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 -- separately-- made two
non-disclosed or poorly disclosed simplifying assumption and a significant
system understanding error which undermined it completely.

In short these were:

* You assume miners do not have the ability to change their level
centralization.

 -- In fact they do, in practice they _seem_ to have responded to
    blocksize 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.

* 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 this
 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.  The result was that the other
authors 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 for your remarks to me three weeks ago in private
correspondence. -- Contrast, in private you said that your model may
only hold in an asymptotic sense and that "the phenomena in the paper
would 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 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, but 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,