[futuravenir]

I want to say that I've been on the anti-censorship boat and the 'AXA money is sketchy' and the unlimited train for as long as I've heard of it.

Just recently, someone in the ecosystem that I've known since the beginning of my time with Bitcoin came out in support of Blockstream and Segwit with a backing of other Canadian support.

https://medium.com/@francispouliot/canadian-bitcoin-economic...

I don't know what to make of it all. I spoke with him a bit and he seems to believe that those pushing against segwit are paid by ASICboosters in China because they stand to make $100,000,000/yearly from their (now not so secret) advantage.

In any case, I just wanted to add that I'm more confused than ever and things are very unclear.

[AgentME]

>because they stand to make $100,000,000/yearly from their (now not so secret) advantage.

If anyone is confused how the 30% advantage that ASICBOOST gives translates into this huge number, remember that the 30% boost applies to revenue, not profit.

The revenue of mining in the long run approaches the costs to mine (basically the cost of electricity), leaving extremely slim profit margins. Let's say the usual revenue from mining over some period of time is $1.02, and the cost is $1.00, giving a profit of 2 cents every time unit. A miner using ASICBOOST could have a revenue of $1.32 every time unit, giving a profit of 32 cents every time unit, which is at least an order of magnitude more profit than anyone else. This miner then has more resources to spend on buying hardware and scaling up.

(The above paragraph goes for any type of optimization and isn't necessarily nefarious. It can be a problem if one miner effectively keeps an optimization secret for too long, because they'll continue to grow in size and could get more than 50% of mining power, which is a specific point that causes huge problems with Bitcoin. But the real unique issues about ASICBOOST are about how it encourages empty blocks, and how it has been secretly incentivizing some groups to argue against any incompatible protocol change.)

[midmagico]

Your arithmetic is off. Revenue doesn't increase. Costs decrease. Effectively the increase in profit is similar, though, to your result. Just for different reasons.

Ignoring depreciation or hardware costs, the arithmetic is like this:

Pre-ASICBoost: Revenue: $1.02 Costs: $1.00 Profit: $0.02

Post-ASICBoost: Revenue: $1.02 Costs: $0.70 Profit: $0.32

The closer to costs that revenue for non-AB mining is, the closer to infinity the comparative profit margin is.

That is, AB doesn't increase hashrate. (That would be a very, very much more complicated equation since the hashrate reward pie is essentially static.) All it does is decrease the amount of power required to do the same work.

[midmagico]

The easiest way to detect who is telling the truth is to ask lots of questions and see who is making the most unusual and/or logically inconsistent (especially over time) claims.

A lot of people are, in fact, keeping track, and can point to significant numbers of problems and inconsistencies in what people are saying and what they've supported and why. Factual assertions are particularly excellent indicators. For example, if someone says Gavin Andresen is a segwit opponent, you can literally just click one link to discover that he isn't:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/60i4jl/miners_we_are_a...

[zik]

That was the exact point of the ASICBOOST FUD we've seen in the last week - to cast uncertainty and doubt. Taking a step back though it all seems like just the latest attempt to distract from real issues. ASICBOOST is just another optimisation from companies who make their living working on these kinds of things. It's been known about for many months now so the last few days just seem like a bizarre attempt to demonise the miners for doing what they do.

[midmagico]

Nobody wants to kill ASICBoost. Literally the only thing people think is a good idea, and the purpose of this post:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017...

.. is to close off only the covert ASICBoost mining incentive which is directly incompatible with a host of high-quality Bitcoin improvement mechanisms. (An incomplete list of which is in the above link, near the bottom.)

Overt ASICBoost is completely wide-open, and remains untouched. In fact it's completely compatible with SegWit.