Hacker News Reader

Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

This is incorrect. The 'peer' in 'peer-to-peer electronic cash' is a reference to a counterparty to a transaction. It's "peer-to-peer" because there is no "trusted third party" (a term used in the white paper) acting as an intermediary.

Satoshi extensively detailed the ability of participants in the Bitcoin network to use light clients, that don't fully validate the blockchain, and predicted that the vast majority of people would use such clients in the future.

The vision of Bitcoin Core that you're promoting totally contradicts the one promulgated in the Bitcoin white paper and further descriptions provided by Satoshi.

The idea of the vast majority of people not being able to hold their own private keys, because transaction fees are so high, contradicts several core features of Bitcoin that are described in the white paper.

View on HN

>The vision of Bitcoin Core that you’re...

No one was discussing the Core implementation of Bitcoin. Why do you bring it up. OP was discussing the engineering trade offs associated with engineering a blockchain.

>The idea if the vast majority of people not unable to hold their own private keys, because transaction fees...

Key custody and transaction fees have nothing to do with each other. I believe you’re referring to UTXO custody, which is influenced by fees. Miners aren’t altruistic, they won’t hash for free. Choose security and fees or no chain-tip extension / double spending is economically feasible.

I bring it up because he's promoting the Bitcoin Core vision for Bitcoin, and I am criticizing that vision. I'm giving a name for the stance that he has for communicative efficiency. How is his vision different than Bitcoin Core's?

>>Key custody and transaction fees have nothing to do with each other.

What are you talking about? They have everything to do with each other. If the average tx fee is $100, you will not be able to have bitcoin sent to your own private key unless you are handling large amounts of value - amounts that are way beyond what the vast majority of the world population deals with.

>>Miners aren’t altruistic, they won’t hash for free.

What does this have to do with having control over your own private key? You're changing the subject instead of addressing the fact that the Bitcoin Core idea of $100 transaction fees means the vast majority of the world population will have to rely on trusted third parties to control the private keys to their wealth, which totally contradicts the purpose of Bitcoin as described in the white paper.

OP was discussing the engineering trade offs associated with engineering a blockchain. Every group engineering a blockchain makes the types of choices he was referring to. To assume he's talking about Bitcoin Core makes you seem like Don Quixote.

>They have everything to do with each other.

You said key custody has to do with fees, which it does not. The fee market does not influence, at all, how hard or easy it is to maintain custody of keys on a blockchain. Again fees do influence the cost of updating the UXTO set. You're confusing the two terms.

>$100 transaction fees means the vast majority of the world population will have to rely on trusted third parties to control the private keys to their wealth

People pay the fees that they are willing to pay. Your position reminds me of the Yogi-ism "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It's Too Crowded". Are you arguing that people are too stupid to know how much fees they're willing to pay? Again, miners will not hash for free. If users want low fees and low security, they got what they wanted by forking off to bcash. People who wanted high security and high fees, they got what they wanted by sticking the legacy consensus rules. What is exactly the problem with this paradigm?

He went out of his way to argue for a particular (and I would argue wrong) interpretation of what 'peer' in 'peer-to-peer electronic cash' means, and his interpretation seems intended to support the 1-MB-digital-gold side of the scaling debate.

I had every right to bring up this debate since his argument very clearly was taking a side in it.

>>You said key custody has to do with fees, which it does not. The fee market does not influence, at all, how hard or easy it is to maintain custody of keys on a blockchain.

I just explained how it does. You didn't address my points. You're denying what common sense says is undeniably true, to promote a vision of Bitcoin where the vast majority of the world don't have private keys to their own Bitcoin wealth, because only a tiny portion of the world population can access the blockchain with any frequency.

>>People pay the fees that they are willing to pay. Your position reminds me of the Yogi-ism "Nobody Goes There Anymore, It's Too Crowded".

That's not even a point. "People pay the fees that they are willing to pay" is tautological. As fees increase, the portion of the population that can afford to access the blockchain shrinks. No amount of spin is going to conceal the fact that a 1-MB block size limit ensures mass adoption of Bitcoin, with Bitcoin remaining an affordable and peer-to-peer electronic cash, is impossible, and furthermore, that it betrays the original vision for Bitcoin as described in the white paper and Satoshi's other writings.

>1-MB block size limit ensures mass adoption of Bitcoin

There is nothing stopping anyone from tweaking consensus rules to their liking. This is what the bcash team did. Sounds like you're mad at people who didn't adopt bcash.

Again: If users want low fees and low security, they got what they wanted by forking off to bcash. People who wanted high security and high fees, they got what they wanted by sticking the legacy consensus rules. What is exactly the problem with this paradigm?

> because there is no "trusted third party"

If you don't run your own node, you need to trust a 3rd party to transact with the blockchain, because you require someone elses node in order to record a bitcoin transaction. So you are, by definition, not a peer, because you are not equal to a person who runs a node, because you need to trust a 3rd party.

