Are you just imagining that?

Sarcasm does not go easily through the internet.  You should use ""even when you think it is obvious.

Hey, nice of you to drop by. 

Replace-by-fee also would help the author of a real spam attack.  Not the "stress tests" that we had so far, that only cause annoyance to nodes and delay low-fee transactions, but a real attack that aims to delay some fraction of the legitimate traffc.

To do that, the attacker needs to continuously issue transactions with proper fees, so as to ensure that he will take most of the space in the next block.

The current average effective capacity of ~0.800 MB/block and actual traffic is ~0.400 MB/block.  If he wanted to let only 50% of that traffic to go through, for example, he would have to issue at least 0.600 MB of transactions every 10 minutes, with fees calibrated to beat all unconfirmed transactions in the pool except the top 0.200 MB.  

Obviously he would have to keep raising his fees, as legit clients raise theirs.  Currently, that means that many of his own transactions would end up stuck in the mempool too, and would be confirmed after the attack ends, costing him a lot of BTC.  With replace-by-fee, he could instead recycle those transactions during the attack, saving money.

These strange megatrades that do not move the price started maybe a week or two ago on OKCoin, then Huobi started soing that too.  Now Bitstamp too?

A few hirs ago I noticed on OKCoin that, during those spikes,a huge wall - thouands of coins - appears briefly on the ask side, at about the current market price, and is then promptly and entirely eaten.

Perhaps someone should ask the OKCoin and/or Huobi guys about those trades?

IIRC, some Chinese exchange announced a while ago that they were implementing a "shadow book" visible only to (ceertain?) clients.  Perhaps those huge volume spikes are shadow book trades, that the exchanges now started showing on the ordinary chart in order to boost their volume numbers.

Self-interest is supposed to convince all clients who care about their coins upgrade -- if the majority of the miners have decided to implement the change in the protocol, if clients are told that there will be a change, and if they are clearly warned that their software will stop working on date X, unless and until they upgrade.   

What chart are you using? As I said, on Bitstamp I see only a small $5 drop on that date, like those that happened almost every day in the preceding 2 weeks.  There was another $5 drop the next day (Sunday), and no drop on the 17th (Monday).  The big drop was on Aug 18.


How many bitcoin traders took note of that post?  

It seems that we have very different ideas about who are the "bictoin comunity" and how they think.  Regular readers of the bitcoin forums seem to think that all bitcoiners and traders are also regular readers like them, well-aware of issues and developments.  But I would be surprised if, even today, there are more than 10'000 bitcoiners who are aware of the "block size war" and have a reasonable idea of what it means.  I even bet that most bitcoiners could not tell Gavin from Luke or Peter in a police line-up.

Among those bitcoiners who do have minimal understanding of the war, I bet that many think that it is an minor technical question that will be satisfactorily resolved, like all previous issues were, and therefore it is not something that they have to understand further.


FUD indeed...  That obviously fake email was a low point in certain party's struggle for absolute power over Bitcoin...

The only difference is whether the rules before the fork were "permissive" or "restrictive"; but that difference has no effect on what happens after the fork.  Only the relative amount of hashpower is relevant.


But (as explained in that linked post) which of these two possibilities happens does not depend on whether the fork was soft or hard, but only on whether the majority of the hashpower after the fork follows the "restrictive" or "permissive" ruleset. 

If the majority uses the "restrictive" ruleset, there is one "restrictive" chain with recurrent "permissive" side branches that get orphaned sooner or later.   This can happen even in a hard fork with blockchain voting, if the miners lied in their votes, or changed their minds afterwards.

If the majority uses the "permissive" ruleset, there are two persistent branches; the minority "restrictive" one grows more slowly at first, but it is still followed by any "restrictive" full clients.  This can happen in a soft fork with blockchain voting too, if the miners lied in their votes, or changed their minds afterwards.

If 100% of the miners use the same ruleset, of course there will be only one branch. By making changes be conditional on blockchain voting, with a large activation threshold, it is hoped that there will be such a large imbalance after the fork that the minority miners will prompty switch too, preferably before the fork.

However, in any case, clients who are running the minority version after the fork will be screwed or confused in various ways. If the split is not 0-100, even some clients who are runnng the majority version may be temporarily confused by the minority branches.   

A rule change is really safe only if all miners and all clients upgrade to the same version before the change is activated. 

As I explain in the linked post, there is no technical difference.  As the two events are usually defined, in both cases after the fork there are two versions of the rules, "permissive" and "restrictive"; and what happens next depends only on which version has the majority of the hashpower (which of course may change after the fork, and in principle could even go back and forth several times). 

The system's evolution does not depend at all on which rules were in force before the fork (i.e. whether the fork was "hard"or "soft").  The only way to make the fork "safe" is for all miners to adopt the same version, whatever that is, before the change is activated.  If that is not possible, one must hope for a strong majority, for either version, when the fork happens; so that the minority is motivated to switch too as quickly as possible.

Moreover, the soft/hard is an incomplete picture: there are changes that are neither restrictive nor permissive. In the extreme case, a "clean fork" is when the two rule-sets after the fork are totally incompatible -- no transaction or block is valid for both versions.  IMHO, the safest forks would be such clean forks, at periodic pre-scheduled dates...

Would you believe if I told you that I did not watch /Fight Club/; that, from what I have read about it, I do not feel like watching it; and that it was only a few months ago that I learned, from some forum, that Zerohedge's "Tyler Durden" borrowed his pseudonym from a character in that movie?

