Alex Mizrahi [ARCHIVE]

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🗓️ Active from 2014-04-07 to 2018-05-18
💬 Posted a total of 50 messages
📚 Participated in the following categories: Bitcoin-development, bitcoin-dev
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2023-06-07 17:59:29

- reply

📅 Original date posted:2017-04-07
📝 Original message:> Can you please not forget to supply us more details on the claims made
> regarding the reverse engineering of the Asic chip?
>
> It is absolutely crucial that we get these independently verified ASAP.
>
Bitmain confirmed that their chips support ASICBOOST and it can be used for
mining:
https://blog.bitmain.com/en/regarding-recent-allegations-smear-campaigns/
They claim that they don't use it on mainnet, but that claim cannot be
verified. it is possible to do covert ASICBOOST in a 100% covert manner.
(It can be done without "transaction reordering" so it's not worth
analyzing blocks etc.)
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2023-06-07 17:59:22

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📅 Original date posted:2017-04-06
📝 Original message:> Agreed! There's no benefit to Bitcoin for having it - one way or the other
> miners are going to destroy ~12BTC/block worth of energy. Meanwhile it
> appears
> to have lead to something like a year of stupid political bullshit based
> on a
> secret advantage - there's no reason to invite a repeat of this episode.
But is it even possible to completely remove ASICBOOST optimization
possibility?
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2023-06-07 17:59:20

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📅 Original date posted:2017-04-06
📝 Original message:> Ethically, this situation has some similarities to the DAO fork.
There are no similarities.
The DAO fork was against the principles of cryptocurrencies: a change of
the ledger done in violation of pre-agreed rules. The whole point of
cryptocurrency is to avoid shit like that. (E.g. a central banker changing
ledger as he wants.)
Greg's proposal is in line with the principles of cryptocurrencies:
PoW-based cryptocurrency can work only if there is a competition between
miners, which requires all miners to have equal access to the technology.
The notion that Bitmain is entitled to future profits is completely
ridiculous. Every investment has a risk, and doing unusual stuff which
boosts your profits is associated with increased risk. Developers just need
to make sure all miners are on equal grounds, as that's the whole point of
the protocol. If Bitmain loses their profits because of that it's really
just Bitmain's problem.
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2023-06-07 17:59:20

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📅 Original date posted:2017-04-06
📝 Original message:> Ethically, this situation has some similarities to the DAO fork.
Much better analogy:
1. An ISV make software which makes use of an undocumented OS feature.
2. That feature is no longer present in the next OS release.
3. ISV suffers losses because its software cannot work under new OS, and
thus people stop buying it.
I think 99% of programmers would agree that this loss was inflicted by a
bad decision of ISV, and not by OS vendor changing OS internals. Relying on
undocumented features is something you do on your own risk.
I think it is ethically unambiguous to everyone who isn't on Bitmain's
payroll.
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2023-06-07 17:52:08

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📅 Original date posted:2016-08-02
📝 Original message:>
> I would love to see an RFC-style standard "multiple-colored-coin-protocol"
> written by reps from all of the major protocols and that meta-merges the
> features of these implementations
>
We actually tried to do that in 2014-2015, but that effort have failed...
Nobody was really interested in collaboration, each company only cared
about it's own product.
Especially Colu, they asked everyone for requirements, and then developed a
new protocol completely on their own without taking anyone's input.
I'm not sure that merging the protocols makes sense, as some protocols
value simplicity, and a combined protocol cannot have this feature.
I don't think there is much interest in a merged colored coin protocol now.
Colu is moving away from colored coins, as far as I can tell.
CoinSpark is now doing MultiChain closed-source private blockchain.
CoinPrism also seems to be largely disinterested in colored coins.
We (ChromaWay) won't mind replacing EPOBC with something better, our
software could always support multiple different kernels so adding a new
protocol isn't a big deal for us.
So if somebody is interested in a new protocol please ping me.
One of ideas I have is to decouple input-output mapping/multiplexing from
coloring.
So one layer will describe a mapping, e.g. "Inputs 0 and 1 should go into
outputs 0, 1 and 2".
In this case it will be possible to create more advanced protocols (e.g.
with support for 'smart contracts' and whatnot) while also keeping them
compatible with old ones to some extent, e.g. a wallet can safely engage in
p2ptrade or CoinJoin transactions without understanding all protocols used
in a transaction.
> - in collaboration with feedback from core developers that understand the
> direction the protocol will be taking and the issues to avoid.
>
Core developers generally dislike things like colored coins, so I doubt
they are going to help.
Blockstream is developing a sidechain with user-defined assets, so I guess
they see it as the preferred way of doing things:
https://elementsproject.org/elements/asset-issuance/
> As it stands, investors have to install multiple wallets to deal with
> these varying implementations.
>
Actually this can be solved without making a new "merged protocol": one can
just implement a wallet which supports multiple protocols.
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2023-06-07 17:51:15

