I'm Marek Palatinus (slush), creator of the first mining pool and creator of TREZOR. AMA - 3rd Dec!

[slush]

@Marek, thanks for all your contributions to the community!!

Questions:

1) what would you do different in the Pool business knowing what you know now?

Definitely building bigger team since beginning. Being alone on everything for more than two years since 2010 was mind blowing experience. I had to be online 24/7/365 which almost ruined my personal life. That was because I did not recognized for long time how big this is going to be. Now the pool is developed and maintained by team of six professionals (and good friends of me!), which kicked the quality of service to another level.

2) What were the biggest challenges in running a pool, starting a pool?

Never ending DDoS incidents. Especially on the beginning that was pretty common and I sometimes did not sleep for many days, fighting attacks and moving pool around the world to different datacenters (because after attacks some datacenters refused to host the project).

Also physical security was an issue. Pool lost some bitcoins during datacenter hacks, like "Linode hack", where also Bitcoinica lost 40k+ BTC: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/th ... 1330805009. Then we've found a way how to protect our servers in much better way. We run servers in five datacenters around the world and we did not have any security issue since then.

Shortly said, the biggest challenge is to run 24/7 online service with above-bank-grade security with minimal budget. I worked in banking industry before my engagement into bitcoin so I can compare. As far as I can say, our current security model is much higher than any setup banks consider "secure".

3) hind sight 20/20 of course, is there a better niche you could have spent your time? I guess this is simialr to question 1... but if you could do it over again would you still do pools and hardware wallets?

Although I never wanted to go into hardware business, it learn me A LOT and I'm thankful for that experience! Both pool business and TREZOR wallet were pretty stressful projects (each in different way). However I regret it only few times .

4) The opportunities in Bitcoin are enormous... but what do you think the top 3 are? Is it wallet software? POS deployment? What say you...

We have third major project in pipeline which (I believe) will have significant impact on Bitcoin. But I prefer to not disclose any details yet!

[slush]

When you started working on a mining pool for Bitcoin, did you have any idea what a large part of your life it would become? When did you realize that you might have stumbled onto something great?

Definitely not! It was a nice hobby project. Those days, Bitcoin was unrecognized by anybody except few geeks on bitcointalk forum. There was a good chance it will die suddenly because of some stupid mistake or overlooked detail in whole concept. Even when I quit my daily job in summer 2011 I was like "ok, let's try this, I can go back to job anytime". However, at that time, Bitcoin took my whole life. I literally quit my 40 hours/week job to work 80+ hours/job as a pool operator.

[slush]

HI Marek,

Thank you for taking part in this AMA, I got a feeling that you will get a lot of questions from our members and here is mine.

A member recenly posted this: alternative-clients/two-disadvantages-o ... lit=trezor
The first question he has was quite easy to solve but the 2nd question not so easy.

He is inquiring about traveling across borders with a Trezor and how to explain the devise to airport customs/security.
Just wondering how you do or would explain this yourself and what rules apply that you know of?

I know each countrie would have different laws but is this something you have experienced?

I travel often with TREZOR in my pocket and I've never had any question regards it. TREZOR is too small and even metallic version is not detected by scanners. If somebody would ask me, I would probably say it's a flash memory. If somebody insist to explain more, I would say it's as a flash storage of private keys for my digital life.

However I must say that airport security is just a theatre. Many times I took some prohibited gadget on board, like knife, pepper spray or kubotan by accident. Maybe I simply do not look suspicious at first sight .

[slush]

In hindsight do you think pooled mining and/or the Stratum protocol has contributed at all to the centralization of mining? Do you see some centralization of mining infrastructure as an unavoidable necessity?

I've build the pool because I as a small miner wanted to stay in the game for longer. So I think the oposite is true! Without pools and optimized protocols, the barrier to enter mining industry would be much higher. Just see how many people mine on P2Pool - and it is just about setting up the bitcoin node! I believe without share-based pools the mining industry would be in hands of few long time ago.

The important note is that pool operator does not own the hashrate. It has been proven many times that hashrate is liquid and if the pool acts badly and lose its reputation, hashrate moves elsewhere.

