Quote from: adam3us on December 31, 2014, 12:30:56 AM

Quote from: cypherdoc on December 30, 2014, 03:37:44 PM

Instead of dismissing my arguments by framing them as having some sort of agenda, perhaps you'd care to address the myriad issues I, and others btw, have voiced in this thread.

actually I wasnt assuming you had an agenda, or at least I couldnt figure out what it might be.

My agenda is simple: bitcoin is awesome, and I want to defend and improve it.

we certainly agree there. and just so you know, i own no altcoin (except for 2 physical LTC smoothie so generously gave me earlier this year) and have no investment in any company or start up. i simply own bitcoin and am an early adopter from Jan 2011.

oh, and btw, i am honored you are infusing your views here on my thread as i truly believe that inventing the POW scheme is simply awesome. but why you missed Bitcoin earlier than me is a conundrum!

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I have a real concern about the philosophical direction you're trying to take Bitcoin in and the highly risky economic effects it may have.

I presume by philosophy you mean stasis vs change? I read your view to be stasis. Nothing about bitcoin must change ever (other than bug fixes). Maybe thats over simplifying. Or maybe your arguments are shifting or dancing around to prod people into extending the argument (sorry thats the impression you give at times).

my view has shifted somewhat but only in the area of block size expansion and well before October's WP release. JR had alot to do with that. it's still possible that block size expansion will never occur and in that sense i see Bitcoin evolving to become merely a global reserve currency used to settle international end of day settlements btwn nations. similar to gold's role years ago but instantaneous and real time. that would still be a great thing to happen to Bitcoin. but as i said, Bitcoin does indeed have much potential as a payment platform and for micro tx's. so if block expansion can be agreed to, then so be it. i could live with that too as it would also be great for Bitcoin.

but as i said above, i would like to see these monetary innovations applied to the MC so as not to disrupt mining assumptions. the 2d delay and unpredictable consequences of moving BTC to a less secure scBTC introduce friction in my mind and thus risk despite whatever potential innovation awaits on the SC's.

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The sequence I saw was people trying to pressure bitcoin core to make changes to support their various ideas and pet projects. And bitcoin core not being able to accommodate them due to resources, and significantly risk.

My pet project that caused me to notice the risk of change clearly, was homomorphic encrypted values, which I thought were pretty cool as they completely hide transaction values and are still validatable. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=305791.0 (They do nothing about hiding which address is paying which, thats harder and takes zerocash which has to much novel crypto to deploy on main IMO).

And actually the earlier one was committed transactions which try to prevent transaction censorship even in the face of miners with dangerously high hashrate. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=206303.15 (there's a so far unresolved problem with that, but if it could be made to work, thats pretty cool in my book also).

So I suppose one example for your philosophy question is would you be against the above two changes being in bitcoin? One improves privacy and the other improves decentralisation properties. I presume most people on bitcointalk like those properties. How about cypherdoc?

those projects are new to me, but yeah, homomorphic encryption sounds pretty cool. anything to increase privacy. the 2nd project, not as cool as it is pretty clear to me that pool hashing % rates are evening out in a beautiful display of the Nash Equilibrium so i don't think tx meddling is necessary

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Next realise there's basically zero chance of those going in, and I approve of that. Its too risky, and what we need even more than cool features to improve bitcoin, is to not lose everyones bitcoins (including cypherdocs hoard, which I am very happy he has, good for him). i dont but thats my fault for not installing the alpha client when Satoshi emailed me about it in Jan 2009. I bought a few but I guess my buy in price average is close to current. I still think bitcoin is the coolest thing and has awesome potential.

And another example is how do we do bitcoin protocol upgrades. There are limitations to live upgrades, some things are not soft-forkable also. We'd have lower risk if we could have a live beta. That was the first proposed use for one-way pegs (precursor to GMaxwell et al two-way peg). Presumably you'd think a one-way peg for the purposes of software upgrade could be good - lower risk of failure during bug fixes and software modularisation.

An example is its hard to fully fix malleability which causes problems in some scenarios.

if it's so hard to get changes to the protocol, why are we seeing useful updates such as header syncing or constant time? maybe they are more trivial but if something is truly valuable and necessary to get into the protocol, i'm sure the community would rally around that. maybe the community didn't value your proposals nearly to the degree you did? (no offense intended). we all have to live with rejection of our ideas sometimes.

no offense, but it's also hard to know how much this Blockstream IPO was affecting the minds of your core dev group over this last year when core protocol progress could have been made. not saying this happened but ppl like me wonder about this.

