Re: [Bitcoin-development] User vote in blocksize through fees

2015-06-12 Thread Vincent Truong
(Sorry for spam, forgot to cc the mailing list)

RE: miner economics
Miners who have an agenda can forego fees to achieve it and create their
own txns if it is completely txn/user driven. It is better to just count
miners votes and let the user votes be their backing.

Although miners need to include txns that have the same vote as them, or
you expect them be able to vote themselves with their own txns, with
backing eventually there will be a large pool of unconfirmed txns that vote
against them. Which means a juicy choice of fees for an honest or small
miner to vote the other way (if there are any).

If the votes are required to be near unanimous (almost 100%) rather than
majority rule, there will be a small miner out there who will vote honestly
and reset the vote on behalf of those users, because there is a fee
incentive to do so (a pure honest miner doesn't care about fees. But
they're a dying breed). If it is a majority rule type of vote, bigger
miners will set the vote direction and small miners have no say no matter
how they vote. From a decentralisation perspective, it is better to want
the big guns to have a small voice, otherwise it will tend towards
centralisation.

Troll users (voting against when the direction is very clear) can still be
ignored by excluding their txns unless they're paying attractive fees. (So
it isn't exactly 100%, but it'll be close). Miners have some power but
ultimately they will represent the users if the users votes are clearly
divided.

If you think 100% is hard, 95-90% could be a compromise but that requires
an assumption that at least 5-10% will have their voices unheard. And that
might be OK. Personally, 100% is consensus, anything less is just a
democracy.

RE: vote bits
I think letting a vote go up and down in the same vote is a strange one.
Personally I think binary votes simplify the process.

Would it be better to 'announce' a vote that will contain a certain change.
For example, hash of a config file that said change MAX_BLOCK_SIZE - 8mb.
More things can use the same mechanism by including changes in a config (or
whatever script/markup) file as needed in the future, for whichever
constants you want to expose to votes.

Votes can just be 0 and 1 for no/yes and omitted for neutral. My preference
is 1 for yes, 0 for no neutral/ignored and omitted for no, so that it is
backwards compatible and doesn't skew votes to the agreeing direction, and
forces node owners and wallet developers to upgrade and participate.
On Jun 13, 2015 6:04 AM, Eric Lombrozo elombr...@gmail.com wrote:

 Miners currently only collect an almost negligible portion of their
 revenue from fees. While I certainly welcome any proposals that move us in
 the direction of defining a smooth metaconsensus process, I think with the
 curent economics, miners (and especially those with significant hashing
 power) have more of an incentive to block txs/spam their votes than to
 adapt to tx sender preferences...unless people increase their tx fees
 significantly. But without wallets that can make decent suggestions in this
 regard, this feature will be almost inaccessible to most regular users. And
 the economics still aren't entirely clear.

 - Eric Lombrozo
 On Jun 12, 2015 12:30 PM, Jannes Faber j.fa...@elevate.nl wrote:

 I'm imagining in Peter's proposal it's not the transaction votes that are
 counted but only the votes in the blocks? So miners get to vote but they
 risk losing money by having to exclude counter voting transactions. But
 garbage transactions are no problem at all.

 Note that users that want to cast a vote pay for that by increased
 confirmation time (on average, hopefully slightly depending on the trend).

 On Fri, Jun 12, 2015, 20:27 Matt Whitlock b...@mattwhitlock.name wrote:

 On Friday, 12 June 2015, at 11:20 am, Mark Friedenbach wrote:
  Peter it's not clear to me that your described protocol is free of miner
  influence over the vote, by artificially generating transactions which
 they
  claim in their own blocks

 Miners could fill their blocks with garbage transactions that agree with
 their vote, but this wouldn't bring them any real income, as they'd be
 paying their own money as fees to themselves. To get real income, miners
 would have to vote in accordance with real users.


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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Max Block Size: Simple Voting Procedure

2015-06-02 Thread Vincent Truong
Some changes:

Votes need to be 100%, not 50.01%. That way small miners have a fair
chance. A 50.01% vote means large miners call the shots.

Users (people who make transactions) need to vote. A vote by a miner
shouldn't count without user votes. Fee incentives should attract
legitimate votes from miners. A cheating miner will be defeated by another
miner who includes those votes, and take the fees.

This lets wallet providers and exchanges cast votes (few wallets will
implement prompts and will just auto vote, so if you don't agree, switch
wallets. Vote with your wallet).

~Vince
On Jun 3, 2015 12:34 PM, Stephen Morse stephencalebmo...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Pindar,

 yes and it's a good idea to separate the hard/soft fork upgrades. The
 point being here is that we're also establishing a process for the
 community to self-determine the way forward in a transparent and verifiable
 manner.

 What's not to like? :)

 I'll probably have some time on Sunday to help hack something up but I
 don't think this is that heavy a coding lift? What am I missing?


 As Matt mentioned, many members of the bitcoin community would be hesitant
 about giving miners this much power. It essentially lets them vote to
 change the rules of the system. But miners are not the only part of this
 ecosystem, and they are not the only ones affected by the choice of block
 size limit, so they probably shouldn't be the only ones with a vote.
 Instead, we vote with the software we run, and all upgrade.

 So, while I think an idea like this has its merits, I would bet that it's
 fairly unlikely to get enough support to be merged into bitcoin core.

 Best,
 Stephen



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