Combustion of fossil fuels accounts for about 5% or so of the total release of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. Natural processes release and absorb many times that per year.
This is one of the dumbest 'arguments' of the anthropocentric truthers and bible throwers. The natural process is a carbon circulation. Combustion of fossil fuels takes carbon out of the ground and transfers it into the ocean and the atmosphere. It is not a circulation but a pump which over time slowly puts more and more carbon into the ground from out of the air. This is why the long term carbon graphs show carbon as constantly decreasing at a steady rate over millions of years. The amount we've taken out and put back into the air is a fraction of what was put into the ground over just the past 100M years. In fact, this removal was/is a problem. Without mankind's intervention, atmospheric carbon would have dropped below the level require for photosynthesis in not too far into the future (geologically speaking, I think the forecast was ~10M years). It is very accurate to say that without the industrial era life on the earth would have run into issues. One of the founders of Green Peace has a great discussion on this. He argues that we should be trying to extract carbon out of the ground to reverse this process and ensure a buffer, and shows how in the big picture we'd still be a levels which are historically low for the earth. The reality is mankind will probably only develop the technology to extract enough carbon to get the earth back to where it was 100M years ago, which in the big picture is not much. Nuclear/wind/solar will be much cheaper alternatives after that because most of the carbon is just too difficult or uneconomical to get to. Edit: http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2015/03/20/why-i-am-climate-change-skepticHuman Emissions Saved Planet
Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution. If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have become too low to support life on Earth. Human fossil fuel use and clearing land for crops have boosted carbon dioxide from its lowest level in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts per million today.
At 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide. The optimum level of carbon dioxide for plant growth, given enough water and nutrients, is about 1,500 parts per million, nearly four times higher than today. Greenhouse growers inject carbon-dioxide to increase yields. Farms and forests will produce more if carbon-dioxide keeps rising.
We have no proof increased carbon dioxide is responsible for the earth’s slight warming over the past 300 years. There has been no significant warming for 18 years while we have emitted 25 per cent of all the carbon dioxide ever emitted. Carbon dioxide is vital for life on Earth and plants would like more of it. Which should we emphasize to our children?
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In terms of 'greenhouse gasses' water vapor is the most crucial. The dispute is actually about whether there is a positive or negative feedback loop. Evidence is piling up that those who panic about a positive feedback loop are wrong. Unfortunately, politics has damaged science to the extent that it will be difficult to understand if there is a threat here which is worth the (devastating) sacrifices needed to address it. I lay the blame for this almost completely on the 'warmunista' side of the battle.
This is what is so absurd about the whole thing, the original theory has been proven objectively incorrect, yet the theory continues as a mass delusion. The global warming theory was predicated on a "if A, then B, then C" hypothesis, where B never happened. The original (and still current) theory is increases in CO2, increase water vapor, which in turn warms the atmosphere. But water vapor did not change in any manner predicted or needed for the theory to work. Thus the theory is wrong, QED. But I'm called the anti-science denier (often in racist terms). As with everything, it is a scam for a narrow set of politically connected people (i.e. climate "scientists" and the green industry) to extract money from the public through the government. That is all it is. Take away the free government money (enabled by the dollar) and the scams stop, or at least decrease significantly. |
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Just had some limit buy orders for GBTC hit in my IRA. God help me I now own* my first Bitcoin through a 3rd party intermediary I have to trust (* own as in have a legal claim to, but lack possession and thus lack true ownership).
The premium has come down a lot, my purchase was only ~$35 over coinbase's spot price. What's strange is my buy is below the day's low being reported...
Please don't f me Barry.
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The reason the Gold bug's dream is never realized, despite the fact that all of the monetary abuses they predicted came true, is simply because gold is not directly used in day to day transactions. If something is not used in day to day transactions, it is not viewed as money. CBs have gotten away with their abuses simply because they outlawed real money alternatives to fiat for long enough that the public lost memory of the very existence of alternatives to CB money. Everyone sees the dollar/euro/pound/yen as money because they use them every day, so no one runs away from these mechanisms no matter how they are abused. What would they run to? The only way to make something else be viewed as money, is if it is used as money in day to day transactions. Using something and knowing others will accept it a basic requirement here. Gold lost that usage which is why it has not come back. This is what is so frustrating about those blocking the blocksize increase. If people can't use bitcoin directly, the entire project is doomed to a fate worse than gold. |
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Yeah, you may well be right about SC/LN timing, I am still trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, FWIW (at least until Wladimir breaks ranks).