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📅 Original date posted:2016-06-23
📝 Original message:>
> The point I'm making is simply that to be useful, when you close a seal you
> have to be able to close it over some data, in particular, another seal.
> That's
> the key thing that makes the idea a useful construct for smart contacts,
> value
> transfer/currency systems, etc.
>
OK, your second post ("Closed Seal Sets and Truth Lists for Better Privacy
and Censorship Resistance") seems to clarify that this data is one of
arguments to the condition function.
Frankly this stuff is rather hard to follow. (Or maybe I'm dumb.)
Now I don't get scability properties. Let's consider a simplest scenario
where Alice creates some token, sends it to Bob, who sends it to Claire. So
now Claire needs to get both a proof that Alice sent it to Bob and that Bob
sent it to Claire, right? So Claire needs to verify 2 proofs, and for a
chain of N transfers one would need to verify N proofs, right?
And how it works in general:
1. Alice creates a token. To do that she constructs an unique expression
which checks her signature and signs a message "This token has such and
such meaning and its ownership originally associated with seal <hash of the
expression>" with her PGP key.
2. To transfer this token to Bob, she asks Bob for his auth expression and
sends a seal oracle a message (Alice_expression (Bob_expression .
signature)) where signatures is constructed in such a way that it evaluates
as true. Oracle stores this in a map: Alice_expression -> (Bob_expression .
signatures)
3. Bob sends token to Claire in a same way: (Bob_expression
(Claire_expression . signature))
4. Now Claire asks if Alice_expression->(Bob_expression . _) and
Bob_expression->(Claire_expression . _) are in oracle's map. She might
trust the oracle to verify signatures, but oracle doesn't understand token
semantics. Thus she needs to check if these entries were added.
If I understand correctly, Alice_expression->(Bob_expression . _) record
can be communicated in just 3 * size_of_hash_digest bytes.
So this seems to have rather bad scalability even with trusted oracles, am
I missing something?
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2023-06-07 15:35:58

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📅 Original date posted:2015-05-31
📝 Original message:> That orphan rate increase will go to whoever is producing the 20MB blocks,
> NOT you.
>
This depends on how miners are connected.
E.g. suppose there are three miners, A and B have fast connectivity between
then, and C has a slow network.
Suppose that A miners a block and B receives it in 1 second. C receives it
in 6 seconds.
This means that blocks mined by C during these ~5 seconds will be orphaned
because B gets A's block first.
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2023-06-07 15:35:58

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📅 Original date posted:2015-05-31
📝 Original message:>
> Yes, if you are on a slow network then you are at a (slight) disadvantage.
> So?
>
Chun mentioned that his pool is on a slow network, and thus bigger blocks
give it an disadvantage. (Orphan rate is proportional to block size.)
You said that no, on contrary those who make big blocks have a disadvantage.
And now you say that yes, this disadvantage exist.
Did you just lie to Chun?
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2023-06-07 15:34:53

