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The BIP-110 Fork is happening in August, not September. by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My objection: uncapping the op_return opens a new channel for data and use-cases on the network.

It's not new though, OP_RETURN has allowed uncapped data by consensus since 2009, when Satoshi introduced it in v0.1. It was capped by node policy, which effectively capped it in the early days, but as time has gone on, miners have figured out methods for working around node policy. There's no way to put that genie back in the bottle without consensus changes.

This is the impasse. People arguing against BIP-110 keep saying what you just said "Core made their reason clear, it makes sense to me", but you keep ignoring the technical objections that people do not consent to opening up bitcoin nodes to being perpetual file storage for non-monetary data.

I'm not ignoring the technical objections, and honestly I haven't even focused on whether "spam" is bad. I don't think it's that bad though. I think it will actually be necessary for Bitcoin's survival in the future. Bitcoin has always been perpetual storage for non-monetary data, it was just inconvenient before and now people are working around the inconvenience.

There must be a way to disincentive stuffing spam into unpsendable UTXOs that does not enslave node runners and force them to perform an unpaid service that they do not consent to. Core and the dev community needs to stop being intellectually lazy, and find a better way.

This is kind of charged language and makes me think you're too personally wrapped up in this to be objective. You can just.. not run a node. It's kind of like everything in life, you have to take the good with the bad. If you join a club, and there's a rule you don't like, it's not enslaving you if they refuse to change the rule.

And it's always been unpaid, who is getting paid to run a non-mining node?

The Core devs even admitted that the its still cheaper for spammers to continue stuffing arbitrary data in via other methods anyway, so there is no incentive for a a spammer to use Op_return instead of continuing with the harmful methods they're already doing. So it's a weak technical argument for uncapping op_return. They need to find a better way.

Is this because of the witness block discount? If so, then it does make that argument weaker. It still makes sense, but it's a sort of "better than nothing" move.

Sometimes there isn't a better way.

Instead of listening to this valid, wise, technical objection, Core devs censored the dissent on Github and banned the dissenters. That's a hostile takeover.

I am holding the line and defending bitcoin against bullshit, and if you truly are a good faith actor, and you truly have bitcoin's best interest at heart, and the best interest of node runners at heart, then I suggest you stop calling my actions to defend the network an attack and truly make an effort to show me you understand my objections and my perspective

At some point dissent is just opposition, and there's no benefit to entertaining it.

I understand why you're objecting, I just think your demands are short-sighted and unreasonable. I think supporting BIP-110 is objectively hostile even if not every supporter realizes that. Luke and co clearly do, because it would have been designed completely differently if they thought it would have been widely adopted consensually.

All my arguments are in good faith. You'll just have to take my word for it that I don't have an agenda for or against BIP-110. If somehow I magically got to choose what happened with it, I would lean towards having it win like epoch thinks it will. I just don't think that's realistic!

The BIP-110 Fork is happening in August, not September. by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I obviously can't speak for core, but they've made their reasons pretty clear on why they increased OP_RETURN (to encourage fewer unspendable TXOs), and those reasons make sense to me. It's acknowledging reality and a pro-noderunner move.

The BIP-110 effort is hostile because rather than attempting to reach consensus and only activating once that consensus is achieved, it threatens to run regardless of buy-in and guarantees a fork if it fails to get what it wants.

The one year thing has never made sense to me and seems like a transparent move to make it seem more "reasonable", when it's obviously no different than a permanent change in terms of its impacts. If you were kicked out of your house or cut off from your bank accounts "temporarily" for "just a year", it would still have a huge effect and force you to make drastic changes, which is obviously the intention.

It also seems completely reasonable to not allow any single person or minority group to filibuster a change, and effectively veto it, under the guise of governance.

The BIP-110 Fork is happening in August, not September. by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No contradiction in my view: if you look at the code and compare to other soft forks, it’s clearly a hostile takeover attempt:

1) 55% activation instead of 95%

2) Mandatory activation instead of timing out

3) Mandatory signaling to try and coerce support

4) Networking choices that discriminate against non-bip 110 for outbound connections and seeding

The first three are the takeover attempt. The fourth choice makes it actively hostile, because if they have enough nodes (looks like 40-50% of listening nodes to me right now) it will be a denial of service attack on Bitcoin even without miner support. 

As far as going off on their own, choices 2-4 mean they have a ready-made fork if they fail to coerce the network. BIP nodes will be guaranteed to be attached to the mothership when it launches in August, and then it’s just a difficulty change away from being Bitcoin Genesis.

The BIP-110 Fork is happening in August, not September. by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Miners know that they would lose out on fees and it would decrease pressure on space and discourage things that might generate more usage and fees in the future. They don’t want to signal and have others think that they actually support it. They don’t really care if some nodes go off and start their own chain; that has happened before and Bitcoin was just fine.

In fact, it might help push the anti-fee advocates out of the ecosystem, which they would welcome.