That is why I think a permanent solution to the blocksize limit today is better than a limit increase that leaves the issue to be addressed later. Even with the 20MB change, we will have to implement another hard fork in 3-5 years. It is better to take care of the issue once and for all, and have future hard fork decisions be limited to a single proposed change. The voting proposal is one form of a permanent solution, Gavin's doubling every 2 years is another, creating a floating limit that resets every x blocks to the average of recent blocks plus overhead is a third. Any of these three work fine and have their own pros and cons. |
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In general, we should not be afraid of cartels That's only true in the sense that cartels are naturally unstable unless and until they get support from governments in the form of externalizing the cost of enforcement. I'm not sure cartels is really the right analogy here. A cartel in the traditional sense is a small number of large entities banding together to force everyone to follow their decisions. But in Bitcoin, any miner not in the cartel could choose to issue larger blocks and capture the fees. That is how Bitcoin's open nature works. The only way a cartel could succeed here is if 51% of the hash rate pooled together and agreed to build a longest chain ignoring large blocks. But I would call this at 51% attack, not a cartel. there is no reason to be part of the 51% cartel in this eg. one of the miners will stop cooperating because it leaves money on the table and whoever breaks rank can profit by pretending to support it and earn more fees by processing bigger blocks giving the 51% advantage to the network. Exactly, it is why the argument that a cartel might form to limit the blocksize and ignore the protocol limit, is unlikely to succeed. BTW, does anyone know what the status of IBLT is? This one change (which doesn't require a fork) would do a lot for the network. |
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Probably the biggest reason that Core Dev is prepared to let the 1MB limit be constantly hit is that they think they can manage the situation. Perhaps they need to look up the word "hubris" in the dictionary.
I think they want to make sure a hard fork is already needed around the same time they are ready to launch Blockstream's LN and SC changes. This would make it easier to push the changes through. i.e. "OK, transactions recently hit the 8MB limit and we need to increase the limit today, here are some additional updates to include in the fork". If there is no pressing need for another hard fork (because the blocksize issue was already dealt with), then the entire discussion is focused on if people want to make a drastic change, and there is no rush to do so. Combining the two might accelerate the process. For a VC backed firm, that has limited time to demonstrate adoption or revenue, running into a wall where it takes 2 years just to convince the Bitcoin ecosystem to change for you, can be a killer. |
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In general, we should not be afraid of cartels That's only true in the sense that cartels are naturally unstable unless and until they get support from governments in the form of externalizing the cost of enforcement. I'm not sure cartels is really the right analogy here. A cartel in the traditional sense is a small number of large entities banding together to force everyone to follow their decisions. But in Bitcoin, any miner not in the cartel could choose to issue larger blocks and capture the fees. That is how Bitcoin's open nature works. The only way a cartel could succeed here is if 51% of the hash rate pooled together and agreed to build a longest chain ignoring large blocks. But I would call this at 51% attack, not a cartel. |
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giving miners a vote in terms of block size is paying them too much deference in terms of the market dynamics in Bitcoin. i've always said that no contingent is more powerful than another in Bitcoin. everyone is important and needed and has power to a degree or so; users, merchants, miners, node operators. which is why i always give that bucket analogy when i think in terms of which of those subspaces i would want to invest in. some will always be more developed (filled) or over invested in than the others while the whole space can still be in a bull mkt w/o anyone of them being "in charge".
