That isn't the problem.

The problem is that there is no way to tell an SPV client that the chain they are following because it has the most proof of work is actually invalid and should be rejected.

If that capability existed, then nobody would have to care whether or not miners choose to burn their own electricity mining invalid blocks or not.

This seems to happen frequently in Bitcoin where bad behaviour by party A can negatively effect party B, and so everybody focuses exclusively on preventing party A's bad behaviour instead of making the system more robust by removing party A's ability to negatively impact party B to solve all current and future problems.

I imagine the Pepsi doesn't routinely allow Coke employees to offer suggestions during their business meetings.

Like it or not, all forms of money inherently compete with each other.

Someone invested in currency A always has an interest in preventing the complete success of currency B, because a complete win for currency B means a loss for A.

But before they need to scale, they just might need some help convincing potential users they are even necessary at all.

I'm done rewarding your sophism for now.

You're conveniently ignoring the reality that reading, parsing, evaluating and responding to ideas requires an expenditure of scarce resources.

When people use sockpuppets, they can increase the resource expenditure of the people they are debating without increasing their own.

Debates involving anonymous parties is highly susceptible to denial of service attacks.

A person using anonymous sockpuppets can bombard the debate with multiple, contradictory positions in a way that they wouldn't be able to get away with if they had to attach the same identity to all their arguments.

It's a bullshit way to engage in a debate of this nature, and shows a profound disrespect for the positions they argue against, as well as insulting the intelligence of everyone involved by pretending that what they're doing isn't obvious.

You are free to use all the anonymous communication you want. You don't get to force people to pay attention to what you have to say.

If you're not willing to pay an accountability price for your arguments, then don't be surprised when other people are not willing to take on the cognitive burden of paying attention to them.

That is a claim that certainly can be made.

On the other hand, it is a known fact that the same technique can be weaponized:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

In the current environment. I'd say that the onus to prove honest dealing lies with the one using the technique.


No. You're so far off that you aren't even wrong.

Before we can talk intelligently about decentralization:

Step 1: Define what the word means
Step 2: Establish that decentralization is, in fact, desirable, and why

I haven't seen much in the way to establish either one of those points, just a lot of begging the question by assuming that "decentralization" has a coherent and stable meaning, and that it (whatever it is) is obviously good.

I'm still not sure what you're going on about with "overcapacity", as I've never used that term.

Are you talking about well-known and understood principles of economics?

The purpose of anonymous speech is, as you mentioned, to avoid adverse consequences of speaking.

In general you can divide this further into two categories:

1. Avoiding the adverse consequences of telling the truth
2. Avoiding the adverse consequences of telling a lie

1. Is admirable, 2. is contemptible.


I have no idea what you're talking about now.

Cowards who use sockpuppets because they aren't willing to pay a reputational cost for their claims.

That form of debate is the proof of stake of public discourse.

They get to claim pure motives for hiding their identities and if they lose the debate, or if their predictions are shown to be false, of if they decide to employ dishonest and underhanded tactics to achieve their goals, then their public identities don't have to suffer.

Fuck them for wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

It just goes to show how insane people are to suggest that Bitcoin transaction processing, with its very high fixed cost, should spread that fixed cost over a smaller number of transactions rather than a larger number of transactions.

I think any business plan that suggested such a strategy would spontaneously combust out of embarrassment before anyone could read it.

Not everyone is susceptible to the Hegelian dialectic that's being employed here.

There are security challenges with a network consisting mostly of light nodes.

Why aren't more people talking about ways to address them rather than using their existence as an excuse to prevent progress?

This is a disaster.

On the one hand, we have a person who's actually telling the truth and also is the same guy who tried to break Tor, add blacklists, and other assorted nasty features.

On the other hand we have someone who tends to invent legitimately useful things, and also lie when it suits his purposes.



There's nothing worse than having to agree with the turd sandwich, because he's the only one telling the truth.

Allowing altcoin discussion on bitcointalk is one of the two biggest reasons this forum is largely unusable (the other one being signature ads).

It doesn't matter.

At all.

This isn't academia - there is no tenure in Bitcoin.

Their position is contingent every single day on their continuing ability to produce new value.

They can choose to embrace that reality, or they can choose to pout about it. Bitcoin will be fine with or without them.

Two standard deviations above the average is probably a better sanity check

I'm not sure what kind of goal you're espousing here.

Is a single owning a lot of hashing power intrinsically harmful because it's wrong somehow, or is the actual problem the attacks someone might perform which are made easier by owning a lot of hashing power?

If it's the latter, then if miners who own a lot of hashing power are forced to behave in the exact same why they'd behave if they had less hashing power in order to avoid a financial loss, and in particular give up control over their hashing power to multiple entities such that they are not in a position to conduct an attack, why is that not a perfectly valid solution to the problem?

I had not seen this comment until it was pointed out to me today:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2k3u97/we_are_bitcoin_sidechain_paper_authors_adam_back/clhy7kk?context=1

There clearly were some accurate acknowledgements of potential conflicts of interests in that Reddit post.

What actually happened is that when Blockstream was announced multiple noted that it created the appearance of a potential conflict of interest.

Instead of acknowledging this potential (fairly standard practice in many business situations!), the Blockstream founders took the bizarre route of denying even the possibility of a conflict of interest.

That choice of actions is what lead to ongoing concern about their motives, not the founding of Blockstream itself.

It's ironic the degree to which your superstitions mirror the ones described by Lloyd de Mause in the link I provided.