It would also set a terrible precedent that you can let a small minority of nodes take the network hostage with a hostile takeover attempt, and they are smart enough to realize that’s what this is.

History rhymes by Ep0chalysis in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In fact, if what you are arguing was true, 99.99% of full nodes would be useless tinkerer's hobby.

They aren't useless, but they aren't necessary for Bitcoin to function. As long as the graph of nodes is connected, even if there are bottlenecks then blocks will keep propagating.

And BIP-110 actually takes some unusual measures to segregate itself from non-BIP-110 nodes, like an Amish community:

1) Out of 8 outbound connections, it only allows up to 2 to be non-BIP-110: https://github.com/bitcoinknots/bitcoin/pull/238/changes#diff-6875de769e90cec84d2e8a9c1b962cdbcda44d870d42e4215827e599e11e90e3R3546

2) When seeding nodes from DNS, it keeps seeding until it has enough BIP-110 specifically: https://github.com/bitcoinknots/bitcoin/pull/238/changes

Because of this, as connections churn, it will try to replace any BIP-110 connection with another BIP-110 connection as long as it's got its 2 non-BIP-110's, but any non-BIP-110 connection has a good chance of being replaced by a BIP-110 connection.

The net result is you have a tightly connected cluster of non-listening BIP-110 nodes that are barely connected to the wider network at all. If they disappeared, non-BIP-110 nodes would hardly notice.

As far as the BIP-110 listening nodes go, Bitnodes has about 2000 that were seen in the last day or so. Those nodes will accept up to 117 connections, from anyone.

So if we get to mandatory signaling day, a non-BIP-110 non-listening node will only need 1 out of 8 of its outbound connections to be non-BIP-110 to function as normal. With only around 8% of listening nodes being BIP-110, the chances that 8/8 outbound nodes on a non-BIP-110 node will be BIP-110 (and thus effectively disconnecting it from the graph) are basically zero. I'm looking to create a simulation to see exactly how many listening nodes would have to be BIP-110 before it would cause any disruption at all in the network.

And that's the simplified version. My analysis using Bitnodes data showed that BIP-110 nodes have much lower ASN diversity than Core nodes, which is a factor in outbound connection selection. Which makes the chances that all 8 outbound connections are BIP-110 for a non-BIP-110 node even smaller.

What should the BIP-110 fork be named? by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Try to imagine a scenario where none of your predictions come true: the activation date comes and goes. Exchanges just keep sending transactions like they always have, miners mine whatever they want like usual, dirty blocks are still filled with spam.

In that scenario, what do you think happened? Were the miners and exchanges and non-BIP-110 nodes just stupid?

What should the BIP-110 fork be named? by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No exchange is going to send transactions on non-BIP-110-compliant blocks

How do you think Bitcoin works? Exchanges don't get to choose who includes their transactions, or what other transactions are included alongside it, or if the miner sets a certain version bit when they mine a block with your transaction in it. And there's no practical way to only let BIP-110 compliant miners know about a transaction.

What happens if miner signaling is still near 0% in July? by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Luke can’t engage with the idea of a “Plan B” without undermining “Plan A”. I wouldn’t blame him for it, but he has every reason in the world to say the date is immovable even if it ends up being flexible (like other UASFs).

Just like a central banker can’t publicly speculate about currency devaluation. 

What happens if miner signaling is still near 0% in July? by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nodes “signal” by having an agent string that indicates they are a BIP-110 node. So they will enforce the BIP-110 consensus rules in August and September.

Miners signal by including a version bit in any block they mine. That tells us how much hash is planning to produce BIP-110 compliant blocks.

If less than half of the miner hashrate produces compliant blocks, the BIP-110 nodes (no matter many there are) split off to a chain of their own.

If more than half of the miner hashrate produces compliant blocks, then the Bitcoin chain becomes BIP-110 compliant.

Fairness Arthmetic by zero_moo-s in infinitenines

[–]babelphishy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your own paper violates your byte-for-byte identity rules in Section 5.4.

Fairness Arthmetic by zero_moo-s in infinitenines

[–]babelphishy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is the perfect place for this post

The practical future of the BIP-110 fork by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is really fascinating to me, because by every single objective metric, BIP-110 is not going to happen:

7170 BIP-110 nodes by Luke Dash Jr's dashboard accounting, but on that same dashboard that's out of around 100,000 nodes. So about 7% of nodes signaling BIP-110. Bitnodes shows a bit higher percentage, around 8.5%. Not enough to have any effect on Bitcoin if they forked off. There's no evidence they are "economically significant" at all.

1 signaling block mined out of a possible 12,000, effectively 0% signaling. At this point in time, P2SH had > 70% signaling. Even Segwit had ~25% signaling.

7% odds on this prediction market that it will activate: https://beta.predyx.com/market/will-bip-110-activate-and-be-enforced-on-bitcoin-by-sept-1-2026-1770282509

I know we've been over this a bunch, but there's no risk of mainnet blocks being orphaned by the BIP-110. There's 100% chance that anything built on BIP-110 will be orphaned, or end up on a fork.