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📅 Original date posted:2015-05-13
📝 Original message:Let's consider a concrete example:
1. User wants to accept Bitcoin payments, as his customers want this.
2. He downloads a recent version of Bitcoin Core, checks hashes and so on.
(Maybe even builds from source.)
3. Let's it to sync for several hours or days.
4. After wallet is synced, he gives his address to customer.
5. Customer pays.
6. User waits 10 confirmations and ships the goods. (Suppose it's something
very expensive.)
7. Some time later, user wants to convert some of his bitcoins to dollars.
He sends his bitcoins to an exchange but they never arrive.
He tries to investigate, and after some time discovers that his router (or
his ISP's router) was hijacked. His Bitcoin node couldn't connect to any of
the legitimate nodes, and thus got a complete fake chain from the attacker.
Bitcoins he received were totally fake.
Bitcoin Core did a shitty job and confirmed some fake transactions.
User doesn't care that *if *his network was not impaired, Bitcoin Core *would
have *worked properly.
The main duty of Bitcoin Core is to check whether transactions are
confirmed, and if it can be fooled by a simple router hack, then it does
its job poorly.
If you don't see it being a problem, you should't be allowed to develop
anything security-related.
If a node is connected to 99 dishonest nodes and 1 honest node, it can
> still sync with the main network.
>
Yes, it is good against Sybil attack, but not good against a network-level
attack.
Attack on user's routers is a very realistic, plausible attack.
Imagine if SSL could be hacked by hacking a router, would people still use
it?
Fucking no.
> A 3 month reversal would be devastating, so the checkpoint isn't adding
> much extra security.
>
WIthout checkpoints an attacker could prepare a fork for $10.
With checkpoints, it would cost him at least $1000, but more likely upwards
of $100000.
That's quite a difference, no?
I do not care what do you think about the reasons why checkpoints were
added, but it is a fact that they make the attack scenario I describe above
hard to impossible.
Without checkpoints, you could perform this attack using a laptop.
With checkpoints, you need access to significant amounts of mining ASICs.
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2023-06-07 15:33:45

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📅 Original date posted:2015-05-30
📝 Original message:> Why 20 MB? Do you anticipate 20x transaction count growth in 2016?
>
> Do you anticipate linear growth?
>
It's safe to say that absolutely nobody can predict the actual growth with
any degree of an accuracy.
I believe that linear growth compares very favorably to other alternatives:
1. Exponential growth: Linear growth is better at modelling diminishing
returns, that is, risk that it grows too much is much smaller. At the same
time initially it will grow faster than reasonable exponential models.
E.g. linear year-over-year relative growth: 100% 50% 33% 25% ...10%
While exponential one which gives the same result in 10 years:
25% 25% ... 25%
This is on the same scale, but exponential starts slower than we want at
start (1.25 MB will be too little for 2016 as we already see fully filled 1
MB blocks), but goes a bit too fast in the long term. It's highly unlikely
we'll see bandwidth growing 10x each 10 years in the long term.
2. Single step increase: an obvious advantage is that linear growth gives
us time to adapt to near realities, time to change something if there is an
unwanted effects, etc. At the same a single step is not a long-term
solution.
While a slow-but-steady growth might be.
3. Adaptive solutions (e.g. limit depends on the last N blocks or something
of that nature):
The problem with them is that they are rather complex, and also:
3.1. prone to manipulation: somebody might try to push the limit if it
will favor him in future
3.2. possibility of a positive feedback loop.
3.3. possibility of an unhealthy game-theoretic dynamics
The main problem is that we do not understand game theoretic aspects of
bitcoin mining in presence of various real-world factors such as block
propagation delays. Thus we can't design a proper adaptive solution.
There is no perfect solution to this problem as we cannot predict the
future and our understanding is limited.
But among the 5 alternatives (linear, exponential, single step, adaptive,
no limit), linear seems to be the best option at this point as it's both
quite safe and doesn't stunt growth too much.
> bitcoin is really really small right now, any sign of real adoption could
make it grow 100x or even more in a matter of weeks.
This is certainly possible, but the thing is:
1) this can't be predicted;
2) this will be a serious problem for many bitcoind installations;
3) it's not necessarily a healthy thing, perhaps it will grow 100x in a
matter of weeks, and then will go to zero in matter of weeks as well.
So I don't think that sudden growth spurts is something we should take into
account on the planning stage. If anything we'd like to prevent them from
happening, slow growth is usually better.
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2023-06-07 15:33:44

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📅 Original date posted:2015-05-30
📝 Original message:> Why 2 MB ?
>
Why 20 MB? Do you anticipate 20x transaction count growth in 2016?
Why not grow it by 1 MB per year?
This is a safer option, I don't think that anybody claims that 2 MB blocks
will be a problem.
And in 10 years when we get to 10 MB we'll get more evidence as to whether
network can handle 10 MB blocks.
So this might be a solution which would satisfy both sides:
* people who are concerned about block size growth will have an
opportunity to stop it before it grows too much (e.g. with a soft fork),
* while people who want bigger blocks will get an equivalent of 25% per
year growth within the first 10 years, which isn't bad, is it?
So far I haven't heard any valid arguments against linear growth.
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2023-06-07 15:33:22

