Reorgs on SigNet - Looking for feedback on approach and parameters

Reorgs on SigNet - Looking for feedback on approach and parameters
2021-09-07 16:44 ` Jeremy
                   ` (2 more replies)
  
From: 0xB10C @ 2021-09-07 16:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: bitcoin-dev

Hello,

tl;dr: We want to make reorgs on SigNet a reality and are looking for
feedback on approach and parameters.

One of the ideas for SigNet is the possibility for it to be reliably
unreliable, for example, planned chain reorganizations. These have not
been implemented yet.

My summerofbitcoin.org mentee Nikhil Bartwal and I have been looking at
implementing support for reorgs on SigNet. We are looking for feedback
on which approach and parameters to use. Please consider answering the
questions below if you or your company is interested in chain
reorganizations on SigNet.

With feedback from AJ and Kalle Alm (thanks again!), we came up with two
scenarios that could be implemented in the current SigNet miner script
[0]. Both would trigger automatically in a fixed block interval.
Scenario 1 simulates a race scenario where two chains compete for D
blocks. Scenario 2 simulates a chain rollback where the top D blocks get
replaced by a chain that outgrows the earlier branch.

AJ proposed to allow SigNet users to opt-out of reorgs in case they
explicitly want to remain unaffected. This can be done by setting a
to-be-reorged version bit flag on the blocks that won't end up in the
most work chain. Node operators could choose not to accept to-be-reorged
SigNet blocks with this flag set via a configuration argument.

The reorg-interval X very much depends on the user's needs. One could
argue that there should be, for example, three reorgs per day, each 48
blocks apart. Such a short reorg interval allows developers in all time
zones to be awake during one or two reorgs per day. Developers don't
need to wait for, for example, a week until they can test their reorgs
next. However, too frequent reorgs could hinder other SigNet users.

We propose that the reorg depth D is deterministically random between a
minimum and a maximum based on, e.g., the block hash or the nonce of the
last block before the reorg. Compared to a local randint() based
implementation, this allows reorg-handling tests and external tools to
calculate the expected reorg depth.

# Scenario 1: Race between two chains

For this scenario, at least two nodes and miner scripts need to be
running. An always-miner A continuously produces blocks and rejects
blocks with the to-be-reorged version bit flag set. And a race-miner R
that only mines D blocks at the start of each interval and then waits X
blocks. A and R both have the same hash rate. Assuming both are well
connected to the network, it's random which miner will first mine and
propagate a block. In the end, the A miner chain will always win the race.

# Scenario 2: Chain rollback

This scenario only requires one miner and Bitcoin Core node but also
works in a multiminer setup. The miners mine D blocks with the
to-be-reorged version bit flag set at the start of the interval. After
allowing the block at height X+D to propagate, they invalidate the block
at height X+1 and start mining on block X again. This time without
setting the to-be-reorged version bit flag. Non-miner nodes will reorg
to the new tip at height X+D+1, and the first-seen branch stalls.

# Questions

    1. How do you currently test your applications reorg handling? Do
       the two discussed scenarios (race and chain rollback) cover your
       needs? Are we missing something you'd find helpful?

    2. How often should reorgs happen on the default SigNet? Should
       there be multiple reorgs a day (e.g., every 48 or 72 blocks
       assuming 144 blocks per day) as your engineers need to be awake?
       Do you favor less frequent reorgs (once per week or month)? Why?

    3. How deep should the reorgs be on average? Do you want to test
       deeper reorgs (10+ blocks) too?


# Next Steps

We will likely implement Scenario 1, the race between two chains, first.
We'll set up a public test-SigNet along with a faucet, block explorer,
and a block tree visualization. If there is interest in the second
approach, chain rollbacks can be implemented too. Future work will add
the possibility to include conflicting transactions in the two branches.
After enough testing, the default SigNet can start to do periodical
reorgs, too.

Thanks,
0xB10C

[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/contrib/signet/miner 



 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-07 16:44 ` 
                   ` 
  
From: 0xB10C @ 2021-09-07 16:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: bitcoin-dev

Hello,

tl;dr: We want to make reorgs on SigNet a reality and are looking for
feedback on approach and parameters.

One of the ideas for SigNet is the possibility for it to be reliably
unreliable, for example, planned chain reorganizations. These have not
been implemented yet.

My summerofbitcoin.org mentee Nikhil Bartwal and I have been looking at
implementing support for reorgs on SigNet. We are looking for feedback
on which approach and parameters to use. Please consider answering the
questions below if you or your company is interested in chain
reorganizations on SigNet.

With feedback from AJ and Kalle Alm (thanks again!), we came up with two
scenarios that could be implemented in the current SigNet miner script
[0]. Both would trigger automatically in a fixed block interval.
Scenario 1 simulates a race scenario where two chains compete for D
blocks. Scenario 2 simulates a chain rollback where the top D blocks get
replaced by a chain that outgrows the earlier branch.

AJ proposed to allow SigNet users to opt-out of reorgs in case they
explicitly want to remain unaffected. This can be done by setting a
to-be-reorged version bit flag on the blocks that won't end up in the
most work chain. Node operators could choose not to accept to-be-reorged
SigNet blocks with this flag set via a configuration argument.

The reorg-interval X very much depends on the user's needs. One could
argue that there should be, for example, three reorgs per day, each 48
blocks apart. Such a short reorg interval allows developers in all time
zones to be awake during one or two reorgs per day. Developers don't
need to wait for, for example, a week until they can test their reorgs
next. However, too frequent reorgs could hinder other SigNet users.

We propose that the reorg depth D is deterministically random between a
minimum and a maximum based on, e.g., the block hash or the nonce of the
last block before the reorg. Compared to a local randint() based
implementation, this allows reorg-handling tests and external tools to
calculate the expected reorg depth.

# Scenario 1: Race between two chains

For this scenario, at least two nodes and miner scripts need to be
running. An always-miner A continuously produces blocks and rejects
blocks with the to-be-reorged version bit flag set. And a race-miner R
that only mines D blocks at the start of each interval and then waits X
blocks. A and R both have the same hash rate. Assuming both are well
connected to the network, it's random which miner will first mine and
propagate a block. In the end, the A miner chain will always win the race.

# Scenario 2: Chain rollback

This scenario only requires one miner and Bitcoin Core node but also
works in a multiminer setup. The miners mine D blocks with the
to-be-reorged version bit flag set at the start of the interval. After
allowing the block at height X+D to propagate, they invalidate the block
at height X+1 and start mining on block X again. This time without
setting the to-be-reorged version bit flag. Non-miner nodes will reorg
to the new tip at height X+D+1, and the first-seen branch stalls.

# Questions

    1. How do you currently test your applications reorg handling? Do
       the two discussed scenarios (race and chain rollback) cover your
       needs? Are we missing something you'd find helpful?

    2. How often should reorgs happen on the default SigNet? Should
       there be multiple reorgs a day (e.g., every 48 or 72 blocks
       assuming 144 blocks per day) as your engineers need to be awake?
       Do you favor less frequent reorgs (once per week or month)? Why?

    3. How deep should the reorgs be on average? Do you want to test
       deeper reorgs (10+ blocks) too?


# Next Steps

We will likely implement Scenario 1, the race between two chains, first.
We'll set up a public test-SigNet along with a faucet, block explorer,
and a block tree visualization. If there is interest in the second
approach, chain rollbacks can be implemented too. Future work will add
the possibility to include conflicting transactions in the two branches.
After enough testing, the default SigNet can start to do periodical
reorgs, too.

