Meh, segwit really isn't that interesting. While it's not disastrous, It adds technical debt because it does things in a kludgy way and the things it does bring to the table can be (and have been) implemented in better ways. Now, that typically means hard forks so could they have been implemented on Bitcoin? We'll never know.

It's definitely clear that forks that don't carry the BTC symbol or have the blessing of Core start a long way behind and hash is always going to be hugely important. It's clear to me that, as AlcoHoDL suggests, increasing the block size limit is inevitable at some point so I think it's far from a dead issue. Bitcoin is still permissionless and to act like all those who believe some kind of change is the block size limit is a good idea got exiled to BCH island is asinine.

It was my understanding that these hydro-power installations were mostly built in anticipation of needed demand (or arguably misallocated resources - see the ghost cities) and were just being used where they would otherwise be idle rather than built specifically by miners. I could see some idiot bureaucrat making a boneheaded decision in that case.

Definitely the kind of idiocy that can only come from a command-and-control economy.

But the government can always step in and bail out all those rich people who made stupid high-risk bets with poor peoples' money doncha know?

It's really a false dichotomy. We could have more capacity for on-chain transactions *and* second layer solutions (which I have been an advocate for since the early part of my presence in the Bitcoin realm) which also need more capacity than we currently have. I mean, if LN is all that, we'll be preferring using it over on-chain anyway. The block size limit is just that, a limit, not a requirement.

Like I say, I have no sympathy for the RPis. They're just the wrong hardware for the job. It's cute to have a Bitcoin node running on one but that's all. It has no justification. Show me some hardware actually designed for the job at around $100 and we might be able to talk (probably Intel Atom, PCIE SSD, proper Gigabit ethernet and expandable RAM starting at 16G).

You are the one who brought up segwit, Hueristic was asking about raising the block size limit, Marcus cast aspersions in big block advocates as a group. I replied to each of these, I did not bring them up. Until you can keep more than one thing in your li'l head at a time, there's no point continuing.

Yes, nothing can be done about Segwit. That was one of the complaints against it at the time.

Quit moving the fucking goalposts*. You ask a question and when answered, you go off on another fucking tangent and act like you've made an excellent counter when you're just being a dick. If you don't care, stop replying. It's really that easy.


(For example, you say:)


But that's irrelevant. You were stating that people were upset that segwit wasn't the block size increase (promised in the Hong Kong agreement, signed by several core devs by the way) they wanted and I explained why. That segwit was passed in 2017? True but totally besides the point.

Your walls of text often have little point but that's doubly so when you fail to maintain a coherent thread of an argument. I won't be doing this for the rest of your dribble (I need to hit the sack in any case).

That first PC is already plenty beefy. Pruning can reduce the storage requirements and UTXO checkpoints (if added) even moreso It's pretty much the specs of my VR rig (not including the GPU). If you want a record of every transaction on the chain, even spent ones, you'd need extra storage but that's niche for most people and not horribly expensive if you do.

Yes, one voice going it alone would make all the difference. It's not like they kicked Gavin out of the repository where previously he was previously the head maintainer. Except they did with a bullshit excuse.

Look, there's a discussion to be had and I'm going to say my piece. Just get over it. We can go back to your regularly scheduled walls of nonsense shortly. It only comes up every 2-3 months and doesn't last long.


Why are we talking about "shitcoins"? Are you trying to trap me into talking about them so you can accuse me of shilling for them? Hard fail on that. Not relevant. We are talking about Bitcoin here. The negatives of restricting the block size so small continue to bring about things like high fees and potentially worse, unpredictable fees. The stories of the problems these cause people are real.

You gotta learn to be able to cope with dissenting voices without spinning off into a hissy-fit. Why does it threaten you so much?

[By the way, you do know that BIPs are very centralized, right? This is a major problem I have with the small blocker side, they're quite happy with centralization when it suits them and it tends to only be a concern in hand-wavy ways when it is]

Moreover, I was responding to Hueristic's post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg57204534#msg57204534 . If you're trying to silence my voice, then fuck you and you have no right to poo-poo my statements about others being silenced with an attitude like that.

Segwit was presented as something that it wasn't. As people looked more and more into it, the problems became clear. It wasn't on-chain scaling. It increased the size per transaction, it moved certain parts of the transaction off-chain, it messed with the cost model of transactions, it required major changes to nodes and wallets and it didn't provide the increase in capacity promised. Even today, it only adds 30% to the paltry 1MB in actual use because lies and gaslighting. Yes, people weren't happy with this. Though I don't know why I'm having to go over this, you've got perfect memory of it all, right?


Just putting the record straight. But yes, doesn't make much difference now. "Big blockers" just wanted a bit of organic on-chain scaling while Bitcoin is in its growth phase. Though CSW is a tit who should be in jail.

No analogy bears too close a scrutiny.

Perhaps a better question would be "Assuming that we need a limit, what should that limit be". I would suggest that we should probably be at 16MB currently (which, note, does not mean that we will certainly have 16MB blocks) but I think we should be willing to consider expanding on that as we go.

Going from 1->2MB in 2015 would have allowed us to cautiously observe how such an expansion affected Bitcoin in a fairly controlled way. It would even have been possible to roll things back should it have affected things negatively (actually a soft fork). There's really nothing scary about 12MB/hr other than the n^2 issue with validating transactions with large number of inputs (and that had a work-around and has been solved since).

Marcus is wrong in saying that big blockers have locked Bitcoin in against forks. That was the outcome of Core refusing to take small steps or even entertain the discussion. It has also exposed a very strong centralization issue around Bitcoin's governance (though it's not clear that could have been avoided).

The big blockers acted with good faith all along. You need to revisit your history. They tried arguing and had their voices silenced. They tried reaching agreements and had them reneged on. They had their developers excommunicated and slandered and their mods removed or demoted. They've been lied to and gaslighted endlessly by certain Core devs.

Yes. Note that when I wrote "you" I was using the rhetorical "you" and not referring to you specifically.


Binding feet when young to restrict the growth in older ages. Some cultures find this attractive but it deforms the feet and is quite grotesque.

It depends on what purpose you want the limit for. If it's to protect from unusually high loads as the original limit was for then something along the lines you suggest would work (and I've shown support for similar schemes). If, for some reason I can't fathom, you think 1 million bytes per block is a magically correct number for all time then it's not even open for consideration (and you might also not see a problem with foot-binding).

No. It was all through the threads on r/btc. Maxwell was the worst for disingenuous arguments and Luke was just insane, as ever but I think people like bluematt (it I remember correctly) gave it a fair shot.

We'll see. Not that it makes much difference other than me feeling crappy about it

The devs are definitely aware of the arguments and, to their credit, some have actually joined in with the discussion (some in more good faith than others).

Banks will always exist but the potential in a bitcoin world is that some of their less savory aspects and some of the friction they add could be eliminated. (The defi people would probably argue that they can be done away with entirely but that's a different discussion).

I have not but I could use some walking-around money so it's a matter of timing.

Did they actually ever get that out? I know their FPGA made it but I remember all sorts of drama with fake demos and some fuss with Inaba when it came to the ASIC.