I agree with this, what I was trying to get at is the outcome of this proposal (miner voting +IBLT) essentially forces or at least encourages maximum blocksize over time. This is in the interest of users and why I like the proposal. i get what you are saying but it assumes 2 things: 1. voting is good 2. IBLT is ready i worry that voting can be gamed. you could argue that versioning is a form of voting i guess but it is different in that it is a commitment that only has to be done once by a miner to indicate the preference to double the block size acc to Gavin's proposal. all that then needs to be done is to flip the switch after 75% of the mining network is demonstrating the upversioned blocks. i have hopes for IBLT as well but that seems like that will take a while and certainly not in time for what we need now. Voting can best be gamed when the process is hidden behind closed side channels between pools, developers or anything else. The advantage of putting voting into the blockchain is it makes the process transparent and visible to individual miners, which makes it much less exposed to gaming as individual miners can see this and respond. The POW process is Bitcoin's voting process. Yes users, merchants, etc. should have influence, and they do, they can choose to run which ever client they want that follows whatever rules they want. But that is the external world interacting with Bitcoin and deciding how they want to interact with Bitcoin. Bitcoin as a self-contained system has only one voting mechanism, POW blocks. If anyone wants to vote within Bitcoin's self contained world, stand-up a miner and point it to the pool that best follows your preferences. In many ways this is better than representative democracy, you are much more likely to find a pool you agree with than a US D or R candidate you agree with. |
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JGarzik's proposal: http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/BIP100-blocksizechangeproposal.pdfWherein the central authority of developers to set block size is passed to the miners who vote (with the highs and lows dropped). This seems to solve the issue of figuring out the right size a bit better than one person picking an arbitrary number. It also moves the ball forward in automating the governance of the protocol. There are a couple of things to like about this proposal. The first is that miners voting on blocksize plus IBLT effectively guarantees the blocksize limit will be removed and the bitcoin MC will be allowed to scale as required. The reasoning is simple, IBLT only works if the majority of unconfirmed transactions are included in the next block. If transaction volume bumps against a blocksize limit, then a only a subset of transactions can be included in a block and the miner cannot transmit their block using IBLT and instead has to re-transmit the entire block, increasing the risk of being orphaned. For example let's say that because of the blocksize limit, only 50% of unconfirmed transactions can be included in the block. Miners on the receiving end do not know which 50% of transactions are in the block and which 50% are not. This means they cannot use IBLT and have to transmit the entire block. However it is in miners' interest to use IBLT to reduce their orphan rate and because it enables them to easily include as many transactions as possible for fees. Because of this it makes sense with IBLT that miners would favor keeping the blocksize limit high enough that it does act as a real limit, but rather constantly rises as needed to match user volume. It is essentially another way to get to Gavin's original proposal of doubling the limit every 2 years. The second thing to like is it moves us toward the environment where miners themselves are voting on what bitcoin is. Not developers, not regulators, not users, not full nodes (which are subject to Sybil attacks), but miners who spend real work to vote. It also will force pools to publicly announce their voting preferences, which in turns allows individual miners to see their preferences and decide which pool to switch to to match their own view. For example if most individual miners want to support larger blocks, but the larger chinese pools vote for 1MB limits, well we might just see miners switching to pools that match their views or that have the capability to grow properly. It brings back the true market, which this dev fight shows we don't have right now. Personally I like this proposal the best right now. the only problem with voting is that it seems to me that that could be gamed in some way. also, miners aren't forced to follow the results of a vote. maybe better to leave voting out all together? just set an automatic adjustment increase and let the market players adapt around it. I originally thought of Garzik's voting proposal that it was brilliant. But now I think adding this would be unnecessarily complex. If there is a need to hold back blocsize, it should be a hard increase based on previous blocks in the style of difficulty change. We can then continue the situation where the only link to the real world is the timestamps. The miners could agree on a soft limit (dont make larger blocks, but build on larger blocks from others). The soft limit could be communicated in a side channel outside bitcoin. Call it a miner cartel, but before you dismiss it, know that a cartel is a very weak economic construct, with possible attacks from inside and outside. Don't forget that each miner is free to choose which block to base his mining on, he chooses that based on self interest. So dynamically incremented hard limit for security, market based soft limit. giving miners a vote in terms of block size is paying them too much deference in terms of the market dynamics in Bitcoin. i've always said that no contingent is more powerful than another in Bitcoin. everyone is important and needed and has power to a degree or so; users, merchants, miners, node operators. which is why i always give that bucket analogy when i think in terms of which of those subspaces i would want to invest in. some will always be more developed (filled) or over invested in than the others while the whole space can still be in a bull mkt w/o anyone of them being "in charge". I agree with this, what I was trying to get at is the outcome of this proposal (miner voting +IBLT) essentially forces or at least encourages maximum blocksize over time. This is in the interest of users and why I like the proposal. |