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📅 Original date posted:2015-05-07
📝 Original message:Just to add to the noise, did you consider linear growth?
Unlike exponential growth, it approximates diminishing returns (i.e. tech
advances become slower with time). And unlike single step, it will give
people time to adapt to new realities.
E.g. 2 MB in 2016, 3 MB in 2017 and so on.
So in 20 years we'll get to 20 MB which "ought to be enough for anybody".
But if miners will find 20 MB blocks too overwhelming, they can limit it
through soft work, based on actual data.
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2023-06-07 15:30:13

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📅 Original date posted:2015-02-12
📝 Original message:> "The approach" is how Bitcoin has always worked.
>
Mike, you're making "it worked before, and thus it will work in future"
kind of an argument.
It is an extremely shitty kind of an argument. And it can be used to
justify any kind of bullshit.
E.g. any scamcoin which haven't yet collapsed will work forever.
As I mentioned, it depends on scale. Highly sophisticated attacks are only
feasible when scale is sufficiently big.
I.e. when you have millions of dollars transacted each day it is one thing,
but if you process billions of dollars, it becomes a whole another matter.
The best way to profit from zero-confirmation payment disruption is through
derivatives: short-sell Bitcoin while performing this attack. But this kind
of an attack depends on a number of conditions:
1. highly liquid and reliable derivative market
2. sufficiently stable exchange rate
3. significant attack impact: lots of merchants relying on
zero-confirmation payments, and lots of customers paying this way
4. significant amounts of capital available to the attacker
These conditions are not yet met, and were never met in the Bitcoin's
history so far.
This is why I wrote "5 years from now", I believe that we might reach those
conditions around that time.
Direct impact of an attack might actually be low (but even if it is just
0.1%, 0.1% of 1 billion is 10 million, which isn't bad), but attacker might
profit from the panic it causes.
Note that I'm talking about situation where Bitcoin-aware PoS solutions are
deployed on a big scale, so cost of upgrade might be huge.
So anyway, in my opinion, it is actually great that Bitcoin is still
relatively small: we have an opportunity to analyze and improve things.
But you seem to be hostile to people who do that (and who do not share your
opinion), which is kinda uncool.
Also, you do not bother to back your intuition with rigorous reasoning,
while also attacking people who offer alternatives with non-rigorous
slipper-slope kind of arguments. Which is doubly uncool.
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2023-06-07 15:30:11

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📅 Original date posted:2015-02-12
📝 Original message:> Miners are *not* incentivised to earn the most money in the next block
> possible. They are incentivised to maximise their return on investment.
>
This would be right if you assume that all Bitcoin miners act as a single
entity. In that case it is true that that entity's goal is to maximize
overall ROI.
But each miner makes decisions on his own. Are you familiar with a concept
of Nash equilibrium, prisoner's dilemma, etc?
The fact that nobody is using this kind of a behavior right now doesn't
mean that we can rely on it.
For example, Peercoin was horribly broken in 6 months after its release
(e.g. people reported that they are able to generate 50 consecutive blocks
simply by bringing a cold wallet online) and yet nobody bothered to exploit
it, and it managed to acquire non-negligible "market cap".
So we have an empiric evidence that proof-of-stake miners are motivated to
keep network secure. So, maybe, we should switch to proof-of-stake, if it
was demonstrated that it is secure?
There are good reasons to not switch to proof-of-stake. Particularly, the
kind which is used in Peercoin is not game-theoretically sound. So even if
it works right now, it can fail in a big way once attackers will really get
around to it. An attack requires significant knowledge, effort and,
possibly, capital, so it might be only feasible on a certain scale.
So, well, anyway, suppose Peter Todd is the only person interested in
maintaining replace-by-fee patches right now, and you can talk him into
abandoning them.
OK, perhaps zero-confirmation payments will be de-facto secure for a couple
of years. And thus a lot of merchants will rely on zero-confirmation
payments protected by nothing but a belief in honest miners, as it is damn
convenient.
But, let's say, 5 years from now, some faction of miners who own
soon-to-be-obsolete equipment will decide to boost their profits with a
replace-by-fee pool and a corresponding wallet. They can market it as "1 of
10 hamburgers are free" if they have 10% of the total hashpower.
So would you take a responsibility for pushing the approach which isn't
game-theoretically sound?
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2023-06-07 15:30:08

