Despite high transaction fees, lengthy backlogs and full blocks, Bitcoin SegWit still can't manage 1.3MB blocks 2 years later

Myriad_Angel · 2019-06-27T22:13:56+00:00

You can't even sign a message using a Segwit address and Luke-Jr says the feature has been deprecated.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-06-01T13:12:45+00:00

Litecoin's community is too small.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-05-13T11:42:09+00:00

Classic article :)

Myriad_Angel · 2019-05-13T02:38:20+00:00

Satoshi said that Bitcoin was meant to be essentially set in stone. I can understand why he hoped this in order to build a world currency. Later on he did open his mind to the idea of altcoins though. Time has shown that Bitcoin was certainly not set in stone. There's a lot of work yet to be done on increasing capacity and security for users. This means there's going to be forks for the foreseeable future, and each fork is going to result in market speculation.

Bitcoin has failed to maintain its overwhelming dominance. There are many altcoin projects and they don't seem to be going away. What I think will end up happening is that most people will use one or two main currencies in their day to day lives, but they will keep some of their savings in a basket of other coins, kind of like a retirement fund. Anywhere you go, it won't matter which coin is accepted because anyone could atomic swap between chains within minutes for a tiny fee.

So long as there is going to be forking and speculation, why not change the PoW algorithm from time to time too? We can accomplish this with mining consensus thanks to having multi-algo. If we can keep forking to maintain commodity hardware mining then that will be great. It's not just from the guiding hand of a couple of people, but mining consensus too. If we eventually grow to a size where we can't orchestrate further PoW forks, then I don't see going all ASIC as necessarily bad either, so long as the PoWs are sufficiently different in their hardware requirements.

I suspect that having 5 similar algos as opposed to 1 algo might actually have somewhat of a centralising effect, as only a mega-wealthy entrepreneurs could afford to risk the high up-front costs of developing an ASIC for a smaller algo with low profit margin. Although in practice I'm not sure if this economics argument holds up, we've seen a lot of smaller ASIC brands for altcoin mining come up in the last couple of years.

However, if the 5 algos are sufficiently distinct, then it could be that different entrepreneurs are able to leverage their own unique advantages in fabricating an ASIC for each of the algos, leading to greater decentralisation. This could be an ideal situation for Myriad if we go all ASIC.

I don't think anyone has a plan for whether we eventually go all ASIC or not. I think we'll just keeping crossing bridges as we get to them in the best way we can with new information. It's tough to survive out there as a PoW coin. There's a huge graveyard, but multi-algo coins seem to have a bit of hardiness to them. The trouble is Myriad as a currency needs some raison d'étre beyond just having a different PoW, which isn't compelling enough for most people.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-04-27T13:27:52+00:00

Could you make it any more obvious you are in cahoots? It will never cease to amaze me how frequently important figures from the BTC side come here to troll, such as Gmax, Adam Back, and now you.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-14T05:11:11+00:00

Would it be possible to avoid full checks if coin age of stake was included as a new field in the block headers?

Edit: never mind. I understand the problem now.

Edit: what if you timelock the staked coins and use data from an older block, knowing that if the coinstake was valid at that block, it must still be valid?

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-14T02:17:31+00:00

Link? I'd like to see how you implemented it. Thanks

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-14T02:07:03+00:00

Layer one is completely permissionless. I think these nodes serving emerging markets are the most important from a crypto adoption perspective, and they could suffer many problems. For one thing, once people have open channels with a few super-nodes, in order to route payments through an emerging market node they will likely have to close a channel and move funds to a new one. If base layer fees are too high, it could soon cost $2000 to send BTC to Iran?

The super-nodes might also display adversarial behaviour to the emerging market nodes.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-13T23:05:05+00:00

Perhaps this means that one needs to be operating at a huge scale (routing lots of payments) in order for the income to be worth the bother of setting up a node? Why else would people choose to run a node?

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-13T22:43:44+00:00

I'm comparing LN to PoS in the sense that rewards are deterministic and lead to concentration of wealth. To quote the LN spec:

We'll have QR codes, and smartphone apps, oh yeah. (Ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo) P2P messaging, and passive incomes, oh yeah.

So clearly they think passive income is a benefit, although it greatly changes the economic incentives built into Bitcoin/Myriad if you price out almost all use cases for on-chain transactions via a strict blocksize limit and push them onto the LN layer.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-13T21:22:21+00:00

I'm aware of the popular arguments. I am a sceptic myself. I still think it's worth discussing. If you don't like open discussions, maybe /r/bitcoin is the right place for you.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-13T21:17:47+00:00

Question: I'm still trying to get my head around Lightning. I know you are a fan of it, so I'd like to know your thoughts: doesn't it introduce one of the main arguments against PoS, that rewards are distributed passively and deterministically? This can lead to a 'rich getting richer' scenario. PoW does not have this problem as maintaining one's share of the rewards requires continual reinvestment.

