Re: [bitcoin-dev] Does Bitcoin require or have an honest majority or a rational one? (re rbf)

From: email@yancy•lol
To: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd•org>,
	Bitcoin Protocol Discussion
	<bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Does Bitcoin require or have an honest majority or a rational one? (re rbf)
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2022 10:47:19 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1f575fa24af142126507eebdf0e6b2e8@yancy.lol> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Y1HnJnpW9Al1W8cP@petertodd.org>

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> ...and the easiest way to avoid Bitcoin being a system that doesn't 
> arbitrarily
> change rules, is to rely on economically rational rules that aren't 
> likely to
> change!

Yes, I think many people on this thread have been making the same point. 
  This is the basis of the Nash Equilibrium, from what I remember.

> This, Satoshi (who doesn't really matter anyways I guess?)

It doesn't seem to me Satoshi was classically trained in CS else maybe 
he/she/they might have referenced the Nash Equilibrium.  Looking at some 
of the other references, including a statistics book titled "An 
Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications" from 1957 makes 
me think this Satoshi person was closer in training and practice to a 
mathematician.

Cheers,
-Yancy

On 2022-10-21 02:26, Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 04:54:00PM -0700, Jeremy Rubin wrote:
> 
>> The difference between honest majority and longest chain is that the
>> longest chain bug was something acknowledged by Satoshi & patched
>> https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/40cd0369419323f8d7385950e20342e998c994e1#diff-623e3fd6da1a45222eeec71496747b31R420
>> .
>> 
>> OTOH, we have more explicit references that the honest majority really
>> should be thought of as good guys vs bad guys... e.g.
> 
> The point is Satoshi got a lot of very fundamental stuff wrong. 
> Bringing up
> what Satoshi wrote now, almost 14 years later, misleads less-technical 
> readers
> into thinking our understanding of Bitcoin is still based on that 
> early,
> incorrect, understanding.
> 
> Incidentally, you realize that it was _Satoshi_ who added RBF to 
> Bitcoin with
> nSequence replacements. My contribution was to fix that obviously 
> broken design
> with fee-based RBF (with nSequence a transaction could be replaced up 
> to 4
> billion times, using essentially unlimited P2P bandwidth; it was a 
> terrible
> idea).
> 
>> I do think the case can be fairly made for full RBF, but if you don't 
>> grok
>> the above maybe you won't have as much empathy for people who built a
>> business around particular aspects of the Bitcoin network that they 
>> feel
>> are now being changed. They have every right to be mad about that and 
>> make
>> disagreements known and argue for why we should preserve these 
>> properties.
> 
> Those people run mild sybil attacks on the network in their efforts to
> "mitigate risk" by monitoring propagation; fundamentally doing so is
> centralizing and unfair, as only a small number of companies can do 
> that
> without DoS attacking the P2P network. It's pretty obvious that 
> reliance to
> zeroconf is harmful to Bitcoin, and people trying to do that have 
> repeatedly
> taken big losses when their risk mitigations turned out to not work. 
> Their only
> right to be mad comes from the 1st Ammendment.
> 
>> As someone who wants for Bitcoin to be a system which doesn't 
>> arbitrarily
>> change rules based on the whims of others, I think it important that 
>> we can
>> steelman and provide strong cases for why our actions might be in the
>> wrong, so that we make sure our justifications are not only 
>> well-justified,
>> but that we can communicate them clearly to all participants in a 
>> global
>> value network.
> 
> ...and the easiest way to avoid Bitcoin being a system that doesn't 
> arbitrarily
> change rules, is to rely on economically rational rules that aren't 
> likely to
> change!
> 
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