Thanks,
0xB10C

[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/contrib/signet/miner 



 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-07 16:07 [bitcoin-dev] Reorgs on SigNet - Looking for feedback on approach and parameters 0xB10C
  2021-09-07 16:44 ` Jeremy

  2021-09-12 14:29   ` vjudeu
  2021-09-10  0:50 ` Matt Corallo
  
From: Anthony Towns @ 2021-09-08  7:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 0xB10C, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

On Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 06:07:47PM +0200, 0xB10C via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> The reorg-interval X very much depends on the user's needs. One could
> argue that there should be, for example, three reorgs per day, each 48
> blocks apart.

Oh, wow, I think the last suggestion was every 100 blocks (every
~16h40m). Once every ~8h sounds very convenient.

> Such a short reorg interval allows developers in all time
> zones to be awake during one or two reorgs per day.

And also for there to reliably be reorgs when they're not awake, which
might be a useful thing to be able to handle, too :)

> Developers don't
> need to wait for, for example, a week until they can test their reorgs
> next. However, too frequent reorgs could hinder other SigNet users.

Being able to run `bitcoind -signet -signetacceptreorg=0` and never
seeing any reorgs should presumably make this not a problem?

For people who do see reorgs, having an average of 2 or 3 additional
blocks every 48 blocks is perhaps a 6% increase in storage/traffic.

> # Scenario 1: Race between two chains
> 
> For this scenario, at least two nodes and miner scripts need to be
> running. An always-miner A continuously produces blocks and rejects
> blocks with the to-be-reorged version bit flag set. And a race-miner R
> that only mines D blocks at the start of each interval and then waits X
> blocks. A and R both have the same hash rate. Assuming both are well
> connected to the network, it's random which miner will first mine and
> propagate a block. In the end, the A miner chain will always win the race.

I think this description is missing that all the blocks R mines have
the to-be-reorged flag set.

>     3. How deep should the reorgs be on average? Do you want to test
>        deeper reorgs (10+ blocks) too?

Super interested in input on this -- perhaps we should get optech to
send a survey out to their members, or so?

My feeling is:

 - 1 block reorgs: these are a regular feature on mainnet, everyone
   should cope with them; having them happen multiple times a day to
   make testing easier should be great

 - 2-3 block reorgs: good for testing the "your tx didn't get enough
   confirms to be credited to your account" case, even though it barely
   ever happens on mainnet

 - 4-6 block reorgs: likely to violate business assumptions, but
   completely technically plausible, especially if there's an attack
   against the network

 - 7-100 block reorgs: for this to happen on mainnet, it would probably
   mean there was a bug and pools/miners agree the chain has to
   be immediately reverted -- eg, someone discovers and exploits an
   inflation bug, minting themselves free bitcoins and breaking the 21M
   limit (eg, the 51 block reorg in Aug 2010); or someone discovers a
   bug that splits the chain, and the less compatible chain is reverted
   (eg, the 24 block reorg due to the bdb lock limit in Mar 2013);
   or something similar. Obviously the bug would have to have been
   discovered pretty quickly after it was exploited for the reorg to be
   under a day's worth of blocks.

 - 100-2000+ block reorgs: severe bug that wasn't found quickly, or where
   getting >50% of miners organised took more than a few hours. This will
   start breaking protocol assumptions, like pool payouts, lightning's
   relative locktimes, or liquid's peg-in confirmation requirements, and
   result in hundres of MBs of changes to the utxo set

Maybe it would be good to do reorgs of 15, 150 or 1500 blocks as a
special fire-drill event, perhaps once a month/quarter/year or so,
in some pre-announced window?

I think sticking to 1-6 block reorgs initially is a fine way to start
though.

> After enough testing, the default SigNet can start to do periodical
> reorgs, too.

FWIW, the only thing that concerns me about doing this on the default
signet is making sure that nodes that set -signetacceptreorg=0 don't
end up partitioning the p2p network due to either rejecting a higher
work chain or rejecting txs due to double-spends across the two chains.

A quick draft of code for -signetacceptreorg=0 is available at 

  https://github.com/ajtowns/bitcoin/commits/202108-signetreorg

Cheers,
aj



 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-07 16:07 [bitcoin-dev] Reorgs on SigNet - Looking for feedback on approach and parameters 0xB10C
  2021-09-07 16:44 ` Jeremy
  2021-09-08  7:59 ` Anthony Towns

  2021-09-12  7:53   ` Anthony Towns
  
From: Matt Corallo @ 2021-09-10  0:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 0xB10C, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion


On 9/7/21 09:07, 0xB10C via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> tl;dr: We want to make reorgs on SigNet a reality and are looking for
> feedback on approach and parameters.

Awesome!

> AJ proposed to allow SigNet users to opt-out of reorgs in case they
> explicitly want to remain unaffected. This can be done by setting a
> to-be-reorged version bit flag on the blocks that won't end up in the
> most work chain. Node operators could choose not to accept to-be-reorged
> SigNet blocks with this flag set via a configuration argument.

Why bother with a version bit? This seems substantially more complicated than the original proposal 
that surfaced many times before signet launched to just have a different reorg signing key. Thus, 
users who wish to follow reorgs can use a 1-of-2 (or higher multisig) and users who wish to not 
follow reorgs would use a 1-of-1 (or higher multisig), simply marking the reorg blocks as invalid 
without touching any header bits that non-full clients will ever see.

> The reorg-interval X very much depends on the user's needs. One could
> argue that there should be, for example, three reorgs per day, each 48
> blocks apart. Such a short reorg interval allows developers in all time
> zones to be awake during one or two reorgs per day. Developers don't
> need to wait for, for example, a week until they can test their reorgs
> next. However, too frequent reorgs could hinder other SigNet users.

I see zero reason whatsoever to not simply reorg ~every block, or as often as is practical. If users 
opt in to wanting to test with reorgs, they should be able to test with reorgs, not wait a day to 
test with reorgs.

> We propose that the reorg depth D is deterministically random between a
> minimum and a maximum based on, e.g., the block hash or the nonce of the
> last block before the reorg. Compared to a local randint() based
> implementation, this allows reorg-handling tests and external tools to
> calculate the expected reorg depth.
> 
> # Scenario 1: Race between two chains
> 
> For this scenario, at least two nodes and miner scripts need to be
> running. An always-miner A continuously produces blocks and rejects
> blocks with the to-be-reorged version bit flag set. And a race-miner R
> that only mines D blocks at the start of each interval and then waits X
> blocks. A and R both have the same hash rate. Assuming both are well
> connected to the network, it's random which miner will first mine and
> propagate a block. In the end, the A miner chain will always win the race.
> 
> # Scenario 2: Chain rollback
> 
> This scenario only requires one miner and Bitcoin Core node but also
> works in a multiminer setup. The miners mine D blocks with the
> to-be-reorged version bit flag set at the start of the interval. After
> allowing the block at height X+D to propagate, they invalidate the block
> at height X+1 and start mining on block X again. This time without
> setting the to-be-reorged version bit flag. Non-miner nodes will reorg
> to the new tip at height X+D+1, and the first-seen branch stalls.

Both seem reasonable. I'm honestly not sure what software cases would be hit differently between one 
or the other, as long as reorgs happen regularly and at random depth. Nodes should presumably only 
ever be following one chain.

> # Questions
> 
>      1. How do you currently test your applications reorg handling? Do
>         the two discussed scenarios (race and chain rollback) cover your
>         needs? Are we missing something you'd find helpful?
> 
>      2. How often should reorgs happen on the default SigNet? Should
>         there be multiple reorgs a day (e.g., every 48 or 72 blocks
>         assuming 144 blocks per day) as your engineers need to be awake?
>         Do you favor less frequent reorgs (once per week or month)? Why?
> 
>      3. How deep should the reorgs be on average? Do you want to test
>         deeper reorgs (10+ blocks) too?