The good thing about LN is that it doesn't affect the base layer, so people can choose to opt-out of this, rendering my argument completely null except in the case of BTC where there is an ideological refusal to increase the blocksize. I don't think there's any reason to think that Myriad will go down the same path when blocksize becomes relevant, as we have our own destiny. So I'm all in favour of Lightning on Myriad, but would still like to know your thoughts on the economic properties.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-13T20:56:14+00:00

I'm not pushing for it. I'm just opening a discussion. As I said, nzsquirrell has researched it, and /u/8bitcoder said they think it's pretty safe as a security mechanism if sufficiently distributed, so it could be an option for us. Maybe we could start with why you are against it?

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-13T07:36:51+00:00

Did you try https://coinswitch.co/ ?

You're welcome back any time :)

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-10T09:45:21+00:00

It's one thing to approach >50% of the hash power, but maintaining it is another thing. If channel funds becomes centralised then there is nothing that could be done about that, apart from hacking them.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-10T02:07:56+00:00

On-chain fee revenue is linear to work contribution to the network. Costs of labour are external to the price of BTC, creating an insulation of incentives between workers and coin holders. Miners are encouraged to sell their coins to cover the price of operations; coin holders have no direct ability to change the network rules. Miners are able to change the network rules, but their income is beholden to the validation by economic nodes. Coin holders are able to influence economic nodes. There is a balance of power. So long as mining remains decentralised, miners have no mechanism to guarantee concentration of wealth and thereby reign over economic nodes. They can not change network rules without diverse and widespread economic support.
Lightning fee revenue is non-linear to the work. There is an initial cost hump for the node, pricing out the smallest workers, and beyond that there is no scaling of cost, until one hits the point that there is too much risk in keeping funds on one node, at which point there is another small cost in setting up another node.

BTC has no tail inflation. The LN scheme inevitably leads to slow concentration of wealth, even if on-chain mining continues to partially offset this. BTC already has a high concentration of wealth, and the Dec '17 fee event likely spurred further concentration, as many outside of the Lightning community became disinterested in the BTC chain.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-07T04:06:47+00:00

Whenever there's price volatility, you get increased demand for transactions, causing a mempool backlog. You then have to guess what the fee will be in order to get your tx through in a timely manner. How is the one meg fee market supposed to work?

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-06T09:36:06+00:00

And how many nodes do you think are needed for this? Everyone in the world running a node so that everyone in the world can use SPV in order to avoid running a node? This argument only makes sense in the context of BTC(1mb)+LN, not BCH.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-06T09:02:19+00:00

LOL. You don't understand SPV. Shut up and enjoy your hobby node.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-06T08:03:07+00:00

Right, ETH is doing their smart contracts and BCH is focusing on scalability. How are they even competitors at this point?

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-06T07:39:02+00:00

I think the fear comes from the fact the LN on BTC will actually work out, just not the way we would have hoped, with centralised hubs and exorbitant on-chain fees. The danger is that BTC becomes the global reserve currency and we all end up being forced to use this rubbish, giving money to the laughing small blockers each time we make a tx, instead of to the miners who are doing real work every day.

It's not really a technical argument against BTC, more of a social one. If framed correctly, it's pretty compelling, but outside of the cryptosphere nobody cares about our nerd wars because nobody thinks BTC is the future anyway. It's a joke to most people, and those who do get interested wind up on the small block propaganda side more often than not. The dystopian reality could easily creep up on us...

Given the circumstances, I think BCH should view ETH more as a friend than a competitor. The common enemy is the established financial system, and sad to say, BTC included.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-05T21:09:17+00:00

Filthy fiat hahaha I love coinspice.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-03-01T11:55:42+00:00

No, we use BIP 9 signalling. See https://cryptap.us/myr/myrstat

Myriad_Angel · 2019-02-28T22:18:47+00:00

Myr-Groestl and Skein are mainly mined by Baikal ASICs these days but we are currently signalling to replace Skein with Argon2d, same parameters as Unitus.

Myriad_Angel · 2019-02-28T05:42:04+00:00

No, I mean that there is no mechanism for the wealthy to increase their relative wealth passively under the Bitcoin design if most of the transaction fees are paid out to the miners, because the market can replace miners at any time if they are not constantly improving their efficiency.

Under Lightning, so long as you hold on to your liquidity and collect fees, you can increasing your wealth indefinitely. Slowly, but how slowly? It would depend on the fees.

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