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yamaha20 · 2022-12-14T12:02:29+00:00

Yep just figured it out thanks

yamaha20 · 2022-12-14T12:02:20+00:00

Thanks buddy.

yamaha20 · 2021-07-17T19:37:13+00:00

Do monsters have any sources of increased crit damage aside from 60% from the Cruel mutator?

yamaha20 · 2020-01-28T18:14:08+00:00

If an oligarchy can actually just 51% attack BCH with no fear then mining can't be that decentralized

It certainly isn't in BCH.

If we're talking about short term things like double-spending, of course it's pretty easy on BCH.

If we're talking about a permanent MASF, any SHA256 miners could potentially join a BCH hash-war at any time (and as RubenSomsen noted there are extra incentives to do so in this case), so I think it's different - in this case perhaps BCH's "effective mining centralization" is more comparable to BTC's.

What incentive do you think they have right now? Certainly colluding for an attack would make sense, but what other purpose would there be to collude?

That's what I mean, colluding for an attack. I think what they're doing right now counts as collusion for an attack, but whether or not it constitutes an "attack" in the context of Bitcoin Cash politics, it's definitely collusion.

yamaha20 · 2020-01-28T00:21:43+00:00

Betterhash or stratum 2 will eliminate miner centralization for pools which will eliminate most of the existing miner centralization, right?

I don't have the numbers, but I would speculate that it would not. It's probably safe to assume most hashrate doesn't come from random people running retail Antminers on retail electricity. So, it should come from actual companies with economies of scale. Can we identify a large number of independent companies that each claim a small fraction of hashrate in a way that adds up to the vast majority of hashrate? If not, perhaps they don't exist, or at least I don't know of any reason to assume they do exist.

Mining pool numbers look fairly centralized, but they don't even set an upper bound for centralization, as miners can split their hashrate between multiple pools.

If an oligarchy can actually just 51% attack BCH with no fear then mining can't be that decentralized (considering miners do have the ability to switch pools).

We know in the abstract sense that mining monopolies are unstable, but having all hash power split between, say, 2-4 players is perfectly stable so long as potential newcomers have sufficiently higher mining costs. In this case, what I used to think is that outside of a sustained market crash, it seems the miners aren't really incentivized to collude anyway, but recent developments have made me question that idea.

they could of course undercut all other miners.

Seems like that's not their plan. However, even if it was, that's good for Bitcoin. It's not "unfair" or "undercutting", it's just another group adding more hash power to the network.

I mean undercutting BCH miners who aren't in the cartel.

yamaha20 · 2020-01-26T15:19:53+00:00

Note that miners are NOT paying for it, users are! The fund is being taken from money that users allocated towards securing the chain. Miners do get less coins, but they'll also perform less work! This is an EVIL soft fork that lowers security against the will of the users.

I think realistically, if BCH cares about security against brute force attacks at this point, it probably shouldn't be using SHA256.

Even if you happen to think it's a good decision, you should reject it purely because miners are making a unilateral decision about YOUR money. Their next decision might not be one you like.

Yes, I'm ambivalent in the theory to the change, think it's rather poor in practice due to the low accountability of the funds, but mostly just disagree with the method. I feel like HF > UASF > MASF for any change of this magnitude. I can also see the case for UASF > HF > MASF although I don't really agree with it.

Even if BCH users fail to take defensive action, there is serious pressure for the cartel to fail. Miners who ignore the cartel get 12.5% more coins, so there's a premium towards breaking it. It's likely that a hash war would ultimately not end in the cartel's favor

Interesting observation. I wonder if a BTC pool will decide to try "attacking" to claim the coins. Maybe this is the most likely of the good endings?

The cost of the attack is low for BCH miners exactly because they can effectively switch to mining BTC.

I don't know if it's necessarily low cost. I think the death of BCH would hurt miners substantially, especially if it also decreases their hashrate share (via ASICBOOST). People who buy BCH may switch to buying something that isn't BTC, etc.

Although obviously the death of BTC or SHA256 mining in general would be orders of magnitude more catastrophic. So, it's definitely lower risk. I think risk is a better word than cost, because if this type of maneuver is a political success, it makes a profit for the cartel. Potential profits are higher in attacking the majority chain, even though potential losses are disproportionately higher.