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JGarzik's proposal: http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/BIP100-blocksizechangeproposal.pdfWherein the central authority of developers to set block size is passed to the miners who vote (with the highs and lows dropped). This seems to solve the issue of figuring out the right size a bit better than one person picking an arbitrary number. It also moves the ball forward in automating the governance of the protocol. There are a couple of things to like about this proposal. The first is that miners voting on blocksize plus IBLT effectively guarantees the blocksize limit will be removed and the bitcoin MC will be allowed to scale as required. The reasoning is simple, IBLT only works if the majority of unconfirmed transactions are included in the next block. If transaction volume bumps against a blocksize limit, then a only a subset of transactions can be included in a block and the miner cannot transmit their block using IBLT and instead has to re-transmit the entire block, increasing the risk of being orphaned. For example let's say that because of the blocksize limit, only 50% of unconfirmed transactions can be included in the block. Miners on the receiving end do not know which 50% of transactions are in the block and which 50% are not. This means they cannot use IBLT and have to transmit the entire block. However it is in miners' interest to use IBLT to reduce their orphan rate and because it enables them to easily include as many transactions as possible for fees. Because of this it makes sense with IBLT that miners would favor keeping the blocksize limit high enough that it does act as a real limit, but rather constantly rises as needed to match user volume. It is essentially another way to get to Gavin's original proposal of doubling the limit every 2 years. The second thing to like is it moves us toward the environment where miners themselves are voting on what bitcoin is. Not developers, not regulators, not users, not full nodes (which are subject to Sybil attacks), but miners who spend real work to vote. It also will force pools to publicly announce their voting preferences, which in turns allows individual miners to see their preferences and decide which pool to switch to to match their own view. For example if most individual miners want to support larger blocks, but the larger chinese pools vote for 1MB limits, well we might just see miners switching to pools that match their views or that have the capability to grow properly. It brings back the true market, which this dev fight shows we don't have right now. Personally I like this proposal the best right now. the only problem with voting is that it seems to me that that could be gamed in some way. also, miners aren't forced to follow the results of a vote. maybe better to leave voting out all together? just set an automatic adjustment increase and let the market players adapt around it. I originally thought of Garzik's voting proposal that it was brilliant. But now I think adding this would be unnecessarily complex. If there is a need to hold back blocsize, it should be a hard increase based on previous blocks in the style of difficulty change. We can then continue the situation where the only link to the real world is the timestamps. The miners could agree on a soft limit (dont make larger blocks, but build on larger blocks from others). The soft limit could be communicated in a side channel outside bitcoin. Call it a miner cartel, but before you dismiss it, know that a cartel is a very weak economic construct, with possible attacks from inside and outside. Don't forget that each miner is free to choose which block to base his mining on, he chooses that based on self interest. So dynamically incremented hard limit for security, market based soft limit. The miners could agree on a soft limit .... The soft limit could be communicated in a side channel outside bitcoin. Pools could communicate preferences in a side channel outside of their miners visibility or knowledge. Let's remember these are pools, not miners. The advantage of the voting process, is it makes every pools' stated preferences fully public in the blockchain. This allows miners to join pools that reflect their views and in the process makes the behavior of centralized pools accurately reflect the voting preferences of individual miners. I think as much as possible should be done in this manner, rather than in non-public side channels that gives lots of power to pools at the expense of decentralized miners. |
