Show Idle (>14 d.) Chans
← 2020-05-14 | 2020-05-16 → ↓
09:45 asciilifeform !w poll
09:45 watchglass Polling 11 nodes...
09:45 watchglass 205.134.172.6:8333 : (172-6.core.ai.net) Alive: (0.082s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=630474
09:45 watchglass 205.134.172.26:8333 : Alive: (0.082s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=630474
09:45 watchglass 205.134.172.4:8333 : (172-4.core.ai.net) Alive: (0.093s) V=70001 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.7.0.1/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=630474
09:45 watchglass 205.134.172.27:8333 : Alive: (0.154s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=630474 (Operator: asciilifeform)
09:45 watchglass 108.31.170.3:8333 : (pool-108-31-170-3.washdc.fios.verizon.net) Alive: (0.106s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=630474 (Operator: asciilifeform)
09:45 watchglass 208.94.240.42:8333 : Alive: (0.106s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=630474
09:46 watchglass 143.202.160.10:8333 : Alive: (0.232s) V=70001 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.7.0.1/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=630474
09:46 watchglass 213.109.238.156:8333 : Alive: (0.323s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=630474
09:46 watchglass 188.121.168.69:8333 : (rev-188-121-168-69.radiolan.sk) Alive: (0.381s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=630474
09:46 watchglass 103.36.92.112:8333 : (terebe.ns01.net) Alive: (0.564s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=630474
09:46 watchglass 192.151.158.26:8333 : Busy? (No answer in 20 sec.)
~ 1 hours 1 minutes ~
10:47 lru where could I find a collection of proof-of-work alternatives? i.e. ideas that were tried and failed
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~ 33 minutes ~
11:20 asciilifeform lru: afaik there is not a convenient encyclopaedia . if you're interested in specific ones, i might be able to find old #t log pointers on subj .
11:21 asciilifeform lru: it also helps to pin down exactly what means 'failed' .
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11:21 snsabot Logged on 2020-05-10 21:14:20 asciilifeform: by some defs, it will still 'work' in 3000 a.d. by others, 'never worked'...
11:22 asciilifeform ( i.e. some folx argue that 'bitcoin's proof of work failed' when asic mining took off , etc )
11:22 asciilifeform and, conversely, what 'succeed' would mean.
11:24 asciilifeform lru: imho the biggest headache in studying 'altcoins' is that ~100% of'em were hamhanded 'get rich' schemes by author. rather than earnest attempts to fix 'problems of bitcoin'
11:24 asciilifeform so ~0 signal, and moar noise than you could ever hope to cut through, in subj.
11:28 asciilifeform arguably bitcoin is still 'in the saddle' specifically because of the the 'alt' idiocies , which continue to make it look like a champ in comparison. rather than on acct of anyffin the btc enthusiasts did at any point.
11:30 asciilifeform lru: possible starting point for research.
11:31 * asciilifeform for his part, not convinced that there is a physically possible solution .
11:34 asciilifeform lru: i rec to do what folx used to do, back when engineering worked, and actually pin down the problem you want to solve. here, for instance, was my attempt re subj.
11:34 snsabot (trilema) 2017-03-02 asciilifeform: it is worth recalling the gedankenexperiment where it turns out that all you'd need to build 'martian bank' on earth, is if martians merely supplied an infallible 'martian clock', a service whereby they take a string S , at regular, say, daily, interval, and return its hash H
11:41 asciilifeform def of term.
11:41 snsabot (trilema) 2016-10-20 asciilifeform: ('martian bank' being simply a naive abstraction of 'idealizes swiss bank', where money supply is constant, and i can send from account a1 can send to a2 if and only if i have the privkey for a1, and double-spend - impossible, etc.)
~ 2 hours 10 minutes ~
13:52 mats https://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsAction.do?action=detail&language=E&newsid=THGOANPGTH followed a day later by https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade-war/US-moves-to-cut-Huawei-off-from-global-chip-suppliers
13:53 asciilifeform lulz
13:53 lru thanks asciilifeform !
13:54 lru sorry for the delay, was deep in thought
13:54 asciilifeform lru: np. lemme know if you have more specific q's.
13:54 lru to pin down the problem, what I'm currently hoping to find is a way to remove the need for so much wasted CPU
13:55 asciilifeform lru: 1st gotta understand where the need orig. came from.
