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Showing 20 of 183 results by coinft
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin Network Capacity is Reaching a Critical State: Mike Hearn
by
coinft
on 12/05/2015, 19:56:32 UTC
The free market provides a solution. When the block size fills up, people will pay higher transaction fees to get their transactions through. Free riders paying zero or low transaction fees won't get their transactions processed.

The block size can only be increased if the big miners agree, and it's not in their interest to increase it.
What happens if you dont pay the required fee an your transaction is never processed? you lose the money?

You double spend your own transaction with a higher fee, or you pay a miner directly to include it.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Yay or Nay to Increasing Block Size to 20mb?
by
coinft
on 11/05/2015, 18:40:21 UTC

Nay. Going straight to 20MB is a huge change, and too risky.

I think besides dangers to decentralization this might kill off alternatives like the Lightning Network. And yes I know the LN would be awesome even with 20MB blocks, but the necessity for it will be reduced.

I would agree to a modest, conservative change, maybe over time and/or coupled to indicators like difficulty. Enough to survive, little enough to drive research and implementation of alternatives. But this is too much.

Not like my opinion will count much, but I will reduce my stockpile appropriately if I see reckless behavior.

-coinft
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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Share your ideas on what to replace the 1 MB block size limit with
by
coinft
on 23/08/2014, 12:58:17 UTC
No matter that will be a hardfork, or an auxiliary block softfork, this will be the most dramatic change to the protocol. However, I can't see any real progress in reaching consensus despite years of debate.

Indeed, but it is now apparent (to me anyway) that simply increasing the block limit to allow larger and larger blocks to propagate is not necessary, as this is not the optimal long-term solution. The optimal solution takes advantage of the fact that most transactions are already known to most peers before the next block is mined. So, "highly abbreviated" new blocks can be propagated instead. This is beyond mere data compression because it relies on the receiver knowing most of the block contents in advance.

We see in the O(1) thread that there are excellent proposals on the table for block propagation efficiency:
A) short transaction hashes: as in block network coding, and similarly in the optimized block relay (Matt Corallo already has a relay service live)
B) IBLT blocks

Even better, they are compatible such that A can be used within B giving enormous efficiency gains. This must be the long-term goal.

The next question is: Can the max block size be made flexible (for example: a function of the median size of the previous 2016 blocks) as a phase in the process of introducing block propagation efficiency as a consensus change?

As far as I understand those schemes they are only good if you run a node with a current memory pool. The full transactions still need to communicated at some time, and still need to be written to the blockchain in full. You couldn't just write IBLTs to the blockchain, because no one without your memory pool could reconstruct the TXs.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: The New Rush Wallet
by
coinft
on 07/08/2014, 18:12:27 UTC


This will end in tears because it just isn't possible to keep the wallet URL secret.

Instawallet 2.0 all over again.


instawallet was killed purely with the google search [ site:instawallet.com ] which crawled all pages and listing all 'secret urls'. so far rushwallet have got good enough code so that it doesnt list all pages on google...

so show me another way to break the secret?

Browser extensions which may look at browser history, or any malware which finds browser history on disk. Using this on a foreign computer and not wiping history afterwards. Social bookmarking sites. Other cloud bookmarking/sync services. Social engineering to trick users into showing their URLs, because you know, URLs are safe.

Maybe it's not as easy as google hacking, but I am very confident people will find ways to attack that, even if just because browsing history and bookmarks are usually not that sensitive, not a worthy target, and thus most likely ill protected.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: The New Rush Wallet
by
coinft
on 07/08/2014, 17:39:23 UTC


This will end in tears because it just isn't possible to keep the wallet URL secret.