6 is the "standard" confirmation window for mainnet. Its arguably much too low, but for testing 
purposes we've gotta pick something, so that seems reasonable?

Matt


 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-10 18:24 ` Matt Corallo
  
From: Michael Folkson @ 2021-09-10 13:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Matt Corallo, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

> I see zero reason whatsoever to not simply reorg ~every block, or as often as is practical. If users opt in to wanting to test with reorgs, they should be able to test with reorgs, not wait a day to test with reorgs.

One of the goals of the default Signet was to make the default Signet
resemble mainnet as much as possible. (You can do whatever you want on
a custom signet you set up yourself including manufacturing a re-org
every block if you wish.) Hence I'm a bit wary of making the behavior
on the default Signet deviate significantly from what you might
experience on mainnet. Given re-orgs don't occur that often on mainnet
I can see the argument for making them more regular (every 8 hours
seems reasonable to me) on the default Signet but every block seems
excessive. It makes the default Signet into an environment for purely
testing whether your application can withstand various flavors of edge
case re-orgs. You may want to test whether your application can
withstand normal mainnet behavior (no re-orgs for long periods of
time) first before you concern yourself with re-orgs.

> Why bother with a version bit? This seems substantially more complicated than the original proposal that surfaced many times before signet launched to just have a different reorg signing key. Thus, users who wish to follow reorgs can use a 1-of-2 (or higher multisig) and users who wish to not follow reorgs would use a 1-of-1 (or higher multisig), simply marking the reorg blocks as invalid without touching any header bits that non-full clients will ever see.

If I understand this correctly this is introducing a need for users to
sign blocks when currently with the default Signet the user does not
need to concern themselves with signing blocks. That is entirely left
to the network block signers of the default Signet (who were AJ and
Kalle last time I checked). Again I don't think this additional
complexity is needed on the default Signet when you can set up your
own custom Signet if you want to test edge case scenarios that deviate
significantly from what you are likely to experience on mainnet. A
flag set via a configuration argument (the AJ, 0xB10C proposal) with
no-reorgs (or 8 hour re-orgs) as the default seems to me like it would
introduce no additional complexity to the casual (or alpha stage)
tester experience though of course it introduces implementation
complexity.

To move the default Signet in the direction of resembling mainnet even
closer would be to randomly generate batches of transactions to fill
up blocks and create a fee market. It would be great to be able to
test features like RBF and Lightning unhappy paths (justice
transactions, perhaps even pinning attacks etc) on the default Signet
in future.

-- 
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson@gmail•com
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3


 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-10 13:05 Michael Folkson

  2021-09-10 19:00   ` Michael Folkson
  2021-09-10 20:00   ` David A. Harding
  
From: Matt Corallo @ 2021-09-10 18:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Michael Folkson, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion



On 9/10/21 06:05, Michael Folkson wrote:
>> I see zero reason whatsoever to not simply reorg ~every block, or as often as is practical. If users opt in to wanting to test with reorgs, they should be able to test with reorgs, not wait a day to test with reorgs.
> 
> One of the goals of the default Signet was to make the default Signet
> resemble mainnet as much as possible. (You can do whatever you want on
> a custom signet you set up yourself including manufacturing a re-org
> every block if you wish.) Hence I'm a bit wary of making the behavior
> on the default Signet deviate significantly from what you might
> experience on mainnet. Given re-orgs don't occur that often on mainnet
> I can see the argument for making them more regular (every 8 hours
> seems reasonable to me) on the default Signet but every block seems
> excessive. It makes the default Signet into an environment for purely
> testing whether your application can withstand various flavors of edge
> case re-orgs. You may want to test whether your application can
> withstand normal mainnet behavior (no re-orgs for long periods of
> time) first before you concern yourself with re-orgs.

Huh? Why would the goal be to match mainnet? The goal, as I understand it, is to allow software to 
use SigNet without modification *to make testing simpler* - keep the header format the same to let 
SPV clients function without (significant) modification, etc. The point of the whole thing is to 
make testing as easy as possible, why would we do otherwise.

Further, because one goal here is to enable clients to opt in or out of the reorg chain at will 
(presumably by just changing one config flag in bitcoin.conf), why would we worry about making it 
"similar to mainnet". If users want an experience "similar to mainnet", they can simply turn off 
reorgs and they'll see a consistent chain moving forward which never reorgs, similar to the 
practical experience of mainnet.

Once you've opted into reorgs, you almost certainly are looking to *test* reorgs - you just 
restarted Bitcoin Core with the reorg flag set, waiting around for a reorg after doing that seems 
like the experience of testnet3 today, and the whole reason why we wanted signet to begin with - 
things happen sporadically and inconsistently, making developers wait around forever. Please lets 
not replicate the "gotta wait for blocks before I can go to lunch" experience of testnet today on 
signet, I'm tired of eating lunch late.

>> Why bother with a version bit? This seems substantially more complicated than the original proposal that surfaced many times before signet launched to just have a different reorg signing key. Thus, users who wish to follow reorgs can use a 1-of-2 (or higher multisig) and users who wish to not follow reorgs would use a 1-of-1 (or higher multisig), simply marking the reorg blocks as invalid without touching any header bits that non-full clients will ever see.
> 
> If I understand this correctly this is introducing a need for users to
> sign blocks when currently with the default Signet the user does not
> need to concern themselves with signing blocks. That is entirely left
> to the network block signers of the default Signet (who were AJ and
> Kalle last time I checked). Again I don't think this additional
> complexity is needed on the default Signet when you can set up your
> own custom Signet if you want to test edge case scenarios that deviate
> significantly from what you are likely to experience on mainnet. A
> flag set via a configuration argument (the AJ, 0xB10C proposal) with
> no-reorgs (or 8 hour re-orgs) as the default seems to me like it would
> introduce no additional complexity to the casual (or alpha stage)
> tester experience though of course it introduces implementation
> complexity.
> 
> To move the default Signet in the direction of resembling mainnet even
> closer would be to randomly generate batches of transactions to fill
> up blocks and create a fee market. It would be great to be able to
> test features like RBF and Lightning unhappy paths (justice
> transactions, perhaps even pinning attacks etc) on the default Signet
> in future.

I believe my suggestion was not correctly understood. I'm not suggesting *users* sign blocks or 
otherwise do anything manually here, only that the existing block producers each generate a new key, 
and we then only sign reorgs with *those* keys. Users will be able to set a flag to indicate "I want 
to accept sigs from either sets of keys, and see reorgs" or "I only want sigs from the non-reorg 
keys, and will consider the reorg keys-signed blocks invalid"

Matt


 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-10 18:24 ` Matt Corallo

  2021-09-10 19:22     ` Matt Corallo
  2021-09-10 20:00   ` David A. Harding
  
From: Michael Folkson @ 2021-09-10 19:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Matt Corallo;  Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

> Huh? Why would the goal be to match mainnet? The goal, as I understand it, is to allow software to
use SigNet without modification *to make testing simpler* - keep the
header format the same to let
SPV clients function without (significant) modification, etc. The
point of the whole thing is to
make testing as easy as possible, why would we do otherwise.

