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- On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 1:43 AM, Peter R <peter_r@gmx.com> wrote:
- > Dear Greg,
- >
- > I am moving our conversation into public as I've recently learned that
- > you've been forwarding our private email conversation verbatim without
- > my permission [I received permission from dpinna to share the email
- > below that proves this fact].
- Unfortunately, your work extensive as it was made at least two
- non-disclosed or poorly-disclosed simplifying assumptions and a significant
- system understanding error which, I believe, undermined it completely.
- In short these were:
- * You assume miners do not have the ability to change their level
- centralization.
- -- In fact they do, not just in theory but in pratice have responded
- to orphaning this way in the past; and it is one of the major
- concerns in this space.
- * You assume the supply of bitcoin is infinite (that subsidy never
- declines)
- -- It declines geometrically, and must if the 21m limit is to be upheld.
- (Though I think this is not equally important to the concerns)
- * You argue, incorrectly, that amount of information which must be
- transmitted at the moment a block is discovered is proportional to the
- block's size.
- -- Instead the same information can be transmitted _in advance_, as
- has been previously proposed, and various techniques can make doing
- so arbitrarily efficient.
- [I would encourage anyone who is interested to read the included off-list
- discussion]
- I contacted you in private as a courtesy in the hope that it would be
- a more productive pathway to improving our collective understanding; as well
- as a courtesy to the readers of the list in consideration of traffic levels.
- In one sense, this was a success: Our conversation concluded with you
- enumerating a series of corrective actions that you would take:
- --------
- > 1. I will make it more clear that the results of the paper hinge on
- > the assumption that block solutions are propagated across channels,
- > and that the quantity of pure information communicated per solution
- > is proportional to the amount of information contained within the block.
- >
- > 2. I will add a note [unless you ask me not to] something to the effect
- > of "Greg Maxwell challenges the claim that the coding gain cannot
- > be infinite…" followed by a summary of the scenario you described.
- > I will reference "personal communication." I will also run the note
- > by you before I make the next revision public.
- >
- > 3. I will point out that if the coding gain can be made spectacularly
- > high, that the propagation impedance in my model will become very small,
- > and that although a fee market may strictly exist in the asymptotic
- > sense, such a fee market may not be relevant (the phenomena in the paper
- > would be negligible compared to the dynamics from some other effect).
- >
- > 4. [UNRELATED] I also plan to address Dave Hudson's objections in my
- > next revision (the "you don't orphan your own block" point).
- >
- > Lastly, thank you for the note about what might happen when fees >
- > rewards. I've have indeed been thinking about this. I believe it is
- > outside the scope of the present paper, although I am doing some work
- > on the topic. (Perhaps I'll add a bit more discussion on this topic
- > to the present paper to get the reader thinking in this direction).
- --------
- To the best of my knowledge, you've taken none of these corrective
- actions in the nearly month that has passed. I certainly understand being
- backlogged, but you've also continued to make public comments about your
- work seemingly (to me) in contradiction with the above corrective actions.
- Today I discovered that another author spent their time extending your
- work and wasn't made aware of these points. A result was that the other
- author's work may require significant revisions.
- I complained about this to you, again privately, and your (apparent)
- response was to post to that thread stating that there was a
- details-unspecified academic disagreement with me and "I look forward
- to a white paper demonstrating otherwise!", in direct contradiction to
- your remarks to me three weeks ago in private correspondence: In private
- you said that your model may only hold in an asymptotic sense and that
- "the phenomena in the paper (may) be negligible compared to the dynamics
- from some other effect"; but in public you said /my/ complaints were
- "academic".
- At this point I thought continuing to withhold this information from
- the other author was unethical and no longer justified by courtesy
- to you, and I forwarded our complete discussion to the other author
- with the comment "I'll forward you a set of private correspondence
- that I've had with Peter R. I would recommend you take the time to
- read it and consider it.".
- I apologize if in doing so I've breached your confidence, none of the
- material we discussed was a sort that I would have ordinarily considered
- private, and you had already talked about making the product of our
- communication published as part of your corrective actions.
- I do not think it would be reasonable to demand that I spent time
- repeating the same discussion again with the other author, or deprive
- them of your side of it and/or the corrective actions which you had
- said you would take but have not yet taken.
- As you say, 'we are all here trying to learn about this new amazing
- thing called Bitcoin'; and I'm not embarrassed to error towards doing
- that and aiding others in doing so, but at the same time I am sorry
- that I have done so in a way which caused you injury.
- In any case, your prior proposed corrective actions seemed sufficient to me.
- It surprises me, greatly, that you are failing to see the extreme
- practicality of what I described to you, and that it does not meaningfully
- diminish miner control of transaction selection-- but even without it your
- remark that the proportionality could be arbitrarily small (Rather than
- 0, as I argue) is an adequate correction to your work. I believe my time
- would be better spent actually _implementing_ improved relaying described
- (and describe what was implemented) than continue a purely academic debate
- with you over in inconsequential difference between epsilon and zero.
- Cheers,
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