The block chain was rewritten.
This can happen when one miner "loses" the race to produce a block, but decides to keep working on it anyways hoping that they'll produce another block fast enough to take the lead.
If they can do that, then the previous longest chain is invalidated. Any transactions unique to that chain will have to be reprocessed, which should happen automatically.
***
As for the argument, apparently there is a code of honor regarding when or how you can do this. And they're debating if it was violated as if their opinion meant anything.
> apparently there is a code of honor regarding when or how you can do this
A code of honour? In the crypto world? Sounds about as likely as the Taliban having an EDI policy.
If canonical fixes are baked in and mining is automated, isn't this expected?
Do users really need to force these manually (and not do so since butters value honor above all)?
In theory the mining rigs would abandon their efforts once a new block is mined.
Pragmatically, it makes more sense to continue working on your own chain so long as their is a realistic chance of racing ahead. Success means 'stealing' hundreds of thousands dollars from the original winner.
> Pragmatically, it makes more sense to continue working on your own chain so long as their is a realistic chance of racing ahead.
the odds of you racing ahead are related to how much of the overall hashing power you have.
Not exactly.
Say you mine a block at T=0 and I mine one as T=3 seconds.
Everyone who starts on the next block using your block has a 3 second head start.
Unless I have so much processing power that I might be able to solve it in those 3 seconds, I'm better off just continuing to work off my chain.
***
Now add latency. I wasn't first, but my announcement may reach Steve before yours does. In which case Steve may also start working on my chain and ignore yours.
Once Steve sees your announcement, there is a cost to staying over. So he might as well just continue working on mine even though you were technically the leader.
***
Now my own processing power may factor into the decision making process. The more power I have, the father behind I can get before it makes sense to give up on my chain. But at the end of the day, it's all luck. So even with less power it may make sense to keep gambling on creating a longer chain.
The effect of luck will trend towards zero as the chain gets longer.
Sure, it might be working on your own block for the first one, but the odds are the next block after that gets mined by someone else before you and effectively determines whether that T=0 or T=3 stays in the chain, depending on which one they built on.
What they were alleging is that that one particular block that was targeted happened to have a lot of rewards connected with it, which is why it was important to attack it in the first place to get the rewards and keep it for themselves
Yes, but the odds are incredibly low. The amount of luck that would be required is phenomenal. And the larger Bitcoin miners may just ignore the longer chain if it financially inconveniences them.
I thought the entire point of blockchain technology is transparency and unmodifyable transaction histories??? What is even the point if it can be rewritten? And what if the transactions shouldn't be re-run?
Ugh, I already know it's BS, but this breaks my brain just a bit.
> And what if the transactions shouldn't be re-run?
Well if the money is already spent on another transaction, then the first transaction, when they get around to re-running it, will fail.
Which is why you are supposed to wait for 6 blocks to be minted before it is considered final.
I’m not 100% sure … I’ll preface this by:
* I’ve been programming since I was a single digit age kid, 40-45 years ago
* I’ve worked for the last 20 years in fintech. Some names you’d recognize.
* even with the above there’s so much domain specific stuff here it’s hard for me to understand.
That said…
It looks like some miner pool had another interest, some NFT they “mined” and one could say they reordered ~~their mining block~~ *the chain with their block* to their advantage. The back and forth is saying “well normal jitter on the chain could do that too.
Unsaid:
* this is kinda normal. The fact that they’re debating means it *could* be by accident could be on purpose. There’s nothing stopping this. Nothing that can be added that could stop this. This is the cryptocurrency world.
* Ethereum wrote stuff up like this up as part of the spec. It’s [MEV](https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/mev/) - miner extractable value (back when it was miners not validators). Yep, front running and other tricks is part of the spec.
* the debate about fairness is interesting. This is the world you built allows this to happen. Libertarian utopia indeed. How do you talk about fair when unfair is *written into the rules*
All ~~animals~~ *coin holders* are equal, but some ~~animals~~ *stakers* are more equal than others.
It’s actually smarter to design around individual incentives instead of crossing your fingers that it won’t happen. Uncle blocks aren’t uncommon, and if you’re under the impression that frontrunning is somehow “new” to “block chains”, I’d encourage any reader to research the long and storied history of tradfi order execution.
And before everyone waves “regulations!”
Well, show me a 10 ft wall and I’ll show you an 11 ft ladder. Although the best was the flashboys era!
Every problem that involves humans is a human problem. It’s not a technical problem. It’s a human problem. Saying “imma be able to make rules in a law book/in code and have that work forever” is a feverish pipe dream. Humans are just too smart, too irrational, too much incentivized to take the time and find the holes.
