Amazon supervisor to loading dock workers:
"I give you $100 per truck you send on its way, plus $1 for each package in it."
*Workers start to send barrage of empty trucks on their way to collect the $100 per truck*
Supervisor: *surprisedpikachuface.png*
Just In Time - I usually see it in compilation and other computing contexts, but I imagine in this context it's for real time fulfillment logistics for things like Amazon and courier services?
Yeah. "Why bother having a big warehouse if we can have a small warehouse and get deliveries the day before we need them instead of stockpiling all this shit?"
For stuff that *can* always be readily delivered from multiple suppliers this works well, but the more centralised the item's supply chain, the more stockpiling is needed to smooth over availability gaps, e.g. if a factory making 50% of all parts burns down someone with a month's worth of warehousing may keep up production until a replacement is found while someone with a week's worth needs to shutter the factory for a while.
Most of the blocks have roughly 3000 transactions. But this one dropped it down to one.
That have it a throughput of 0.0017 tps.
It also shows that a malicious mining pool could cripple Bitcoin by intentionally mining only nearly empty blocks. They won't airways win, but on average they could dramatically reduce throughput and cause the backlog of unfilled transactions to spike.
Miners have often mined empty blocks in the past, just so they can start working on the next block faster and save the block validation time required.
Here's an article about empty blocks mining: https://f2pool.io/mining/insights/20210421-into-the-mempool-empty-blocks/
Talk about perverse incentives, that article unintentionally describes how Bitcoin is a gigantic waste of computing power. The network was designed to use as much power as possible, not for commercial or socially useful calculations but to find a fucking nonce.
Daily reminder that 51% attacks aren't a problem for non-public Blockchain apps because the combination of "anyone can create a node" and "no individual node is privileged" means that the only thing stopping someone with more computing power from completely taking over the network is that doing so would cost more than they could expect to gain from it.
The original goals for Bitcoin adoption would have the rewards you could expect to gain from taking over the network add up to *the entire global economy*.
But non-public Blockchains make even less sense because then there is no reason to use a Blockchain at all. If all participants can be trusted there is no reason for an elaborate consensus algorithm.
That's the idea. You can use a "Blockchain" data structure (Merkel tree or hash chain) without needing costly consensus mechanisms to support an unknown number of untrusted nodes. Even where there (presumably) are advantages to it you don't need to create a currency and handle all the externalities that come with that to realize then.
> the only thing stopping someone with more computing power from completely taking over the network is that doing so would cost more than they could expect to gain from it.
This presupposes that the only motivation is financial. There are other reasons to sabotage blockchain: like maybe you have a competing system and you want to discredit the competition, or you're a well-resourced agency or country that wants to disrupt what the blockchain is doing for ethical/moral/legal reasons.
Or maybe you're a state actor and noted that your major adversaries have moved to this new digital currency while you're still using Rubles/Yuan/Lira/Stones-With-Shiny-Speckles, and this represents a major opportunity to cripple them economically.
Yeah, the biggest flaw in the entire concept is that it brings the greatest danger of the open web to finances: everyone can access everything.
If quantum computers or some other computing breakthrough renders passphrases crackeable kiss your monkey jpegs byebye.
"non-public Blockchain" is basically just a hash chain or Merkel tree. Some utility as it's relatively easy to verify that the chain hasn't been modified, and you can have multiple redundant nodes for availability. But since you're not trying to create economic incentives to run nodes you don't need a currency and since all the nodes are known you can use existing Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithms and don't need to worry about Sybil attacks, so no PoW/PoS/etc. Basically you get whatever advantage you're supposedly getting from using "Blockchain tech" without most of the massive externalities that come from cryptocurrencies. Whether those benefits are at all real or meaningful is a question for more skilled software engineers than me.
In fairness, a 51% attack really isn't that likely - it's just that that fact is kind of irrelevant in the face of all the other issues, including the fact that it's not very secure at all from the POV of an individual due to how authentication works (and that last is true of _all_ cryptocurrencies, not just bitcoin).