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📅 Original date posted:2015-02-12
📝 Original message:> To remain useful as border router, the replace-by-fee patched core should
> only relay double spend if it actually replaces an earlier transaction, as
> otherwise the replace logic that is according to your commit more than just
> fee comparison, would have to be replicated in the proprietary stack and
> mempool might get out of sync with that of the border router.
>
Why don't you use getrawmempool RPC call to synchronize mempool contents?
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2023-06-07 15:27:05

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📅 Original date posted:2014-11-03
📝 Original message:> For those following this thread, we have now written a paper
> describing the side-chains, 2-way pegs and compact SPV proofs.
> (With additional authors Andrew Poelstra & Andrew Miller).
>
> http://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf
Haven't seen any material discussion of this paper in this mailing list, so
I'll start.
(Otherwise, I've seen Peter Todd's reaction on reddit.)
This paper fails to demonstrate that sidechains are anything more than a
wishful thinking.
It can be distilled down to this:
"We want such and such features, hence we'll use DMMS, the same thing
Bitcoin uses, thus it will be secure!"
Um, no.
Alt-coins also use DMMS, but aren't as secure as Bitcoin.
So DMMS does not work by itself, it is a mechanism to secure a blockchain
using economic incentives.
The sidechains paper does not mention this, as far as I can tell.
In my opinion, this is not acceptable. If you're making a proposal, you
need to describe what conditions are required for it to work.
Authors are clearly aware of the problem and mention it in section 6
"Future directions" 6.1. "Hashpower attack resistance".
The problem is they do not make it clear that the proposal just makes no
sense until this is solved.
In the discussions on reddit I've noticed that pretty much everybody
believes that release of sidechains paper implies that the proposal is
complete and now we are just waiting the implementation.
It doesn't help that the paper itself tries to sweep the problem under the
rug and has misleading statements.
Particularly, I'm talking about section "4.2. Fraudulent transfers":
"Reorganisations of arbitrary depth are in principle possible, which could
allow an attacker to
completely transfer coins between sidechains before causing a
reorganisation longer than the contest
period on the sending chain to undo its half of the transfer. ... If the
attacker is allowed to return the transferred coins to the original
chain, he would increase the number of coins in his possession at the
expense of other users of the sidechain.
Before discussing how to handle this, we observe that this risk can be made
arbitrarily small by
simply increasing the contest period for transfers."
Wow, really? Is this risk stochastic?
The first sentence implies that attacker is able to cause a reorganization
of an arbitrary depth, but the rest of the section implies that
reorganizations are a naturally occurring phenomenon.
All in all, I find this paper really disappointing. It's going to be
influential (9 co-authors, many of which are regarded as Bitcoin core
developers, must be good!) and hyped, and thus might focus research on an
area which is fundamentally flawed.
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2023-06-07 15:27:05

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📅 Original date posted:2014-11-03
📝 Original message:> From the introduction "[...]Because signers prove computational work,
> rather than proving secret knowledge as
> is typical for digital signatures, we refer to them as miners. To
> achieve stable consensus on the
> blockchain history, economic incentives are provided where miners are
> rewarded with fees and
> subsidies in the form of coins that are valuable only if the miners
> form a shared valid history,
> incentivising them to behave honestly.[...]"
>
This isn't applicable in case of sidechains: anybody with sufficient
hashpower will be able to unlock a locked coin on the parent chain by
producing an SPV proof.
"Only if the miners form a shared valid history" isn't a requirement here,
as miner will get bitcoins which aren't in any way connect to sidechain he
have wrecked. Thus there is no incentive to behave honestly.
Thus sidechains, in principle, reward their miners
>
with the same Bitcoin will use in the future: only transaction fees.
> Since some people claim that won't be enough
Whether it is enough depends on a variety of factors, including existence
of other chains miner can mine.
You cannot assume that it is the same situation as with a simple
single-chain model.
E.g. imagine 1000 BTC were moved to a sidechain. Miners can keep mining
bitcoins as usual, and in parallel work on an SPV proof to claim these 1000
BTC. (I assume that merged-mining is allowed.)
In this case the amount of fees which miners could collect by honest mining
on the sidechain is irrelevant, as long as it is smaller than 1000 BTC.
This is quite different from attacks which can be performed on vanilla
Bitcoin (see below), so I don't think you can say that the security model
is the same.
Also says "Given our assumption that p > q, the probability drops
>
exponentially as the number of blocks the
> attacker has to catch up with increases."
>
Yes, but that doesn't apply to reorganizations which attacker might cause
intentionally.
Hence I think it was disingenuous to include these two very different
treats into one section:
it sounds like you claim that attacker-induced reorganizations are
unlikely, while it isn't the case.
So the longer the contest period is, the harder it is to succeed with
> a fraudulent transfer.
>
Yes, but "harder" isn't same as "unlikely".
Another problem with this section is that it only mentions reorganizations.
But a fraudulent transfer can happen without a reorganization, as an
attacker can produce an SPV proof which is totally fake. So this is not
similar to double-spending, attacker doesn't need to own coins to perform
an attack.
> I hope this clarifies our assumptions.
>
Yep, thanks. It looks like you assume that sidechain security will be
similar to Bitcoin security in the long term.
Now quite the assumptions I've been looking for, but OK...
I'm sorry for the harsh tone, but I just find it hilarious that people who
explained that proof-of-stake is not going to work because an attacker
might collect everybody's past signing keys to rewrite the whole history
(I'm referring to this: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf )
didn't bother to mention that miners can collude to wreck a sidechain and
get an awesome reward, basically for free.
something something the mote in thy brother's eye something something
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2023-06-07 15:27:00