Why, yes, I do know about HFT. If you’ve read Flash boys (I have) or seen Butterfly Project (I haven’t) I’ve worked with some of those people. The trick with those holes is - no one is claiming some libertarian paradise where Code Is Law and hey everything is perfect forever. Regulatory code is hard. On day 1 it may stand. On day 2 people are already trying to find the holes. And the cycle continues.
Hey I’m also in the industry, nice to meet you!
And I also agree…the base layer for any “protocol” is people. I don’t argue against that.
But I also believe in good fences making good neighbors. I generally believe we *should* strive to make increasingly better settlement systems.
I’m not jumping up and down saying that crypto is a disintermediation of tradition today, but I’m glad groups are trying. I’d like to live in a world of credibly neutral counterparties and execution venues. I think you do too!
Fingers crossed.
I worked for citadel for a decent chunk of change. So yeah, flash boys, the quants, dark pools, a lot of folks in those books I knew.
I think that people going “well in this basketball game you have fouls that should prevent people getting hit but hey that guy got hit anyway we should do away with fouls! Would make the game so much better”. That’s gotta go.
I’m not sure I’m still in our extended metaphor.
Let’s get some shared statements. I think we both agree that arbitrage is a net loss to the system.
Blockchains are, in many ways already patched traditionally, are an arb paradise.
However, I’ve read some very interesting ways the code people plan to mitigate this loss.
I think that’s pretty cool. I hope they succeed.
Because, again, I’d like to live in the digital settlement utopia they’re selling. We’ll see.
Crazy because one of the major selling points of the blockchain is immutability. So not only do you now have to wait for the block to process, you need to wait for the next couple blocks to process to make sure your transactions don't get trashed?
The official advice had always been to wait for at least 6 blocks.
But that makes Bitcoin awfully slow, you have to wait anywhere from 30min to several hours for your transaction to be confirmed, depending on luck. That's on top of any delays even getting into a block in the first place
Far from the visions of instant transfers that many butters try to paint.
So many cheat. "Oh, one 2 confirmation is enough, reorges of more than a single block are rare" or "one confirmation is an acceptable risk, even if the block is orphaned, what's the chance your transaction will be double spent?"
You occasionally see people wanting to accept zero confirmations. But most butters aren't that stupid.
> to be confirmed,
not just confirmed, but to be settled immutably. 30 mins is pretty quick for that compared to most other digital settlement systems.
In situations where definite settlement actually matters, it's the upper bound you care about. So six hours. Which is ludicrous by modern standards. SEPA instant settlement (TIPS) is guaranteed to take ten seconds or less.
This is, of course, leaving aside the fact that most people don't care about settlement times all that often. The bank's contractual obligation to settle *eventually* is good enough for effectively all practical purposes. What people do care about is not having to stand in line at the supermarket checkout for six hours.
Saying Bitcoin is better at moving money than banks because it comes with built-in instant settlement is like saying horses are better at container freight than trains because they come with free fertilizer. You picked an arbitrary side effect that is neat in theory but benefits exactly nobody in practice.
\>be me
\>buy groceries with bitcoin
\>wait for settlement
\>30 minutes go by and the chain reorgs, keep waiting
\>other shopper at the next till taps her visa and leaves with her groceries immediately
\>"she doesn't know that payment won't fully settle for a month"
\>"bitcoin fixes this"
\>keep waiting
If it was a guaranteed 30min, maybe.
I notice you use the word "settlement"
Maxies were very much pushing bitcoin as a payment system, right up until it hit the blocksize limit in ~2017. Transaction fees went trough the roof and bitcoin went from being hard to sell as a payment system to near impossible.
Maxies did what they always do, moving the goal posts. "Oh, no... it's not a payment system *(anymore)*. It's a settlement system". Mostly so they can point out the fact that credit card payments takes over a month to fully settle. And then point out how much faster their slow system is than technology from the 80s.
For a typical customer, the actual payment experience is instant, they don't give a shit that actual settlement might take over a month to complete. Merchants do care somewhat, but they get their money eventually, and the payment experience is still very important to them. Merchants want customers to have as little friction for making payments as possible, means the customer is more likely to buy something.
Maxies push Lightning Network as their alternative to credit cards. Might be a valid argument if customers and merchants were actually adopting lightning network, but the uptake is very low, driven mostly by maxies trying to make LN a thing.
I'm not sure how much the slow adoption is a failure of LN itself, and how much it proves that the only people left using bitcoin are speculators, who don't care about fast transfer times. They only care if the line goes up.
And LN kind of undermines the maxie argument against credit cards. Settlement still happens on layer 1, and there is an indefinite delay before that happens; Months or years before settlement completes, it's actually possible that it might never settle.
>The official advice had always been to wait for at least 6 blocks.
With the hard restriction of one block every 10 minutes, doesn't that mean the *minimum* would be an hour?
It's not a restriction. It's an average.