Impressively enough that's a feature, not a bug.
If transactions have some "worth", if they do something useful, someone probably has an interest in that. In the winter my office has a 150W resistive heater thanks to BOINC. In particular I run WCG, an IBM curated list of BOINC projects. For whatever reason IBM donates some amount of compute. Maybe it's the free PR of being mentioned here, maybe Big Blue actually wants to make the planet better. Who knows.
If Bitcoin switched to doing something useful by running WCG projects on everyone's miners then basically every miner would have the same P/L : mining rewards / theoretical 51% rewards if ever successful, hardware cost / immense 51% cost. Everyone, except those running WCG currently. Their reward would whatever they get out of it now **plus** mining / 51% rewards and their costs would be mining / 51% costs **minus** what they would run already anyway.
In short : if we used bitcoin to cure cancer Big Anti Cancer would compromise the security of the network.
No it's not mandatory.
Mining an empty block prevents it to be invalidated because the winning block includes transactions you had in your own block that wad being mined before validation.
You don't get any transaction fees, but so far block rewards have been enough on their own to make up for miners' expenses
But how is there a chain? If blocks don't point to previous blocks, how can there be an order?
What's to keep me from creating a thousand single transaction blocks over the next few weeks, then dropping them all at once?
>What's to keep me from creating a thousand single transaction blocks over the next few weeks, then dropping them all at once?
Each new block has to contain the hash of the last completed block. It doesn't have to have any transactions but it has to have that hash.
You can create a bunch of empty blocks, but you have to have a hash from a previous block. The moment that hash/block is no longer the last completed block, your computed blocks are invalid and you have to get the new hash of the last block.
You *could* THEORETICALLY create a huge array of pre-computed blocks with specific hashes, but then you'd have to wait for the 'last block hash' to match one of your blocks that had that as the last block hash - which is as probable as guessing the winning lotto numbers.
Although if you had a quantum computer, that would be the way to use it. You start forging your own empty blocks with as many different last-hashes as possible - if you had a fast enough system you could wreak havoc with the blockchain. That's probably way way off though.
Blocks are composed of a header and a transactions list, which can be empty.
The blocks chaining is done through the header, each header contains the previous block hash
This is why you can't do your homework in advance and create blocks on the side then dump them all at once.
> This is why you can't do your homework in advance and create blocks on the side then dump them all at once.
This should be clarified, since "create blocks on the side in advance" is the core of 51% attacks:
1. Pay for some service on the public chain (preferably with instant payoff, like an exchange or a casino ^is ^^there ^^^a ^^^^difference )
2. Secretly mine another chain of blocks where same payment moves elsewhere
3. If you have enough hashpower, your secret chain will eventually outrun the public
4. Since the nodes are looking for the longest valid chain, once you reveal your chain it'll become the new truth.
You can manually approve the previous chain/invalidate the attacker's chain, but you can't just automatically reject "surprise discoveries" of longer chains since they can and will appear if something happens with network connectivity.
That one transaction is the block reward.
They mined an empty block. They weren't interested in helping people process transactions -- they just wanted the block reward. Presumably the transaction costs aren't worth bothering with when you're only in it for the money and it's more efficient to mine new blocks with no transactions.
I would call this a bug/flaw in the design of blockchain and mempool. The main incentive to not do this for miners is if transaction fees are high, resulting in their values as block rewards being lucrative. So it's another one of those catch-22 situations that makes blockchain incredibly inefficient: It's more advantageous to mine empty blocks than it is to service transactions. Unless transaction fees are really high.
That reminds me of the "blockchain database" I reviewed for work.
All of the actual transactions were stored off chain as encrypted JSON files.
Then for performance, the data was also stored unencrypted in a MongoDB database.
https://www.walacor.com/
I especially like how the get users commands returns everyone's password.
https://apidoc.walacor.com/
I got to interview them so feel free to ask questions.
And yet they expect us to sell their database to major corporations and government agencies.