Another story is centralization of hardware in large mining farms. I see this as a threat, but it was inevitable that people with better access to cheap hardware will use the opportunity. I believe this must be addressed somehow to keep Bitcoin independent and secure. However it is irrelevant to pooled mining concept, because if you own hall full of top ASIC miners, you're mining solo.

[Skin_in_the_game]

Hello Marek
I was re-reading Antifragile by iconoclast thinker Nassim Taleb recently. He writes

"Never ask anyone for their opinion [...] Just ask them what they have -or don't have- in their portfolio"

I have come to think it's a very relevant question and you can better weight people's opinions having an idea of how many Bitcoins they hold (or do not hold.) So Instead of asking their opinion on bitcoin, I'm now asking every participants the same question:

- Do you mind to tell us which percentage of your personal net worth and/or liquid assets you hold in Bitcoins ?

[slush]

What are your opinions regarding the Blocksize-issue? are you for BIP100(increase of up to 17%)/BIP101(8 MB and up to GBs)/BIP103(2-4-8-32MB)?

I'm mildly for BIP101 and I like the work which Gavin put into the project, but I think some other solutions will work, too. Although rising proposed in BIP101 may be a bit aggressive, it's just a limit - not the block size itself! Remember that Satoshi used the limit as a precaution of various DoS attacks to network for its first day of existence, talking about removing eventually. On the opposite, keeping the limit low in time of Bitcoin expansion limits the economy of blockchain and it may be dangerous for bitcoin adoption rate. I'm closely related in Paralelni Polis, the bitcoin-only space in Prague, and I see even today that small blocksize may affect real-world usage of Bitcoin.

Do you hold bitcoins yourself(in the trezor,web Wallet,mobile wallet or desktop wallet)?

I use TREZOR as my primary bitcoin storage, Mycelium wallet on my phone for change and NFC card for terminals in Paralelni Polis for the fastest way of paying for coffee. It's just "beep" - I even don't need to unlock my phone! .

What are you opinions regarding alt-coins such as litecoin?

I'm generally skeptical about "bitcoin with faster blocks" altcoins. In my opinion the social network of users is what counts. Litecoin and other copypasta-coins does not offer significant improvement over Bitcoin to attract enough users.

What do you think about bitcoins future(block halvening,openbaazar etc)?

Block halvening years ago shown that it's not an issue at all. It is just a demonstration how differently the economic works when all participants have full information. Such predictive and seamless changes would never happen in normal fiat economic with central bankers, which can change rules in any day without telling anybody in advance.

I believe decentralized applications like Openbazaar will take a traction, because by eliminating middlemen they can simplify and cheapen many things of daily life. I still see Bitcoin as the Internet in 1995. There were already all those protocols and technologies, yet we did not have all services we use everyday today.

Are you open for a (sort of) plugin of trezor with Bitcoin Core wallet/Bitcoin XT?

It is technically doable, but it's not in our pipeline for now. We do not see Core as a software ready for common users. Even Core developers said they may eventually remove Wallet from the code, because it it hard to maintain such monolithic code. I rarely agree with them; Core should be just an minimalistic implementation of node enforcing network rules and keeping blockchain running. They should leave other parts of infrastructure to people with better skills for UX.

[slush]

can or will trezor be able to be used in a similar way to the yubikey on top of the bitcoin functionality it already provides? ssh keys/2fa etc.

Definitely yes. SSH login is already working in linux (https://medium.com/@satoshilabs/trezor- ... a622d7e609) and it should be straightforward to add support into Putty for Windows (but I did not use Windows for years, so I cannot say 100%). U2F is already in progress (I linked github repository few posts before). We plan Yubikey emulation too, yet ETA is not set.

Our plan is to turn TREZOR into minimalistic personal security device with private keys derived from the seed. Anyway the usage of seed for various use cases like authentication is a nice example how technologies behind bitcoin influences other technologies, too.

[slush]

Hi Slush,

Can you give a ballpark update on the number of Trezors sold to date ?

Can you elaborate at all on the shenanigans that people attempt to defraud mining pools, past and present ?