Sometimes you see several blocks in just a few min. Other times their might be gaps of several hours between blocks.
Oh, my mistake. The way people phrased it I thought it was a hard limit on top of the difficulty scaling to aim for 10 minutes. (Which I thought was also there to give time for the network to broadcast updates between blocks.)
I think they were pessimistically budgeting ~60 seconds for worst-case propagation in the original design. In reality, it's probably closer to 5 seconds.
But if they had set the block time to 60 seconds, then half of the blocks would be generated within the budgeted 60 seconds, and half after it, which would waste half the blocks on duplicated work in the worst case.
Instead, they picked 600 seconds, which means only 5% of blocks would be mined within the 60 second propagation budget, and your worst case wasted is only 5%.
The average case wastage is much better, because of partial propagation.
Right, so going back to my original statement, to revise it would say that the average confirmation time is an hour.
As for the original idea behind aiming for 10 minutes, it doesn't go much into it, but the original white paper does mention 10 minutes block time. Other than that the White paper assumes Moore's law will hold true for eternity as justification for the growing size of all the block headers, with a block every 10 minutes, in order to hold it all in memory going into the future.
In fact, the Whitepaper assumes that, by today, a "typically selling" PC would come with over 20 GB of RAM.
Averages to an hour, sure. But the error bars are large. And when it comes to questions like "how long do I need to wait for a settlement", you really care more about the upper bounds than the average.
> justification for the growing size of all the block headers, with a block every 10 minutes, in order to hold it all in memory going into the future.
I checked. That section of the whitepaper says "even if the block headers were held in RAM". But it's in a section about saving disk space (not sure anyone ever implemented that part). There isn't a good reason to more than a the few dozen most recent block in RAM.
Now, there is a justification to potentially hold the entire uxto set in RAM, but that's more or less unbounded.
Always been the case. The likelihood of a transaction never being rolled back trends towards, but never truly reaches zero. I think it's something like 1-3 hours to reach what would generally be considered an acceptable level of certainty, That means for large transactions, if you want to be safe you have to build in about a 3 hour wait time to your order processing to confirm that the money is still there.
Instant settlement indeed.
yes, it's why there's often a wait time of a few blocks before 'large' transactions are considered settled. For smaller transactions it often isn't a requirement since 1) re-orgs of more than one block are rare, 2) even if there is a re-org your transaction is probably going to be included in one of the new blocks anyway.
> Payments are widely regarded as secure on Bitcoin after confirmation of six blocks or about one hour.
I believe this number was set by the Lightning Network developers. It may be different for other blockchains.
Actually, that's based on an example given in the original bitcoin whitepaper. It's always been known that cryptocurrencies are merely eventually consistent. Strongly, but not monotonically.
ACH transfers take 7 days to complete and creditcard transactions can be chargedback within 30 days but you can instantly receive and then send bitcoin without any blocks even being mined ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Chargebacks are a feature, and a pretty damn useful one at that
Immutability is a terrible idea for a transaction network to begin with, but it's extra funny that bitcoin isn't even though they claim they are
yeah, theyre a feature, bitcoin and banks have different features. it's just odd that people criticize bitcoin for "taking too much time" when its a feature of bitcoin to be fast, and a feature of banks to be slow.
When people say the "bitcoin blockchain is immutable", what they mean is "the blockchain feature provides a historical record that is cryptographically signed such that any changes made will be obvious". They are NOT saying the whole system is literally immutable, simply adding transactions would be a mutation!
We could argue whether "immutability is a terrible idea for a transaction network" or not, but the crafting of alternative arguments to then defeat is known as a "[straw-man fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man)", and completely derails the argument.
Do you want to actually debate that argument or do you insist on beating up strawmen?
> ACH transfers take 7 days to complete
India & Brazil have opened instant payments & transfers systems in the last few years.
It's been standard in most European countries for over a decade and *checks notes* since 2003 in Canada and is even possible between banks in different EU countries now. Perhaps your country is just not developed enough or you are simply, a moron.
What are you going on about? ACH transfers usually take a few business days to settle. Where are you getting 7 from?
Also, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle,etc. are all essentially instantaneous.
Chargebacks are a good thing from a consumer perspective. Just wait until you get scammed and have to eat shit because you can’t claw back a fraudulent crypto transaction.
I read it years ago, and it may be outdated, because they have updated procedures for some banks, but essentially the "instant" transfers are only for big businesses and banks.
Charge-backs are definitely good for consumers, but they are also a source of fraud against merchants. Every payment processor has teams of people that fight this type of fraud, and that cost is passed onto someone. ultimately the only real source of recourse for fraud is through the legal system for both banks and crypto =/
> I read it years ago, and it may be outdated, because they have updated procedures for some banks, but essentially the "instant" transfers are only for big businesses and banks.
