Gavin's grandma needs to be able to use bitcoin. Here is a real world sampling of the types of people wanting to use bitcoin but are having some difficulty which I have collected from Facebook. Should we listen to the end user? :-P"what is the intention of Bitcoin? Is it supposed to be - eventually - for dummies like myself or is it just for those individuals who are code and algorithm writers? I downloaded a wallet but how do I know if I need more software or a massive computer system to solve "the problem" for the next block? With all the talk of mathematical problem solving on a world wide network of computers I can't see a small laptop figuring out anything thus not gaining any bitcoins. Why should I be interested in this if it appears it's just for computer scientists?""hi, instaled bitcoin qt, but after it dowladed all the stuff, now i get DEP protecction from windows, and it tells me bitcoinQT need to run with DEP on, dont let me make an exception for it, nor work it i turn DEP only for sys, so hwat i should do?"
"hi, i'm new to bitcoin, i got a bunch of free bitcoins from a bunch of the free sites. how come when i tried to send my bitcoins to myself, it says the fee exceeds the balance? I thought there was no fees?""Is there a way to speed up the process of synchronisation with the network? It has been taken ages on my MAC.Any help would be nice"and more...Sorry if this doesn't belong to the bitcoin-development email list. I just see this as end-user/customer data gathering to refine the requirements, since this is software engineering...isn't it?JimOn Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Alan Reiner <etotheipi@gmail.com> wrote:Not so— a moderately fast multicore desktop machine can keep up with
> Our divergence is on two points (personal opinions):
>
> (1) I don't think there is any real risk to the centralization of the
> network by promoting a SPV (purely-consuming) node to brand-new users.
> In my opinion (but I'm not as familiar with the networking as you), as
> long as all full nodes are full-validation, the bottleneck will be
> computation and bandwidth, long before a constant 10k nodes would be
> insufficient to support propagating data through the network.
the maximum possible validation rate of the Bitcoin network and the
bandwidth has a long term maximum rate of about 14kbit/sec— though
you'll want at least ten times that for convergence stability and the
ability feed multiple peers.
Here are the worst blocks testnet3 (which has some intentionally
constructed maximum sized blocks),E31230 :
(with the new parallel validation code)
- Verify 2166 txins: 250.29ms (0.116ms/txin)
- Verify 3386 txins: 1454.25ms (0.429ms/txin)
- Verify 5801 txins: 575.46ms (0.099ms/txin)
- Verify 6314 txins: 625.05ms (0.099ms/txin)
Even the slowest one _validates_ at 400x realtime. (these measurements
are probably a bit noisy— but the point is that its fast).
(the connecting is fast too, but thats obvious with such a small database)
Although I haven't tested leveldb+ultraprune with a really enormous
txout set or generally with sustained maximum load— so there may be
other gaffs in the software that get exposed with sustained load, but
they'd all be correctable. Sounds like some interesting stuff to test
with on testnet fork that has the POW test disabled.
While syncing up a behind node can take a while— keep in mind that
you're expecting to sync up weeks of network work in hours. Even
'slow' is quite fast.
Thats not generally concern for me. There are a number of DOS attack
> In fact,
> I was under the impression that "connectedness" was the real metric of
> concern (and resilience of that connectedness to large percentage of
> users disappearing suddenly). If that's true, above a certain number of
> nodes, the connectedness isn't really going to get any better (I know
> it's not really that simple, but I feel like it is up to 10x the current
> network size).
risks... But attacker linear DOS attacks aren't generally avoidable
and they don't persist.
Of the class of connectedness concerns I have is that a sybil attacker
could spin up enormous numbers of nodes and then use them to partition
large miners. So, e.g. find BitTaco's node(s) and the nodes for
miners covering 25% hashpower and get them into a separate partition
from the rest of the network. Then they give double spends to that
partition and use them to purchase an unlimited supply of digitally
delivered tacos— allowing their captured miners to build an ill fated
fork— and drop the partition once the goods are delivered.
But there is no amount of full nodes that removes this concern,
especially if you allow for attackers which have compromised ISPs.
It can be adequately addressed by a healthy darknet of private
authenticated peerings between miners and other likely targets. I've
also thrown out some ideas on using merged mined node IDs to make some
kinds of sybil attacks harder ... but it'll be interesting to see how
the deployment of ASICs influences the concentration of hashpower— it
seems like there has already been a substantial move away from the
largest pools. Less hashpower consolidation makes attacks like this
less worrisome.
Yes, I said so specifically. But the fact that people are flapping
> (2) I think the current experience *is* really poor.
their lips here instead of testing the bitcoin-qt git master which is
an 1-2 order of magnitude improvement suggests that perhaps I'm wrong
about that. Certainly the dearth of people testing and making bug
reports suggests people don't actually care that much.
No. The "question" that I'm concerned with is do we promote lite nodes
> You seem to
> suggest that the question for these new users is whether they will use
> full-node-or-lite-node, but I believe it will be a decision between
> lite-node-or-nothing-at-all (losing interest altogether).
as equally good option— even for high end systems— remove the
incentive for people to create, improve, and adopt more useful full
node software and forever degrade the security of the system.
The current software patches plus parallelism can sync on a fast
> Waiting a day
> for the full node to synchronize, and then run into issues like
> blkindex.dat corruption when their system crashes for some unrelated
> reason and they have to resync for another day... they'll be gone in a
> heartbeat.
system with luck network access (or a local copy of the data) in under
an hour.
This is no replacement for start as SPV, but nor are handicapped
client programs a replacement for making fully capable ones acceptably
performing.
Making the all the software painless for users is a great goal— and
> Users need to experience, as quickly and easily as possible, that they
> can move money across the world, without signing up for anything or
> paying any fees.
one I share. I still maintain that it has nothing to do with
promoting less capable and secure software to users.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial
Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support
Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services
Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers
http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d
_______________________________________________
Bitcoin-development mailing list
Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial
Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support
Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services
Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers
http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d
_______________________________________________
Bitcoin-development mailing list
Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development