13:55 lru true
13:55 asciilifeform before can think about 'how to remove'
13:55 lru exactly
13:55 lru which is why I wanted examples of "failures" so that I could see what other alternatives missed, as well as understanding the original bitcoin design goals
13:56 asciilifeform the typical failure, in 'attempts to remove waste of mining' is that you get a 'coin' that's in fact controlled 100% by author. and no one w/ half a brain wants anyffin to do with it.
13:56 lru right :-)
13:57 asciilifeform ( typically author is cynical scammer to begin with, and searches for -- and sometimes finds -- idiots. then profits a la 'penny stocks' . )
13:58 asciilifeform afaik ~100% of the 'attempts to remove mining' were simply shell games to disguise the fact that $coin is centrally controlled. e.g. 'proof of stake' (where whoever holds massive amts, controls, and author plays games to try to disguise the fact that he's the one )
13:59 asciilifeform for that matter, 'alts' which had conventional mining a la btc, were 100% 'premined', and author went to great lengths to pretend that they weren't
14:02 lru so far I think I've only managed to shift it from a CPU-winner problem to a storage-winner problem lol
~ 44 minutes ~
14:46 lru well that link to "mining is a bug" logs yielded the idea that splitting mining/CPU and nodes/storage is a bad thing... good to know
14:47 asciilifeform aha,subj was beaten to death in old #t
14:47 asciilifeform see 'trb-i' threads.
14:50 lru what does the -i mean? trb = therealbitcoin, but I'm not parsing the i
14:50 asciilifeform 'ideal'
14:50 lru thanks
~ 1 hours 6 minutes ~
15:57 asciilifeform meanwhile imho good thrd in #trb, apropos.
15:57 snsabot (therealbitcoin) 2020-05-15 jfw: asciilifeform: mind expanding on what you mean by leave it the fuck alone and why?
15:59 asciilifeform lru: imho attempts to remove 'winners' resemble search for perpetuum mobile.
16:00 asciilifeform it's superficially appealing, to the naive, but physically impossible, and sets you up for self-deception -- 'really, no winners, in this magical new $scheme!111'
16:02 asciilifeform in reality, someone will always devise 'unfair advantage' . (and , in 'alts', orig. author is 100% guilty until proven innocent of having done so while conceiving the thing)
16:03 asciilifeform i'm not even 100% convinced that 'satoshi' didn't have a shortcut for sha256 in his pocket.
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16:05 asciilifeform in schemes where gnarly/ram-intensive pow, the 'winners' were automatically the folx who write virii. (until, in the rare cases where the $alt ended up 'worth something', the folx w/ access to ic fabs caught up)
16:05 asciilifeform but there is always 'winner'. and it's almost (not quite) always -- the author.
16:06 asciilifeform ( most of the time 'no winner' arguably strictly because $alt -- worthless , no one dumb enuff to pay for it. )
~ 3 hours 27 minutes ~
19:33 feedbot http://verisimilitudes.net/2020-05-15 << A Syndication of Verisimilitudes -- A Review of ``Hackers & Painters'' by Paul Graham
~ 27 minutes ~
20:00 lru so, best not to try to remove winners, but to design the system to favour the right ones... also a hard problem
20:01 lru I would not have equated "virus writer" == "winner" when I first heard of bitcoin :-)
~ 39 minutes ~
20:40 asciilifeform lru: it was exactly the virii folx who won from 'anti-asic' crackpotcoinz.
20:42 asciilifeform point being, there is always 'winner'. especially when naive designer tries to make a naive 'fair' whatever.
~ 18 minutes ~
21:00 asciilifeform lru: w/ bitcoin proper, as late as 2013 there were trojan payloads that (with variable success -- variations in iron/drivers made this nontrivial) gpu mined.
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21:01 asciilifeform later on this became exclusive to 'shitcoins' (the myriad 'alts' w/ 'anti-asic' pow function)
~ 27 minutes ~
21:28 lru what would you consider "naive fair"? I'm thinking, we have the random distributedness of hash functions, surely there should be some way to use them without working against them
21:29 asciilifeform lru: what do you mean 'without working against them' ?
21:29 asciilifeform lru: do you understand what problem 'mining' was solution to ?
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21:30 lru a number of problems, but including making it near impossible to double spend
21:31 asciilifeform right. so how do you propose to solve any of'em without a pow ?