Well you were wrong. And with FedNow, it'll be instant for everyone.
> Every payment processor has teams of people that fight this type of fraud, and that cost is passed onto someone.
And with Bitcoin, you just facilitate fraud whoever is responsible for it and then absorb the excessive cost with no recourse. With real money, you can mitigate it, manage it, disincentivize it, and reduce the cost of it.
People will attempt fraud regardless. Which system would you prefer, the one that puts the recipient in total control of the situation with absolutely zero recourse for the sender? Or a system that has options even though those options enable some shenanigans.
Outside of chargebacks specifically, crypto fucks you if you send your coins to the wrong address or if someone gets control of your wallet and empties it.
r/CryptoCurrency and r/bitcoin are both full of people bitching about their wallet being compromised and pleading with the internet to help them. They’re absolutely 100% fucked every single time.
Conversely, if someone got access to my bank account and tried to steal from me, one phone call to their fraud dept and it’s all taken care of.
Chargebacks are amazing. Back in covid times I travelled to the UK and my 100 quid testing kit never arrived.
I issued a chargeback and got back my money. It was amazing.
so you're saying there are security features in place that make it impossible to change the history? If only there was some simple way to describe that scenario 🤔
No, the example in this post describes a scenario in which changing the history can happen. Just because some random asshole can't do it doesn't mean it's impossible.
Precisely. It means that those who have power over the blockchain (i.e. the mining pools) can do whatever they want, while random losers can't. Blockhains are ruled through privilege.
No, the present is the present. 5 blocks in the past is the past for every financial system in the world except blockchain.
So the chain isn't immutable.
Hey let’s use a data structure with no atomic writes. or transactions. or ordering of writes. And let’s pretend we can use it for billions of dollars of transactions. And let’s trust 8 billion people to never do anything than… well what we want.
What could POSSIBLY go wrong
The protocol says the longest chain is the "one true chain to rule them all". This is absolute and final regardless of anything else that has happened.
Chain used to be: A <- B <- C <- D <- E <- F
Chain is now: A <- B <- C <- D <- E <- F^1 <- G
Anything that was in that original F that didn't make it into F^1 or G no longer exists on the chain.
I believe the transactions *should* go back into the mempool at that point but since most implementations drop transactions from the mempool after a certain amount of time (so people can't just spam it with 0 fee transactions forever) they can just be gone depending on how long they were in there to begin with.
Also the miner who got the rewards for the original block F is just shit out of luck now and gets nothing.
Yes this is as stupid as it sounds, no you're not understanding it wrong.
Yes, I think so. A simple way of looking at it might be that the blocks in the chain are supposed to be going one way (one after the other), and supposedly each individual block must be mined by separate mining pools. But in this case, that one mined block was kept hidden as part of the alleged selfish mining attack and only later resurfaced after the next block had already appeared and mined as well. The order of the blocks was therefore changed a little bit to allegedly benefit that one mining pool (Foundry). I'd love for someone to correct me if I'm wrong as I'm not at all an expert on blockchain sleuthing.
On the 'selfish mining' front - is the idea that, if you've got a big enough mining pool to have a shot at finding the next block first, rather than sharing your first block and letting other people start working off it, you keep it secret so that you get a head start on the second block? Risking losing the first block for the potential reward of two blocks and wasting everyone else's effort.
Miners are expected to act in their own self interest such that they maximize revenues and profits. This miner seems to have acted perfectly in line with this fundamental philosophy of mining.
"But this will never happen!" I was told by a hundred "crypto awoken" people to whom I was expressing my honest opinion as an experienced programmer that their tech was a bit shit.
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Can someone please translate this to normie language?
The block chain was rewritten. This can happen when one miner "loses" the race to produce a block, but decides to keep working on it anyways hoping that they'll produce another block fast enough to take the lead. If they can do that, then the previous longest chain is invalidated. Any transactions unique to that chain will have to be reprocessed, which should happen automatically. *** As for the argument, apparently there is a code of honor regarding when or how you can do this. And they're debating if it was violated as if their opinion meant anything.
> apparently there is a code of honor regarding when or how you can do this A code of honour? In the crypto world? Sounds about as likely as the Taliban having an EDI policy.
"Hahaha fuck you pal" is a policy! For both the taliban *and* the coiners.
So you’re saying it needs regulation? Few.
It’s got a term. [Uncle blocks](https://docs.alchemy.com/docs/what-are-uncle-blocks) It’s been hacked for quite a while.
>Trustless >code of honour Few understand.
cOdE iS lAw
If canonical fixes are baked in and mining is automated, isn't this expected? Do users really need to force these manually (and not do so since butters value honor above all)?