You trust the hashpower in the aggregate, you do not trust the node that gives you the information. That is because the block solution is independently verifiable by the spv wallet. They can also independently verify that a transaction was indeed in a block. To say they don't verify anything or trust someone is not true. They don't validate the rules, they validate the hashpower. If the hashpower is evil, bitcoin is fucked anyways. If the hashpower is evil your full node can be fooled into accepting a payment for something and reversing it with their superior hashpower. The whitepaper assumes the majority of hashpower is honest for bitcoin to work...

Whitepaper, section 1, end of last paragraph...

"The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes."

If that sentence is broken, like you give as an example that would fool an spv wallet, then by definition bitcoin is not secure.

> You trust the hashpower in the aggregate

Are you explaining your definition of a trust requirement in a trustless protocol?

> by definition bitcoin is not secure.

It is not secure if you use your understanding of how bitcoin works. Which, as we've demonstrated with the four failed fork attempts, is not rooted in reality.

I just explained the evidence that this is not how Satoshi defined "trusted third party". He extensively promoted the use of light clients, and didn't find any contradiction between this and peer-to-peer electronic cash. I don't understand why you ignore this point, which I've conveyed to you in our previous discussion as well.

You also continue to sidestep the fact that Bitcoin Core's vision of letting transaction fees rise to astronomical levels with growing usage of the blockchain is going to mean the vast majority of the world population will have to trust other parties to hold their private keys, which is a much greater reliance on trusted third parties than polling random nodes for SPV proofs, as required when running a light client, which still let's the user control their own private key.

There is no such thing as a trustless implementation of a light client. Funnily enough, it was one of the things Satoshi could never get to work.

What do you mean core? Core doesn't run my node. I do. If you can't convince the peers in bitcoin to run your node client, you don't have a solution. I know this, because I do run a node, and I am a peer in peer-to-peer cash. And I, personally, have rejected your scalability plans, because I, personally, being a peer in peer-to-peer cash, have rejected your node client. I was not happy with your security model, and therefore I, with all of the other bitcoin peers, rejected it. Which is why bitcoin remains bitcoin, and failed fork after failed fork attempts remain the failed fork attempts. Because you don't have enough peers willing to follow your consensus change.

Bitcoin nakamoto consensus in action. It is a beautiful thing.

Satoshi never claimed that a "trustless implementation of a light client" is possible. The white paper explains that a light client still has to trust other nodes:

>>As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network, but is more vulnerable if the network is overpowered by an attacker. While network nodes can verify transactions for themselves, the simplified method can be fooled by an attacker's fabricated transactions for as long as the attacker can continue to overpower the network. One strategy to protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to confirm the inconsistency. Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification.

While you claim that light clients betray the vision of Satoshi, based on totally unsubstantiated claims about what Satoshi meant by a light client, that are contradicted by several pieces of evidence (e.g. Satoshi communicating with Mike Hearn about Hearn's implementation of the SPV light client concept, without once claiming that his implementation fell short of Satoshi's idea of a light client, and while continuing to promote light clients on Bitcoin talk, like in this instance: http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/345/), you promote a future where the vast majority of the world have zero control over their own wealth, because they can't economically control their own private keys.

> One strategy to protect against this would be to accept alerts from network nodes when they detect an invalid block, prompting the user's software to download the full block and alerted transactions to confirm the inconsistency

This part of the white paper is broken. Satoshi was wrong. Accepting unverifiable "alerts" from network peers as a trigger for doing large amounts of computation is a significant DoS vulnerability.

For this sort of scheme to work you would have a small-to-transmit, easy-to-verify proof of the invalidity of a block. (Called a "fraud proof" among developers who have looked at this.) Bitcoin protocol as specified by Satoshi does not allow for the full range of fraud proofs necessary to support this sort of DoS-resistant lite node implementation.

He didn't give the strategy as a requirement for light wallets to actually work. He gave it as an example of making the security trade off better. Light wallets do work. To fool them you have to have to be able to 51% the network and sybil my node. Not likely, especially if my spv wallet is checking multiple sources, even over https.

No, I have to send a simple forged "alert" packet to cause you to download 1-4MB of block data plus additional dependent spend data of similar size from your peers, and lock up your CPU for an intensive amount of time doing signature verification and hash tree calculations only to find out the alert was incorrect. Meanwhile another spoofed peer sends another alert packet....

and then my wallet bans your peer and moves on. Not an issue

You need a dictionary more than you need the white-paper :

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peer

> one that is of equal standing with another : equal

If you aren't running a node, you're not equal, and therefore, by definition, not a peer.

You're totally ignoring my arguments. This is pretty much how every discussion with an advocate of 1-MB-block-Bitcoin and $100 transaction fees goes. It's bizarre.

People who wanted lower security in exchange for lower fees already got what they wanted with Bcash.

What problem do you have with people running the blockchain they prefer?

I feel you, you are correct btw.

Fees are in sat/wu not $.

I'm using $ as a unit of account because people have a frame of reference for it. Any real world value can be described as its dollar equivalent, and frequently is for understandability.

> So you are, by definition, not a peer, because you are not equal to a person who runs a node, because you need to trust a 3rd party.

This is incorrect and plain wrong. Trusted party only exists in Ethereum, not in Bitcoin. You are not trusting anyone when you transact in Bitcoin, there is distributed consensus. How is distributed consensus trusting a third party?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com