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To: Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org>
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From: Eric Voskuil <eric@voskuil.org>
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Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP: Block signal enforcement via tx fees
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On 05/12/2017 10:45 PM, Luke Dashjr wrote:
> On Saturday 13 May 2017 3:26:08 AM Eric Voskuil wrote:
>> If people want to influence the decisions of miners, all they
>> need to do is mine.
> 
> Most people cannot mine except at a huge expense (profit is limited
> to few people via monopoly and electric costs). But more
> importantly, the profits from every miner you buy will go to pay
> for Bitmain growing their arsenal more than enough to offset your
> influence.

You seem to be suggesting that in order to decentralize mining nobody
should mine. I'm having a hard time making sense out of that.

> Mining is simply broken at this point.

So maybe you are just saying that nobody should mine because it's a
zero sum game that one miner will always win and therefore we should
not push up the hash rate by trying to compete because the same miner
just makes more money on the hardware. Apparently it is economically
impossible for anyone else to compete in hardware as well.

I agree that there is a serious problem of mining centralization (and
economic/validation centralization). If these problems are not solved
Bitcoin will fail. It will rise again, with people a little wiser, but
the disruption will be unfortunate for many.

I don't want to see that, so I tend to not advocate for solutions that
run counter to the security model. Many people must mine, there is no
way around it. And if people want a say with respect to mining, they
should mine. As a developer I would rather work toward fixing that
problem than putting a band-aid over it that basically tells people
that the way they get their say is by donating to the big mining
personality of their choice.

>> There is nothing inherently wrong with paying people to run nodes
>> or signal "readiness", but there is no reason whatsoever to
>> consider these ideas beneficial from a personal/economic or 
>> security/decentralization standpoint.
> 
> Running a node and mining are two very different things.

No, really?

If it wasn't clear, I was relating two sets of proposals. One aims to
find ways to fund node operation and the other aims to fund miner
signaling. The former fails to understand the economics and security
model of full node operation and the latter fails to understand that
distributed mining is as essential to Bitcoin survival as distributed
validation.

>> The argument fails to recognize that mining for one's self may
>> (or may not) result in a net loss, but donating to a miner in the
>> hope of some action is comparatively a total loss. One is an
>> expense in exchange for the intended social outcome, and the
>> other is payment for representative government.
>> 
>> And in this form of representative government that you propose,
>> if we assume that miners are somehow bound to honor the payments
>> (votes), ...
> 
> First of all, this isn't donating to miners, but forbidding them
> from mining your transaction (and thereby collecting your
> transaction fee) unless they signal for the softfork.

I assumed that people understand how markets work. Miners compete for
fees. By eliminating a subset of potential sellers (currently by ~70%)
the buyer raises his own price. Presumably the price is raised even
further by increasing the size of the transaction. This is either a
donation to the cause or a purchase of the signal, depending on how
you want to describe it (all donations are purchases of a sort).

So there is a cost increase that could alternatively be incurred by
mining (i.e. assuming a lossy operation). If one is going to spend
money on influencing mining one might as well not do it in a way that
contributes to centralization while training people to rely on it.

> Secondly, your argument here assumes miners are a government or
> control Bitcoin in some way. This is not correct.

Miners absolutely "control Bitcoin in some way" - that is their
purpose. They control the ordering of transactions, and with
sufficient hash power can double-spend and therefore make the network
unusable. Why would you bother to make me type this?

> So miners are in fact already bound to honour the wishes of the
> greater economy, and their refusal to do so is an attack on the
> network.

Absolute nonsense, a miner incurs no obligation to the "greater
economy". He is offering a service in voluntary trade. He is likely to
do what it takes to spend his coinbase, assuming he wants to. This
gives the economy strong economic control over his behavior. But
nothing whatsoever obligates him to signal soft forks (or not optimize
his operations).

Double spending is an attack, on the person who has been robbed. The
state enforcing a patent is an attack, on the person against whom it
is enforced. These are called attacks **because they are actually
theft**. You are conflating normal operation (despite disagreement
with some unmeasurable "wishes") with robbery.

e
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