I stand corrected. But it is Blockstream who is "selling" soft forks as if they were completely safe and different from hard forks, even though there is no technical diffrerence between them -- especially since the possibility of miners cheating, hiding, or changing their mind about their preferences, before and after the fork, is no longer just a theoretical possibility.

Yes, "hard forks are terrible things" is part of the FUD that Blockstream created. 

Maybe because they invented the concept of  "soft fork", namely a change in the protocol that is deployed by the devs without the community being told about it; and that fits better with the time-honored hacker's approach to software project management. 

Are you asking about the character from the movie /Fight Club/, the ZeroHedge blogger who uses that as a pseudonym, or the poster?

You linked to a message of yours from 2015-08-15, but there was no big drop on that date.  There was just another small drop like there had been almost every day since the $296 peak on 2015-07-28.

The big drop was on 2015-08-18, and -- again -- it only brought the price to ~$230, where it was before the "Greek crisis" bubble.  The most obvious and convincing explanation is that, with the resolution of the Greek crisis, people finally realized that the Greek would NOT be buying billions of bitcoins. 

Of course the Blockstream bootlickers blamed that drop on the XT schism.  Since the schism had been developing for months, that was easy -- pick any random event in that story, and blame the drop on that event.

By the way, all this fuss abut the blocksize limit was ENTIRELY the fault of Blockstream and their idiotic plans for the "fee market".  If they had any sense, they would have implemented the raise in 2014 to be activated in 2016, with a two-line patch, as Satoshi proposed; and reminded everybody, a month before the activation, that very old versions of the software would stop working, so people had better upgrade or add the same patch to their software.  Then the hard fork would be a non-event and NOTHING bad would happen from it.

Thanks for the comment... but I would not be qualified to write such a paper, of course. That is a social sciences / psychology / anthropology topic...

By the way, one of the most interesting Scaling conference videos that I saw was the one by Gabriella Coleman. You must have seen that in person, I suppose.  She would be the person to write that paper -- if she could be conviced to spend a year or two studying the bitcoin community...

But I think that, as you suggest, bitcoin will need some governmance entity.  A good example may be the General Conference on Weights and Measures, that governs the metric system --- a much more critical "protocol" than bitcoin.  It has representatives from all countries, typically designated by the local standards bodies.  The delegates propose "BIP"s, they debate and ponder, and then eventually decide on "forks" by vote.  It has no legal power, but it has considerable moral power; countries and companies will promptly accept its decisions, because "a bad standard is always better than no standard".   

Other similar examples are IUPAC (for chemical nomenclature), the UNICODE consortium, ISO, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (that defines the UTC leap seconds), etc.

For definiteness, consider postponing the next halving by 2 years, but then reducing the halving interval to 2 years instead of 4, so that the total issuance woudl still be ~21 M BTC. 

That change would means something like 150 million USD of extra revenue over 2 years to a majority mining cartel. (Too lazt to check the number now, but it is that order of magnitude.) That obviously could make the difference beween getting rich or going bankrupt,

So, the motivation for the miners would be very strong.  All other players would be against that change in principle, because the would see little gain (or some loss) for them at various time scales, and "the protocol is sacred".  But, if the change were to happen, they would not be directly harmed, and could live with it.

Would the cartel be able to impose that change on the rest of the community?  I believe that it would.  The "self-interest" argument works better the other way: why would the "economic majority" crash the price and lose all their investment, by trying to fight the cartel?  In order to protect their investment, most holders and companies would pretend to approve the change, and would tell everybody that it was "good for bitcoin"...

Then the price should be zero right now, because the tot 4 Chinese miners can do a coup (e.g. by imposition of the Chinese government). 

Why is it not zero? Because bitcoiners have rationalized that problem away, claiming that it is the "economic majority" that matters and that everybody would commit financial seppuku if the miners (rather than the Core devs) tried to change the protocol in any way, therefore the miners will never do it.

Neither of those claims is grounded in evidence or common sense.  What is more likely is that a subtle change in protocol imposed by the miners (such as a postponement of the next halving, without changing the 21 M cap) would be rationalized as "harmless" or even "good for bitcoin"; and the "economic majority" would just submit to it.  (BIP100 is going that way: it says that the Core devs should "decide" the blocksize issue by handing over the decision to the miners. No wonder that the miners like it...)


Did it? When was that?  How big was the crash?

I recall that there was much affliction among the people in the know, but BitFury promptly removed themselves from GHash.io and the problem was quickly forgotten.

Looking at the 1d charts, I see a bubble from ~230 to ~290 that started when many bitcoiners believed that the Greek would rush to bitcoin as a way to escape devaluation /  confiscation / currency controls / etc.  That bubble neatly and completely deflated, bringing the price back to ~230, when the crisis got resolved and it became clear that the Greek wanted euros, not bitcoins.

I bet that very few bitcoiners -- probably less than 50'000 -- are aware of the block size war, and even fewer understand the issue and/or see it as a risk factor for the price of bitcoin.  I bet that the proportion is even smaller among the day traders who set the price.  (How many of the gold fund speculators are aware of the state of the gold mining and recovery industries?)

That is the conventional argument that is used to dismiss that problem.  It is like the Captain "defeating" a sailor''s mutiny by taking off in a small lifeboat and declaring it to be "the real ship"...

The Core developers would have to convince all bitcoin users to get into that small boat with them and discard the coins that they have on the carte's branch of the chain. Good luck on that...