<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>npub1f2nvlx49er5c7sqa43src6ssyp6snd4qwvtkwm5avc2l84cs84esecrwet</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub1f2nvlx49er5c7sqa43src6ssyp6snd4qwvtkwm5avc2l84cs84esecrwet</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2015-08-30&#xA;📝 Original message:On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 4:13 AM, Peter R &lt;peter_r at gmx.com&gt; wrote:&#xA;&gt; I agree that miners may change their level of centralization.  This neither&#xA;&gt; affects the model nor the results presented in the paper.&#xA;&#xA;It has tremdous significance to the real-world impact of your results.&#xA;&#xA;If not for the other errors in your work, this point would make the&#xA;take away of your work not &#34;a healthy transaction fee market exists&#xA;without a block size limit&#34; but rather &#34;a decenteralized bitcoin&#xA;cannot exist&#34;-- as, accepting the other errors as fact your model&#xA;shows that centralizing mining is always strictly more profitable at&#xA;any level of fee demand; because your model equivilent shows that for&#xA;any level of fee demand and gamma miners could increase their income&#xA;by centeralizing further.&#xA;&#xA;I absolutely agree that simplifications are useful and essential, but&#xA;it is critically important to call them out before someone mistakes&#xA;theoretical work as useful motivation for policy in the non-simplified&#xA;system.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; -- Instead the same information can be transmitted _in advance_, as&#xA;&gt; has been previously proposed, and various techniques can make doing&#xA;&gt; so arbitrarily efficient.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; I assume, very reasonably, that the block solutions contain information&#xA;&gt; about the transactions included in the block.  This is the case today, this&#xA;&gt; is the case using the relay network, and this would be the case using any&#xA;&gt; compression scheme I can personally imagine actually occurring in the&#xA;&gt; future.&#xA;&#xA;This assumption is unreasonable, and does not-- in fact-- accurately&#xA;reflect the situation today.&#xA;&#xA;For example it does not reflect how hashers return work to pools&#xA;_today_ (and since 2011) as they so to only by referencing the merkel&#xA;root... the pool already knows the  transaction set. In that&#xA;particular case it knows it because it selected it to begin with, but&#xA;the same behavior holds if the hasher selects the transaction set and&#xA;sends it first.&#xA;&#xA;It only _very_ weakly reflects how the relay protocol works (only the&#xA;selection and permutation is communicated; not the transaction data&#xA;itself; for already known transactions). Even if you assume nothing&#xA;more than that (in spite of the existing reality) you have not shown&#xA;that the compressed data must be linear in the size of the block.&#xA;&#xA;It does not reflect how P2Pool works (which also sends the&#xA;transactions in advance).&#xA;&#xA;There is a simple, and intuitive understanding that does not require&#xA;any complex supposition:  You argue that the information must be&#xA;transfered when a block is found, thus delaying it.  I point out, no,&#xA;any required information (to the extent that there is any at all after&#xA;efficient encoding) can be sent in advance of the block.&#xA;&#xA;I believe that you&#39;ve allowed the fact that the specifc example block&#xA;relay protocol doesn&#39;t bother sending _all_ information in advance to&#xA;confuse it for mere compression.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; My public comments have been factual.  I&#39;ve even gone out of my way in&#xA;&gt; several public threads to point out your objection that the coding gain&#xA;&gt; could be zero (even though I think it is flawed &#34;black-and-white thinking&#34;&#xA;&gt; about an academic scenario that will never unfold and might actually be&#xA;&gt; physically impossible without Bitcoin already being centralized).&#xA;&#xA;I believe my reponses are firmly grounded in the physical reality of&#xA;actually deployed systems and constructable protocols.&#xA;&#xA;By comparison, even if I were to agree that the bound is not actually&#xA;exactly 0 proporionality  you have already agreed that with&#xA;&#34;compression&#34; the amount sent could be arbritarily low. The result&#xA;being that the behavior you&#39;re describing would only be asymptoic and&#xA;have no relationship to the actual Bitcoin system that exists in a&#xA;finite universe.&#xA;&#xA;But you continue to demand debate over this meaningless point.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; I&#39;ll end by saying that I am the one describing things as the presently are.&#xA;&gt; You are talking about a hypothetical future that may or may not exist (and&#xA;&gt; may not even be possible).  The results of my paper logically follow from&#xA;&gt; the assumptions made. You think the assumption that &#34;block solutions contain&#xA;&gt; information about the transactions included in the block&#34; will not hold in&#xA;&gt; the future.  Can you show:&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; (a) Under what assumptions/requirements your communication scheme is&#xA;&gt; physically possible.&#xA;&#xA;Pratically every block today is mined under a protocol which does not&#xA;need to communicate anything but constant data when a block is found.&#xA;&#xA;I am getting a little tired of people suggesting things which are&#xA;widely deployed are not physically possible.&#xA;&#xA;Yes, that particular example is not the most powerful form of that&#xA;idea-- but it has the benefit of _universal_ use.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; (b) That such a configuration is not equivalent to a single entity[1]&#xA;&gt; controlling &gt;50% of the hash power.&#xA;&#xA;I find this a little amusing. Even in this messsage you defend&#xA;ignoring of centeralization considerations in your paper. But here ask&#xA;that I address concerns which you refused to suggest. Why do you&#xA;demand my correction use weaker assumptions than your work?&#xA;&#xA;That said-- I already gave you a fairly concrete description of a&#xA;pratical protocol which would accomplish your requirement ( (a) reduce&#xA;the information transmitted in a latency critical way at block&#xA;discovery time to O(1) network wide, (b) without creating&#xA;centeralization in chain or transaction selection). I believe my&#xA;description in the messages was adequate that anyone working on&#xA;Bitcoin Core could go implement a version of it, at least.  You appear&#xA;to have simply ignrored it.&#xA;&#xA;If the actual technical details made your eyes glaze over I also&#xA;offered a simple intutive understanding:  The no proportional&#xA;information need be transfered at the latency critical time, because&#xA;it can be transfered in _advance_. Everything beyond that is just&#xA;efficiency optimizations to reduce the cost of doing the advanced&#xA;transmission.&#xA;&#xA;&gt; (c) That the network moving into such a configuration is plausible.&#xA;&#xA;That it already uses advanced information techniques in every widely&#xA;used mining protocol, that the relay protocol was rapidly adopted, and&#xA;that your own model would suggest significant profits from any such&#xA;improvement would seem to remove any doubt related to (c)... and again&#xA;here you hold me to a higher bar than your own work: as nowhere do you&#xA;show that the &#34;limits&#34; your model erroniously extracts are plausable&#xA;as limits, and in private you seemed to admit to me that they may well&#xA;not be.</html></oembed>