jeremy  wrote:

> Dear Bitcoin Developers,
>
> On February 1st, 2020 in San Francisco (location to be shared with
> attendees only) I will be hosting a workshop to aid in reviewing and
> advancing OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY.
>
> The workshop will be from 10am-5pm. The basic schedule of events (subject
> to change) is in the footer of this email.
>
> If you would like to attend, please fill out the form
> https://forms.gle/ex2WLYS319HFdpJYA . We should have capacity for
> everyone who wants to come, but I'll need to know by January 15th if you
> plan to attend. The primary audience for the event is Bitcoin developers,
> ecosystem engineers (i.e., mining pools, wallets, exchanges, etc), and
> researchers.
>
> If you have research or projects related to OP_CTV you would be interested
> in presenting, please indicate in the application form with a brief
> summary of your topic.
>
> I may be able to sponsor travel for a few developers who would otherwise
> be unable to attend. Please indicate on the form if you require such
> support.
>
> If you're able to sponsor the event (for lunch/dinner, or for travel
> subsidies), please reach out or indicate on the form.
>
> If you cannot attend, I'll make a best effort to make all materials from
> the event available online. The channel ##ctv-bip-review is also available
> for general discussion about OP_CTV.
>
> Happy New Year!
>
> Jeremy
>
> 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM: coffee & registration
>
> BIP SESSION
> 10:30 AM - 11:00 AM: CTV BIP Design Walkthrough & Basic Motivation
> 11:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Small Group Discussion & BIP Reading
> 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM: BIP Q&A
>
> 12pm: Lunch
>
> IMPLEMENTATION SESSION
> 1:00 PM - 1:30 PM: BIP Implementation Walkthrough
> 1:30 PM - 2:00 PM: Q&A + silent review implementation review time
>
> DEPLOYMENT SESSION
> 2:00 PM - 2:15 PM: Deployment Plan Proposal
> 2:15 PM - 2:45 PM: Deployment Plan Discussion
>
> 2:45-3pm: BREAK
>
> ECOSYSTEM SUPPORT SESSION
> 3:00 PM - 3:30 PM: Mempool Updates Presentation & Discussion
> 3:30 PM - 4:00 PM: Package Relay Informational Updates
>
> DEMO SESSION & APPLICATION TALKS
> 4:00 PM - 4:10 PM: SENDMANYCOMPACTED Demo
> 4:10 PM - 4:20 PM: Vault Wallet Demo
> 4:20 PM: - 4:30 PM: TBA
> 4:30 PM - 4:40PM: TBA
> 4:40 PM - 4:50 PM: TBA
>
> WRAP UP
> 4:50 PM - 5:00 PM
>
> DINNER:
> 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM Dinner & Drinks
>
>
> --
> @JeremyRubin 
> 
>
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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Coins: A trustless sidechain protocol

[ZmnSCPxj via bitcoin-dev]

Good morning Robin,

> Hi Joachim, 
>
> > if anyone can halt operation of a sidechain with just tiny investment.
>
> It'll be impossible to halt a healthy chain with a tiny investment because 
> halting a chain costs you at least as much as the side chain rewards. The 
> "invested time value per block" of all honest stakers converges against the 
> block reward. If imbalanced, someone will stake more bitcoin to get the cheap 
> sidechain rewards. Exactly the same market mechanism secures PoW.
>
> For a decentralized consensus via resource consumption it doesn't matter 
> which limited resource you consume. The only relevant factor is that the 
> value of the block reward is sufficient to motivate people to invest a lot of 
> that resource. To motivate them to invest so much that an attacker cannot 
> invest more. Independently of the resource, the amount of honestly invested 
> resources converges against the value of the block reward.

Also known as MC = MR.

This is in fact the core of the argument *against* this kind of global 
microchain system: each individual chain will either:

* Pay ridiculously high fees per transaction, because the microchain has a 
small number of transactions because that is the entire *point* of microchains.
* Pay insufficient fees per block, making it easy to attack, meaning the 
security of the chain has to be centralized around a few actors anyway (e.g. 
checkpoints, like what every altcoin implements), which is not much better than 
the custodial case you are complaining against.

In order to have a sidechain that is as secure as Bitcoin today, you need:

* Sidechain fees to cover both *current Bitcoin fees* plus *current Bitcoin 
block rewards*.

Consequently, the sidechain has to have either *more* users than Bitcoin today, 
or *higher* fees than Bitcoin today.

Unless of course you propose to have the sidechain issue its own coin, in which 
case it is not much more than an altcoin.
Still, the real-world value of the total block rewards for that altcoin will 
have to match the real-world value of the total block rewards of Bitcoin in 
order to have security even approaching Bitcoin.

>
> Thus, I would even go further with my claim and argue that the security of 
> bitcoin-backed PoS is exactly as strong as PoW because in both cases their 
> security is proportionally to the dollar value of their block reward. PoS 
> sidechain security depends only on a sufficient userbase and thus, block 
> reward value.