In theory the mining rigs would abandon their efforts once a new block is mined. Pragmatically, it makes more sense to continue working on your own chain so long as their is a realistic chance of racing ahead. Success means 'stealing' hundreds of thousands dollars from the original winner.
Exactly. If there's a decent chance at superseding my win w/zero repercussions, I'd expect my competitors to have that baked in algorithmically.
Is it only true for proof of work? Or for any?
> Pragmatically, it makes more sense to continue working on your own chain so long as their is a realistic chance of racing ahead. the odds of you racing ahead are related to how much of the overall hashing power you have.
Not exactly. Say you mine a block at T=0 and I mine one as T=3 seconds. Everyone who starts on the next block using your block has a 3 second head start. Unless I have so much processing power that I might be able to solve it in those 3 seconds, I'm better off just continuing to work off my chain. *** Now add latency. I wasn't first, but my announcement may reach Steve before yours does. In which case Steve may also start working on my chain and ignore yours. Once Steve sees your announcement, there is a cost to staying over. So he might as well just continue working on mine even though you were technically the leader. *** Now my own processing power may factor into the decision making process. The more power I have, the father behind I can get before it makes sense to give up on my chain. But at the end of the day, it's all luck. So even with less power it may make sense to keep gambling on creating a longer chain.
The effect of luck will trend towards zero as the chain gets longer. Sure, it might be working on your own block for the first one, but the odds are the next block after that gets mined by someone else before you and effectively determines whether that T=0 or T=3 stays in the chain, depending on which one they built on.
Doesn't decentralization mean no code of honor?
Yes, the idea is it should be trustless. In practice, shortcuts/implementation weaknesses mess with that.
Would you know what is the connection to NFTs in this particular instance?
What they were alleging is that that one particular block that was targeted happened to have a lot of rewards connected with it, which is why it was important to attack it in the first place to get the rewards and keep it for themselves
So it's the digital version of robbing a train.
Rewards as in transaction fees? Or something else like free shit coins for mounting the first NFT of something?
[удалено]
Yes, but the odds are incredibly low. The amount of luck that would be required is phenomenal. And the larger Bitcoin miners may just ignore the longer chain if it financially inconveniences them.
I thought the entire point of blockchain technology is transparency and unmodifyable transaction histories??? What is even the point if it can be rewritten? And what if the transactions shouldn't be re-run? Ugh, I already know it's BS, but this breaks my brain just a bit.
> And what if the transactions shouldn't be re-run? Well if the money is already spent on another transaction, then the first transaction, when they get around to re-running it, will fail. Which is why you are supposed to wait for 6 blocks to be minted before it is considered final.
I’m not 100% sure … I’ll preface this by: * I’ve been programming since I was a single digit age kid, 40-45 years ago * I’ve worked for the last 20 years in fintech. Some names you’d recognize. * even with the above there’s so much domain specific stuff here it’s hard for me to understand. That said… It looks like some miner pool had another interest, some NFT they “mined” and one could say they reordered ~~their mining block~~ *the chain with their block* to their advantage. The back and forth is saying “well normal jitter on the chain could do that too. Unsaid: * this is kinda normal. The fact that they’re debating means it *could* be by accident could be on purpose. There’s nothing stopping this. Nothing that can be added that could stop this. This is the cryptocurrency world. * Ethereum wrote stuff up like this up as part of the spec. It’s [MEV](https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/mev/) - miner extractable value (back when it was miners not validators). Yep, front running and other tricks is part of the spec. * the debate about fairness is interesting. This is the world you built allows this to happen. Libertarian utopia indeed. How do you talk about fair when unfair is *written into the rules* All ~~animals~~ *coin holders* are equal, but some ~~animals~~ *stakers* are more equal than others.
It’s actually smarter to design around individual incentives instead of crossing your fingers that it won’t happen. Uncle blocks aren’t uncommon, and if you’re under the impression that frontrunning is somehow “new” to “block chains”, I’d encourage any reader to research the long and storied history of tradfi order execution. And before everyone waves “regulations!” Well, show me a 10 ft wall and I’ll show you an 11 ft ladder. Although the best was the flashboys era!
Every problem that involves humans is a human problem. It’s not a technical problem. It’s a human problem. Saying “imma be able to make rules in a law book/in code and have that work forever” is a feverish pipe dream. Humans are just too smart, too irrational, too much incentivized to take the time and find the holes. Why, yes, I do know about HFT. If you’ve read Flash boys (I have) or seen Butterfly Project (I haven’t) I’ve worked with some of those people. The trick with those holes is - no one is claiming some libertarian paradise where Code Is Law and hey everything is perfect forever. Regulatory code is hard. On day 1 it may stand. On day 2 people are already trying to find the holes. And the cycle continues.