I guess Kalle (and AJ) can answer this question better than me but my
understanding is that the motivation for Signet was that testnet
deviated erratically from mainnet behavior (e.g. long delays before
any blocks were mined followed by a multitude of blocks mined in a
short period of time) which meant it wasn't conducive to normal
testing of applications. Why would you want a mainnet like chain? To
check if your application works on a mainnet like chain without
risking any actual value before moving to mainnet. The same purpose as
testnet but more reliably resembling mainnet behavior. You are well
within your rights to demand more than that but my preference would be
to push some of those demands to custom signets rather than the
default Signet.

Testing out proposed soft forks in advance of them being considered
for activation would already be introducing a dimension of complexity
that is going to be hard to manage [0]. I'm generally of the view that
if you are going to introduce a complexity dimension, keep the other
dimensions as vanilla as possible. Otherwise you are battling
complexity in multiple different dimensions and it becomes hard or
impossible to maintain it and meet your initial objectives.

But if this feature of extremely regular re-orgs is an in demand
feature for testers I think the question then becomes what the default
be (I would suggest re-orgs every 8 hours rather than no re-orgs at
all) and then the alternative which you can switch to, re-orgs every
block or every 6 blocks or whatever.

> I believe my suggestion was not correctly understood. I'm not suggesting *users* sign blocks or
otherwise do anything manually here, only that the existing block
producers each generate a new key,
and we then only sign reorgs with *those* keys. Users will be able to
set a flag to indicate "I want
to accept sigs from either sets of keys, and see reorgs" or "I only
want sigs from the non-reorg
keys, and will consider the reorg keys-signed blocks invalid"

Ah I did misunderstand, yes this makes more sense. Thanks for the correction.

[0] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/98642/can-we-experiment-on-signet-with-multiple-proposed-soft-forks-whilst-maintaining

On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 7:24 PM Matt Corallo <lf-lists@mattcorallo•com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 9/10/21 06:05, Michael Folkson wrote:
> >> I see zero reason whatsoever to not simply reorg ~every block, or as often as is practical. If users opt in to wanting to test with reorgs, they should be able to test with reorgs, not wait a day to test with reorgs.
> >
> > One of the goals of the default Signet was to make the default Signet
> > resemble mainnet as much as possible. (You can do whatever you want on
> > a custom signet you set up yourself including manufacturing a re-org
> > every block if you wish.) Hence I'm a bit wary of making the behavior
> > on the default Signet deviate significantly from what you might
> > experience on mainnet. Given re-orgs don't occur that often on mainnet
> > I can see the argument for making them more regular (every 8 hours
> > seems reasonable to me) on the default Signet but every block seems
> > excessive. It makes the default Signet into an environment for purely
> > testing whether your application can withstand various flavors of edge
> > case re-orgs. You may want to test whether your application can
> > withstand normal mainnet behavior (no re-orgs for long periods of
> > time) first before you concern yourself with re-orgs.
>
> Huh? Why would the goal be to match mainnet? The goal, as I understand it, is to allow software to
> use SigNet without modification *to make testing simpler* - keep the header format the same to let
> SPV clients function without (significant) modification, etc. The point of the whole thing is to
> make testing as easy as possible, why would we do otherwise.
>
> Further, because one goal here is to enable clients to opt in or out of the reorg chain at will
> (presumably by just changing one config flag in bitcoin.conf), why would we worry about making it
> "similar to mainnet". If users want an experience "similar to mainnet", they can simply turn off
> reorgs and they'll see a consistent chain moving forward which never reorgs, similar to the
> practical experience of mainnet.
>
> Once you've opted into reorgs, you almost certainly are looking to *test* reorgs - you just
> restarted Bitcoin Core with the reorg flag set, waiting around for a reorg after doing that seems
> like the experience of testnet3 today, and the whole reason why we wanted signet to begin with -
> things happen sporadically and inconsistently, making developers wait around forever. Please lets
> not replicate the "gotta wait for blocks before I can go to lunch" experience of testnet today on
> signet, I'm tired of eating lunch late.
>
> >> Why bother with a version bit? This seems substantially more complicated than the original proposal that surfaced many times before signet launched to just have a different reorg signing key. Thus, users who wish to follow reorgs can use a 1-of-2 (or higher multisig) and users who wish to not follow reorgs would use a 1-of-1 (or higher multisig), simply marking the reorg blocks as invalid without touching any header bits that non-full clients will ever see.
> >
> > If I understand this correctly this is introducing a need for users to
> > sign blocks when currently with the default Signet the user does not
> > need to concern themselves with signing blocks. That is entirely left
> > to the network block signers of the default Signet (who were AJ and
> > Kalle last time I checked). Again I don't think this additional
> > complexity is needed on the default Signet when you can set up your
> > own custom Signet if you want to test edge case scenarios that deviate
> > significantly from what you are likely to experience on mainnet. A
> > flag set via a configuration argument (the AJ, 0xB10C proposal) with
> > no-reorgs (or 8 hour re-orgs) as the default seems to me like it would
> > introduce no additional complexity to the casual (or alpha stage)
> > tester experience though of course it introduces implementation
> > complexity.
> >
> > To move the default Signet in the direction of resembling mainnet even
> > closer would be to randomly generate batches of transactions to fill
> > up blocks and create a fee market. It would be great to be able to
> > test features like RBF and Lightning unhappy paths (justice
> > transactions, perhaps even pinning attacks etc) on the default Signet
> > in future.
>
> I believe my suggestion was not correctly understood. I'm not suggesting *users* sign blocks or
> otherwise do anything manually here, only that the existing block producers each generate a new key,
> and we then only sign reorgs with *those* keys. Users will be able to set a flag to indicate "I want
> to accept sigs from either sets of keys, and see reorgs" or "I only want sigs from the non-reorg
> keys, and will consider the reorg keys-signed blocks invalid"
>
> Matt



-- 
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson@gmail•com
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3


 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-10 19:00   ` Michael Folkson

  
From: Matt Corallo @ 2021-09-10 19:22 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Michael Folkson;  Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

Fwiw, your email client is broken and does not properly quote in the plaintext copy. I believe this 
is a known gmail bug, but I'd recommend avoiding gmail's web interface for list posting :).

On 9/10/21 12:00, Michael Folkson wrote:
>> Huh? Why would the goal be to match mainnet? The goal, as I understand it, is to allow software to
> use SigNet without modification *to make testing simpler* - keep the
> header format the same to let
> SPV clients function without (significant) modification, etc. The
> point of the whole thing is to
> make testing as easy as possible, why would we do otherwise.
> 
> I guess Kalle (and AJ) can answer this question better than me but my
> understanding is that the motivation for Signet was that testnet
> deviated erratically from mainnet behavior (e.g. long delays before
> any blocks were mined followed by a multitude of blocks mined in a
> short period of time) which meant it wasn't conducive to normal
> testing of applications. Why would you want a mainnet like chain? To
> check if your application works on a mainnet like chain without
> risking any actual value before moving to mainnet. The same purpose as
> testnet but more reliably resembling mainnet behavior. You are well
> within your rights to demand more than that but my preference would be
> to push some of those demands to custom signets rather than the
> default Signet.

Huh? You haven't made an argument here as to why such a chain is easier to test with, only that we 
should "match mainnet". Testing on mainnet sucks, 99% of the time testing on mainnet involves no 
reorgs, which *doesn't* match in-the-field reality of mainnet, with occasional reorgs. Matching 
mainnet's behavior is, in fact, a terrible way to test if your application will run fine on mainnet.

My point is that the goal should be making it easier to test. I'm not entirely sure why there's 
debate here.  I *regularly* have lunch late because I'm waiting for blocks either on mainnet or 
testnet3, and would quite like to avoid that in the future. It takes *forever* to test things on 
mainnet and testnet3, matching their behavior would mean its equally impossible to test things on 
mainnet and testnet3, why is that something we should stirve for?


