pull down to refresh
all these toplevel comments are like gossip around a roulette table obsessing over how many chips are flying without ever saying red or black
please consider including polarity in the text of your comments
yes I saw that anything two-digit is probably short and three-digit long, however, why follow your own rules religiously? ~lol
That might be too simple. This would e.g., break incentives as follows:
it has been an honor, postponing this response to a criticism of my trite oversimplifications by @Murch
let's hope I don't abuse the privilege more often than can be reasonably avoided by not making stupid suggestions to begin with!
honestly, I don't have any strong criticism of the aversion to any soft incentive depending on the anachronism of tolerance for some zero-fee consumption of blockspace by aligned participants.
the only undisputable anecdotes I can think of before my perversely-priced cheapness of speech drops out of relevance is that during one of the spam attacks, people were doing things like dusting onto the brainwallet generated from passphrase cat.... if someone likes leaving so many breadcrumbs that miners become brainflay afictionados, then the network should probably have some way of eventually baring fangs against consensus-legal preferences that rise to meet Jevon's Law like it's a schoolyard challenge.
the only good news might be that such changes will always be soft forks.
This is never going to end.
In conversations I've had with technical folks about long-term scalability, they've never hesitated to describe soft-forks improving the incentives for making validation more efficient. The simplest one to describe is only allowing zero-fee transactions if the transaction has fewer outputs than inputs, in the hope of incentivizing a reduction of the UTXO set size. More complicated mechanisms could play around with things like "virtual weight" calculations, and include both biases in miner policy and actual consensus requirements.
My point ... well I don't exactly have any urgent point. I doubt Bitcoin development will ever be uneventful within our lifetimes. There are just so many people with technical skills and varying economic and political opinions, that social consensus will probably never happen, especially not while Bitcoin is less than two decades young.
for geeks like myself, who might not even want an image on-screen ...
the label is in the bottom left, and it reads:
Data: GHS_POP, EU
Software: Aerialod
Auther: Alasdair Rae
there aren't any links, although a quick web search turned up lots of hits for the author, including his personal page in his professional portfolio website; as for Aerialod, there are search engine hits, although it appears to be a rather narrow tool, perhaps a plugin for other visualization programs... and that is as deep as I'll explore the rabbithole.
"The market will fix it" is not something you can count on when you're deciding whether an activation is safe.
I think you'll find that lots of maximalists are still only maximalists relative to altcoins, and consider Bitcoin itself young and experimental technology. I'm grateful that I had the mostly-squandered opportunity of watching Bitcoin mature from its early days, although I sometimes wish I could see how the ship will look in 2140, rather than work to bail it out in 2040...
My point is like 'what does not kill you, makes you stronger"; except in this case, I believe that us maximalists need the maturity of preferring a stronger Bitcoin in 2040, that has weathered some terrible storms over a few decades of chaos, over naively hoping for painless growth while all the developers sit around singing kum-ba-ya and not fixing what isn't broken.
True maximalism does not believe in unicorns, it worships the phoenix and recognizes the importance of the flames.
Bitcoin timestamping in legal case software, so I can prove a case file existed on a certain date without trusting anyone's server. That's actually the use a split damages least
there still is reduced strength, because timestamping draws its power from the cost of rewriting history; and after a fork, the divided hashpower produces weaker separate histories, and any given attacker with some amount of equipment is thus correspondingly more powerful in an attempt to rewrite either individual chain.
I hope you're building on top of OpenTimestamps?
firstly thank you for making this effort!
while not directly undermining it, I do wish that people would abandon the "dev/user" dichotomy, perhaps in favor of something softer, like a spectrum of technical literacy... consider how most devs are only actually developers of a small number of projects, and are trusting various people and practices when they use tools and services that they haven't or even couldn't audit independently.
furthermore, some allegedly "devs" have not done any coding or auditing in a long time, and are more accurately considered technically literate users.
thank you for the review!
as I've not read the book yet, I skipped to your last line, and it suggests to me that any spoilers in your review are limited to the first two-thirds of the book; please confirm this, before I read your detailed review... as I do have that title on my general "read, someday" heap.
thank you also for the download link, I didn't realize it was freely distributed online by the author.
So: parallel hardware, yes. Parallel truth, no. That's why a permanent split is the worst case — it wrecks the thing all the other redundancy exists to defend.
