Bitcoin’s 4th of July : INDEPENDENCE FROM AMERICA DAY

In the wee hours of the morning – this July 4, 2015i – a pair of woefully mismanaged but +EV-driven mining pools conspired to mine invalid orphan blocks on top of other invalid orphan blocks… FIVE FUCKING TIMES !!!1 This is unusual, to be sure. One or two happen with some frequency, three even, but six is a once-every-few-years sort of occurance.

This event was the result of the retardation-on-a-stick known as “Bitcoin Improvement Protocols,” or “BIPs,” wherein one BIP66 allowed for 95% “consensus” of the last 1,000 blocks mined to determine that blocks mined with versions >0.6 of the Bitcoin Core software (i.e. “v1”) and versions 0.7 – 0.8  (i.e. “v2”) were rejected in favour of blocks mined using 0.9.5+ (i.e. “v3”). This caused a softfork, or ph0rk, if you will.

The absolutely unacceptable stupidity of such a proposal aside, that it gives a bunch of marauding idiots a few blissful moment of warm gooey feelings to the detriment of the entire society aside, it might even have worked ! That is, had the miners who claimed to be “in consensus” actually been running the Bitcoin Core software, but of course they weren’t. ii And why would they ? It’s a piece of shit, after all. And tawk is cheap.

Turns out that F2Pool, Antminer, and others were “SPV Mining” – using a lite client that only measures the depth of the blockchain instead of verifying block hashes – in order to gain an edge in block propagation times because, lo and behold, even 1 MB blocks are slow and cumbersome.iii  This is just business, after all, and the rotating door of large mining pools would indicate that none of them have yet figured out how this whole shebang really works, so surprise of surprises, none of them exactly stands out for their technological robustness and market savvy.

Needless to say, the aforementioned events resulted in some deal of commotion before everything settled down again and came to a resolution, leaving us with some important lessons learned :

I. No more BIPS.iv
II. No more versions.v
III. No more Americans.vi

While Americans are celebrating their independence from the British Empire, so too will Bitcoin, TMSRO~ celebrate its independence from the American Empire. I mean, why throw away a good day just because some kids at the playground happened to borrow it for a minute ? It’s not like Jesus invented Easter. Besides, every culture has to have a mid-summer festival.

Now where did Jimbob go off to with those goshdarn fireworks ?

___ ___ ___

  1. Blockheight 363,731 – 363,736.
  2. More detail on what happened, as is very often the case, is in the logs.
  3. And you wonder why USGavin is left wondering “Hey guise, who turned the lights off ?” It’s precisely this. Bigger blocks impose unrealistic hardware and bandwidth demands on miners, leading miners to find creative solutions that pay well even if they come at the expense of fragilising the network.
  4. Or BIP 999 : No more fucking BIPs.
  5. Blockchains that don’t validate under 0.5.3, the canonical reference implementation, are altcoin chains. See The Real Bitcoin Foundation’s Official Statement.

    Also, the basic premise that there are “improvements” to be made on software only shows that children with dreams shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the stuff. Can you imagine if NASA let malevolent moles like Gavin and Hearn anywhere near a space shuttle ? The Columbia disaster would look like a day at the beach in comparison.

  6. mircea_popescu: These are people who have been so far causing nothing but problems for Bitcoin. There can not be a single instance documented where they did anything useful to any degree or in any sense an abundance of instances can be documented where they fucked things up. Then they go on reddit to “explain” why what they fucked up isn’t their fault, and “what really happened”, and collect cheap applause from the celenterates therein living.
    *: pete_d searches memory for instances of useful ‘devs’… blank.
    mircea_popescu: This is EXACTLY how USG works throughout. First, cause black people to be poor and depenedent. Then cause them to be violent. Then go on press conferences about how “they’re doing things about black violence.”

    This is to say that, while there are a couple of American residents in the TRBF’s dev WoT, they’re not Americans in the sense of being monolingual, monocultural apes who fling shit at each other and fling shit at their wives and fling shit at the canvas and call it “art.” The Americans I’m talking about here are as backwards as the Indians that the Americans thought they killed off a couple hundred years ago before ironically becoming. These are the enemy of all that’s good and proper, these are the Gavins, Hearns, and Luke-Jrs.

5 thoughts on “Bitcoin’s 4th of July : INDEPENDENCE FROM AMERICA DAY

  1. […] weekend the Bitcoin Blockchain experienced a forking incident due a discrepancy between what the expectations of a group developing a Bitcoin network client […]

  2. […] smashing their skulls on every single step on the way down. Sorta like they did with that SPV Mining nonsense, […]

  3. […] there were totally 135k coins changing hands in a single day on a single scammy exchange, because the 4th of July never happened, and because maybe, just maybe, if you closed your eyes a tad harder and clenched […]

  4. […] relay the larger blocks, something that already seems to be an issue with 1 MB blocks based on the SPV idiocy of early July,  the network would be more fragile as fewer users could afford nodes as the costs of running a […]

  5. […] set,v he’s no Krugman or Piketty now, which is to say that he will starve when this is all said and done, but I can’t help but think that his bespectabled head would look ever so right atop a spike […]

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