> Testing out proposed soft forks in advance of them being considered
> for activation would already be introducing a dimension of complexity
> that is going to be hard to manage [0]. I'm generally of the view that
> if you are going to introduce a complexity dimension, keep the other
> dimensions as vanilla as possible. Otherwise you are battling
> complexity in multiple different dimensions and it becomes hard or
> impossible to maintain it and meet your initial objectives.

Yep! Great reason to not have any probabilistic nonsense or try to match mainnet or something on 
signet, just make it deterministic, reorg once a block or twice an our or whatever and call it a day!

Matt


 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-10 18:24 ` Matt Corallo
  2021-09-10 19:00   ` Michael Folkson

  
From: David A. Harding @ 2021-09-10 20:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Matt Corallo, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

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On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 11:24:15AM -0700, Matt Corallo via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> I'm [...] suggesting [...] that the existing block producers each
> generate a new key, and we then only sign reorgs with *those* keys.
> Users will be able to set a flag to indicate "I want to accept sigs
> from either sets of keys, and see reorgs" or "I only want sigs from
> the non-reorg keys, and will consider the reorg keys-signed blocks
> invalid"

This seems pretty useful to me.  I think we might want multiple sets of
keys:

0. No reorgs

1. Periodic reorgs of small to moderate depth for ongoing testing
without excessive disruption (e.g. the every 8 hours proposal).  I think
this probably ought to be the default-default `-signet` in Bitcoin Core
and other nodes.

2. Either frequent reorgs (e.g. every block) or a webapp that generates
reorgs on demand to further reduce testing delays.

If we can only have two, I'd suggest dropping 0.  I think it's already
the case that too few people test their software with reorgs.

-Dave

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 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-10  0:50 ` Matt Corallo

  2021-09-13  5:33     ` Matt Corallo
  
From: Anthony Towns @ 2021-09-12  7:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Matt Corallo, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

On Thu, Sep 09, 2021 at 05:50:08PM -0700, Matt Corallo via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > AJ proposed to allow SigNet users to opt-out of reorgs in case they
> > explicitly want to remain unaffected. This can be done by setting a
> > to-be-reorged version bit [...]
> Why bother with a version bit? This seems substantially more complicated
> than the original proposal that surfaced many times before signet launched
> to just have a different reorg signing key.

Yeah, that was the original idea, but there ended up being two problems
with that approach. The simplest is that the signet block signature
encodes the signet challenge, so if you have two different challenges, eg

  "<normal> CHECKSIG"
  "0 SWAP 1 <normal> <reorg> 2 CHECKMULTISIG"

then while both challenges will accept a signature by normal as the
block solution, the signature by "normal" will be different between the
two. This is a fairly natural result of reusing the tx-signing code for
the block signatures and not having a noinput/anyprevout tx-signing mode.

More generally, though, this would mean that a node that's opting out
of reorgs will see the to-be-reorged blocks as simply invalid due to a
bad signature, and will follow the "this node sent me an invalid block"
path in the p2p code, and start marking peers that are following reorgs
as discouraged and worth disconnecting. I think that would make it pretty
hard to avoid partitioning the network between peers that do and don't
accept reorgs, and generally be a pain.

So using the RECENT_CONSENSUS_CHANGE behaviour that avoids the
discourage/disconnect logic seems the way to avoid that problem, and that
means making it so that nodes that that opt-out of reorgs can distinguish
valid-but-will-become-stale blocks from invalid blocks. Using a versionbit
seems like the easiest way of doing that.

> > The reorg-interval X very much depends on the user's needs. One could
> > argue that there should be, for example, three reorgs per day, each 48
> > blocks apart. Such a short reorg interval allows developers in all time
> > zones to be awake during one or two reorgs per day. Developers don't
> > need to wait for, for example, a week until they can test their reorgs
> > next. However, too frequent reorgs could hinder other SigNet users.
> I see zero reason whatsoever to not simply reorg ~every block, or as often
> as is practical. If users opt in to wanting to test with reorgs, they should
> be able to test with reorgs, not wait a day to test with reorgs.

Blocks on signet get mined at a similar rate to mainnet, so you'll always
have to wait a little bit (up to an hour) -- if you don't want to wait
at all, that's what regtest (or perhaps a custom signet) is for.

I guess it would be super easy to say something like:

 - miner 1 ignores blocks marked for reorg
 - miner 2 marks its blocks for reorg, mines on top of the most work
   block
 - miner 2 never mines a block which would have (height % 10 == 1)
 - miner 1 and miner 2 have the same hashrate, but mine at randomly
   different times

which would mean there's almost always a reorg being mined, people that
follow reorgs will see fewer than 1.9x as many blocks as non-reorg nodes,
and reorgs won't go on for more than 10 blocks.

Cheers,
aj



 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-08  7:59 ` Anthony Towns

  2021-09-12 14:54     ` Greg Sanders
  
From: vjudeu @ 2021-09-12 14:29 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Anthony Towns, bitcoin-dev

> - 1 block reorgs: these are a regular feature on mainnet, everyone
   should cope with them; having them happen multiple times a day to
   make testing easier should be great

Anyone can do 1 block reorg, because nonce is not signed, so anyone can replace that with better value. For example, if you have block 00000086d6b2636cb2a392d45edc4ec544a10024d30141c9adf4bfd9de533b53 with 0x0007f4cc nonce, you can replace that with 0x00110241 nonce and get 000000096a1c4239d994547185c80308a552cba85d5bd28a51e9dc583ae5eadb block, where everything is identical, except the nonce.

Sometimes that reorg could be deeper if you would be lucky enough to get a block with more work than N following blocks combined.

On 2021-09-08 09:59:29 user Anthony Towns via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 06:07:47PM +0200, 0xB10C via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> The reorg-interval X very much depends on the user's needs. One could
> argue that there should be, for example, three reorgs per day, each 48
> blocks apart.

Oh, wow, I think the last suggestion was every 100 blocks (every
~16h40m). Once every ~8h sounds very convenient.

> Such a short reorg interval allows developers in all time
> zones to be awake during one or two reorgs per day.

And also for there to reliably be reorgs when they're not awake, which
might be a useful thing to be able to handle, too :)

> Developers don't
> need to wait for, for example, a week until they can test their reorgs
> next. However, too frequent reorgs could hinder other SigNet users.

Being able to run `bitcoind -signet -signetacceptreorg=0` and never
seeing any reorgs should presumably make this not a problem?

For people who do see reorgs, having an average of 2 or 3 additional
blocks every 48 blocks is perhaps a 6% increase in storage/traffic.

> # Scenario 1: Race between two chains
> 
> For this scenario, at least two nodes and miner scripts need to be
> running. An always-miner A continuously produces blocks and rejects
> blocks with the to-be-reorged version bit flag set. And a race-miner R
> that only mines D blocks at the start of each interval and then waits X
> blocks. A and R both have the same hash rate. Assuming both are well
> connected to the network, it's random which miner will first mine and
> propagate a block. In the end, the A miner chain will always win the race.

I think this description is missing that all the blocks R mines have
the to-be-reorged flag set.

>     3. How deep should the reorgs be on average? Do you want to test
>        deeper reorgs (10+ blocks) too?

Super interested in input on this -- perhaps we should get optech to
send a survey out to their members, or so?