That would be a long list of scam attempts . Some of them were successful, at least for some time. For example we have a case where somebody in ISP company was hijacking Stratum connections of customers and pointed it into another pool. But generally this does not happen often, the most common are attempts to impersonate to pool users and get an access to pool accounts. For that reason we encourage people to send bitcoins away from the service as soon as they trigger anti-spam threshold. In the end there's not much to steal from the Pool...

For example about 18 months ago BTCGuild, Eligius, Bitminter and others were hit with a winning share withholding attacks and DDOS attacks. Around this time PPS options were removed by most pools, attackers had their balances witheld and Giga' s pool closed down.

THAT was the reason why we were refusing to add PPS for years, although many users left the pool and joined some fancy PPS service. However PPS is like playing a russian roulette; statistically you never have enough bitcoins to survive long enough period of bad luck. Not talking to technical issues alone (like BtcGuild paid out to users 1000+ BTC by mistake during migration to bitcoind 0.8) and scam attempts like block withholding. As far as I can say, we never experienced such attempts, because on score-based pool it does not have much sense.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic ... msg7282674

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic ... msg6060325

Do such innovative attacks still occur ? Do you think these attacks on independent pools are a proxy attack on the decentralisation of independent miners' hashrate ?

There may be various motivations behind such attacks. Profit, damaging competitors, destabilisation of bitcoin network, fear, ... I honestly don't think too much about "why", it's not important at all .

What are your thoughts on Ghash's behaviour at that time - they dropped their fee from 2% to 0%, an employee was caught double spending, and I suspected them of selfish mining/block witholding with a high orphan rate (often chains of 2-3 consecutive orphaned blocks).

I don't have any information regards this cause.

What are your thoughts on SPV mining - perhaps this is an ingenius solution to larger block propagation times between pools?

SPV mining (mining based on blocks without full verification) is going against the purpose of mining itself - validating transactions and keeping blockchain healthy.

[slush]

category silly:

Do you like giant red underpants?

Haha

To others - Alena is talking about recent event on Prague castle: Czech art activists scale Prague Castle walls to replace the President's flag with a huge pair of pants

I like this kind of peaceful political activism. Our politicians behave like they don't see there're people upset by them. Anyway, Ztohoven (group behind "pants replacement") are my friends and people behind Paralelni Polis, which are in love with Bitcoin!

[slush]

slush,
I love the two Trezors I own, and really like that i can set them up to be identical, and use them interchangeably.

My question is when will you (or are you considering to) have the passphrase entry obfuscated like you do for PINs? I recognize that I might have to scroll through a few pages (with the two Trezor buttons) to see all the letter and symbol pairings. I also recognize that some people may not like it since their passphrases might use extended character sets. However, I would think that during the initial setup (or in advanced mode) the user could activate the passphrase obfuscation with the full knowledge that they are limited to a certain set of characters (upper, lower, numeric, limited symbols). This approach would give me massive peace-of-mind regarding keyloggers. Is this idea in the works?

We've tried hard to introduce safe passphrase entry on TREZOR, but nothing was really usable. Even PIN entry is a bit geeky and it is sometimes hard to explain for average joe (although most people like it once they understand the concept ).

However I don't see entering passphrase over the keyboard as a security risk. You still cannot control TREZOR without PIN. Passphrase acts more like physical attack security protection (=somebody find your recovery seed, somebody disassemble your TREZOR and read the chip content, ...), not as a software protection; that's why PIN is in the place.

Generally the problem of comfortable handling of passphrase is unsolvable without keypad directly on TREZOR, which goes against TREZOR minimalistic philosophy. However, we don't rest on laurels and we have something in pipeline which will address secure entering of text into TREZOR, although it will require minor changes in TREZOR hardware...

[slush]

Hi Marek,

Thank you for coming here!

Around when do you think the next version of the Trezor will come out or is it still a while before there will be any hardware updates?

