Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: SegWit losing Bitcoin Unlimited winning -> Moon soon
by
iamnotback
on 20/03/2017, 00:09:01 UTC
Here is another way to realize how ridiculous @Peter R's (Bitcoin Unlimited's) thesis is.

Let's assume every miner had the same hashrate and the same propagation delay, i.e. perfect equality, and so the equilibrium block size was established at rate at which the waste costs of orphans for the entire system was balanced with what the market was willing to pay for transaction fees. But every miner would have an incentive to have a higher share of the hashrate and a faster than average propagation delay, because those who did would win a disproportionate share of the rewards (if you don't understand why then you need to study the original selfish mining paper and the followup on optimal mining strategies).

So the natural market outcome is that miners would sign their blocks with a public key representing their reputation to not send invalid blocks. So then miners (pools) would be economically incentivized to trust each other and send only the signed block headers so they can begin mining on the new blocks as fast as possible with only constant factors of propagation (independent of block size). Of course they can still propagate the block data for verification but propagation delay no longer matters. Miners who didn't participate would be less profitable and lose share of hashrate over time. So then you end up with no free market limit on block size, i.e. no fee market. Once again a power vacuum ensues and there must be winner-take-all power-law aggregation of economies-of-scale. This is why Satoshi's PoW is flawed as a decentralization paradigm.

Q.E.D.

It doesn't matter whether you choose SegWit/Core or Bitcoin Unlimited, both are centralized control paradigms. But Bitcoin Unlimited means massive chaos and market confusion (thus probably a cratering price which destroys many miners) until the power structure takes form that takes control over the chaos (which will then be no better than Core because again a monopoly over block size and extracting maximum transaction fees the market will bear). At least with Core, we already have the banksters in control and leading us over the cliff. Continuity is what the miners need right now, until someone invents a real solution. So the miners will reject Bitcoin Unlimited unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot with chaos and cratering price. I think the market will quickly rally behind the most continuous path and reject the copycoin, same as it did for Ethereum Classic. If you don't actually bring a solution for anyone, then don't go fucking up the market and creating needless chaos, because the market will reject it.

I am very very sleepy (8am here haven't slept whole prior day and night), but I wrote this further explanation for someone who didn't understand what I wrote above:

You need to watch Peter R's video which I linked. The orphan rate is what % of the block solutions get thrown away because another block was found and formed a longer chain. I hope you understand orphans. So the % of orphans is the amount of wasted hashrate in the network. The hypothesis is that as we increase the block size to accomodate more transactions, then the orphan rate increases due to higher block propagation time across the network of nodes (and that time t is in the equation for the orphan rate). Thus we say there would be an equilibrium point at which the level of transaction fees the market would bear meets the cost in wasted hashrate. That is Peter R's (and Bitcoin Unlimited's) thesis (in their whitepaper). But I explain that thesis is incorrect, because it assumes that miners all have the same hashrate and propagation delays. Then factor in what I wrote after that, "optimal mining strategies give disproportionate rewards greater than their percentage share to those who have greater share of hashrate and/or faster propagation". Now re-read my explanations with that in mind and perhaps it will make more sense to you?