My feeling is:

 - 1 block reorgs: these are a regular feature on mainnet, everyone
   should cope with them; having them happen multiple times a day to
   make testing easier should be great

 - 2-3 block reorgs: good for testing the "your tx didn't get enough
   confirms to be credited to your account" case, even though it barely
   ever happens on mainnet

 - 4-6 block reorgs: likely to violate business assumptions, but
   completely technically plausible, especially if there's an attack
   against the network

 - 7-100 block reorgs: for this to happen on mainnet, it would probably
   mean there was a bug and pools/miners agree the chain has to
   be immediately reverted -- eg, someone discovers and exploits an
   inflation bug, minting themselves free bitcoins and breaking the 21M
   limit (eg, the 51 block reorg in Aug 2010); or someone discovers a
   bug that splits the chain, and the less compatible chain is reverted
   (eg, the 24 block reorg due to the bdb lock limit in Mar 2013);
   or something similar. Obviously the bug would have to have been
   discovered pretty quickly after it was exploited for the reorg to be
   under a day's worth of blocks.

 - 100-2000+ block reorgs: severe bug that wasn't found quickly, or where
   getting >50% of miners organised took more than a few hours. This will
   start breaking protocol assumptions, like pool payouts, lightning's
   relative locktimes, or liquid's peg-in confirmation requirements, and
   result in hundres of MBs of changes to the utxo set

Maybe it would be good to do reorgs of 15, 150 or 1500 blocks as a
special fire-drill event, perhaps once a month/quarter/year or so,
in some pre-announced window?

I think sticking to 1-6 block reorgs initially is a fine way to start
though.

> After enough testing, the default SigNet can start to do periodical
> reorgs, too.

FWIW, the only thing that concerns me about doing this on the default
signet is making sure that nodes that set -signetacceptreorg=0 don't
end up partitioning the p2p network due to either rejecting a higher
work chain or rejecting txs due to double-spends across the two chains.

A quick draft of code for -signetacceptreorg=0 is available at 

  https://github.com/ajtowns/bitcoin/commits/202108-signetreorg

Cheers,
aj

_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev



 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-12 14:29   ` vjudeu

  
From: Greg Sanders @ 2021-09-12 14:54 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: vjudeu, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion;  Anthony Towns

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5913 bytes --]

> Sometimes that reorg could be deeper if you would be lucky enough to get
a block with more work than N following blocks combined

Each block is credited for its contribution to total chainwork by the
difficulty target, not the hash of the block itself.

On Sun, Sep 12, 2021 at 10:42 PM vjudeu via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> > - 1 block reorgs: these are a regular feature on mainnet, everyone
>    should cope with them; having them happen multiple times a day to
>    make testing easier should be great
>
> Anyone can do 1 block reorg, because nonce is not signed, so anyone can
> replace that with better value. For example, if you have block
> 00000086d6b2636cb2a392d45edc4ec544a10024d30141c9adf4bfd9de533b53 with
> 0x0007f4cc nonce, you can replace that with 0x00110241 nonce and get
> 000000096a1c4239d994547185c80308a552cba85d5bd28a51e9dc583ae5eadb block,
> where everything is identical, except the nonce.
>
> Sometimes that reorg could be deeper if you would be lucky enough to get a
> block with more work than N following blocks combined.
>
> On 2021-09-08 09:59:29 user Anthony Towns via bitcoin-dev <
> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 06:07:47PM +0200, 0xB10C via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > The reorg-interval X very much depends on the user's needs. One could
> > argue that there should be, for example, three reorgs per day, each 48
> > blocks apart.
>
> Oh, wow, I think the last suggestion was every 100 blocks (every
> ~16h40m). Once every ~8h sounds very convenient.
>
> > Such a short reorg interval allows developers in all time
> > zones to be awake during one or two reorgs per day.
>
> And also for there to reliably be reorgs when they're not awake, which
> might be a useful thing to be able to handle, too :)
>
> > Developers don't
> > need to wait for, for example, a week until they can test their reorgs
> > next. However, too frequent reorgs could hinder other SigNet users.
>
> Being able to run `bitcoind -signet -signetacceptreorg=0` and never
> seeing any reorgs should presumably make this not a problem?
>
> For people who do see reorgs, having an average of 2 or 3 additional
> blocks every 48 blocks is perhaps a 6% increase in storage/traffic.
>
> > # Scenario 1: Race between two chains
> >
> > For this scenario, at least two nodes and miner scripts need to be
> > running. An always-miner A continuously produces blocks and rejects
> > blocks with the to-be-reorged version bit flag set. And a race-miner R
> > that only mines D blocks at the start of each interval and then waits X
> > blocks. A and R both have the same hash rate. Assuming both are well
> > connected to the network, it's random which miner will first mine and
> > propagate a block. In the end, the A miner chain will always win the
> race.
>
> I think this description is missing that all the blocks R mines have
> the to-be-reorged flag set.
>
> >     3. How deep should the reorgs be on average? Do you want to test
> >        deeper reorgs (10+ blocks) too?
>
> Super interested in input on this -- perhaps we should get optech to
> send a survey out to their members, or so?
>
> My feeling is:
>
>  - 1 block reorgs: these are a regular feature on mainnet, everyone
>    should cope with them; having them happen multiple times a day to
>    make testing easier should be great
>
>  - 2-3 block reorgs: good for testing the "your tx didn't get enough
>    confirms to be credited to your account" case, even though it barely
>    ever happens on mainnet
>
>  - 4-6 block reorgs: likely to violate business assumptions, but
>    completely technically plausible, especially if there's an attack
>    against the network
>
>  - 7-100 block reorgs: for this to happen on mainnet, it would probably
>    mean there was a bug and pools/miners agree the chain has to
>    be immediately reverted -- eg, someone discovers and exploits an
>    inflation bug, minting themselves free bitcoins and breaking the 21M
>    limit (eg, the 51 block reorg in Aug 2010); or someone discovers a
>    bug that splits the chain, and the less compatible chain is reverted
>    (eg, the 24 block reorg due to the bdb lock limit in Mar 2013);
>    or something similar. Obviously the bug would have to have been
>    discovered pretty quickly after it was exploited for the reorg to be
>    under a day's worth of blocks.
>
>  - 100-2000+ block reorgs: severe bug that wasn't found quickly, or where
>    getting >50% of miners organised took more than a few hours. This will
>    start breaking protocol assumptions, like pool payouts, lightning's
>    relative locktimes, or liquid's peg-in confirmation requirements, and
>    result in hundres of MBs of changes to the utxo set
>
> Maybe it would be good to do reorgs of 15, 150 or 1500 blocks as a
> special fire-drill event, perhaps once a month/quarter/year or so,
> in some pre-announced window?
>
> I think sticking to 1-6 block reorgs initially is a fine way to start
> though.
>
> > After enough testing, the default SigNet can start to do periodical
> > reorgs, too.
>
> FWIW, the only thing that concerns me about doing this on the default
> signet is making sure that nodes that set -signetacceptreorg=0 don't
> end up partitioning the p2p network due to either rejecting a higher
> work chain or rejecting txs due to double-spends across the two chains.
>
> A quick draft of code for -signetacceptreorg=0 is available at
>
>   https://github.com/ajtowns/bitcoin/commits/202108-signetreorg
>
> Cheers,
> aj
>
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>

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 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-12  7:53   ` Anthony Towns

  2021-09-14  4:56       ` Anthony Towns
  
From: Matt Corallo @ 2021-09-13  5:33 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Anthony Towns;  Bitcoin Protocol Discussion



> On Sep 12, 2021, at 00:53, Anthony Towns <aj@erisian•com.au> wrote:
> 
> ﻿On Thu, Sep 09, 2021 at 05:50:08PM -0700, Matt Corallo via bitcoin-dev wrote:
>>> AJ proposed to allow SigNet users to opt-out of reorgs in case they
>>> explicitly want to remain unaffected. This can be done by setting a
>>> to-be-reorged version bit [...]
>> Why bother with a version bit? This seems substantially more complicated
>> than the original proposal that surfaced many times before signet launched
>> to just have a different reorg signing key.
> 
> Yeah, that was the original idea, but there ended up being two problems
> with that approach. The simplest is that the signet block signature
> encodes the signet challenge,

But if that was the originally proposal, why is the challenge committed to in the block? :)

> So using the RECENT_CONSENSUS_CHANGE behaviour that avoids the
> discourage/disconnect logic seems the way to avoid that problem, and that
> means making it so that nodes that that opt-out of reorgs can distinguish
> valid-but-will-become-stale blocks from invalid blocks. Using a versionbit
> seems like the easiest way of doing that.