We're generally satisfied with TREZOR design approach. Comparing to our competitors, we don't plan to add GSM, Bluetooths, Wifis, batteries and other unnecessary stuff, which makes the device more expensive, more complex and less secure. Our initial idea was "hardware wallet to everyone's hand", not make a crappy and expensive mobile phone/tablet . Although current pricetag may seems a bit high, we're still in track of our initial vision and we're focused to eliminate unnecessary obstacles and make TREZOR even more minimalistic and available to wide audience.

What are some of the most rewarding things about running a mining pool?

Reputation. I think reputation is everything in such anonymous and decentralized environment like Bitcoin and Internet. It is really easy to lost reputation, but it take years to earn it. Pool and TREZOR projects open us doors to many interesting people and opportunities and I like that we'll have a chance to improve (bitcoin) world even more thanks to this.

What are your thoughts about the balance of power in deciding the direction of bitcoin -- between the users, industry such as exchanges and merchants, miners and developers? How can the different segments of bitcoin society work together and not get stymied by negative actors?

Bitcoin is such crazy social experiment! I think this may be the first time in history where people unknown each to other have a real motivation to act honestly and cooperate. Of course as the experiment is going on, there're more visible downsides and weak points. Myself I'm concerned by few huge miners with an access to cheap hardware, huge mining facilities and little motivation to act honestly. I think this has to be addressed and physical mining hardware should be distributed more equally around the world.

[slush]

If you had full control of Bitcoin core what changes would you implement first?

I would kick of everything unnecessary to relay node and validation of blockchain and add reasonable API for external applications. Current monolithic architecture is hell and we fight with Core integration in Pool and TREZOR all the time, just because current JSON API is horrible and does not offer enough tools and performance for enterprise usage.

All stuff like mining or wallet functionality should be maintained separately by another teams. For example, Core still does not implement HD wallets, although all other major wallets have it for long time. Of course it's because small team of Core devs cannot do everyhing at once.

Unfortunately Core for its complexity and steep learning curve is behind closed doors for most developers. Also all those never-ending flamewars on mailing list and github - this may be the reason why many people left the project and why the codebase is lagging behind standards.

[slush]

Hi Marek,

welcome to bitcoin.com!

My question:

Are you planing to sell a cheaper Hardware Wallet in the future?

Hi LiteCoinGuy, thanks for hosting AMA here!

Hardware wallet in hands of every bitcoiner is definitely our vision, so yes, low price and wide availability are our primary goals. However R&D is quite massive; it is not only about hardware itself, but about full bitcoin stack. There's team of ~10 people working on TREZOR fulltime for years already and we're financing that only from our sources and sells. From this point of view, I'm really proud of SatoshiLabs, that for just $99 and small product batches we were able to develop world-unique solution from the ground, we're successfully selling it worldwide and that we have free resources for further development and improvements.

To put this into perspective, some of cheap Chinese TREZOR clones are out of market, although they got *everything* from us for free, because TREZOR is completely opensource. So even they did not put a dollar into R&D and they just took final product into chinese production facility, they did not make it financially viable.

Side note to financing TREZOR project: Although we had offers, we didn't accept VC funding, because we wanted to have free hands with our strategy and product development. I had a chance to work for some VC-funded projects before and it mostly turned into a "never ever" experience. Our primary goaI is to do something useful for customers and prove TREZOR is a viable product.

...and what is about the giant red underpants ? Tell us!

Haha, I've explained this in previous post. It was some political act/performance of our bitcoin friends on Prague Castle!

[slush]

Marek, 2 q's:

1. What are your thoughts on proof of work vs. proof of stake? Do you think Ethereum could develop a viable alternative to proof of work?

2. As someone in the industry, what are your primary news sources for Bitcoin/crypto, and why?

Appreciate your thoughts.

ad 1) Firstly, I don't consider myself to be an expert on proof of stake nor Ethereum. Thankfully I have friends/colleagues around me who are such expert! I don't know how to solve many issues of proof of stake like initial distribution of coins or security (you don't want to keep your private keys online - TREZOR ftw!). However I don't say this cannot be addressed somehow.

ad Ethereum) I don't think Ethereum will be viable solution in general. It seems too complex to me, much more complex than Bitcoin. Firstly I consider myself a minimalist, so such monolithic solutions are not attracting me. Secondly, I personally have a bad experience with too complex systems which try to solve too much things at once. In the end they do not work perfect for any single use case.

ad 2) Unfortunately I don't have any secret link to Satoshi . So I read bitcoin magazines, follow mailing lists (although I cannot read everything anymore because lack of time) and I read Reddit. I'm also in active Bitcoin community here in Prague, so important news come to me from every side .