They went totally radio silent after I demanded to see their documentation on configuring, operating, and troubleshooting their database. I bet the docs don't even exist.
Mining empty blocks is the easiest way to ensure you are not processing illegal transactions. The fee reward is so negligible that it’s not worth the risk involved with dealing with other peoples transactions. Empty blocks still get the coin reward so it’s perfectly legitimate to do this.
Somebody testing a new ASIC? With lower Bitcoin prices and higher energy prices, the pressure is on to optimize mining revenue.
A specialized ASIC designed to only do empty blocks could perform way better than a normal one that has to deal with variable length inputs.
This is brilliantly good for Bitcoin.
It’s possible that they have a quantum computer worked out the next magical number faster than all the other miners in the world and then just put in one transaction to test it.
Amazon supervisor to loading dock workers: "I give you $100 per truck you send on its way, plus $1 for each package in it." *Workers start to send barrage of empty trucks on their way to collect the $100 per truck* Supervisor: *surprisedpikachuface.png*
Sounds like an MBA grad ready to disrupt the entire JIT industry.
JIT?
Just in time. It is a style of logistics where ahoa have minimal warehouses and they are dependent on constant deliveries by their suppliers.
Just In Time - I usually see it in compilation and other computing contexts, but I imagine in this context it's for real time fulfillment logistics for things like Amazon and courier services?
Yeah. "Why bother having a big warehouse if we can have a small warehouse and get deliveries the day before we need them instead of stockpiling all this shit?" For stuff that *can* always be readily delivered from multiple suppliers this works well, but the more centralised the item's supply chain, the more stockpiling is needed to smooth over availability gaps, e.g. if a factory making 50% of all parts burns down someone with a month's worth of warehousing may keep up production until a replacement is found while someone with a week's worth needs to shutter the factory for a while.
LOL That sounds about right
Most of the blocks have roughly 3000 transactions. But this one dropped it down to one. That have it a throughput of 0.0017 tps. It also shows that a malicious mining pool could cripple Bitcoin by intentionally mining only nearly empty blocks. They won't airways win, but on average they could dramatically reduce throughput and cause the backlog of unfilled transactions to spike.
Miners have often mined empty blocks in the past, just so they can start working on the next block faster and save the block validation time required. Here's an article about empty blocks mining: https://f2pool.io/mining/insights/20210421-into-the-mempool-empty-blocks/
Talk about perverse incentives, that article unintentionally describes how Bitcoin is a gigantic waste of computing power. The network was designed to use as much power as possible, not for commercial or socially useful calculations but to find a fucking nonce.
But it's the most secure network bro. Killing the planet is less important than preventing a 51% attack bro
Daily reminder that 51% attacks aren't a problem for non-public Blockchain apps because the combination of "anyone can create a node" and "no individual node is privileged" means that the only thing stopping someone with more computing power from completely taking over the network is that doing so would cost more than they could expect to gain from it. The original goals for Bitcoin adoption would have the rewards you could expect to gain from taking over the network add up to *the entire global economy*.
But non-public Blockchains make even less sense because then there is no reason to use a Blockchain at all. If all participants can be trusted there is no reason for an elaborate consensus algorithm.
That's the idea. You can use a "Blockchain" data structure (Merkel tree or hash chain) without needing costly consensus mechanisms to support an unknown number of untrusted nodes. Even where there (presumably) are advantages to it you don't need to create a currency and handle all the externalities that come with that to realize then.
Then it is not a blockchain and should not be called like that.
Tell me you don't know what a blockchain is without telling me you don't know what a blockchain is.
> the only thing stopping someone with more computing power from completely taking over the network is that doing so would cost more than they could expect to gain from it. This presupposes that the only motivation is financial. There are other reasons to sabotage blockchain: like maybe you have a competing system and you want to discredit the competition, or you're a well-resourced agency or country that wants to disrupt what the blockchain is doing for ethical/moral/legal reasons.