Only if the consumed resource matches what is consumed under PoW.
Otherwise it is not much better than a low-PoW altcoin, i.e. easily attackable 
unless it centralizes around the developers.


I understand the desire to smoothen the experience of onboarding new users to 
Bitcoin.
But this path is not much better than the custodial solutions you are trying to 
avoid anyway.

Regards,
ZmnSCPxj
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Re: [bitcoin-dev] Coins: A trustless sidechain protocol

[Robin Linus via bitcoin-dev]

Hi Joachim,

> if anyone can halt operation of a sidechain with just tiny investment.

It'll be impossible to halt a healthy chain with a tiny investment because 
halting a chain costs you at least as much as the side chain rewards. The 
"invested time value per block" of all honest stakers converges against the 
block reward. If imbalanced, someone will stake more bitcoin to get the cheap 
sidechain rewards. Exactly the same market mechanism secures PoW.

For a decentralized consensus via resource consumption it doesn't matter which 
limited resource you consume. The only relevant factor is that the value of the 
block reward is sufficient to motivate people to invest a lot of that resource. 
To motivate them to invest so much that an attacker cannot invest more. 
Independently of the resource, the amount of honestly invested resources 
converges against the value of the block reward.

Thus, I would even go further with my claim and argue that the security of 
bitcoin-backed PoS is exactly as strong as PoW because in both cases their 
security is proportionally to the dollar value of their block reward. PoS 
sidechain security depends only on a sufficient userbase and thus, block reward 
value.

Thanks again for your detailed feedback,
-Robin

> For me that is critical security flaw of your proposal. By enforcing stakers 
> having to stake per chain you have actually lowered the cost for the attacker 
> to attack each specific chain.
>
> Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com) Secure Email.
>
> ‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐
> On Monday, January 13, 2020 10:22 PM, Robin Linus  
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Joachim,
>>
 Regarding Reason #1:
 This proposal is less like Bitcoin vs. Altcoins and much more like 
 Ethereum vs. ERC20 tokens, because the derivatives are not in competition 
 with BTC, but depend on it heavily. You support Bitcoin's growth by 
 supporting such a sidechain.
 Also, they won't work as separate currencies. For endusers you can 
 abstract away all underlying complexities such that they have to think 
 only in BTC. Exchanges rates can be hidden in TX fees. The sidechain 
 derivatives would be nothing but a means of transfer. The unit of account 
 is still BTC.
>>>
>>> I can't see any difference and advantage over doing the same with say 
>>> Litecoin. All you need is to create a special wallet which offers atomic 
>>> swaps LTC-BTC and its unit of account displayed to user is going to be BTC. 
>>> All you say will work perfectly with this special LTC wallet. Therefore 
>>> your idea is as good as any other altcoin. In your case, someone else 
>>> should indeed be able to create such a wallet in which the unit of account 
>>> will be the new token, thus emulating the current LTC wallets. So the only 
>>> difference in Litecoin is that the special wallet with BTC as unit is going 
>>> to be created after the native one, while in your case it is vice versa.
>>>
>>> I simply can't see why I'd call this construction of yours a Bitcoin 
>>> sidechain and any other altcoin not. So I'd call both altcoins.
>>
>> Let me try to explain where I am coming from: Whenever I want to onboard a 
>> not-so-techy friend to Bitcoin by sending him $5 worth of BTC, I don't have 
>> many good options. Usually we end up using BlueWallet. It works great. 
>> Though it only works so well because it is fully custodial. That is how they 
>> solve all the tough LN problems like inbound-capacity of new users, 
>> watchtowers and channel backends. Their service is just an Excel table 
>> connect to the LN. Unfortunately, that is the best UX we can currently offer 
>> to endusers. To me that's unsatisfying. Is that how we want to enter the 
>> emerging markets and on-board the next Billion users? I like that BlueWallet 
>> gives me the option to run my own LndHub for my friends. Still, does that 
>> scale globally? More importantly, do we want that?
>>
>> Now let's think about the altcoins argument. We want to serve a billion 
>> users. Blockchains do scale well to about a couple Million UTXOs, so we 
>> require a network of a couple thousand altcoins to serve our users.
>> We know how to build a nice LN for all of our altcoins with a star-shaped 
>> topology around Bitcoin as the central settlement layer. Atomic swaps FTW. 
>> We can abstract away their native currencies. We display to our users only 
>> BTC, hide the exchange rates in the TX fees and we're done. That is actually 
>> a scalability solution. So why don't we do that?
>> The problem here is, that In the long term, the market of PoW blockchains 
>> should be a winner-takes-all market, right? So all PoW chains but Bitcoin 
>> will eventually die because they're wasting lots of value on their energy. 
>> So actually we don't want a couple thousand altcoins wasting resources on 
>> pointlessly weak PoW chains. We want a single PoW chain which is as strong 
>> as possible.
>>
>> That's why I'd argue it makes sense to consid