21:32 lru well, the pow is really just the network agreeing on a set of rules for determining who gets to make the next block... those rules could be anything, so long as everyone can verify that the rules are being followed
21:33 asciilifeform they can't be 'anything' if you want the item to be of any use. gotta have certain properties.
21:33 asciilifeform starting with '1 fella can't show up and start deciding on a whim what'll go in each block'
21:34 asciilifeform (that reduces to 'slow + expensive paypal' and gets boring fast )
21:34 lru 1) hard to obtain, 2) easy to verify, 3) hard to crack
21:34 asciilifeform correct
21:35 lru even in the pow method, though, the one who finds the block gets to decide what transactions to include, no?
21:35 asciilifeform atm, to properly hijack e.g. traditional bitcoin, you would need to build ic fab + 3 or 4 gigawatt reactors. which aint cheap (and is rather conspicuous.)
21:36 asciilifeform lru: notice that it aint the same people who bake erry block. (yet...)
21:36 lru right, so ideally, the "chosen one" is distributed across the network somewhat evenly
21:36 asciilifeform aha, was the whole point of powism.
21:37 asciilifeform if you want hypothetical replacement, it has to actually do the same job. and at least as well.
21:37 lru correct
21:37 asciilifeform afaik state of art there hasn't in fact advanced, at all, since '09.
21:38 asciilifeform the only known effective pill against 'degeneration to paypalism' remains pow. w/ expensive brute-force puzzlers.
21:38 lru and by "paypalism" I'm assuming you mean "centralized payment processing"?
21:38 asciilifeform correct
21:38 * lru nods
21:38 asciilifeform and, as in orig. bitcoin, it gotta get ~more expensive~ the more people beat on it.
21:39 asciilifeform which is how bitcoin went from '3 fellas mining on 1kwatt of cpu' to what's there now.
21:39 lru well, either more expensive, or more expensive to crack, which I'm not sure are the same things
21:40 asciilifeform more expensive period.
21:40 asciilifeform if someone finds 'cheap pill' for your pow, you're sunk.
21:41 asciilifeform i.e. if via some mathematical insight you find that no longer need 4gw of reactor, but 20amp mains socket suffices for 'petahash', bitcoin is through.
21:42 lru and so might crypto be
21:42 asciilifeform any crypto that relies on sha2, at any rate
21:43 asciilifeform point being, the expense is not a bug, but in fact the only reason any of it works
21:44 lru I haven't convinced myself that's true yet, but that could just because I'm catching up :-)
21:44 asciilifeform i'd say this is 'pons asinorum' for bitcoin. i.e. you don't actually understand how it worx until it becomes obv. to you how and why this is true.
21:45 Apocalyptic asciilifeform, maybe someone already has a 'cheap pill' for sha256
21:45 asciilifeform the very palpable energy cost, combined with the difficulty adjustment formula ('the more beat on it, the harder it gets') is the only thing keeping the thing from paypalization.
21:45 Apocalyptic yet bitcoin is not sunk yet because they didn't abuse it
21:46 Apocalyptic agreed on that last statement
21:46 asciilifeform Apocalyptic: noted this earlier today and on many prev. occasions
21:46 snsabot Logged on 2020-05-15 16:03:13 asciilifeform: i'm not even 100% convinced that 'satoshi' didn't have a shortcut for sha256 in his pocket.
21:46 Apocalyptic I think the search for a better/more meaningful PoW is doomed
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21:47 asciilifeform hashism is intrinsically voodoo, no one has (or , i suspect, ever will have) any proof that particular hash is 'hard' (i.e. has no better solution than brute force)
21:47 asciilifeform for any particular hash.
21:47 Apocalyptic just reacting to "<asciilifeform> if someone finds 'cheap pill' for your pow, you're sunk."
21:47 asciilifeform see also .
21:47 snsabot (trilema) 2017-03-02 asciilifeform: a 'secure prng' is fundamentally THE SAME animal as the 'secure hash' and the 'secure blockcipher'.
21:47 Apocalyptic you're sunk if and only if the attacker wishes it
21:48 asciilifeform Apocalyptic: this is universally the case in crypto. recall coventry.
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21:48 Apocalyptic he can quietly mine along and all will seen "well as intended"
21:48 Apocalyptic *seem
21:48 asciilifeform sometimes the fella with the pill finds it (for whatever reason) profitable to sit on it.