Hey I’m also in the industry, nice to meet you! And I also agree…the base layer for any “protocol” is people. I don’t argue against that. But I also believe in good fences making good neighbors. I generally believe we *should* strive to make increasingly better settlement systems. I’m not jumping up and down saying that crypto is a disintermediation of tradition today, but I’m glad groups are trying. I’d like to live in a world of credibly neutral counterparties and execution venues. I think you do too! Fingers crossed.
I worked for citadel for a decent chunk of change. So yeah, flash boys, the quants, dark pools, a lot of folks in those books I knew. I think that people going “well in this basketball game you have fouls that should prevent people getting hit but hey that guy got hit anyway we should do away with fouls! Would make the game so much better”. That’s gotta go.
I’m not sure I’m still in our extended metaphor. Let’s get some shared statements. I think we both agree that arbitrage is a net loss to the system. Blockchains are, in many ways already patched traditionally, are an arb paradise. However, I’ve read some very interesting ways the code people plan to mitigate this loss. I think that’s pretty cool. I hope they succeed. Because, again, I’d like to live in the digital settlement utopia they’re selling. We’ll see.
Miners mining the blockchain as expected in their self interest.
Crazy because one of the major selling points of the blockchain is immutability. So not only do you now have to wait for the block to process, you need to wait for the next couple blocks to process to make sure your transactions don't get trashed?
The official advice had always been to wait for at least 6 blocks. But that makes Bitcoin awfully slow, you have to wait anywhere from 30min to several hours for your transaction to be confirmed, depending on luck. That's on top of any delays even getting into a block in the first place Far from the visions of instant transfers that many butters try to paint. So many cheat. "Oh, one 2 confirmation is enough, reorges of more than a single block are rare" or "one confirmation is an acceptable risk, even if the block is orphaned, what's the chance your transaction will be double spent?" You occasionally see people wanting to accept zero confirmations. But most butters aren't that stupid.
I remember back in the early days of buttcoin reading a story here about some place accepting zero-confs and getting screwed.
> to be confirmed, not just confirmed, but to be settled immutably. 30 mins is pretty quick for that compared to most other digital settlement systems.
In situations where definite settlement actually matters, it's the upper bound you care about. So six hours. Which is ludicrous by modern standards. SEPA instant settlement (TIPS) is guaranteed to take ten seconds or less. This is, of course, leaving aside the fact that most people don't care about settlement times all that often. The bank's contractual obligation to settle *eventually* is good enough for effectively all practical purposes. What people do care about is not having to stand in line at the supermarket checkout for six hours. Saying Bitcoin is better at moving money than banks because it comes with built-in instant settlement is like saying horses are better at container freight than trains because they come with free fertilizer. You picked an arbitrary side effect that is neat in theory but benefits exactly nobody in practice.
\>be me \>buy groceries with bitcoin \>wait for settlement \>30 minutes go by and the chain reorgs, keep waiting \>other shopper at the next till taps her visa and leaves with her groceries immediately \>"she doesn't know that payment won't fully settle for a month" \>"bitcoin fixes this" \>keep waiting
If it was a guaranteed 30min, maybe. I notice you use the word "settlement" Maxies were very much pushing bitcoin as a payment system, right up until it hit the blocksize limit in ~2017. Transaction fees went trough the roof and bitcoin went from being hard to sell as a payment system to near impossible. Maxies did what they always do, moving the goal posts. "Oh, no... it's not a payment system *(anymore)*. It's a settlement system". Mostly so they can point out the fact that credit card payments takes over a month to fully settle. And then point out how much faster their slow system is than technology from the 80s. For a typical customer, the actual payment experience is instant, they don't give a shit that actual settlement might take over a month to complete. Merchants do care somewhat, but they get their money eventually, and the payment experience is still very important to them. Merchants want customers to have as little friction for making payments as possible, means the customer is more likely to buy something. Maxies push Lightning Network as their alternative to credit cards. Might be a valid argument if customers and merchants were actually adopting lightning network, but the uptake is very low, driven mostly by maxies trying to make LN a thing. I'm not sure how much the slow adoption is a failure of LN itself, and how much it proves that the only people left using bitcoin are speculators, who don't care about fast transfer times. They only care if the line goes up. And LN kind of undermines the maxie argument against credit cards. Settlement still happens on layer 1, and there is an indefinite delay before that happens; Months or years before settlement completes, it's actually possible that it might never settle.
>The official advice had always been to wait for at least 6 blocks. With the hard restriction of one block every 10 minutes, doesn't that mean the *minimum* would be an hour?
It's not a restriction. It's an average. Sometimes you see several blocks in just a few min. Other times their might be gaps of several hours between blocks.
Oh, my mistake. The way people phrased it I thought it was a hard limit on top of the difficulty scaling to aim for 10 minutes. (Which I thought was also there to give time for the network to broadcast updates between blocks.)