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JGarzik's proposal: http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/BIP100-blocksizechangeproposal.pdfWherein the central authority of developers to set block size is passed to the miners who vote (with the highs and lows dropped). This seems to solve the issue of figuring out the right size a bit better than one person picking an arbitrary number. It also moves the ball forward in automating the governance of the protocol. There are a couple of things to like about this proposal. The first is that miners voting on blocksize plus IBLT effectively guarantees the blocksize limit will be removed and the bitcoin MC will be allowed to scale as required. The reasoning is simple, IBLT only works if the majority of unconfirmed transactions are included in the next block. If transaction volume bumps against a blocksize limit, then a only a subset of transactions can be included in a block and the miner cannot transmit their block using IBLT and instead has to re-transmit the entire block, increasing the risk of being orphaned. For example let's say that because of the blocksize limit, only 50% of unconfirmed transactions can be included in the block. Miners on the receiving end do not know which 50% of transactions are in the block and which 50% are not. This means they cannot use IBLT and have to transmit the entire block. However it is in miners' interest to use IBLT to reduce their orphan rate and because it enables them to easily include as many transactions as possible for fees. Because of this it makes sense with IBLT that miners would favor keeping the blocksize limit high enough that it does act as a real limit, but rather constantly rises as needed to match user volume. It is essentially another way to get to Gavin's original proposal of doubling the limit every 2 years. The second thing to like is it moves us toward the environment where miners themselves are voting on what bitcoin is. Not developers, not regulators, not users, not full nodes (which are subject to Sybil attacks), but miners who spend real work to vote. It also will force pools to publicly announce their voting preferences, which in turns allows individual miners to see their preferences and decide which pool to switch to to match their own view. For example if most individual miners want to support larger blocks, but the larger chinese pools vote for 1MB limits, well we might just see miners switching to pools that match their views or that have the capability to grow properly. It brings back the true market, which this dev fight shows we don't have right now. Personally I like this proposal the best right now. the only problem with voting is that it seems to me that that could be gamed in some way. also, miners aren't forced to follow the results of a vote. maybe better to leave voting out all together? just set an automatic adjustment increase and let the market players adapt around it. The results of the voting adjustment are a part of the protocol. Miners could no more ignore the adjusted blocksize limit than they could ignore the difficulty adjustment. They are binding. Yes, some miners could choose to issue smaller blocks, but: 1) that is not ignoring the limit, it is a max limit not a requirement 2) with IBLT issuing smaller blocks exposes the miner to a higher rate of orphaned blocks because they increase the probability of having to transmit the entire block and not just the IBLT diff. |
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JGarzik's proposal: http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/BIP100-blocksizechangeproposal.pdfWherein the central authority of developers to set block size is passed to the miners who vote (with the highs and lows dropped). This seems to solve the issue of figuring out the right size a bit better than one person picking an arbitrary number. It also moves the ball forward in automating the governance of the protocol. There are a couple of things to like about this proposal. The first is that miners voting on blocksize plus IBLT effectively guarantees the blocksize limit will be removed and the bitcoin MC will be allowed to scale as required. The reasoning is simple, IBLT only works if the majority of unconfirmed transactions are included in the next block. If transaction volume bumps against a blocksize limit, then a only a subset of transactions can be included in a block and the miner cannot transmit their block using IBLT and instead has to re-transmit the entire block, increasing the risk of being orphaned. For example let's say that because of the blocksize limit, only 50% of unconfirmed transactions can be included in the block. Miners on the receiving end do not know which 50% of transactions are in the block and which 50% are not. This means they cannot use IBLT and have to transmit the entire block. However it is in miners' interest to use IBLT to reduce their orphan rate and because it enables them to easily include as many transactions as possible for fees. Because of this it makes sense with IBLT that miners would favor keeping the blocksize limit high enough that it does act as a real limit, but rather constantly rises as needed to match user volume. It is essentially another way to get to Gavin's original proposal of doubling the limit every 2 years. The second thing to like is it moves us toward the environment where miners themselves are voting on what bitcoin is. Not developers, not regulators, not users, not full nodes (which are subject to Sybil attacks), but miners who spend real work to vote. It also will force pools to publicly announce their voting preferences, which in turns allows individual miners to see their preferences and decide which pool to switch to to match their own view. For example if most individual miners want to support larger blocks, but the larger chinese pools vote for 1MB limits, well we might just see miners switching to pools that match their views or that have the capability to grow properly. It brings back the true market, which this dev fight shows we don't have right now. Personally I like this proposal the best right now. |
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It's always shocked me how many 9/11 conspiracy theories people buy into, where there exists significantly more evidence that FDR knew of Pearl Harbor a day or so in advance, but allowed it to happen in order to push a reluctant US into war.