Instawallet 2.0 all over again.
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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Share your ideas on what to replace the 1 MB block size limit with
by
coinft
on 26/07/2014, 21:53:59 UTC
Storage in the (not so far distant future) will not be free. Talk about "programmed destruction" yikes. What the bytecoin stuff does reduces all the generated coin, including subsidy— what you're suggesting really is a duplicate of it, but less completely considered, please check out the bytecoin whitepaper. I suppose that leaving _out_ the fees at least avoids the bad incentive trap. It's still broken, none the less, and you really can't wave your hands and ignore the fact that subsidy will be pretty small in only a few years... esp with the same approach being apparently ineffective in bytecoin and monero when their subsidy is currently quite large.

Yes it was an idea of the moment to fix the bytecoin model, especially the adaptive limit. With N small enough it might not have bad effects, but it also limits blocks to only 1+N MB forever, which is conservative but maybe not worth the effort. This suits me fine, I would much prefer to compromise on trust and decentralization for payments of small amounts off the block chain any way, and keep the core system as small and trusted (distributed) as possible.

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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Share your ideas on what to replace the 1 MB block size limit with
by
coinft
on 26/07/2014, 20:15:15 UTC
This is the approach we were talking about with Bytecoin above.  The income is reduced by a multiple determined as function of size^2. This, sadly, does not work in the long run once subsidy is not an overwhelming portion of miner income, because transactions will just pay miners directly (e.g. just author N different transactions, one for each miner you know of, each including an output for that miner. Eligius started supporting being paid fees in this way in 2011).

A version that wasn't a multiple but instead was an absolute number of coins to destroy might work, since you couldn't escape it by moving fees to outputs— but then you have a free parameter of not knowing the value of a bitcoin to its users— and as we've seen with fees, constants that depend on how much a bitcoin is worth easily get out of wack. Any magical thoughts there?

In what I proposed above you don't give up on a percentage of fees (which may be zero due to out of band fees) but on the block reward itself. And you need to do that for every single block to exceed the 1MB, it does not change the limit for future blocks. For example, if for x% of the block reward you may increase the block by N*x%, with N=10, the new block limit range becomes 1-11MB for a linear range of subsidies from 25 to 0BTC. There is no way to "cheat" with out of band fees.

At the highest end there is no block reward at all. It is true this will become cheaper for miners as the block reward goes down, and eventually it will be free, but in my opinion that's a feature compensating for cheaper future storage and processing resources. With N=10 and today's subsidy, few miners would elect to create larger blocks unless the market changes a lot, but it becomes more reasonable over time.
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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Share your ideas on what to replace the 1 MB block size limit with
by
coinft
on 26/07/2014, 18:18:58 UTC
Just an idea regarding incentives:

A miner who wants to mine a block larger than 1MB needs to give up a part of the block reward. That way there is a strong incentive not to break the 1MB limit unless there are enough TX available which make up for the lost part (and the higher orphan risk) in fees.

Of course the actual numbers need to be determined with great care.

I would guess that even if this would be introduced today with conservative numbers, it wouldn't be used much to mint larger blocks until several block reward halvings have passed, or TX volume picks up a lot. Also by reducing block rewards this does lower the theoretical maximum of 21M, unless further measures are taken. And there will have to be an upper limit for the time when block rewards reach zero.

Has anyone ever thought about such a system?

-coinft
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Board Pools
Re: [6600Th] Eligius: 0% Fee BTC, 105% PPS NMC, No registration, CPPSRB (New Thread)
by
coinft
on 16/06/2014, 00:10:50 UTC
I think Pool ops need to add to the User Agreement that users found to be selfish mining forfeit any non-dispersed mining funds and are contractually obligated to return their ill-gotten gains.  Most other users would support this.

The problem is how can you prove it statistically except for looking at massive deviations (like 6 magnitudes off).

I am not totally sure how mining works now, but couldn't a pool spot check miners by giving them work known to contain a valid block solution every now and then? I'd be easy to get evidence this way.