Anyway, I'm really pissed of Theymos (bitcoin subreddit moderator), because his censorship is ridiculous. He even removed link to this AMA once it appear on subreddit homepage. So I follow also /r/btc and /r/bitcoinxt.

[slush]

Hello Marek
I was re-reading Antifragile by iconoclast thinker Nassim Taleb recently. He writes

"Never ask anyone for their opinion [...] Just ask them what they have -or don't have- in their portfolio"

I have come to think it's a very relevant question and you can better weight people's opinions having an idea of how many Bitcoins they hold (or do not hold.) So Instead of asking their opinion on bitcoin, I'm now asking every participants the same question:

- Do you mind to tell us which percentage of your personal net worth and/or liquid assets you hold in Bitcoins ?

Call me crazy, but I'm full in bitcoin. I just believe in what we're working on.

[slush]

That was the last question in this AMA. Thank you for your attention and all your questions, they were really intersting! Incidentally I'm on Slush Pool hackathon right now; whole team is in Krkonose mountains in hut, sitting all days in front of monitor and coding new features for the Pool. Pool team is waving to you and I'm back going to them, continue working on improved Stratum protocol .

[iFixBTCmemoryIssues]

Hello everybody! I just sit in front of keyboard. Let's go to answers!

Congrats on TREZOR!

Thank you! Positive feedback is one of main motivation for our projects .

AND LOTS OF MONEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!

Happy Holidays

[Windowly]

Wow the picture looks lovely.

Thank you for answering all our questions and I'm looking forward to seeing what your new project will be.

[Aussiehash]

I didn't see a really to.my question, but here's the kind of answer I was looking for
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/commen ... o_slow_it/

[Kula13]

Hello Marek.
Back in 2012 i open a wallet for storing BTC. My problem is really stupid. I do not remember the name on the webside where i open the wallet. I found the paper note where i wrote down username, password and a pincode. I also got a Recovery key. The recovery key they told me, would be shown to me only one time, and if i loose the it, i would not be able to open my account again. The R key has 22 mix og letters and numbers. So my question for you is; could you please give me some advice what to do to locate my wallet? Can you please find out if i may have open an account on this site, Bitcoin.com?
I'm looking forward to hear from you. Thank you.

[fearless felder]

Hi Marek,


I'm new to bitcoin but I know that this currency will redefine our current system as we know today by cutting out the middleman,the banks. I want to be apart of this revolution,my background is sales and marketing with 30 years of experience. I have the domain name of www.bittaken.com,I want to get funding to start a company that signs up retailers to accept bitcoin as payment and act as a shoppers guide for bit. I want to put together a team in Chicago, nationally than international by years end. I would like your team and financial support on this project,my concept will increase the demand though consumers interactions which will increase brand visibility. I can be reached at 312-622-1057,I'm ready when you call!

Front-line man
Rob Fearless Felder

[Marconi]

Thank you for your work

[phoenix.spirtual]

hi! i am new here can you please teach me a few things!!!

; how to post things on the main feed

and so on then

can you help me answer some question about bitcoin!

thanks


i hope you reply as soon as you get this messsge

[CryptoBeans]

Your project is so awesome.

[CryptoBeans]

Thank you for your work

[dsdarduck]

Marek,

Do you see value in bitcoin related domain names? I'm currently selling BitcoinMining.io on Flippa and am curious what opportunities you would see with this name. I also own DigitalWallet.io if you wouldn't mind providing your thoughts on this one either. Thanks in advance.

https://flippa.com/9606939-bitcoinmining-io

r,
Darrin

[Cryptozone]

Your project saved my crypto life

[zoneforcrypto]

What was your biggest challenge