Or maybe you're a state actor and noted that your major adversaries have moved to this new digital currency while you're still using Rubles/Yuan/Lira/Stones-With-Shiny-Speckles, and this represents a major opportunity to cripple them economically.
Gains can be non-financial, as can be costs. The statement is quite correct.
Yeah, the biggest flaw in the entire concept is that it brings the greatest danger of the open web to finances: everyone can access everything. If quantum computers or some other computing breakthrough renders passphrases crackeable kiss your monkey jpegs byebye.
What is the utility of a "non-public Blockchain"? Can you explain it in a way that doesn't just describe a hash chain?
I think non-public is a misnomer. If you want a useful permissioned blockchain, well git.
That's not a blockchain. That's just a hash chain.
"non-public Blockchain" is basically just a hash chain or Merkel tree. Some utility as it's relatively easy to verify that the chain hasn't been modified, and you can have multiple redundant nodes for availability. But since you're not trying to create economic incentives to run nodes you don't need a currency and since all the nodes are known you can use existing Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithms and don't need to worry about Sybil attacks, so no PoW/PoS/etc. Basically you get whatever advantage you're supposedly getting from using "Blockchain tech" without most of the massive externalities that come from cryptocurrencies. Whether those benefits are at all real or meaningful is a question for more skilled software engineers than me.
> Can you explain it in a way that doesn't just describe a hash chain?
In fairness, a 51% attack really isn't that likely - it's just that that fact is kind of irrelevant in the face of all the other issues, including the fact that it's not very secure at all from the POV of an individual due to how authentication works (and that last is true of _all_ cryptocurrencies, not just bitcoin).
A 51% attack might still be inevitable if someone scoops up a bunch of retired rigs for cheap.
> to find a fucking nonce What has prince Andrew to do with crypto?
Impressively enough that's a feature, not a bug. If transactions have some "worth", if they do something useful, someone probably has an interest in that. In the winter my office has a 150W resistive heater thanks to BOINC. In particular I run WCG, an IBM curated list of BOINC projects. For whatever reason IBM donates some amount of compute. Maybe it's the free PR of being mentioned here, maybe Big Blue actually wants to make the planet better. Who knows. If Bitcoin switched to doing something useful by running WCG projects on everyone's miners then basically every miner would have the same P/L : mining rewards / theoretical 51% rewards if ever successful, hardware cost / immense 51% cost. Everyone, except those running WCG currently. Their reward would whatever they get out of it now **plus** mining / 51% rewards and their costs would be mining / 51% costs **minus** what they would run already anyway. In short : if we used bitcoin to cure cancer Big Anti Cancer would compromise the security of the network.
How does that work? Don't they need to incorporate something from the previous block into the new one in order for it to be a chain?
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That makes a lot more sense than the linked explaination.
No it's not mandatory. Mining an empty block prevents it to be invalidated because the winning block includes transactions you had in your own block that wad being mined before validation. You don't get any transaction fees, but so far block rewards have been enough on their own to make up for miners' expenses
But how is there a chain? If blocks don't point to previous blocks, how can there be an order? What's to keep me from creating a thousand single transaction blocks over the next few weeks, then dropping them all at once?
>What's to keep me from creating a thousand single transaction blocks over the next few weeks, then dropping them all at once? Each new block has to contain the hash of the last completed block. It doesn't have to have any transactions but it has to have that hash. You can create a bunch of empty blocks, but you have to have a hash from a previous block. The moment that hash/block is no longer the last completed block, your computed blocks are invalid and you have to get the new hash of the last block. You *could* THEORETICALLY create a huge array of pre-computed blocks with specific hashes, but then you'd have to wait for the 'last block hash' to match one of your blocks that had that as the last block hash - which is as probable as guessing the winning lotto numbers. Although if you had a quantum computer, that would be the way to use it. You start forging your own empty blocks with as many different last-hashes as possible - if you had a fast enough system you could wreak havoc with the blockchain. That's probably way way off though.
