Yeah. I have a question!

Why is it only those that own the means of production that get a vote?

The reward is the transaction fee. This is the same scenario for the future of miners when the 21mil has been reached and there are no more blocks to mine. It could even be a relationship between the fee and the difficulty so that low hash power devices process low fee transactions while mining warehouses get the higher fee transactions. What it shouldn't be is that the higher the fee, the less you get ignored!

The purpose is to not exclude any clients from participating in verifying transactions for inclusion in the block chain and using low resource clients as a sort of load sharing scheme for the transactions so even if miners do concentrate on high paying fees, there is probably a few clients nearby that will take anything if they are not busy. The engineering goal is for the network to still function as a payment system in the absence of dedicated infrastructure such as miners. I'm not necessarily proposing that dedicated hardware cannot profit more, just that numbers of clients dictate the operational health, stability and speed of the network transactions not an elite group of resource rich entities with a high barrier to entry into the club.

Can you expand on your earlier statement:
* Only you can mine blocks you produce

I think it depends.
If mining for new coins must remain an intensive operation and transaction mining can be split out into a simpler, easier operation even for something like Raspberry Pis, then the miners keep the rewards as it is. The clients' reward is zero transaction costs and convenient transactions. The pre-requisit of that participation is they mine transactions even if they cannot generate new coins.

If they cannot be split, then it is a harder problem and reduced mining difficulty all round is probably the only way forward unless there are other ideas. I have read about a few of those and like the ideas being floated here.

This is just the sort of discussion I've been  hoping for. Decentralisation is a requisite, IMO and I'm extremely excited by the work being done here.

I'll ease myself in slowly, so to speak  

I think we need to think outside of just the game theory for incentives. You can spot the almost religious fervour by phrases such as rational miners. Whilst there is some merit in the ideas, people are not rational - as Nash finally accepted after he had done his stint in a mental institution. If game theory did work as taught then advertising wouldn't work and open source software would be an ideal mental exercise.

Participation is a strong driver. You can see this is MMORPG (different kind of game threory   ) and the demand for online games against real people. What if
a) all clients were miners and
b) The incentive for running a full node was the ability to send and receive transactions at almost zero cost.

Hang on though. Didn't we already have that a while ago?
Yes we did until the block chain file got too big and to mine you had to have warehouses full of specialist machinery.

I'm very excited that we are talking about the mining being on every client again - where it needs to be. That means that everyone is a miner and everyone can put transactions on the block chain. I'm not interested in the mining for new coins, only in the ability to place transactions in the block chain.

If we can separeate the new coins generation from the inclusion in the block chain or make mining a reality on resource restricted platforms, then from there, we get to single transactions in a block which makes the current block war moot and seconds for confirmations given enough client connections.

Dress it up any way you like. It is a 51% attack and this is how you do it - not with huge investments in hardware of your own to out hash the existing network. But with propaganda and your own client to sway existing miners.

It needs to happen if only to wake up developers that are in denial that it is actually possible. It reminds me of that XKCD cartoon,

It may be that it is a reward mechanism for supplying storage to the network rather than a bitcoin-like mining. The bandwidth aspect is probably part of the reward calculation. There is a similar system in Maidsafe

I look at Tribler from time to time but it's not a very active project. Maybe time to look in again.

It's not about block size. It's about control of the network. Block size is just the catalyst.

They have always said the 51% attack was impossible. Well. This is what one looks like.

It's here;

I'm glad you saw past the initial question to the reason for the question. That is rare on forums. My question was based, as you surmised, on why are we defaulting to using these technologies when there are others that could yield a superior system to these broken technologies.

I was not aware of the history of Convergence. It was merely an attempt to say there are other, probably better, ways. If DNS is the sole requirement then surely Namecoin is a superior solution? The version 2 spec has the signatures required now.

Whats this about DNSSEC PKI vs x.509?. Why isn't something like Convergence being investigated?

Keeps getting better and better
Now they are stealing your bandwidth.

Source:

Gamers are going to love their ping times when the forced updates are in progress.

I ran out a few weeks ago. I now keep the chain on a NAS but it only takes a tiny problem an you are back to a week re-indexing or re-downloading. I now only turn it on every few days just to catch up and I suspect many are doing something similar.

Agreed. It was everyone acceptance of a walled garden that prompted this move. Apple always had a smaller market share but it was Google and Sony that made the software as a service model acceptable for operating systems.

Linux needs to come into the 21st century and put these guys to sleep once and for all.

They need to remember that is it our hardware and we have just bought some of their software to run on it. Using their online services should not be a pre-requisit for using the software on our hardware. Its not theirs and they are not the internet prison service searching our cells, confiscating belongings and turning lights on and off as they see fit.

I'm Satoshi and so's my wife 

Not fussed about any of them, truth be told.

I want to see things like smaller on-disk block chain. Distributed block chain etc.

The problem as I see it is that the Bitcoin Core software is the reference software. If you want software guaranteed to have no back-doors,spying code or malicious spamming. Where do you find it? You have to trust an implementation and be able to judge other implementations against it. We need to trust that those that know and are experts in their fields, are actively defending against malicious changes and they can't do that across 10,000 different implementations.

Gavin has been there since the start. He has "form", as they say and the respect he has, was earned. That's not to say he could not be convinced into bad ideas, I just think its not his modus operandi to be malevolent and I don't see any factual basis to not continue with this assessment. He seems to feel passionately about bitcoin and argues for things he wants to see. Has he been "subverted" and moved to the dark side? Maybe. But I only see reasoned articles for debate at the moment fro a topic and decision he feels passionately for.

I sometimes feel that people want to piss in the developers' garden that they are tending because they can and there is nothing they can offer. Its a sort of reaction to a feeling of helplessness. There is nothing wrong with criticism and debate as there is nothing wrong with others wanting a different route but there must be a plan and plans by committee are slow laborious processes that don't please everyone.
Others just want to stamp on your plants because they don't like people having nice things

The problem is that most people don't know what the implication of these sorts of issues really are or, perhaps more importantly, what the interests of those in the debate are. What we do know is some people want change and the debate is about how much rather than not at all. So. Bitcoin is a hard concept to see in its entirety and most can only grok small chunks at a time. There are some that can grok everything and for us muggles, we have to listen to their arguments and vote with our confidence in those we trust.

My opinion is, I don't have an opinion on this particular change. I am dead set against centralisation and see many discussions that will ultimately lead us there but this isn't one of them. To me, this discussion is like "how pregnant should we be" and see all proposals as not being efforts to increase the distributed nature of Bitcoin.

Yes. Except I was challenging that authority not appealing to support my position.

I was referring to this post  where he states



Have I misrepresented? He seems to be clearly stating that distributed nodes are a small scale solution with consolidation at scale. That I find depressing and stand by what I said. If I have misinterpreted, then please correct me. The only other interpretation that I can see is he is agreeing with me, that unless clients do the block processing and miners only "generate" coins, then the result will be big server farms as we are seeing now. I think that is a rather wistful reading of the words, however.

If you put block processing (not mining) back into clients, they will get transaction fees and be paid and incentivised for supporting the network.

I was quite disappointed to read that Satoshi envisioned huge centralised farms and users just being users paying fees. That means the end game is a cartel of infrastructure rich companies - back to square one for the proles.