Basically have the pool send work that only needed difficulty 1 to solve?  I guess that could work, but I'm not well versed on the inner workings of nonces and all the stuff... need one of those brainiacs to post on that Tongue

I was thinking send it the same work description which another miner already solved and reported a block on.
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Board Pools
Re: [6600Th] Eligius: 0% Fee BTC, 105% PPS NMC, No registration, CPPSRB (New Thread)
by
coinft
on 15/06/2014, 23:41:19 UTC
I think Pool ops need to add to the User Agreement that users found to be selfish mining forfeit any non-dispersed mining funds and are contractually obligated to return their ill-gotten gains.  Most other users would support this.

The problem is how can you prove it statistically except for looking at massive deviations (like 6 magnitudes off).

I am not totally sure how mining works now, but couldn't a pool spot check miners by giving them work known to contain a valid block solution every now and then? I'd be easy to get evidence this way.
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Board Economics
Re: Price back to 400$
by
coinft
on 14/06/2014, 12:19:24 UTC
It might not drop below 400$ but will be in the range of 450-600. News of the doj selling the silkroad coins is what has caused the drop but this is good news for the ones who will buy them, so by July the price might hit 700$

Not good news for us others - who won't buy them. If they buy low and we bounce back, they have the opportunity to dump.

Aside from short term price fluctuations, long term it is very good this chunk is held by enterprising people, not a govmnt with questionable motives. Even if they mean no harm, the doubt and fear of a future selloff would remain. Also they can't easily declare bitcoin itself illegal after selling it, which limits further law making to regulate how you do business with it, not whether at all.
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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Disincentive to confirm transactions when burning (destroying) transaction fees?
by
coinft
on 18/05/2014, 19:31:50 UTC
Miners could agree not to build on purposefully empty or too small blocks. If the majority complies, the risk of getting an empty block ignored by the network costs too much.

This could be done informally just by each node looking at its own memory pool, and not forwarding new blocks which do not contain enough TXs, and miners not building on them. Or a more elaborate scheme could involve some cryptographic proof of neglected TXs.

Probably just the threat of such a scheme is enough to keep miners in line.
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Board Economics
Re: Bitcoin volatility actually GOOD for business! (with proof)
by
coinft
on 10/05/2014, 14:34:35 UTC
This concept only works if the merchant is a speculator himself. What if the price doesn't make a recovery?

Being a merchant is being a speculator. When you buy (or produce) stock, you have to believe to be able to sell it with a profit, but that's not guaranteed -- hence speculation. When you accept any currency for payment, you have to believe it keeps its value well enough to be able to restock and pay your other expenses, and to actually be allowed to keep it. This is not guaranteed either, and ranges from inflation and unexpected new taxes to outright disownment (see Cyprus).

There's no principal difference in which currency a merchant accepts. This analysis tries to compare the quantitative difference of being exposed to $ or BTC in the recent past, which of course is a poor indicator for the future.

There are worse flaws than assuming merchants are open to assume risk for a profit here. I think assuming a constant sales value in $ per day, payed in BTC, is a bad assumption. I'd expect BTC holders to prefer to spend on peaks, and pay in $ in valleys, which may undo the cost-averaging effect. Also I'd expect rising BTC sales over time, which will shift more sales to the time in 2014 which has a lesser performance.

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Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: New Coin Concept: proof of work in fix time (defeating ASIC)
by
coinft
on 22/04/2014, 00:16:32 UTC

Read up on Sybil attack.

It's explained in the bitcoin whitepaper. Posting raw ideas without checking the most obvious sources (and explaining why they don't apply) doesn't make you look smart.
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Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Why has Ripple decreased so much in Market cap? Used to be second to Bitcoin
by
coinft
on 18/04/2014, 15:10:46 UTC
Ripple is just a pump-and-dump altcoin. It will die out quietly sometime soon. Litecoin is also an altcoin, but it is the most trusted altcoin. You can't even compare Ripple with Litecoin.

Do you even know anything about ripple?

Ripple is not just another altcoin. It actually serves a purpose. It is also the further thing  from a pump and dump.

Educate yourself before posting something like this.

Comparing Ripple and altcoins is an insult to altcoins. At least altcoins transfer some kind of value, while Ripple can only transfer debt.