It is very likely that he did. In my fairly rudimentary research on the matter I would say it's almost a certainty. That's a leader's job. Later in the conversation, Gilbert recorded Goering's observations that the common people can always be manipulated into supporting and fighting wars by their political leaders: We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." FDR had it easy in that he had someone (and a very foolish someone) who was actually able and willing to attack us. Ah, the good old days. FDR's platform was to remain isolationist, however as time went on it was increasingly obvious the US could not remain so as the Allies were beng dominated by the Axis throughout Europe and Japan had controlled much of Asia for years by 1942. In order to provoke Japan, the US (iirc) blocked oil supplies to the Home islands, amongst other things, effectively daring them to throw the first punch that would get the American public onside. Hitting Pearl Harbour (and Darwin in Australia) was an attempt to decimate the US fleet in the Pacific to stymie the effectiveness of the US when they eventually joined (as the Japanese knew was inevitable). and, iirc someone stood up in parliament (Denmark?) in the weeks before the attack and spoke of intelligence of an attack on PH..... That is the biggest bunch of historical revisionist bunk. FDR was the very opposite of isolationist and very strongly pushing the US to support Briton very early on. This was to the point where the US was essentially engaging the German navy on Briton's behalf on the Atlantic side. FDR explicitly intermixed US merchant ships with British convoys, providing explicit protection to the Brits. That is not isolationist. The Germans however learned their lesson in WWI, where the US only entered the war after their uboats sunk US merchant ships. Without that Wilson would not have been able to get the US to enter WWI. So in WWII the Germans went very far out of their way to avoid a direct confrontation with the US navy or US merchant ships. Very far out of there way. To call FDR isolationist is absurd, he was pro-Briton. This presented a problem for the pro-Briton FDR. He needed a spark, and found it in Japan. |
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But just step back for a moment and ask yourself who in the hell had the power to do 9/11?
Anyone who took some flying lessons? Fuck man. You haven't even done the most basic research. Steel buildings with girders the width of your room don't collapse into a pile of dust from kerosene and impact with aluminum. And they certainly don't do it straight down onto themselves perfectly every time (3 times in this case) and with complete collapse and all with free fall acceleration (no resistance). sure man. After the planes hit some dudes with explosives ran UP the stairway ALL the way to where the fire was burning, planted the explosives, then ran all the way back down. /s That's why if you look at the footage you'll see the building collapse started from the burn not from the bottom like when a building is demoed. And yes absolutely kerosene and the vast quantity of flammable stuff in office buildings can heat steel to the point where it loses structural strength. I've done it to the log holder in my fireplace just with office paper. It's always shocked me how many 9/11 conspiracy theories people buy into, where there exists significantly more evidence that FDR knew of Pearl Harbor a day or so in advance, but allowed it to happen in order to push a reluctant US into war. Ok I'm done with this conversation. But my prior "joke" was meant partly seriously. You have some interesting ideas at times but nobody is listening because you lack the ability to self-filter. Nobody has the time to wade through hours of your blather to find the one or two gems. They aren't valuable enough.
Join the club, the thread is surprisingly clean once again after hitting that one little ignore button just that one time. |
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...
P.S. I am fairly certain Cypherdoc is a mouthpiece for TPTB. I posit he was purposely compromised by the HashFast offer to maintain his allegiance. This is their usual modus operandi. This is evident by his public role and other factors such as his denial of the fact that Bitcoin core is heading towards a centralized end game.
I keep weighing this as the most solid explanation for certain of cypherdoc's behaviors, but then I think back to the early days and various aspects of his person and back off. So someone who has spent the past 4-5 years promoting Bitcoin as a new form of sound money and trying to educate as many people about that as possible, is really a tool of the TPTB who would lose most of their power/influence under a true sound money system. Got it. I'll file that one right next to Satoshi is really the CIA. |
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I don't think the full node count would scale as far as 12m in the growth example above, but payment channels for node services would at least reverse the decline even when it becomes necessary to support that loading.
