Incident Raises Concerns About a More Formal Spec For Bitcoin

An anonymous reader writes: Aberrant treatment of transactions by Bitcoin miners has renewed concerns that Bitcoin as a protocol may need a stronger specification. OpenBSD savior and Bitcoin entrepreneur Mircea Popescu raised this issue back in 2013 that the current attitude of "the code is the spec" was introducing fragility and harming Bitcoin's vital decentralization. While a lot of fuss has been made about the maximum blocksize, perhaps formalizing the protocol and breaking the current mining cartel is a more urgent and serious problem. The debate going on resurrects many of Datskovskiy's early concerns about Bitcoin's fragility including mining as a necessary bug, but a bug nonetheless.

Comments

How is Bitcoin doing?

[samuel.progin]

Besides this issue, I recently read that the block size debate between 1 or 2 MB is heated. Is it just a small hiccup the the sign the Bitcoin is reaching it limits?

Re:How is Bitcoin doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to every other currency in the world, ever.

Re:How is Bitcoin doing?

[Richard_at_work]

It already has reached its (current) limits - you can currently wait up to an hour to have your transaction written into the block chain, which means that at any time during that period the buyer can withdraw the transfer, so you have to delay handing over products until the transaction has actually been written into the block chain.

Can you imagine having to wait an hour before you can leave the supermarket if Visa didn't authorise a transaction right away?

Re:How is Bitcoin doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfectly traceable.

Re:How is Bitcoin doing?

[GLMDesigns]

As does cash.

However, unlike cash, bitcoin is traceable.

Re:How is Bitcoin doing?

[GLMDesigns]

yes. Dice buying slashdot.

Re:How is Bitcoin doing?

[vtcodger]

But how do you use bitcoin to blow cocaine?

Re:How is Bitcoin doing?

[Richard_at_work]

Even before they started to be completely refused as a payment mechanism at UK shops in recent years, cheques were almost always refused at shops if they were not accompanied by a cheque guarantee card which covered amounts greater than the face value of the cheque.

Re:How is Bitcoin doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly while VISA does typically authorize the transaction right away (although Supermarkets may choose to operate without online auth, for example if they have a telecoms outage)... ... authorization and settlement are separate.

Authorizations on their own do nothing. No money changes hands, nothing.

Settlement moves the money but doesn't require authorization. The supermarket can issue a settlement saying "send me $800 of Richard_at_work's money" without any authorization showing you asked to pay them that money. They normally do provide the authorization, but if they don't VISA can (and for a big customer like a supermarket usually will) complete the settlement anyway.

That's right, the only thing keeping a Walmart from taking every penny out of your credit card is good will. No technical measures are in place to ensure it doesn't happen. If they do it "by accident" and get caught, maybe VISA will slap them and tell them not to do it again. And in theory if they did it a few times, or if it caused a big public outrage, VISA could kick Walmart out and refuse to do any settlements for them. But most likely PR people would come in and smooth things over and assure everyone it will never ever happen again, even though in fact it might.

Re:How is Bitcoin doing?

[mysidia]

Beyond beefier network nodes, there are a number of approaches to offloading transactions off the main Bitcoin blockchain. Most of these are not ready for use yet

A good reason to not change block sizes, at least not yet.

If you shorten the interval, you either have to halve the generation amount, or change the total number of coins which will be generated.

Obviously: adjust the generation amount to correct the discrepancy. This also helps with the problem that Confirmations take too long.

The 1 MB limit was only supposed to be temporary.

The protocol has this arbitrary limit. Who is to say that this is only going to be a temporary limit? Consider that changing the size of a block may not be the best way of ultimately achieving the desired objectives, even if someone had suggested it before.

Always fun.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's always entertaining to see the latest episode of 'Bitcoin: rediscovering the reasons behind the various messy hacks that we dislike about more typical currencies...'

Re:Let's call the CEO of Bitcoin!

[michelcolman]

Or just create a new protocol that fixes Bitcoin's flaws. I wonder why nobody has thought of that yet.

The underlying problem appears grave

[goombah99]

So the underlying problem is there is phenomenological evidence that indicates that for long stretches of time, some cartel can controls 51% of the block chain compute and is withholding submits so it can privately mine them before distributing them.

If I understand bitcoin correctly, both of those are its fundamental achilles heel, assumed never to happen, and therefore the currency is now subject to manipulation, and thus eventually worthless.

Or am I wrong?

Re:The underlying problem appears grave

[goombah99]

Yes one could accept that competing mafia's might be benevolent. But why should they? someone with 51% of the compute can dictate if you can trade bitcoin. That is, if you were to transact something with your keycode, they could prevent it from entering the block chain, thus nullifying your transaction. They can hold the entire system hostage or blackmail individuals.

Re: The underlying problem appears grave

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many ways to profit from tanking a currency.

Conflicts of Interest

[bill_mcgonigle]

There are competing implementations of full nodes in progress, some more useful than bitcoin-core. Some, like classic allow for bigger blocks, some others are more focused on having a full spec and compatibility.

There are some who claim that only the core c code binaries can be allowed to run. They DDOS competing nodes and talk trash about every competing codebase, trying to keep Bitcoin out of distros, off devices, etc. They claim that it's because Bitcoin is so fragile that only one codebase may be allowed to touch the Blockchain. Yet other codebases already are and it appears to be working.

I was interested to read the other day that a couple of the core developers are now funded by very old-world banking interests. It seems so odd to me to see self-proclaimed Bitcoin evangelists fighting against efforts to spread its adoption.

Meanwhile I saw a bitcoin vending machine in the vestibule of a restaurant the other day, next to the other candy machines, and was happy to be able to seamlessly exchange currencies in a few seconds. The arbitrage between that machine and Amazon makes purse.io a huge boon for local residents.

Re:Conflicts of Interest

[Applehu Akbar]

"Meanwhile I saw a bitcoin vending machine in the vestibule of a restaurant the other day, next to the other candy machines, and was happy to be able to seamlessly exchange currencies in a few seconds. The arbitrage between that machine and Amazon makes purse.io a huge boon for local residents."

How are customers adjusting to the idea of swiping in a Bitcoin purchase, and then waiting an hour for the blockchain to update before their soda drops? How large a crowd accumulates around the machine on hot days?

Re:Conflicts of Interest

[N1AK]

I'm pretty sure this may be like the machines you get at Airports where you put in real money and it eventually credits your bitcoin account. Given the delay on locking in a bitcoin transaction no one is going to provide something for bitcoin by vending machine because it would be too easy to take the item and rescind the payment.

Misleading link (mining not stated t be a bug)

[rocqua]

No where within site linked to with the text "mining as a necessary bug, but a bug nonetheless" is it stated that mining is a bug. In fact, the word mining is only used twice. It is mentioned only to explain what mining is in the most hand-wavy way possible. Very misleading

Why group mining?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is group mining even a thing?
It seems to be the source of most buttcoin problems.

Why not rip it out entirely and change the spec around to balance singular nodes?
Or put a max nodes per group in effect.

Re:decred

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

What does Decred have that Bitcoin doesn't? Your lack of arguments for Decred and against Bitcoin doesn't tell us much.

More Formal Specifications Please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes please a formal specification! I tried implementing Bitcoin but quickly realized the documentation is incomplete and sometimes even incorrect. People keep saying how the protocol is beautiful but honestly these people don't know what they are talking about. It's a big mess to look at that codebase.

Why do we have specification you might ask? Specifications are a type of contract and as a type of contract they are there to assign blame. It answers the question "Who is violating the specification" when something doesn't go as planned. Which leads me to my next point. It isn't fair to other implementations if the specification is the original Bitcoin client.