Sure, you could set that for invalid block signatures as well though. It’s not really a material DoS protection one way or the other.

>>> The reorg-interval X very much depends on the user's needs. One could
>>> argue that there should be, for example, three reorgs per day, each 48
>>> blocks apart. Such a short reorg interval allows developers in all time
>>> zones to be awake during one or two reorgs per day. Developers don't
>>> need to wait for, for example, a week until they can test their reorgs
>>> next. However, too frequent reorgs could hinder other SigNet users.
>> I see zero reason whatsoever to not simply reorg ~every block, or as often
>> as is practical. If users opt in to wanting to test with reorgs, they should
>> be able to test with reorgs, not wait a day to test with reorgs.
> 
> Blocks on signet get mined at a similar rate to mainnet, so you'll always
> have to wait a little bit (up to an hour) -- if you don't want to wait
> at all, that's what regtest (or perhaps a custom signet) is for.

Can you explain the motivation for this? From where I sit, as far as I know, I should basically be a prime example of the target market for public signet - someone developing bitcoin applications with regular requirements to test those applications with other developers without jumping through hoops to configure software the same across the globe and set up miners. With blocks being slow and irregular, I’m basically not benefited at all by signet and will stick with testnet3/mainnet testing, which both suck.

 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-13 16:24 ` Matt Corallo
  
From: Michael Folkson @ 2021-09-13 12:30 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Matt Corallo, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

> Can you explain the motivation for this? From where I sit, as far as I know, I should basically be > a prime example of the target market for public signet - someone developing bitcoin applications > with regular requirements to test those applications with other developers without
> jumping through hoops to configure software the same across the globe and set up miners.
> With blocks > being slow and irregular, I’m basically not benefited at all by signet and will
> stick with testnet3/mainnet testing, which both suck.

On testnet3 you can realistically go days without blocks being found
(and conversely thousands of blocks can be found in a day), the block
discovery time variance is huge. Of course this is probabilistically
possible on mainnet too but the probability of this happening is close
to zero. Here[0] is an example of 16,000 blocks being found in a day
on testnet3.

On signet block discovery time variance mirrors mainnet.

On mainnet you are risking Bitcoin with actual monetary value. If you
don't mind doing this then you don't need testnet3, signet or anything
else. In addition proposed soft forks may be activated on signet (and
could also be on testnet3) well before they are considered for
activation on mainnet for testing and experimentation purposes.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160910173004/https://blog.blocktrail.com/2015/04/in-the-darkest-depths-of-testnet3-16k-blocks-were-found-in-1-day/

-- 
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson@gmail•com
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3


 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-13 12:30 Michael Folkson

  
From: Matt Corallo @ 2021-09-13 16:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Michael Folkson;  Bitcoin Protocol Discussion



> On Sep 13, 2021, at 05:30, Michael Folkson <michaelfolkson@gmail•com> wrote:
> 
> ﻿
>> 
>> Can you explain the motivation for this? From where I sit, as far as I know, I should basically be > a prime example of the target market for public signet - someone developing bitcoin applications > with regular requirements to test those applications with other developers without
>> jumping through hoops to configure software the same across the globe and set up miners.
>> With blocks > being slow and irregular, I’m basically not benefited at all by signet and will
>> stick with testnet3/mainnet testing, which both suck.
> 
> On testnet3 you can realistically go days without blocks being found
> (and conversely thousands of blocks can be found in a day), the block
> discovery time variance is huge. Of course this is probabilistically
> possible on mainnet too but the probability of this happening is close
> to zero. Here[0] is an example of 16,000 blocks being found in a day
> on testnet3.

Blocks too fast isn’t generally an issue when waiting for blocks to test, and hooking up a miner is probably less work on testnet3 than creating a multi-party private signet with miners. In any case, you didn’t address the substance of the point - we can do better to make it a good platform for testing…. Why aren’t we?

 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-13  5:33     ` Matt Corallo

  2021-09-15 15:24         ` Matt Corallo
  
From: Anthony Towns @ 2021-09-14  4:56 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Matt Corallo, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

On Sun, Sep 12, 2021 at 10:33:24PM -0700, Matt Corallo via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > On Sep 12, 2021, at 00:53, Anthony Towns <aj@erisian•com.au> wrote:
> >> Why bother with a version bit? This seems substantially more complicated
> >> than the original proposal that surfaced many times before signet launched
> >> to just have a different reorg signing key.
> > Yeah, that was the original idea, but there ended up being two problems
> > with that approach. The simplest is that the signet block signature
> > encodes the signet challenge,
> But if that was the originally proposal, why is the challenge committed to in the block? :)

The answer to your question was in the text after the comma, that you
deleted...

> > Blocks on signet get mined at a similar rate to mainnet, so you'll always
> > have to wait a little bit (up to an hour) -- if you don't want to wait
> > at all, that's what regtest (or perhaps a custom signet) is for.
> Can you explain the motivation for this? 

I'm not sure that's really the question you want answered? Mostly
it's just "this is how mainnet works" plus "these are the smallest
changes to have blocks be chosen by a signature, rather than entirely
by PoW competition".

For integration testing across many services, I think a ten-minute-average
between blocks still makes sense -- protocols relying on CSV/CLTV to
ensure there's a delay they can use to recover funds, if they specify
that in blocks (as lightning's to_self_delay does), then significant
surges of blocks will cause uninteresting bugs. 

It would be easy enough to change things to target an average of 2 or
5 minutes, I suppose, but then you'd probably need to propogate that
logic back into your apps that would otherwise think 144 blocks is around
about a day.

We could switch back to doing blocks exactly every 10 minutes, rather
than a poisson-ish distribution in the range of 1min to 60min, but that
doesn't seem like that huge a win, and makes it hard to test that things
behave properly when blocks arrive in bursts.

> From where I sit, as far as I know, I should basically be a prime
> example of the target market for public signet - someone developing
> bitcoin applications with regular requirements to test those applications
> with other developers without jumping through hoops to configure software
> the same across the globe and set up miners. With blocks being slow and
> irregular, I’m basically not benefited at all by signet and will stick
> with testnet3/mainnet testing, which both suck.

Best of luck to you then? Nobody's trying to sell you on a subscription
plan to using signet. Signet's less expensive in fees (or risk) than
mainnet, and takes far less time for IBD than testnet, but if those
aren't blockers for you, that's great.

Cheers,
aj


 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-14  4:56       ` Anthony Towns

  2021-10-15  4:41           ` Anthony Towns
  
From: Matt Corallo @ 2021-09-15 15:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Anthony Towns;  Bitcoin Protocol Discussion



> On Sep 13, 2021, at 21:56, Anthony Towns <aj@erisian•com.au> wrote:
> I'm not sure that's really the question you want answered?

