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@Murch
stacking since: #127838
302 sats \ 1 reply \ @Murch 2 Dec \ parent \ on: A soft fork is a 51% attack on Bitcoin bitcoin
It’s a frequent question we get on Bitcoin Stack Exchange: if a block gets reorged, what happens to the transactions in that block? Do they all get unconfirmed and returned to the mempool?
And the important thing to realize there is, that from the perspective of each chaintip the other block might as well not exist. The best chain has only one block at each height, so competing blocks do not at all influence each other in regard to what is included.
Most of the time two competing blocks at the same height will include almost exactly the same transactions with some minor differences in what txs they had seen when they created their template, or some locally prioritized transactions. Obviously, the coinbase transactions will differ, and very occasionally, one block could include a replacement of a transaction while the other block included the corresponding original. But because miners try to maximize the revenue from the available mempool, they pick all the same transactions, and for the most part, either both blocks or neither confirm a transaction, so it makes no difference for the users which block wins out in the end.
Addendum:
Obvious exceptions are of course when someone is deliberately reorganizing the chain to revert a previously confirmed transaction, or when a reorg is so deep that coinbase transactions matured on both chaintips and said coinbase outputs don’t exist on the competing chains, so a reorg could remove whole chains of transactions from the history.
That’s right, the only way the network would converge back on a single chaintip without intervention would be if the soft forking chaintip outpaced the non-enforcing chaintip and the non-enforcing nodes reorged to the soft fork chaintip.
This is highly unlikely when only a minority of the hashrate enforces the soft fork.
That’s a correct description of what would happen if the hashrate moved that way, but an unlikely scenario.
It’s the best practice to only start enforcing soft fork rules if they are expected to be enforced by a majority of the hashrate, exactly because a minority-enforced soft fork leads to a chain split. It would be against the interest of the miners on the heavier chain to switch to the minority-enforced soft fork chain, as they would be sacrificing their block rewards. Similarly, starting to enforce a soft fork with a minority of the hashrate most likely means that the block rewards will never become part of the best chain and therefore likely to incur the whole cost of mining with no reward.
In effect, anyone proposing to activate a soft fork with a minority chain is essentially advocating to create a forkcoin.
Was the double negative on purpose there, or did you mean “if less than 51% are enforcing the new rules”?
There are just two cases:
- If a majority of the hashrate enforces the soft fork, the non-enforcing minority may occasionally find a block considered invalid by the majority, but the soft fork enforcing majority will ignore such a block and eventually build a heavier competing chaintip at which point the minority will reorganize to the majority chain.
- If only a minority of the hashrate enforces the soft fork, it will create a permanent fork as the minority will not accept the non-enforcing majority chaintip and the majority chaintip will accumulate more work faster. The majority chaintip will simply pull away and the enforcing miners will be stuck on a less-work chaintip.
I imagine that conveyor belts outside would be hard to maintain and get dirty rapidly. I do like Factorio as well, but walking seems mostly fine.
I mean, it’s ironic but not wrong. Congestion pricing significantly reduced honking, accidents, and sped up traffic in large parts of Manhattan.
I’m wondering how much parking problems in NYC would decrease, if the parking minimums were reduced or removed, and they started charging for street parking everywhere. Having lived in NYC for over four years, having a car there sounds like a nightmare. A bit of financial pressure would get some people to rid themselves of cars they don’t use, generate revenue for the city, and make parking easier for the people that want to keep their cars.
Hey Jason, perhaps it isn’t clear, but the block weight limit has not changed and is not expected to change. Today, just as any day since segwit activated, the blockchain cannot grow more than 4 MB per block, but in reality, it grows by about 1.6 MB per block. If people put a lot of OP_RETURN data, it would grow closer to 1 MB per block, because output data does not get the witness discount.
For all of these reasons, the concern that the blockchain will grow faster due to this mempool policy change is easily dismissed — it’s simply untenable.
As to whether porn will be stored on the blockchain, there has been smut and illegal content on the blockchain for over a decade. It’s an obvious result of a censorship resistant append-only data structure with open write access. You may understand then why that doesn’t keep people awake at night, and why it is hard to admit it as a some sort of changed reality.
On the other hand, concern about sitcoms getting stored is just absurd. Even while feerates are pretty low now, blockspace is strictly limited (as described above), and if anyone added to the current demand by trying to store big data files, demand would immediately exceed the blockspace production. As you’d expect, the feerates would shoot up, and storing large amounts of data would be prohibitively expensive. While payment transactions would also get more expensive, they are generally tiny and people would be easily able to outbid other demand for urgent transactions. This dynamic in addition to the initial hype having tapered off, is why all the “NFTs on Bitcoin” crap is at a fraction of its ATH prices: the scarcity of blockspace makes it unsustainably expensive in the long run.
So, in my humble opinion, Mechanic has worked himself up over discovering how things always have been, but ymmv.
This was cited as a successful posts from past years by “This day in SN”, and I just wanted to point out that a (usually up-to-date) list of the Bitcoin Core maintainers can be found in https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/176/5406
It’s not a perfect analogy, but the split does map pretty well. The “invent a new thing” and “riffing off each other”, would be devs working on the protocol, LN, node software, wallets, Ecash, Ark, Statechains, other L2s, as well as cryptographers, BIP authors, and protocol researchers, whereas “contributing energy (time, adulation, organization, analysis)” fits pretty well to describe meetup facilitators, podcasters, conference organizers, community moderators, newsletter authors, and other hardcore bitcoiners.
In our case, there are some geeks and fanatics on both sides of the debate, but I would say that each is more heavily represented by one or the other.
I’ll leave it to others to identify the mops and sociopaths. ;)
I’ve referenced this article in a discussion recently about why the OP_RETURN debate is actually the most harmful at the social layer: it’s a divorce among the geeks, with creators and fanatics being at odds.
Thanks for the continued coverage, @Scoresby! Great write-up.
There is a "we" (the BIP editors)
Actually, I was thinking of “we” here as all of us, the self-selected participants of the BIP process.
Also, slightly embarrassing, your post here made me notice that BIP 2 actually already stated:
After working on BIP 3 for nearing two years, I thought that this section was something that was introduced in BIP 3. So, I was incorrect, when I stated that BIP 2 doesn’t specify how to activate process BIPs. Thank you for surfacing this. — Luckily, my proposed approach is compatible with BIP 2 either way.
The rumors have been swirling about a secret knots code fork that actually fixes the utxo bloat, at least since Bitcoin Prague 2024. Core won't talk about it, because they can't stomach being scooped by someone they look down on as a. crank, but who has the chops and the work ethic to actually write the code.
^ seems at odds with
But we both know that isn't what we're actually talking about.
So, what are we talking about then?
That proposal just was republished, including code now. You're misconstruing what people are trying to tell you. The code doesn't make him look good, everybody is trying to distance themselves from it, because they consider it reckless and irresponsible.
Luke is a genius. He invented frickin segwit last time bitcoin was under attack by corporate douchebags.
If he had invented segwit, don’t you think he would be the author of at least one of the segwit BIPs?
He only had the idea how to deploy it as a soft fork instead of a hard fork.
I realized it’s also on Youtube directly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BFgoQawG7Q
We have been getting a lot of submissions that are almost entirely LLM generated. We consider such BIPs low-quality and a waste of time. I don’t have an issue with people using LLMs to improve their language or grammar, when they come up with the content: the concept, motivation, rationale, design, and specification must come from the authors.