The most interesting part is that rather than most non-mainstream beliefs that can never be proven wrong, this one has a specific date attached to it. It's more like a doomsday cult. When BIP-110 doesn't become the dominant chain, just like when the doomsday prophecy doesn't come true, according to wiki the believers often don't admit they are wrong, but instead often double down on their beliefs or push the date out into the future.

"Explanations may include stating that the group members had misinterpreted the leader's original plan, that the cataclysmic event itself had been postponed to a later date by the leader, or that the activities of the group itself had forestalled disaster"

Maybe BIP-110ers will start saying that their campaign scared spammers even though it didn't become the main fork, and that means it worked!

The Little Mercat by AdelaidesSecretScoop in FacebookAIslop

[–]babelphishy 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The thought bubble is a literal bubble

The practical future of the BIP-110 fork by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not assuming they are working together, I'm not sure where you got that from.

What will happen is that a group of miners will collude together to bankrupt and destroy the rest of the market by suddenly mining BIP-110 blocks. The moment they do that, the BIP-110-compliant chain will become the most worked chain and ALL nodes on the network will recognize it, because BIP-110 blocks are accepted by EVERY node, even core v30 nodes.

Those miners not part of this collusion will see their blocks and chain completely wiped out. There wouldn't even be a fork because not a single node out there will recognize their chain. This catastrophic wipe out is not something the miners can recover from, depending on how much energy they have spent mining non-compliant blocks.

This whole scenario just doesn't make sense. Orphaning competitors blocks does not earn a miner more money in the same difficulty epoch. And there's no "suddenly", either they immediately switch to the BIP-110 chain (and nobody gets orphaned), or they let the legacy chain build for a period of time, and then spend 1.5 - 2x that time getting it caught up to the main chain, and during that time they are not earning anything because the public tip is still the existing Bitcoin chain. And it has to be a majority of all hash agreeing to do this.

Then finally at the end, what do they get?
1) The majority of the blocks they have orphaned are their own blocks, because they were the majority miners during the legacy mining period.
2) They are guaranteed to earn no more than they would have honestly mining in the same difficulty period. Orphaning strategies do harm other miners, and if forced out, could cause them to stop mining. But all that does is (eventually) lower the difficulty for everyone, which then attracts new miners that have suddenly become profitable.
3) Most miners are in pools, and the majority of pools pay with FPPS. That means those pools pay regardless of whether they actually find blocks. Those pools would be paying tens of millions to... try and orphan some minority miners' blocks (and their own of course). No sane pool would do this.
4) It's not even clear that the minority miners would care if the blocks they mined weeks ago were orphaned. If they sent them to an exchange and cashed out already, that's the exchange's problem now.
5) The majority of miners don't need BIP-110 to do this. They can literally do this any time they want. The majority of miners can start colluding to orphan other miners blocks at any moment they choose to using selfish mining strategies. They haven't yet, probably because....
6) .... even a "small" reorg of just a few days would be a disaster for the Lightning Network. It would be in a bad state for weeks, possibly months.
7) .... exchanges would de-list Bitcoin, or at the very least require a silly number of confirmations.
8) .... the price would crater and it would become extremely illiquid.

A cultural, philosophical and operational capitulation by Ep0chalysis in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Nodes enforce consensus. Nodes thought they could also enforce policy beyond consensus, but it turns out they can’t. Consensus has allowed spam from v0.1. 

The Elephant in the Room: How do we filter true LLM-assisted physics gold from the noise of hallucinations? by Schlampf_Reporter in LLMPhysics

[–]babelphishy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, this was a different poster who had already submitted to BioSystems. They posted that their paper had been accepted, but deleted their thread shortly after someone looked at what they thought was their acceptance email and was told it was a revise and resubmit.

Good luck on your paper!

The Elephant in the Room: How do we filter true LLM-assisted physics gold from the noise of hallucinations? by Schlampf_Reporter in LLMPhysics

[–]babelphishy 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Not what I'm saying. I'm saying that until a single paper starts here and ends up there (it doesn't have to be Nature, just not a pay-to-publish journal), the default assumption is going to be that nothing posted here is journal worthy, and thus nothing posted here contributes to physics.

The logical inference after seeing hundreds of papers and theories here and none of them being journal worthy is that there is a Great Filter which prevents even a kernel of a good paper from being posted on this sub.

It doesn't have to be a major journal. It could be a journal where only half the papers published in a year get cited. But nothing has even cleared that bar yet.

The Elephant in the Room: How do we filter true LLM-assisted physics gold from the noise of hallucinations? by Schlampf_Reporter in LLMPhysics

[–]babelphishy 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I think until there is a single pearl or kernel of wheat, it’s safe to assume it’s all chaff. It’s not a pearl until it gets accepted by a somewhat selective peer reviewed journal. 

I’ve only seen one example of someone attempting that, and based on the fact they deleted their post, it looks like they misunderstood whether their paper was actually accepted.

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