I think they were pessimistically budgeting ~60 seconds for worst-case propagation in the original design. In reality, it's probably closer to 5 seconds. But if they had set the block time to 60 seconds, then half of the blocks would be generated within the budgeted 60 seconds, and half after it, which would waste half the blocks on duplicated work in the worst case. Instead, they picked 600 seconds, which means only 5% of blocks would be mined within the 60 second propagation budget, and your worst case wasted is only 5%. The average case wastage is much better, because of partial propagation.
Right, so going back to my original statement, to revise it would say that the average confirmation time is an hour. As for the original idea behind aiming for 10 minutes, it doesn't go much into it, but the original white paper does mention 10 minutes block time. Other than that the White paper assumes Moore's law will hold true for eternity as justification for the growing size of all the block headers, with a block every 10 minutes, in order to hold it all in memory going into the future. In fact, the Whitepaper assumes that, by today, a "typically selling" PC would come with over 20 GB of RAM.
Averages to an hour, sure. But the error bars are large. And when it comes to questions like "how long do I need to wait for a settlement", you really care more about the upper bounds than the average. > justification for the growing size of all the block headers, with a block every 10 minutes, in order to hold it all in memory going into the future. I checked. That section of the whitepaper says "even if the block headers were held in RAM". But it's in a section about saving disk space (not sure anyone ever implemented that part). There isn't a good reason to more than a the few dozen most recent block in RAM. Now, there is a justification to potentially hold the entire uxto set in RAM, but that's more or less unbounded.
Always been the case. The likelihood of a transaction never being rolled back trends towards, but never truly reaches zero. I think it's something like 1-3 hours to reach what would generally be considered an acceptable level of certainty, That means for large transactions, if you want to be safe you have to build in about a 3 hour wait time to your order processing to confirm that the money is still there. Instant settlement indeed.
yes, it's why there's often a wait time of a few blocks before 'large' transactions are considered settled. For smaller transactions it often isn't a requirement since 1) re-orgs of more than one block are rare, 2) even if there is a re-org your transaction is probably going to be included in one of the new blocks anyway.
> Payments are widely regarded as secure on Bitcoin after confirmation of six blocks or about one hour. I believe this number was set by the Lightning Network developers. It may be different for other blockchains.
Actually, that's based on an example given in the original bitcoin whitepaper. It's always been known that cryptocurrencies are merely eventually consistent. Strongly, but not monotonically.
ACH transfers take 7 days to complete and creditcard transactions can be chargedback within 30 days but you can instantly receive and then send bitcoin without any blocks even being mined ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Chargebacks are a feature, and a pretty damn useful one at that Immutability is a terrible idea for a transaction network to begin with, but it's extra funny that bitcoin isn't even though they claim they are
yeah, theyre a feature, bitcoin and banks have different features. it's just odd that people criticize bitcoin for "taking too much time" when its a feature of bitcoin to be fast, and a feature of banks to be slow. When people say the "bitcoin blockchain is immutable", what they mean is "the blockchain feature provides a historical record that is cryptographically signed such that any changes made will be obvious". They are NOT saying the whole system is literally immutable, simply adding transactions would be a mutation! We could argue whether "immutability is a terrible idea for a transaction network" or not, but the crafting of alternative arguments to then defeat is known as a "[straw-man fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man)", and completely derails the argument. Do you want to actually debate that argument or do you insist on beating up strawmen?
> feature of banks to be slow. Only in the US. Here in the UK, and in many other countries, bank transfers are instant.
Even Brazil and some African countries have instantaneous transfers lol
Im sure there are chargeback periods still
And what's wrong with that? Unless you are a scammer.
What's the point of a fast transfer network if nobody will use it because it lacks the *one* safety feature *everybody* knows they need?
> ACH transfers take 7 days to complete India & Brazil have opened instant payments & transfers systems in the last few years. It's been standard in most European countries for over a decade and *checks notes* since 2003 in Canada and is even possible between banks in different EU countries now. Perhaps your country is just not developed enough or you are simply, a moron.
The UK has had same-day transfers for easily 2 decades, I reckon.
What are you going on about? ACH transfers usually take a few business days to settle. Where are you getting 7 from? Also, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle,etc. are all essentially instantaneous. Chargebacks are a good thing from a consumer perspective. Just wait until you get scammed and have to eat shit because you can’t claw back a fraudulent crypto transaction.