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📅 Original date posted:2014-10-28
📝 Original message:> This thread is, in my opinion, a waste of time. It's yet again
> another perennial bikeshedding proposal brought up many times since at
> least 2011, suggesting random changes for
> non-existing(/not-yet-existing) issues.
>
> There is a lot more complexity to the system than the subsidy schedule.
>
Well, the main question is what makes Bitcoin secure.
It is secured by proofs of work which are produced by miners.
Miners have economic incentives to play by the rules; in simple terms, that
is more profitable than performing attacks.
So the question is, why and when it works? It would be nice to know the
boundaries, no?
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2023-06-07 15:26:48

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📅 Original date posted:2014-10-25
📝 Original message:> For the sake of argument, lets assume that somehow (quite unlikely)
Why is it unlikely? Do you believe that the cost of electricity cannot be
higher than expected mining revenue?
Or do you expect miners to keep mining when it costs them money?
> half the mining equipment gets shut off.
> The amount of hashes/second is such that it is currently, lets just say,
> quite
> secure against any takeover.
>
The equipment won't be simply turned off, it will be up for grabs.
Please check this web sites:
https://nicehash.com/
https://www.multipool.us/
One can use them in the same way he uses normal mining pools, and they
switch between different chains.
Say, multipool.us can switch between BTC and PPC (Peercoin).
Mining BTC will be less profitable after a halving, so a miner who is
willing to maximize his profits might use multipool to auto-switch to
something more profitable.
Which might be attack-on-Bitcoin.
E.g. if 60% of bitcoin's total hashrate is available via "multipools", one
can try to pull of a double-spending attack.
> Your document makes a long series of assumptions about how this can turn
> out
> bad with each individually is implausible, together are just fiction.
>
It sounds like you failed to grasp even basics.
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2023-06-07 15:26:46

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📅 Original date posted:2014-10-25
📝 Original message:> We had a halving, and it was a non-event.
> Is there some reason to believe next time will be different?
>
Yes.
When the market is rapidly growing, margins can be relatively high because
of limited amounts of capital being invested, or introduction of more
efficient technologies.
However, we should expect market to become more mature with time, and a
mature market will result in lower margins.
The halving can do much more damage when margins are relatively small.
Besides that, there is a difference in ecosystem maturity:
1. Back in 2012, miners weren't so focused on profits, as Bitcoin was
highly experimental: some were mining for the hell of it (it was a novelty
thing back then), others wanted to secure the network, others did it
because it was hard to obtain bitcoins by other means. But now miners are
mostly profit-motivated: they buy expensive dedicated mining equipment and
want to maximize profits. As you might know, at one point ghash.io reached
50% hashrate, and miners didn't care about it enough to switch to a
different pool.
2. Back in 2012, we didn't have multipools. Multipools automatically
switches between mining different alt-chains to maximize miners' profits.
Miners who use multipools do not care how their hashrate is used as long as
they profit off it.
Particularly, check https://nicehash.com/ -- you can easily buy hashrate to
attack a smaller alt-coin, for example.
If the halving will result in a significant hashrate drop (and we did
observe hashrate drop in 2012, although it wasn't that big), it might be
possible to buy enough hashpower to attack Bitcoin.
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2023-06-07 15:26:17