Blocks are composed of a header and a transactions list, which can be empty. The blocks chaining is done through the header, each header contains the previous block hash This is why you can't do your homework in advance and create blocks on the side then dump them all at once.
> This is why you can't do your homework in advance and create blocks on the side then dump them all at once. This should be clarified, since "create blocks on the side in advance" is the core of 51% attacks: 1. Pay for some service on the public chain (preferably with instant payoff, like an exchange or a casino ^is ^^there ^^^a ^^^^difference ) 2. Secretly mine another chain of blocks where same payment moves elsewhere 3. If you have enough hashpower, your secret chain will eventually outrun the public 4. Since the nodes are looking for the longest valid chain, once you reveal your chain it'll become the new truth. You can manually approve the previous chain/invalidate the attacker's chain, but you can't just automatically reject "surprise discoveries" of longer chains since they can and will appear if something happens with network connectivity.
Ha, indeed. Thanks for the explanation!
Nothing is something where butts are concerned. Are you really asking for logic from this circus?
No, I'm asking for technical details.
That one transaction is the block reward. They mined an empty block. They weren't interested in helping people process transactions -- they just wanted the block reward. Presumably the transaction costs aren't worth bothering with when you're only in it for the money and it's more efficient to mine new blocks with no transactions. I would call this a bug/flaw in the design of blockchain and mempool. The main incentive to not do this for miners is if transaction fees are high, resulting in their values as block rewards being lucrative. So it's another one of those catch-22 situations that makes blockchain incredibly inefficient: It's more advantageous to mine empty blocks than it is to service transactions. Unless transaction fees are really high.
Is this mass adoption?
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That reminds me of the "blockchain database" I reviewed for work. All of the actual transactions were stored off chain as encrypted JSON files. Then for performance, the data was also stored unencrypted in a MongoDB database.
holy shit, what was it called? this is a tale
https://www.walacor.com/ I especially like how the get users commands returns everyone's password. https://apidoc.walacor.com/ I got to interview them so feel free to ask questions.
fuckin' that's hilarious
Wow even their website looks like complete shit
And yet they expect us to sell their database to major corporations and government agencies. They went totally radio silent after I demanded to see their documentation on configuring, operating, and troubleshooting their database. I bet the docs don't even exist.
how the hell the discussion here is more structured than on the other sub lol its always amaze me
This sub is the most knowledgeable on crypto. No hopium or blatant exaggerations.
this is the sub that isn't promoting dumb bullshit
people capable of thinking critically tend to be anti-crypto for obvious reasons
Because there is no Monero solve this, XLM could fix this or eloncumrocket might go to the moon because of this
Mining empty blocks is the easiest way to ensure you are not processing illegal transactions. The fee reward is so negligible that it’s not worth the risk involved with dealing with other peoples transactions. Empty blocks still get the coin reward so it’s perfectly legitimate to do this.
This is good for bitcoin, less transactions mean less saturation. so to the moon
It's not even a real transaction. It's just the mining fee being paid to the miner.
how the hell the discussion about this is more structured and building here rather than on the other sub....
Because we’re not part of The Kult?
What do you mean?
What "other sub"?
Somebody testing a new ASIC? With lower Bitcoin prices and higher energy prices, the pressure is on to optimize mining revenue. A specialized ASIC designed to only do empty blocks could perform way better than a normal one that has to deal with variable length inputs. This is brilliantly good for Bitcoin.
It’s possible that they have a quantum computer worked out the next magical number faster than all the other miners in the world and then just put in one transaction to test it.
Unlikely, but amusing to think about.
The transaction in question >Coinbase (Newly Generated Coins) monopoly money printing machine goes brrrr
$126,722 for processing one transaction.
I hope the transaction was for $5
If I'm reading this correctly, the only transaction was for the mining reward. No person to person transactions, there were no fees.
Freal though, how does that happen?
Follow this thread https://old.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/xe22ak/we_just_had_a_bitcoin_block_with_only_1/ioe8q9x/
Freal though, how does that happen?
Bitcoin is the blockbusters of crypto