Of course it is? I’d like to understand the initial thinking and design analysis that went into this decision. That seems like an important question to ask when seeking changes in an existing system :).

> Mostly
> it's just "this is how mainnet works" plus "these are the smallest
> changes to have blocks be chosen by a signature, rather than entirely
> by PoW competition".
> 
> For integration testing across many services, I think a ten-minute-average
> between blocks still makes sense -- protocols relying on CSV/CLTV to
> ensure there's a delay they can use to recover funds, if they specify
> that in blocks (as lightning's to_self_delay does), then significant
> surges of blocks will cause uninteresting bugs. 

Hmm, why would blocks coming quicker lead to a bug? I certainly hope no one has a bug if their block time is faster than per ten minutes. I presume here, you mean something like “if the node can’t keep up with the block rate”, but I certainly hope the benchmark for may isn’t 10 minutes, or really even one.

> It would be easy enough to change things to target an average of 2 or
> 5 minutes, I suppose, but then you'd probably need to propogate that
> logic back into your apps that would otherwise think 144 blocks is around
> about a day.

Why? One useful thing for testing is compressing real time. More broadly, the only issues that I’ve heard around block times in testnet3 are the inconsistency and, rarely software failing to keep up at all.

> We could switch back to doing blocks exactly every 10 minutes, rather
> than a poisson-ish distribution in the range of 1min to 60min, but that
> doesn't seem like that huge a win, and makes it hard to test that things
> behave properly when blocks arrive in bursts.

Hmm, I suppose? If you want to test that the upper bound doesn’t need to be 100 minutes, though, it could be 10.

> Best of luck to you then? Nobody's trying to sell you on a subscription
> plan to using signet.


lol, yes, I’m aware of that, nor did I mean to imply that anything has to be targeted at a specific person’s requirements. Rather, my point here is that I’m really confused as to who  the target user *is*, because we should be building products with target users in mind, even if those targets are often “me” for open source projects.

 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2021-09-15 15:24         ` Matt Corallo

  
From: Anthony Towns @ 2021-10-15  4:41 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Matt Corallo, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion

On Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 08:24:43AM -0700, Matt Corallo via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > On Sep 13, 2021, at 21:56, Anthony Towns <aj@erisian•com.au> wrote:
> > I'm not sure that's really the question you want answered?
> Of course it is? I’d like to understand the initial thinking and design analysis that went into this decision. That seems like an important question to ask when seeking changes in an existing system :).

Well, "are there any drawbacks to doing X instead, because that would make
it easier for me to do Y" just seems like a more interesting question?
Because:

> > Mostly
> > it's just "this is how mainnet works" plus "these are the smallest
> > changes to have blocks be chosen by a signature, rather than entirely
> > by PoW competition".

doesn't seem like that interesting an answer...

To be a bit more specific, it's not at all clear to me what you would
be happy with? (I mean, beyond "something magic that works exactly how
I want it, when I want it, even if I don't know what that is yet or
change my mind later" which is obviously the desired behaviour for all
software everywhere) 

You say you're happier with both mainnet and testnet3 than signet,
but mainnet isn't any faster than signet, while (if you've got an ASIC)
testnet3 will give you a block per second, especially if you don't mind
your blocks getting reorged out. There's a lot of ground between those
two extremes.

> > For integration testing across many services, I think a ten-minute-average
> > between blocks still makes sense -- protocols relying on CSV/CLTV to
> > ensure there's a delay they can use to recover funds, if they specify
> > that in blocks (as lightning's to_self_delay does), then significant
> > surges of blocks will cause uninteresting bugs. 
> Hmm, why would blocks coming quicker lead to a bug? I certainly hope no one has a bug if their block time is faster than per ten minutes. I presume here, you mean something like “if the node can’t keep up with the block rate”, but I certainly hope the benchmark for may isn’t 10 minutes, or really even one.

The lightning to_self_delay is specified in blocks, but is meant to allow
you to be offline for some real time period; if you specify 1000 blocks
and are sure you'll be online every two days, that's fine on mainnet
and signet as it stands, but broken on testnet.

> > It would be easy enough to change things to target an average of 2 or
> > 5 minutes, I suppose, but then you'd probably need to propogate that
> > logic back into your apps that would otherwise think 144 blocks is around
> > about a day.
> Why? One useful thing for testing is compressing real time.

Sure, but if you're compressing _real_ time you need to manipulate the
nTime not just the number of blocks -- and that might be relevant for
nLocktime or nSequence checks by mtp rather than height. But that's
not something signet's appropriate for: you should be using regtest for
that scenario.

> > We could switch back to doing blocks exactly every 10 minutes, rather
> > than a poisson-ish distribution in the range of 1min to 60min, but that
> > doesn't seem like that huge a win, and makes it hard to test that things
> > behave properly when blocks arrive in bursts.
> Hmm, I suppose? If you want to test that the upper bound doesn’t
> need to be 100 minutes, though, it could be 10.

Mathematically, you can't have an average of 10 minutes and a max of 10
minutes without the minimum also being 10 minutes...

> > Best of luck to you then? Nobody's trying to sell you on a subscription
> > plan to using signet.
> lol, yes, I’m aware of that, nor did I mean to imply that anything has to be targeted at a specific person’s requirements. Rather, my point here is that I’m really confused as to who  the target user *is*, because we should be building products with target users in mind, even if those targets are often “me” for open source projects.

I don't really think there's a definitive answer to that yet?

My guess is "integration testing" is close to right; whether it be
different services validating they interoperate, or users seeing if a
service works the way they expect in a nearly-live environment.

For private signets, the advantage over regtest is you don't risk some
random participant causing major reorgs, and can reasonably use it over
the internet without having to worry too much about securing things.

For the default public signet, the advantage over regtest is probably that
you've got additional infrastructure already setup (eg explorer.bc-2.jp
and mempool.space/signet, perhaps eventually a decent lightning test
network? there's signet-lightning.wakiyamap.dev)

The advantage of a private signet vs the default public one is probably
only that you can control the consensus rules to introduce and test a
new soft fork if you want. The advantage of the default public signet
over your own private one is probably mostly that it already has
miners/explorers/faucets setup and you don't have to do that yourself.

I think the default public signet makes sense as a "demo mainnet" --
somewhere you can do all the things you can on mainnet, with pretty
similar constraints, but some more interesting behaviours -- like bigger
reorgs, or earlier availability of new features.

So to me that adds up as:

 * are you a single developer making software? do it on regtest so you've
   got complete control

 * are you trying out some software? so it on the default public signet,
   because that's the least effort and will give you a pretty good idea
   how it will behave on mainnet

 * are you checking your software interoperates with some random other
   project in the way you expect? again, default public signet, since
   hopefully the other project already supports it

 * are you doing a collaboration/partnership with another development
   team? do you want a stable environment for your team to collaborate
   on? setup your own private signet for the test environment (but do
   local tests and CI tests via regtest too)

YMMV, that's just my opinion, etc.

FWIW, I was frustrated the other day when trying to mine [0] and seeing
the next block wasn't due for ~40 minutes (and the spend script had a
CSV constraint, so I had to wait for it to be mined before I could get
the followup txs in the mempool). OTOH, it wasn't frustrating enough to
either mine a block early or switch to regtest, so... I guess I see the
point, but not really any particular action to take for it?

[0] https://explorer.bc-2.jp/tx/ba58d99dfaad83e105a0de1a9becfcf8eaf897aaaada54bd7b08134ff579997c?input:0&expand

Cheers,
aj



 permalink raw reply	[|nested]