tal8d · HackerTrans

Check the reference client buglist, they got hit with a slowloris resource exhaustion combo. They fixed the resource exhaustion (kind of), they did not address the slowloris vulnerability. So again, you have no idea what you're talking about. Doubly so if you didn't write the backend of a major mining pool - because you're just running your mouth about code you haven't seen otherwise.

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

> Where is the contradiction?

I said that you can't verify the header until you have downloaded the entire block - meaning the time between a false header being submitted and the last transaction in the block being downloaded is time the miner either abandons its work on the last real block and then sits idle or risks hashing a new block prior to verifying the false header. He implied that you can somehow verify using the PoW. I demonstrate that you cannot. I'm not sure how you could have missed it.

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

lol, I marked every tenth led manually and counted twice - the number is correct, the marketplace is wrong.

https://imgur.com/a/NqVXtDd

https://www.mblock.com.tw/upload/Investor/events/2020/202008...

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

> What are you even talking about here? 900KB takes a fraction of a second to transfer on a modest internet connection...

You are assuming that there are no bad actors in the network who might not want to transfer a block in a fraction of a second, and don't have to because they control the packet rate. Also you seem really hung up on this 900KB figure, you've repeated it in 8 recent posts. You know bitcoin's 30 day average block size has been above 900KB since 2018-10-24? But why would you harp on bitcoin's block size when you are advocating for a max block size that could accommodate all of Visa's transactions? Is is because you know that a 300MB+ block guarantees the death of decentralization and you'd look ridiculous pretending otherwise? To quote you before you presumably exchanged your BTC to double down on your bcash airdrop:

"Once again, whatever people's views on bitcoin at least realize that mining hashes don't dictate how many transactions can be processed by a miner. They mine a block, then they include as many transactions as they think they can get away with and keep the latency low enough to propagate."

2016 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11689765

> ...a VPS can transfer that is a millisecond.

Ah yes, that has worked out great for several exchanges and various other cryptocurrency related services. The cloud has been great, fill it with all the things.

> No one said anything about downloading fractions of blocks, you hallucinated that.

You don't seem to understand how packet switched networks function either. Go lookup "MTU", I look forward to hearing how even the most modest internet connection enjoys IPV6 with a 300MB jumboframe policy spanning the entire network path!

> Why do you think 32MB or more would be anything other than trivial to send and receive? Any miner can send and receive that in a second.

Except for everyone transiting a sub 256mb peering point... so alot of people: https://www.peeringdb.com/advanced_search?info_traffic__in=0...

It isn't that it'd take them 10 minutes to download the entire block... it is that they are at a 0.92 second disadvantage to their competition - this drives the physical centralization.

> Bitcoin cash already has more sustained transactions than bitcoin. Maybe you should reach beyond the propaganda of /r/bitcoin

lol, the salty salty tears.

> Miners that do that take the risk that someone else will propagate a block before them since they didn't share the previous block they found.

And yet they do it, because it has been mathematically demonstrated to be a winning strategy - even before block bloat induced propagation delay. The rest of the statement is simply nonsensical.

> In your last message you compared something with a 10 minute window to millionths of a second. For some reason you ignored this and ignored the actual numbers of modern bandwidth. You keep using hyperbole but won't quantify anything because the numbers don't add up.

Yeah, you clearly don't understand the comically simple idea that a consistent head start on your competitors guarantees eventual domination. The 10 minute window is completely immaterial to the point. If you can consistently verify the newest announced block 1 second before every other miner - then your average solve rate is guaranteed to be 1 second faster than their average solve rate.

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

> Where are you getting ideas like this? How fast do you think internet connections are?

As fast as the packet source wants? The only way to defend against a slowloris DoS is by accounting for it at the application layer, which is both unusual and difficult - as DoS attacks are usually handled at the transport layer. In this case that could mean applying a deadline for the block announcement in its entirety - which means mandating a minimum connection speed, and classifying every connection that dips below that as an attack... so you better have a good SLA with your upstream network. Well, that is no problem for centralized operations... Guess what happens to cryptocurrencies that adopt massive 128MB+ blocks in order to increase their transaction throughput - they become incredibly fragile as the slightest amount of packet loss starts waves of peer bans.

> Who are these miners that are struggling to send out 900KB ?

Anyone who wants to handicap a competing pool by forcing them to either wait for the complete false block, or waste time hashing on a fake block header.

When are you going to admit that you haven't thought this through?

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

> I'm unclear on where you got 104x78.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Hot-sale-small-pitch-...

    Module  Res     Size
    P1.923  104*78  200*150

I went ahead and counted... 128x96 (12,288 LEDs)

https://imgur.com/a/4qdY1Pr

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

> Malicious actors can't give a bogus header, because you can verify the bogus header doesn't have enough PoW.

Ok, I guess you don't know how verification works. Here are the 19 steps: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_rules#.22block.22_messag...

    Step 4) "Block hash must satisfy claimed nBits proof of work"

The bad actor has full control of that, he just has to make sure the fake header has enough leading 0s in phony header nBits, the function that checks this is CheckProofOfWork() at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/pow.cpp#L...

    Step 10) "Verify Merkle hash"

Well gee-wiz, how are we going to do that without having all the transaction in the block that the phony header hashMerkleRoot represents? GetHash() at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/primitive...

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

Unless I'm misreading the page, it is claiming a resolution of 104x78. So that means 8,112 LEDs.

The HDSP-2132 is made of 8 character elements, each element has a resolution of 5x7. So a 80x24 terminal would have a resolution of 400x168... 67,200 LEDs.