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Maybe also zerocash itself. Kind of risky bleeding edge crypto, but really good privacy. I would be against that going into main due to the novel crypto risk unless it was somehow constrained to those opting in to it.
But that kind of sucks, people who want it cant use it. You and I and everyone is censoring their desired feature. Thats not permissionless innovation. But we are justified because of the risks in fact. A securely firewallable extension mechanism enables permissionless innovation. Otherwise you just see more feature coins.

and there is nothing wrong with feature coins other than i think they will all fail while cheating ppl at the same time. at least they're competing on a level playing field with Bitcoin by not asking for source code changes that benefit themselves. well, maybe they did ask, but they sure aren't getting them yet they plow forward. and if one of them produces some innovation that is useful, by all means adopt it into Bitcoin. there's nothing wrong with that process. yeah, alot of ppl are going to get hurt and lose money along the way but who is a for-profit Blockstream to force a source code change to eliminate them all? that is the other way to look at it.

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I am not sure if you are aware sidechains are nearly possible with zero changes to bitcoin. Its already programable via the script language. It may even be doable with zero changes with some chained contorted big script to validate compact SPV proofs.

great, then do it if it doesn't involve a source code change. i have no problem with that.

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Anyway its not like blockstream even existed when a bunch of core devs got excited about the possibility of improving on the above situations with a generic extension mechanism so I encourage you to separate out arguments about risk or imagined intent of blockstream from concerns about the change. eg pretend the change is just that group of developers, same people who've been coding bitcoin for years. (Blockstream basically is that group of developers, but thats a separate discussion!)

i'll be sure to try and do that, but yeah, i have multiple problems with SC's and Blockstream so it is hard to focus on one w/o jumping to another. i do worry that SC's take away from allowing Bitcoin to focus on Sound Money. you guys have advocated using SC's for all sorts of speculative assets. that worries me and i think it is a distraction. i also don't trust the economic assumptions behind the 2wp. there's no precedent for that and to assume it has no feedback effects on MC is presumptious, imo. those SC's are not the MC and it will be unrealistic to assume they will be 100% MM'd. but then you'll say "don't use it". that's fine for me but there will be ppl who only hear 1:1 100% backed by your original BTC". those ppl can be duped. just look at our first shark: Truthcoin.

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Note also the 51% takes all coins risk depends on the peg script. Its possible to limit that problem and place the risk on the people doing the arbitrage or transfers by forcing the person returning coins to put up a bounty in main-chain bitcoins equal to the exchange which they forfeit if their transfer is proven fraudulent by a chosen % of the sidechain. There can also be caps and time-adaptive delays (longer for more bitcoin). Its a programming language, the op_spv is just an opcode to simplify the coding of one part of it, validating the compact-proofs.

incredibly complex. i have no doubt you can do it. but does it make sense and will it bring value when presented to the market. no one knows, including me. but i do think it is a distraction and that the market won't like it.

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Hopefully we got past the misinterpretation of Konrad Graf's article, to see that the discount is for time-preference only, and the security firewall will work fine against a malicious or dud sidechain; caveat emptor, and look at the credibility of people writing wallets, chains and cryptocurrency.

he wrote that article the day your WP came out, or close to it. it would be interesting to see how his view has changed if any given all the discussion since.

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If you dont put your coins into a chain they are not at risk. Why would you want to censor someones ability to have zerocash, homomorphic value, faster transactions, more TPS, native share/color support, snark contracts? Wouldnt those be good things for bitcoin? I personally thought it'd be pretty cool to see a new wave of bitcoin centric innovation.

Also I dont think even statis vs change captures the situation. If you like stasis, keep your coins on bitcoin main; if others like cool features they can use them on chains that support them. Why is this a conflict?

Adam

i object and disagree with how you and Greg are now presenting/framing this argument.

when i first got into Bitcoin back when, i was "sold" on the concept that it was "trustless". i didn't have to trust any man or group of men (sorry women) to do the right thing. the open source nature of the protocol was such that nothing would get done unless there was a consensus. given my study of the rules at that time, i liked what i saw and made an agreement with myself that i would invest accordingly to my own risk tolerance. i bought those principles hook, line, and sinker. i view Bitcoin as digital gold which is the principle behind this long thread. but better. no one can transmute gold atoms into SCgold. they just are.

now, i see in Blockstream, a for-profit group of 2 core devs and 3 of the top committers potentially being influenced by a $21M investment from ppl who expect at least a 10x return on their money from SC development for probably anyone willing to pay. and it's clear this model depends on insertion of the spvp which i view as a transmutation of Bitcoin for the benefit of your company at the expense of altcoin and the platforms like Ethereum, Bitshares and CP. i think that's unfair. this guy over on Reddit stated pretty clearly exactly how i feel:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2qtdxi/thoughts_on_sidechains_by_lukas_ryan/cn9txk8?context=3

so i ask you, Adam, why should i do a 180 degree flip in what i was sold back then and now "trust" you to do what's right for Bitcoin when you have a fiduciary duty to do what's right for Blockstream?