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📅 Original date posted:2014-10-06
📝 Original message:I've heard about this idea from TierNolan. Here's some quick an dirty
analysis:
Suppose the last known block claimed a large tx fee of L. A miner who owns
1/N of the total hashrate needs to choose between two strategies:
1. Mine on top of that block and win usual reward R with probability 1/N.
2. Mine on top of the previous block, trying to make two blocks in a row,
might get reward L with probability 1/N^2.
Thus for the first strategy expected payoff is R/N, and for the second the
expected pay-off is L/N^2.
Second strategy is viable if R/N < L/N^2,
R < L/N.
Now suppose the miner who claimed the unusually large reward will share it
with the next miner, for example, using coinbase output with OP_TRUE. If
that shared reward Rs is higher than L/N^2, then the next miner will be
better off mining on top of that block.
This doesn't require protocol changes(*) and can be simply incorporated
into a piece of code which decides what to do when a transaction with
unusually large fee appears. (I.e. it will automatically share the fee, and
others will recognize that). And if the biggest miner has 25% of all
hashrate, sharing 25% of your loot doesn't sound that bad.
(*) Except one problem: coinbase maturity rules won't allow one to share
the fee with the next miner.
So some protocol changes are required. But changes which affect coinbase
maturity and sharing are probably going to be simpler and smaller than what
Sergio have proposed.
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2023-06-07 15:20:02

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📅 Original date posted:2014-04-28
📝 Original message:>
> I can't remember who I saw discussing this idea. Might have been Vitalik
> Buterin?
>
Yes, he described it in an article a couple of months ago:
http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-algorithm/
but it is an old idea.
For example, I've mentioned punishment of this kind in discussion about
PPCoin when it was released in 2012, and, I think, it was described in
Etlase2's Decrit design.
Also, I and Iddo did some research on pure proof-of-stake, and it seems to
be feasible, in the sense that there are no obvious problems like "nothing
is actually at stake". (Unfortunately I can't refer to it now as it isn't
published yet.)
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2023-06-07 15:19:50

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📅 Original date posted:2014-04-23
📝 Original message:>
> These sorts of proposals are all just ways of saying block chains kind of
> suck and we should go back to using trusted third parties.
>
No.
Different approaches have different trade-offs, and thus different areas of
applicability.
Proof-of-work's inherent disadvantage is that it takes some time until
transaction becomes practically irreversible. On the other hand, it has
advantages like neutrality, censorship-resistance, high degree of security,
etc.
TTP can be very efficient, but doesn't have advantages mentioned above.
It is possible to combine several different approaches into one hybrid
systems. For example, classic Bitcoin PoW blockchain can be used for
settlements, large transactions, savings and so on. While TTP-based payment
system will be used for small-value transaction like buying coffee.
In this case you get benefits of both approaches. Censorship-resistance is
irrelevant when one buys a cup of coffee with his pocket money, isn't it?
For some reason, instead of considering these hybrid solutions (which can
also address scalability problems), you want to make PoW-based system more
complex to be applicable for real-time transaction too.
This will, likely, weaken advantages provided by PoW, and also it won't
provide any hard guarantees, and, if implemented, will undermine
development of alternative solutions.
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2023-06-07 15:19:33

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📅 Original date posted:2014-04-23
📝 Original message:> And it still would. Non-collusive miners cast votes based on the outcome
> of their own attempts to double spend.
>
Individually rational strategy is to vote for coinbase reallocation on
every block.
Yes, in that case nobody will get reward. It is similar to prisoner's
dilemma: equilibrium has worst pay-off.
In practice that would mean that simple game-theoretic models are no longer
applicable, as they lead to absurd results.
> I'm using it in the same sense Satoshi used it. Honest miners work to
> prevent double spends. That's the entire justification for their existence.
> Miners that are deliberately trying to double spend are worse than useless.
>
Miners work to get rewards.
It absolutely doesn't matter whether they are deliberately trying to
double-spend or not: they won't be able to double-spend without a collusion.
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