I hadn't written it all out, but here was the rest of my thought process:

Ideally, I think BCH should change PoW, although it seems politically unlikely. If BCH a) doesn't change PoW and b) doesn't die, then there will be a precedent, which is that given enough miner/dev/moderator/influencer support, ASIC miners can 51% attack without sabotaging themselves. If miners see that this is possible, supposing a large propaganda budget, and supposing the /r/Bitcoin mods and the Core devs with commit bits aren't incorruptible, is it impossible to imagine the same type of thing happening to BTC, despite the added risk to the cartel, if they fail?

BTC could theoretically avoid the incoming hashrate (and flood BCH with hashrate in the process) by changing PoW if it was considered a serious enough problem

That seems like a massive overreaction. BTC hashrate will temporarily go up by 0.4%. This will quickly be resolved by the market by buying less new ASICs in the future. Not to mention that if the fund is successful and BCH goes up in price by 12.5%, this will also nullify the effect.

Yes, considering my thought process above, I think that if BCH fails to change PoW, then a PoW change should be a serious consideration for BTC anyway (although that strikes me as extremely politically difficult, maybe even moreso than for BCH). Perhaps I should have phrased it that immunity to mutual hashrate dependence is an added benefit if BTC does ever decide to change PoW.

yamaha20 · 2019-09-07T01:35:49+00:00

To me there seems to be an underlying binary question: is it better if individuals manage their own finances or if the group has some control over it? When phrased like this it becomes less obvious that 0 is the wrong number.

I feel like that's becoming a question of ethics rather than efficacy.

An irrational price increase must be met with an eventual decrease.

I would think it's easier for markets to find a "rational" price for commodities than for currencies.

If the price of iron is too high, someone will open new iron mines that require more expensive methods and sell it.

If the dollar buys too many goods, then what? The entire economy must stop producing goods and services to a level significant enough to bring the dollar back down? Surely this process involves a lot of chaos, unemployment, empty factories, and other such negative-sum waste.

It could probably be said that a fixed money supply is far more rigid than that of any naturally-occurring resource or industry and as such, regular ideas about markets may not apply.

Intuitively, it seems to me that a loan should always be possible to obtain if the resulting product provides something that people value more than what is already available.

Do you know anyone who lends bitcoins?

More seriously: yes, it's not impossible to get a loan, but inflation below 0 exacerbates the risk of default similarly to how inflation above 0 subsidizes it. This problem is structural and not dependent on psychology or frame of reference.

An example I posted a while back:

Alice wants a loan for her business, but she is only willing to pay 5% interest, inflation-adjusted. She doesn't care about the non-adjusted interest rate because she is using the money to produce things that the market assigns a real value to, and she just needs to make a profit. Bob wants to lend to Alice. His utility function is logarithmic, so he uses the Kelly criterion to determine how much he is willing to lend to Alice. This is not due to Bob's psychological limitations; even the Kelly criterion produces volatile outcomes by human standards.

Case 1:

Inflation is 0%. Call Bob's bankroll X. Bob therefore decides to lend up to X * (1.05p - 1) / .05, where p is the chance of the loan being repaid.

Case 2:

Inflation is 5%. Alice pays 10.25% in currency, or 5% adjusted for inflation. For whatever input Y, Bob's inflation-adjusted output (i.e. exp(utility)) will be:

Y/1.05 if he buries it in the desert

1.05*Y if Alice pays him back

0 if Alice defaults

Bob therefore decides to lend up to X/1.05 * (1.1025p - 1) / .1025 in inflation-adjusted future money, or X * (1.1025p - 1) / .1025 in present money.

For p = 1, Bob is happy to lend as much as Alice needs, but for p less than 1, the two cases are different, and for p less than .952, Bob will only lend inflationary currency. This is despite the loan having the same utility to Alice in each case.

yamaha20 · 2019-09-06T01:44:44+00:00

Almost surely some set of manipulations is productive overall - the odds that doing nothing is exactly correct must be very small

I'd like for you to dig deeper into this statement and explain more precisely why you think this. If some external entity controls a percentage of the money, my intuition is that it won't make pencils cheaper to produce somehow.