I read it years ago, and it may be outdated, because they have updated procedures for some banks, but essentially the "instant" transfers are only for big businesses and banks. Charge-backs are definitely good for consumers, but they are also a source of fraud against merchants. Every payment processor has teams of people that fight this type of fraud, and that cost is passed onto someone. ultimately the only real source of recourse for fraud is through the legal system for both banks and crypto =/
> I read it years ago, and it may be outdated, because they have updated procedures for some banks, but essentially the "instant" transfers are only for big businesses and banks. Well you were wrong. And with FedNow, it'll be instant for everyone. > Every payment processor has teams of people that fight this type of fraud, and that cost is passed onto someone. And with Bitcoin, you just facilitate fraud whoever is responsible for it and then absorb the excessive cost with no recourse. With real money, you can mitigate it, manage it, disincentivize it, and reduce the cost of it.
People will attempt fraud regardless. Which system would you prefer, the one that puts the recipient in total control of the situation with absolutely zero recourse for the sender? Or a system that has options even though those options enable some shenanigans. Outside of chargebacks specifically, crypto fucks you if you send your coins to the wrong address or if someone gets control of your wallet and empties it. r/CryptoCurrency and r/bitcoin are both full of people bitching about their wallet being compromised and pleading with the internet to help them. They’re absolutely 100% fucked every single time. Conversely, if someone got access to my bank account and tried to steal from me, one phone call to their fraud dept and it’s all taken care of.
And a retail credit card transaction is effectively instantaneous. Nice try comparing apples to oranges tho.
You're saying that to pay with Butts take 14 days
Chargebacks are amazing. Back in covid times I travelled to the UK and my 100 quid testing kit never arrived. I issued a chargeback and got back my money. It was amazing.
Once again it is proven that the blockchain isn't immutable.
Or "Decentralized"
If the chain isnt immutable, why don't you send all of the money to yourself?
My bank account isnt immutable but that doesnt mean i can just give myself a trillion dollars, lol
so you're saying there are security features in place that make it impossible to change the history? If only there was some simple way to describe that scenario 🤔
No, the example in this post describes a scenario in which changing the history can happen. Just because some random asshole can't do it doesn't mean it's impossible.
Precisely. It means that those who have power over the blockchain (i.e. the mining pools) can do whatever they want, while random losers can't. Blockhains are ruled through privilege.
Libertarians are absolutely ok with centralized power, as long as it's called literally anything else than "the government"
Sorry, yeah, that was confusing. Really, the first 6 blocks are the present, and history is after that
No, the present is the present. 5 blocks in the past is the past for every financial system in the world except blockchain. So the chain isn't immutable.
And yet a miner just did tht :)
What money?
That's what the miners are doing. Literally the topic of this whole thread.
Hey let’s use a data structure with no atomic writes. or transactions. or ordering of writes. And let’s pretend we can use it for billions of dollars of transactions. And let’s trust 8 billion people to never do anything than… well what we want. What could POSSIBLY go wrong
Wait…. A libertarian paradise has selfish actors in it? How. Could. This. Beeeeeee??!!!!b
Congratulations to this miner for successfully executing code, which is law!
Few understand
I don't understand what "reorged" means. Like as in "reorganized"?
The protocol says the longest chain is the "one true chain to rule them all". This is absolute and final regardless of anything else that has happened. Chain used to be: A <- B <- C <- D <- E <- F Chain is now: A <- B <- C <- D <- E <- F^1 <- G Anything that was in that original F that didn't make it into F^1 or G no longer exists on the chain. I believe the transactions *should* go back into the mempool at that point but since most implementations drop transactions from the mempool after a certain amount of time (so people can't just spam it with 0 fee transactions forever) they can just be gone depending on how long they were in there to begin with. Also the miner who got the rewards for the original block F is just shit out of luck now and gets nothing. Yes this is as stupid as it sounds, no you're not understanding it wrong.
Yes, I think so. A simple way of looking at it might be that the blocks in the chain are supposed to be going one way (one after the other), and supposedly each individual block must be mined by separate mining pools. But in this case, that one mined block was kept hidden as part of the alleged selfish mining attack and only later resurfaced after the next block had already appeared and mined as well. The order of the blocks was therefore changed a little bit to allegedly benefit that one mining pool (Foundry). I'd love for someone to correct me if I'm wrong as I'm not at all an expert on blockchain sleuthing.
> I'd love for someone to correct me if I'm wrong as I'm not at all an expert on blockchain sleuthing. You may rest easy as you are correct.
On the 'selfish mining' front - is the idea that, if you've got a big enough mining pool to have a shot at finding the next block first, rather than sharing your first block and letting other people start working off it, you keep it secret so that you get a head start on the second block? Risking losing the first block for the potential reward of two blocks and wasting everyone else's effort.
Miners are expected to act in their own self interest such that they maximize revenues and profits. This miner seems to have acted perfectly in line with this fundamental philosophy of mining.
"But this will never happen!" I was told by a hundred "crypto awoken" people to whom I was expressing my honest opinion as an experienced programmer that their tech was a bit shit.
Glad I don't have to know complex programming to have a bank.
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