Replying to Avatar Zach⚡️

You are wrong, people do verify this, and they do it every 10 minutes. Even still though, option 1 would be the path forward without any debate. 21 Million is not debatable. We could recover from a few hours, days, weeks, or even months of reversed transactions. We could not recover from the 21 Million hard cap breaking.

We’d probably catch this bug fast, in which case we’d restart the chain at the last valid block before any inflation. It would be messy, but I don’t see any large minority wanting to do something different.
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Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

So, what is the difference from a Monero user who also relies on a node to do this for them?

Monero users *can't* personally verify other transactions themselves. Bitcoiners can, but *don't* (infeasible to do every ten minutes + ~1 billion txs that already exist). ***In practice, both rely on their nodes to verify for them. They're both vulnerable to being unaware of implementation bugs in software.***

I would really like your answer to this as I've never had a good response from anyone.

I don't know why you assume this would be caught fast. It wouldn't even necessarily be detectable by nodes. There was already a supply inflation bug in 2018 that would've gone unnoticed by nodes. That was only avoided because of a single anon reporting it before it was exploited.

Ok, but option 1 means a hard fork (your desire for ossification can never truly happen if this is always on the table) and you just potentially fucked over millions of innocent Bitcoin users (especially if Bitcoin grows in adoption) who gave away real goods and services. You've now Thanos'd their payments. That would surely be catastrophic for confidence in Bitcoin. Hence no good solution.

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Zach⚡️ 2y ago

The 2018 bug would not have gone unnoticed, in large part because Bitcoin is an open and transparent ledger. The 2018 bug was also never exploited because you’d need to control enough hash power to mine a block to attempt it, and miners understood that it would be detected so quickly that instead of maybe getting +50 BTC from double spending they would’ve actually gotten -12.5 BTC from losing the block reward.

I’d love if someone sent me documents on how to verify the monero supply for myself, but I’ve yet to come across them. While you’re right that we have nodes to validate instead of doing it all by hand, the transparency and simplicity offered by inputs and outputs is desirable. If I really wanted to, I could export the whole UTXO set to an excel sheet and check it separately there. I can also see in my node the aggregate inputs and outputs in each block, and would be able to detect 99% of problems quickly just due to that.

The desire to ossify only applies to proposed protocol changes. A hard fork to fix a critical vulnerability is not a protocol change. And yes, potentially millions of transactions would become unconfirmed depending on how fast this bug was caught. But if you think that’s comparable to allowing inflation, you still don’t understand Bitcoin. Merchants could simply request payment be resent, and many people would do that. Fixing inflation is something which would benefit billions of people perpetually. A hard fork would be a great solution to any inflation bugs, because 21M is not something to compromise on.

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Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

For the first paragraph, I'll take your word for it for now, but I'll read more into this later. Thanks.

Fair enough for the second paragraph. But like I've already acknowledged, you can't verify the Monero supply the way you're asking. My whole point is Bitcoin users can do this, but in practice *don't* do this. Almost no one exports the whole blockchain to excel to verify for themselves. Certainly no one does this every ten minutes. They just run a node and call it a day.

Not so sure that just because something is a critical vulnerability change would mean it isn't a hard fork especially if we're talking about rollbacks. Sounds like it would be a similar situation to the Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic split.

Sure maybe some customers would be honest and resend payment to merchants, but this is largely impractical to rely on and wishful thinking. Something tells me those millions of users who didn't do anything wrong and are now missing Bitcoin after a rollback would feel very differently.

Would you willingly sacrifice all your Bitcoin at the altar of 21 million? I don't think many would.

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Zach⚡️ 2y ago

I think most would. Almost all Bitcoiners I know would dump any fork where the supply exceeds 21 Million. I certainly would.

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Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

I mean if that meant a significant part of your stack, or even the entire thing, went poof

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Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

because you received fake bitcoin and the chain was rolled back*

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Zach⚡️ 2y ago

Yes. Although I’m not quite sure what situation I’d have to be in for this to happen in this manner. All my UTXOs are thousands of blocks deep, and I don’t think I’d do business with someone completely random for a transaction worth any significant amount of money.

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Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

Ok. Just a hypothetical question to see your response. Similar to those who say the world is over populated, but are the last to volunteer themselves off the planet (not saying this is you)

Even honest people that you trust for business could unknowingly receive and give you fake bitcoin in the event of a supply bug exploit depending on the type and how long it goes unnoticed. Imagine newer users onboarding their fiat savings around the same time period, or even older users making a massive trade, only to have received fake Bitcoin.

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Zach⚡️ 2y ago

Here is a link to information about the 2018 bug, which shows how important the ability to audit the UTXO set is. It also talks about why it was never exploited, since it would’ve been so obvious and quickly caught.

https://hackernoon.com/bitcoin-core-bug-cve-2018-17144-an-analysis-f80d9d373362

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Saberhagen The Nameless 2y ago

You're the first person who has ever actually given me a rebuttal to this specific bug, so thanks. I'll read this over.