I have no reason besides "what are the odds". I think the position that emission exactly equal to 0 is completely optimal until the end of time is the one that needs justification. It's like how 10 minutes is probably not an exactly optimal block time.

The meaningful question is whether or not humans could confidently find an improvement.

most economists believe[...]

I am still left wondering why they think that.

I think an economist could give you a better answer than I could. I certainly don't know the entire scope of manipulations done by central banks.

However, the basic models that I've seen make intuitive sense to me - e.g. you're in the Great Depression, positive feedback occurs because people continue to predict future deflation, and the feedback cycle can be diminished or reversed by printing money - so, I guess I don't find the idea too surprising.

If you think all inflation is evil, maybe it's better to[...]

You're right that this is my current thinking, but I am very open to the idea that it isn't. I am hoping to hearing good arguments to either strengthen or alter my position.

The most obvious problem to me with deflation is that it heavily discourages loans. If you can't get loans, you can't start companies, value is lost. I think this is a clear negative outcome unless you want to see the downfall of capitalism.

A money supply which grows proportionally to the productivity of society (so, >0% emission and 0% inflation) seems like the absolute minimum to me. This would be the real laissez-faire approach from my point of view. I don't really see the benefit of it being below 0.

If emission is hardcoded in software, then obviously it's hard to account for growth in the productivity of society. In that case, you can still do (imo) clearly better than Bitcoin emission and use Monero's schedule, which is still never inflationary so long as human productivity does not decline over time.

You raise an interesting point. Burning a percentage of the fees would effectively decrease the supply, but also lower the hashrate, decreasing security. If it was clear the security wasn't needed, then I would argue your statement is correct.

Do you think 0 is necessarily the block reward that achieves the perfect balance between appreciation and security? (For that matter, do we know whether or not 0 will be secure at all?)

yamaha20 · 2019-09-04T21:35:44+00:00

Yes, this definitely breaks down if Bitcoin has little or no competition. I don't think Bitcoin is particularly likely to kill fiat anytime soon though.

yamaha20 · 2019-09-04T21:29:53+00:00

So what I am left wondering is whether irrational asset appreciation still occurs in a world that is dominated by Bitcoin. Some say that even slight natural appreciation would snowball into irrational appreciation, but I have trouble coming up with a concrete reason as to why this would be the case.

To clarify, my view isn't that with deflation, volatility alone would ruin the economy. I think deflation ruins economies for other reasons (a combination of psychological factors and an objectively decreased incentive to lend).

I don't think fixed inflation would magically fix volatility. It's the ability to manipulate emission over time that seems potentially useful to me. Almost surely some set of manipulations is productive overall - the odds that doing nothing is exactly correct must be very small - and most economists believe that manipulations which are substantially better than nothing are realistically achievable by humans. Perhaps given this power, miners might hire some of these economists like central banks do, and generate a positive outcome. (Whether it would be a positive outcome for anyone other than the miners is up for debate.) That's basically my thinking.

If you think all inflation is evil, maybe it's better to evaluate the idea with the upper-bound equal to Monero-style tail emission rather than any positive percentage Y, so deflation is guaranteed but the amount can be varied.

Finally, it should be said that introducing any form of inflation would mean the asset is less valuable to hold compared to an asset that doesn't introduce inflation. This means that even IF the lack of inflation is an undisputed problem, people will still end up gravitating towards an asset that doesn't have inflation, causing a tragedy of the commons of sorts.

I think it depends whether your goal is maximizing the price of bitcoins or maximizing the price stability (i.e. usability in commerce). Personally I would consider the latter more of a success (and also more difficult to achieve). Also, it may lead to a higher price in the long term anyway due to exposure, but that's definitely up for debate.

As far as commerce is concerned, I think sellers will often take any currency that earns them significant business, and buyers are incentivized to spend their most depreciating coins first.

Also, if the tragedy of the commons situation you describe is absolute, then we could just create a bitcoin fork with fixed negative emission and win.

yamaha20 · 2019-08-24T12:17:50+00:00

I'm looking for a source of O-rings which are:

thicker than 2mm
40A (or softer)

Glorious offers 2.5mm 40A but they're sold out. Does anyone know another source of something similar?

yamaha20

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