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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: bitcoin no longer in ubuntu as of 14.04?
by
coinft
on 18/04/2014, 09:12:07 UTC
Let me rephrase my previous argument: if you don't trust Ubuntu, don't install a wallet client there at all. Ubuntu maintainers may hide a bug or exploit which enables wallet stealing in any package.

And don't give me crap about it would be found -- it may be found, but as recent experience shows, it may take a long time.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: bitcoin no longer in ubuntu as of 14.04?
by
coinft
on 17/04/2014, 12:43:00 UTC
I've always used the ppa

I'm sure many people do, that's not the point.  Ubuntu is one of the largest GNU/Linux distros around, and their average user had access to bitcoin as part of their operating system.  It would be as if windows 7 had came with an option to install bitcoin via an optional windows update or something.  Today is release day for 14.04, perhaps it's worth reflecting on what we just lost.

Exactly, why would they include Bitcoin? I wouldn't expect anyone to. Not some anonymous os maintainer. I'd rather get it from the ppa and know the guy doing it. You must trust their signing keys.

If you do not trust the Ubuntu repository and their maintainers, you shouldn't run a bitcoin client (or anything else sensitive) in Ubuntu regardless of where you get it from, that's a really stupid argument.

Since you already have to trust Ubuntu, trusting additional sources (and you would have to do that for more than just bitcoin) raises the bar considerably, and does not improve your real security.

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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin Vs the Banks debate feat Andreas Antonopoulos - your ideas please
by
coinft
on 21/03/2014, 19:50:15 UTC
>> Is Bitcoin just a redistribution of wealth from one group of people to another?

All commerce is a redistribution of wealth from one group of people to another.  Voluntary redistribution of wealth is a good thing.

When properly structured, the wealth flows to those that truly add value, and only voluntarily based on a win-win transaction.

I'll leave it up the reader to decide whether the current banking system, and 'quantitative easing' meet that criteria.



The question I would like asked and answered:

"Why would a bank not accept a business involved in Bitcoin?  It looks and smells like capricious behavior.  It seems to me that the bank's job should be to make sure deposits are safe, and only withdrawn by the owner directly or through a negotiable instrument.   I understand turning down a loan request because the perceived risk might be higher than say a widget manufacturer.  But where is their risk with deposits and withdrawals?"
 
Tron
Founder, CoinCPA


If you are quietly involved in criminal activities it is unwise to draw additional attention and publicity by offering services officials might take an interest in.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: 10 Billion bitcoin uncofirmed transaction on blockchain.info. EDIT: It's gone.
by
coinft
on 13/03/2014, 20:05:07 UTC
if this 10 Billion BTC transaction was paired with a 51% attack  by the same people
could this invalid transaction be made valid and screw up the blockchain ledgers?

No, with a 51% attack you can only double spend bitcoins you have legitimately.
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Topic
Board Economics
Re: blockchain fork backed by a government
by
coinft
on 08/03/2014, 11:49:01 UTC
This fork would not replace Bitcoin, but it would coexist with it. Many people will move, subdue to government control and in time will be robbed by government "for he greater good". Some will see this coming, return to original Bitcoin, maybe even avoid any loss at all. Others would stay and loose.
Maybe the government fork would offer good ratio between freedom/privacy and security and would work just fine (for some people).

If you are careful you can spend pre-fork coins on *both* chains.

Most likely once the majority decides one fork is better than the other they will cash in the coins of the other fork, and likely kill it in the process. I don't believe 2 forks can coexist for long on equal footing.

I for one would take a guarantee of 1000$ up immediately to cash out and keep my coins on the original fork. If everyone does that the gov is down a lot of fiat money, has gotten a stack of pretty worthless crypto coins, and the original bitcoin still survives. I don't see any gov being stupid enough to try that.

Well except maybe if they mandate their crypto coins to be legal tender and start paying employees with it, but then these crypto coins would be nothing more than fiat in disguise.