21:48 asciilifeform or make very miserly use.
21:49 Apocalyptic indeed
21:49 asciilifeform ( if you had 'pill for rsa', wouldja tell anyone? i sure as hell wouldn't )
21:49 lru that would make it a suppository
21:49 asciilifeform lol
21:50 asciilifeform see e.g. old discussion of subj .
21:50 snsabot (trilema) 2016-10-20 asciilifeform: trinque: see thread. mining is not provably costing all of the participants anything.
21:51 lru yeah, that costing structure is key I think
21:51 asciilifeform was thrd re 'why mining is a bug'. already can observe that it costs some participants less, in effect, than others (not because anyone openly broke sha2, but because large miner can preferentially build on own prev. blocks)
21:52 asciilifeform hence slow cartelization
21:52 asciilifeform i.e. bitcoin is paypalizing and has been for some yrs, simply -- slowly.
21:54 asciilifeform this fact was quite obvious already when you started needing product from $bil ic fab to play at all.
21:55 asciilifeform (expected 'mine 1 block' time via cpu mining is in the thousand years range atm iirc)
21:56 asciilifeform folx who read about this, often immediately start to think 'how might one get rid of mining...' but afaik it's 100% 'squaring the circle'.
21:56 asciilifeform no one has not only answer, but the faintest approach to an answer.
21:56 asciilifeform pow was 100% of the novel item that made bitcoinism a thing.
21:57 asciilifeform ( there were 1990s schemes proposed by various maths folx for 'cryptocurrency' but all of'em relied on idiocies, either 'trusted central throne' or magically untamperable machinery and similar )
21:58 lru bitcoin relies on the network and the rules... everyone in the network can verify the entire thing, which gets rid of the throne and the magic
21:58 asciilifeform except it doesn't, if i show up with 1e7 bots which are now, voila, 99% of 'the network'
21:59 asciilifeform this has to be made expensive. or you have the equivalent of those 'online polls'
22:01 asciilifeform lru: to 'verify entire thing', 1st they have to agree on what is 'the thing' to start with.
22:01 lru has bitcoin not agreed?
22:01 asciilifeform bitcoin -- yes. by asking participants to expensively bruteforce sha2.
22:03 asciilifeform it's the only thing that keeps the network from becoming a plaything of 1 idiot. (and even it, only partially effective, soon enough will be plaything for handful of idiots, if trends continue)
22:09 asciilifeform http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2020-05-15#1012321 << i agree, with caveat (see the linked threads, where discusses 'miners oughta have to prove that they're actually storing the chain')
22:09 snsabot Logged on 2020-05-15 21:46:36 Apocalyptic: I think the search for a better/more meaningful PoW is doomed
22:10 lru the actual services to the network should be what gets rewarded
22:11 asciilifeform lru: this is the unsolved problem that was subj of that thrd. right now only some of the services get rewarded.
22:11 asciilifeform the double-spend prevention -- yes. relaying tx, aint. people who run nodes, do it at own expense and it (if done properly, i.e. on hardware you physically own and control) aint cheap.
22:13 asciilifeform see also .
22:13 snsabot (trilema) 2017-03-01 asciilifeform: what are ~all~ of the places where A has the ecstasy, but B does the laundry, where A!=B
22:15 asciilifeform bitcoin remains a thing because it sorta, partially, solved ~some~ of the problems ('who gets to decide what is a coin?' 'who gets to decide when counts as 'spent' ?' 'what is incentive for participating?') none of the supposedly-competing items proposed any meaningfully different working solutions ( plenty of braindamaged ones tho )
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22:15 asciilifeform 'where original, not good; where good, not original' (tm)
22:18 asciilifeform lru: it may help to clear up your thinking re subj if you realize that there is no such thing as 'people' in the network. there are participants, in abstract mathematical sense; but it doesn't cost very much to rent whatever # of machines, w/ unique ips , and pretend 'i'm 1e7 people' .
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22:19 asciilifeform ( the term of art for this in distrib. computation is 'sybils' . named for the original sufferer of 'multiple personality disease' . )
22:21 lru right... for every potential solution, I must put on black hat and pretend I had mega resources and break it
22:22 asciilifeform most of the would-be 'replacements for mining' don't even require mega-resource to break to death.
