Quote from: gmaxwell on February 28, 2017, 02:53:09 AM

Repeating a lie won't make it true.

It doesn't make it true, by the pure meaning of the "true" word, but it can help to make everyone believe a lie for a longest time of being able to gain a profit.

Currently, no one is paying me to talk about BU or other Bitcoin implementation, no one paid me in the past, and I still nearly fully invested in the "Bitcoin token", on private keys that I fully own.
I haven't any full contract with any company and/or invested on them. So I feel myself in a better position than yours about denying this possibility of having an incentive of gaining profit by repeating lies.

Quote from: gmaxwell on February 28, 2017, 02:53:09 AM

Even though you and BU insist on ignoring how _every version ever released_ works-- you don't even need to look to the operation of the system to disprove your belief that Bitcoin does whatever the majority of the hashpower wants-- The whitepaper itself specifically speaks to the potential for a dishonest hashrate majority:

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As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network, but is more vulnerable if the network is overpowered by an attacker. While network nodes can verify transactions for themselves, the simplified method can be fooled by an attacker's fabricated transactions for as long as the attacker can continue to overpower the network.One strategy to protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid block, [...]

"simplified method"

The quote refers to the SPV clients, while instead we are talking about full nodes verification.

Full quote:

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8. Simplified Payment Verification
It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node. A user only needs to keep
a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying
network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain, and obtain the Merkle branch
linking the transaction to the block it's timestamped in. He can't check the transaction for
himself, but by linking it to a place in the chain, he can see that a network node has accepted it,
and blocks added after it further confirm the network has accepted it.

IMAGE

As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network, but is more
vulnerable if the network is overpowered by an attacker. While network nodes can verify
transactions for themselves, the simplified method can be fooled by an attacker's fabricated
transactions for as long as the attacker can continue to overpower the network. One strategy to
protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid
block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to
confirm the inconsistency. Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to
run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification.

(emphasis is mine)

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The text you quote, "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules"-- is speaking to a world where network nodes validate and so miners ability to profitably break the rules is very limited. This incentive assumption is far weaker in the BU world where all users strongly trust miners.

I think that you are trying to mix the full node situation with the SPV situation.

It is suggested by always to wait more confirmations on an SPV clients.

This is now, and it will be the same on a possible BU world. Again, nothing will change.

There is also a big difference on "trusting the miners" and "trusting the legit miners". BU nodes trust the legit miners.
Where is the difference? Legit BU miners aren't going to blindly accept blocks bigger then their EB settings.
Because this damaging the users and belief in the Bitcoin system will damage their income.

So, the possible attacker (from the quote of the bitcoin.pdf you have reported) will just mine huge blocks that will go nowhere.

BU nodes instead (with the current default setting, that the user can freely change) aren't going to accept bigger block without 12 consecutive blocks after it. (AD setting)

So, at the end, to be more precise, in the "current BU world" (with default settings) there is the basic idea that there can't be an attacker that is going to be able to do and pay for an attack of 13 consecutive blocks (the first one bigger + 12 small blocks)

If someone thinks that a 13 block attack is still possible ... there is also this coming:
Parallel Validation: https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BUIP/blob/master/033.mediawiki (being developed here)
The first block downloaded and validated wins.
So, the smaller and easier to be fully validated the better.

I think that if segwit hadn't the fake block size increase (but everything else), now it could be already activated by the larger majority of the miners.