So about a magnitude off, even before ignoring the built in character spacing :)

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

You are overlooking the disadvantage of not verifying the prior hash, which you can't do until you can verify hashMerkleRoot, which you can't do until you have collected the entire block. If you skip verification, you open yourself up to bad actors feeding you a bogus header - and you only figure that out after being drip fed a bunch of transactions that don't match the merkle root. Erasure coding doesn't fix that. In any case, proponents of the 'cram everything in the public ledger' method have already advocated 128MB and even completely uncapped block sizes... so the outcome is predictable.

Take a hint from every successful network that has ever networked since ever: hierarchy, extensibility, etc. Demanding that it all be crammed into a homogenous block is so obviously doomed to fail that you should be suspicious of the proponents' motives.

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

> What numbers are you basing that on? Bitcoin is 1.5KB/s.

You know you can't verify an incomplete block, right? If you think you can just plow ahead after getting the first packet... you are going to have a really bad day once the other miners notice that you can be fooled into wasting hash power on bogus headers. You know that blocks get announced by the miners after they solve the hash, in chunks that can be up to the max blocksize, right? For Bitcoin that is 1MB, for bcash it is 32MB. Imagine if NASDAQ offered two levels of service: one that put the FIX protocol behind a 1MB buffer, and the other behind a 32MB buffer - which one would be disadvantaged? Anyone sitting at the 32MB buffer would be getting their lunch eaten. This is about as fundamental as it gets, so you might want to do some reading - because you've clearly got a big blindspot.

> No they don't. The examples you are talking about are rare and have very little impact.

If you are talking about bitcoin, you are very wrong - it is a thoroughly documented occurrence, it even has a name: the selfish miner strategy. If you are talking about bcash, I dunno one way or the other - I don't pay much attention to the joke coins. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICBC48266.2020.9169436

> How long do you think it takes to send around 900KB ?

Again, you need to actually do some reading on how mining works and what the network propagation characteristics are. I really don't want to have this come off as meanspirited, but it needs to be said: you obviously thought you knew how things worked, and you obviously don't - I wonder how many people you've misinformed.

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

When you blow up the transaction limit you physically centralize the verification process. This is why you'd see miners gamble with sitting on a solved block and secretly beginning the next search, with a few seconds of head start, before announcing to the network, or skipping the inclusion of any transactions: because fractions of a second make a big difference. Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the advantage of employing those kinds of undesirable behaviors. This is why HFT boxes end up as physically close to Wall Street as possible. This is also why bcash got so much early support from Chinese miners.

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

Yes, but they will be dealing with a currency that has mathematical guarantees - which changes things entirely. Imagine a scenario in which self driving cars are not only the norm, but they've achieved a perfect safety record due to an open source, formally verified, code-base. In that scenario, do you think the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration still needs 600 employees and a 900 million dollar budget? I have no doubt that it would still exist, but it would be addressing an infinitely simpler problem - and the reduction in resource requirements would cut it down to a skeleton crew that would operate much like stubcode in the wake of a refactor.

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

He was pretty upfront with the the possibility that his problems with rust were of his own making. The places he tried to leverage conditional compilation could be charitably described as "creative", and would raise eyebrows even in a language like C - where the preprocessor is relatively unconstrained. I'm not familiar with his project beyond the snippets he shared, so he may have had good reason to effectively ifdef inside a function call instead of any of the more traditional locations.

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

Oh and it gets better: known bad data is still repeated, despite the poster being told why it was bad data - over a year ago. Pointing this out results in flagging, for reasons that have nothing to do with ego or narrative continuity... surely.

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

I've never seen an estimate that withstood any kind of scrutiny. I've seen estimates based on both fundamental misunderstanding of the function of mining, and wild assumptions regarding miner behavior and out of date asic specs. Have you bothered fact checking any of those claims you just made? I mean actually reading the papers they cite, and learning the methodology they used. Because while you're thinking about conquistas, I'm thinking about the field of cybernetics in the 70's, and how it killed itself dead with ridiculously flawed methodology for modeling population growth - as the Davos types all nodded in agreement.

"Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists say 'on the one hand...', then 'but on the other..."

-- Harry Truman

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

It has been done a few times, but I doubt there would be any kind of market for it. https://hackaday.io/project/85515-redotmatrix

Electroluminescent glass panels on the other hand... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2o_Sp2-aBo

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

Yeah, the HDSP-2132 is a common display component in military hardware. I'm sure that readability figures into it (especially for NVGs), but so does hardiness. My hopes of an 80x24 dumb terminal were dashed when I finally learned the unit replacement price... I don't need a rad hardened serial display that bad.

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

I wasn't kidding when I said "parroting". You are regurgitating a number derived from lazy thinking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289486

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

lol, you seem to be forgetting every other system related to and directly supporting payment networks, clearinghouses, etc... oh, and all the regulatory frameworks. And the FED :)

tal8d

há 5 anosdiscuss

It is odd, I've been involved in the cryptocurrency scene from the beginning, and I've seen the whole "Bitcoin kills Mother Gaia" talking point pop up every couple of years - but I've never seen such prolonged parroting as this last cycle. It is a silly complaint, because it never considers the wastefulness of the status quo. But it is an interesting method of attack, trying to conceal the fact that it is a call for others to act against their own interests, while also tickling their envy. It could be a dangerous gambit though, while most people can't see far enough ahead to realize that global carbon caps effectively freeze the international market's structure, they can see when somebody is ham-fistedly screwing with their money.

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