I agree. I've been thinking a lot about full node count lately, and I could also imagine a future where node count continues to decline but network decentralization actually improves. Let's imagine a distant future where: - Every major research university operates 1 full node on average (there's 108 in the US, 15 in Canada, and let's assume 150 elsewhere). That makes about 280 nodes. - Every major bitcoin company in this "bitcoin future" and every mining pool operates a full node. Assume another 280 nodes. - Various branches of governments in most countries run a few nodes. Assume 190 countries x 2 nodes = 380 nodes. - And a bunch of wealthy bitcoiners operate their own nodes. Assume another 300 or so. This gives a total of only ~1,240 nodes, but I think such a configuration would be more decentralized than the current state of the network. I'm not suggesting that this will actually happen, just pointing out that the network doesn't necessarily need hundreds of thousands of nodes. Fully agree, I was saying something along these lines in the earlier UTXO commit discussion where we might end up with only a small number of "archival" nodes that maintain a full history, while most nodes function as some form of pruned node. The reason this or your situation above works is you only need one honest node on the network to highlight and flag issues. If some majority of full nodes (which is possible with a small node count) decide to collude and cheat, because of the way the blockchain is structured any single honest node has the ability to present irrefutable proof of such collusion to the public. Again, this goes back to the fact that Bitcoin's decentralization is driven by the mining security process, not the node count (which can be influenced by Sybil attacks, mining cannot be influenced by Sybil attacks because it requires work). Even with 1 billion tps the mining situation looks similar to today. A large number of independent miners operating over stratum (<1kbps) connected to a small number of pools. If any pools collude, it only takes one honest node to highlight that and those pools would see their miners switch to honest pools. As long as the independent miner remains decentralized, Bitcoin is OK. This is also why your O(nm) equation works. It is OK for the number of nodes m to decrease as needed bringing us back to O(n). The devs' arguments that you can't scale O(n^2) networks is correct, but this is showing they don't understand the network and Bitcoin's economics as well as they think. |
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Remember this quote by Adam when the time comes that they make their proposal to change the Bitcoin protocol to enable LN and SCs. As you can probably tell I think a unilateral fork without wide-scale consensus from the technical and business communities is a deeply inadvisable.
The bar to add LN and SC enabling protocol changes is wide-scale consensus. If a small number of participants disagree, it doesn't happen by their own logic. Additionally these protocol changes significantly change what Bitcoin fundamentally is much more than a simple 20MB blocksize change. Something tells me though that their tune will be different then. Edit: I think this comment by Mike sums up the need here. If Bitcoin runs out of capacity *it will break and many of our users will leave*. That is not an acceptable outcome for myself or the many other wallet, service and merchant developers who have worked for years to build an ecosystem around this protocol.
Mike is pointing out that Bitcoin is the entire ecosystem, not just the development board. In fact if you totaled the amount of work and effort put in to build Bitcoin I think it would work out to be less than 1% bitcoin devs and >99% everyone else. There has been a tremendous amount of effort put in to build Bitcoin that goes far beyond and outside of the bitcoin core. But the devs are ignoring that and acting as if Bitcoin is their project and they own it and have put the most amount of work behind it. I think this is telling, and demonstrates the need for systems controlled by users. |
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Sidechains breaks the single-point-of-failure problem which vexes a 'one-size-fits-all' solution and pushes the critical infrastructure support role to people who can handle it. It also pushes the benefits of a counter-party-risk free solution down to the masses. Nobody can stop the masses from giving their money to shysters but it's very possible to arrange for the sidechain operates themselves to have a tough time robbing their users (unlike general alts.)
The entire point of Bitcoin is to push the critical infrastructure support role to a decentralize DAC that no people handle or control and that has no single point of failure. Your entire argument is contrary to the very purpose of Bitcoin and most people's participation in the project. If Bitcoin become becomes dependent on SCs that manage risk for people to protect them from their own mistakes, then we are back into FRN land, where we are all protected and coddled for the minor fee of being slowly boiled alive in the FEDs inflationary pot. |
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