22:22 asciilifeform (typically the author 'pre-breaks' it, simply doesn't tell the victim^H^H^H^users )
22:23 lru and if I am ever in doubt as to the effort people will go to earn a virtual buck, all I have to do is look at the 157 quintillion hashes per second the bitcoin network is currently burning into nothingness :-)
22:24 asciilifeform lru: lemme ask you, do you think the resources that went into making, e.g. hydrogen bomb, were wasted ?
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22:24 asciilifeform lotsa folx seem to think this. yet you and i are 100% only alive because of that bomb.
22:27 lru hmmmm, hadn't thought of it that way, but at least the bomb was somewhat efficient... the bitcoin case seems more like chopping down hundreds of trees just so nobody else does first
22:28 asciilifeform bomb monstrously inefficient, for what it does (only small % of the 'fuel', burns)
22:28 asciilifeform but that's rather tangential
22:28 lru when I first heard of bitcoin, many years ago, I was dubious that it would even pay for the power it needed to run
22:29 asciilifeform lru: interestingly, by some calculations, it doesn't (i.e. mining may be a more expensive method of getting coin than other methods)
22:29 lru a farmer that eats more than he can grow is going backwards fast
22:29 asciilifeform there are other incentives to do it than 'it is cheapest method of getting any'
22:29 lru true, but still
22:31 asciilifeform i, for instance, mined at one pt a coin on a fpga. (before there were commercial systems for it on market, simply so happend that i was working w/ fpgas for other reasons)
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22:31 asciilifeform did it not because it was easiest way of getting a coin, but because didn't need to ask anyone's permission, or produce 'trail'
22:31 asciilifeform ( this was almost decade ago... )
22:33 asciilifeform and incidentally systems which 'cost more to run than they return' can persist for aeons. for instance, spam.
22:33 asciilifeform spammers are born when some moron hears that someone, somewhere, made profit..
22:33 lru and from a "getting a coin" perspective, that's fine and cool, but the reason getting coin works that way is separate from the idea of independence / anonymity
22:34 lru lol
22:34 asciilifeform lru: they aren't meaningfully separate, is the thing. the reason why bitcoin is interesting, to most of the orig. participants at least, was precisely the decentralization.
22:34 lru again, the cost paid for by others... I'm seeing a theme in this world
22:35 asciilifeform erryone wants 'cost paid by others'. at all times.
22:35 asciilifeform 'all men are brothers, but let the warheads fall on others'(tm) etc
22:38 asciilifeform upstack -- to think meaningfully about bitcoinism, gotta 1st understand what the orig. appeal of it was, that the participants weren't getting from somewhere else
22:38 asciilifeform my 2012 piece re subj.
22:40 lru thanks
22:40 lru that's a lot of words for 10:30 at night though lol will have to leave that tab open
22:40 asciilifeform aite
22:40 * asciilifeform also to bed soon
22:41 lru "faint smell of spam and cocaine" lol
22:42 lru so true
22:50 asciilifeform observe that , presently, 1 btc is ~10,000x moar valuable than 1 u.s. $ . it isn't entirely accidental .
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22:50 asciilifeform 1 btc has certain very useful properties that 1 usd does not .
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22:51 lru it is also only about 12 years old
22:52 asciilifeform 11y ago was already slightly moar valuable than 1 usd..
22:52 asciilifeform try to think about why.
22:54 lru likely because people see a non-inflationary currency
22:54 asciilifeform not only.
22:55 asciilifeform ( tho, this also, e.g. last month usa created $trillion with stroke of a pen. )
22:55 asciilifeform but , say, you want to move $mil across a border. without it being stolen by officials.
22:56 asciilifeform $mil in usd weighs several kg and takes up suitcase. won't fit up arse. whereas $mil of btc can live inside yer head.
22:56 lru yep, that's valuable
22:57 asciilifeform or say you wanna get paid , and have some money, without busybodies knowing about it.
22:57 asciilifeform or, conversely, pay someone, w/out asking anyone for permission .
22:59 asciilifeform traditional money -- unless you bury it, like capt. kidd -- aint actually 'yours' in any meaningful sense.
23:00 asciilifeform not even speaking of folx condemned by judges to confiscation, necessarily. in usa, you can fall down and wake up with empty bank acct, and sold house, and negative net worth in 6-7figures, from coupla wks of hospital.
23:01 * asciilifeform bbl
23:01 lru not sure how bitcoin would help with that
23:01 lru ok, thanks!
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