The Bitcoin blockchain is not anyone's ledger of truth, yet. I've had various ideas over time, including even consulting once for a project that wanted to upload the Pentateuch [first five books of the old testament, aka "Torah"] to the blockchain... however if you look at actual usage today, the "truth" in the blockchain is an economical ledger, which is important within its domain, lots of private data, which is best considered a backup rather than shared truth, and mostly lots of "art", which is an interesting use of the datastructure, although not the same kind of "truth".
I do look forwards to a future where Bitcoin is much more widely used for timestamping of all kinds of publications, and has a much more fundamental role in helping humanity agree upon shared truths, although I believe it is decades away, and requires a greater social/political trust in a system that will have matured significantly by then.
the claim holds up: the one part of an activation that can actually split the chain comes down to a single number — how much of the hashrate runs the new rule on day one.
I really don't like such radical oversimplifications. Even if you insist on looking only at some "day one", don't you think the interesting questions are slightly more complex than the one-dimensional integral of hashrate allocation across that day?
Even if you are only interested in which chain wins and how much "work" is lost during the forking noise, it is an evolving self-aware process, where some actors might modify their behavior in response to political pressures or price movements, rather than some sterilized game-theoretical situation where people pick a column from a matrix, go to sleep, and check their payoff after waking up.
I skimmed a bit about "Sophy-Peter Bounded Physics" and ... even if anyone has been convinced, the accomplishment would be quite similar to Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, with the sad difference that the justly convinced audience needed to learn an entirely new framework, rather than needing to have already learned several obscure ones.
I'm not ruling it out as moonshine, as they do have an interesting tl;dr from search engine blurbs; basically, they aim for proving results about finite ranges alone, rather than axiomatic systems that slurp infinity into the problem.
Nvidias chips are GPUs
nope, NVDA have been in the general-purpose custom-garbage space-heater business for a while now.
GPUs are for the hobbyist, TPUs[1] are for enterprise
according to that link, apparently TPUs are specifically Google bricks, while NVIDIA makes "Tensor Cores"; honestly, if it burns like a brick, and it cracks like a brick, is it not just a brick!? ↩
big picture napkin? you need at least an awareness of deliberate ink, versus unwanted stains.
fine-grain picasso-find napkin? there is the red ink of the professor, the black ink of the salesman, and the impeccable blinding whiteness of an infinitely large napkin... before anyone has begun eating, the waiter brings to the table un carafe du l'eau, huil d'olive, et un screw-cap bottle of bleach.
---
yes those are three separate URL anchors; casual web surfers click an infinite, caution evergreen students visit large, foolish data hoarders download napkin.
They are currently overpriced whatever currency they are denominated in.
Rational people often compute a similar valuation upon mining hardware, although somehow the market not only survives, but keeps on pushing log2_work upwards... looking at inefficiences on the "days to rewrite entire chain" scale, sometimes, it's almost like our hemisocial computing spiderome hasn't even begun to climb a much larger mountain that remains out of sight, far away, a little upwards and a long way to the right...
warning: joke in arguably bad taste
One of my last popular posts on Facebook, after the quip won excellent responses from the live test audience of my cadre, was: "If you see a soldier sleeping, do not wake him; perhaps he dreams of freedom..."
Over a decade later, I might caution myself that in English, a more accurate word than "soldier" might be "conscript", although some on the site might claim that mercenaries are often more like a conscript indentured by capitalism, than like voluntary traders in a free and efficient market.
why is cross-posting a moral thing
whether or not approaches being a fundamentally ethical question as the portion of expenditure someone has posting diminishes relative to the totals of posting, commenting, etc; and honestly I don't have any strong bias towards whether it is "moral" to crosspost-by-default, thus effectively pressuring oneself to post less frequently while sharing the rewards across more territories, or target posts narrowly, thus arguably not making any significant disincentivization to the fragmentation of the SN community into territories with gradually less cross-talk.
after thinking through that while typing it all out, I'm slightly biased towards it being morally preferable to both crosspost when the budget allows, and monopost when wishing to reduce crosstalk; ideally the people who crosspost-by-default would be familiar enough with all the relevant overlapping territorial subsets of the generalized SN community that there would not be a resultant harm of blending the potentially valuable emergent diversity of different communities into a tepid blandness of the kind that makes interesting people drift away from places like Reddit even if they don't get shadowbanned first.
the presentation memorable for me was by a physicist, about anti-fragility; and regretably I'm having trouble now finding the presenter's name
wayback machine delivers!
the presentation was by Ricardo Perez Marco: "On Instabilities of the Bitcoin Protocol", and it was actually a sort of "How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Grok Taleb"
there is a fine line in the metaphorical sand, and @Scoresby definitely treads both sides.
why do you care though, @anon ?