Please, not this again.  The difficulty is a self correcting system.  It's high now because so many people are competing for the block reward, which is still subsidized.  The subsidy cuts in half every 4 years, and will be inconsequential before all 21 million bitcoins have been issued around 2140 AD.  Either way, it won't be an issue I'll live to have to worry about, and probably not you either; and it would still outlive every fiat currency the world has yet seen.  Please search the forum history before asking the same questions that have been asked for 6 years.

Yes, that's true.  There are a couple of different ways of doing this that have been discussed, with the most likely that a new type of address would be developed to contain sub-satoshi values.  The first character of your address is always a "1", only because that denotes the address version.  There can, therefore, be at least 9 different types of addresses.

Not for the common man, no.  But it's still very much a working money.

No, it's not. The short answer is those institutions & individuals that have a lot of bitcoins will have a vested interest in seeing that the bitcoin network remains strong, even if the transaction market (and it is a market) doesn't seem to be able to provide enough incentive to keep miners in the game.  That said, the transaction system is a market, and a balance between speed of confirmation and cost of transactions will develop as the block reward diminishes; and secondary settlement networks are expected to develop to handle the high transaction traffic, as the main bitcoin network starts to take a 'big transactions' settlement role.

correct

Just to be clear, this bounty was posted several years ago, and I am definitely no longer willing to give 20 BTC now.

It would be trivial for the real Satoshi to prove it, if s/he wanted to, simply by signing a message with the genesis block key.

This debate has become academic.  The network has already chosen a path, and XT ain't it. BIP 100 looks like the winner, and it also looks like a reasonable compromise; introducing a miner voting variable, and setting a 'soft' block limit based upon the lower bound of the three center quintelles of the vote distribution.  Looks like it will function similar to how the target difficulty system works, but with a 12 week period (instead of two) and a 12 week delay period.  It also has a factor of 2 max change limit, just like the target difficulty system; with a 32 meg upper hard limit.

This is not how Bitcoin propogation is supposed to work.  If this is part of the XT proposal, it would destroy bitcoin, by centralizing more than can be mitigated with a fee market anyway.  Such a change would render nodes no longer peers, as larger pools would be superior.  This would break the 51% rule.

Ah, I see.  Not a student of economics.  You just completely lost me with this one, and since I don't have the time to consider every point of view, you also just earned a spot in my ignore list.

But we still need a working transaction market in the long term. How is this intention maintained in XT?

You can not join the banking system as a peer, only as a customer.


Decentralization is a relative term, and Bitcoin was not developed with that as a goal.  Decentralization was a tool toward Satoshi's ends.  What makes Bitcoin work is that it is truly peer to peer, if that is what users want to be able to do.  But that's not going to work with a flexible blocksize.  Moving to 8 megs isn't a big deal, but nor does it really change the scalilibilty issue much.  I'm not even opposed to soft limits, so long as Satohsi's original idea of rising transaction fees for larger blocks is preserved; but some kind of transaction fee market needs to exist.  If we screw this up, and the hashrate collapses, it would be catastrophic.  I'm not really opposed to how the XT team is actually using a hard fork as a voting method.  It's actually a good plan, it would appear.  I came here hoping I could get forum members who were better versed in XT than myself to explain the details, but instead I get noise.

I've been doing some research into the Lightning network proposal, and I'd say that I'd be more in favor of fixing malliability in order to permit such a network to develop, over the XT proposal of larger blocks and better support for light clients; simply because larger blocks don't really solve the scalability problem.  It has long been the idea that Bitcoin's main network would have to be a backbone mostly between major institutions that performed 99.9% of transaction volume.  Centralization really isn't a huge issue, so long as it's always possible for a new player to join the main bitcoin network as an equal peer with the rest.  XT seems to make such an idea more costly, without actually solving the scalability issue in the long run.  We will still need overlay networks with XT.  I remember the payment channels thing, and remember discussing it years ago, in the context of bitcoin banks settling up with each other by being able to identify the customers of another bank by their bitcoin addresses instead of personal data.  We still need these bitcoin banks.

What kind of "change in management" are you referring to here?  The different set of lead developers, perhaps? Or something else?

I'm more than a bit concerned that the big block mod, generally, will force marginal mining nodes off the network.  I know that it would prevent the broadcasting of whole blocks, and likely even naked merkle tree data, over datacasting paths such as Outernet.  If we are going to make changes for scalability, why are we not making naked blocks the standard broadcasting method first?  That alone would reduce redundancy.

I know I have been out of the loop for a while, but I've started to hear about this Bitcoin versus Bitcoin XT "code fork" from semi-mainstream news sources.  I sounds like FUD, so I have checked out the Bitcoin XT website and searched a bit around this forum for details.  One thing that I don't understand is why does Bitcoin XT have the other features, such as auto-dropping of TOR nodes?  And can the Bitcoin XT node be forced into the 'quiet' node format?  From what I have found out, it looks like it leaks the node's IP address while it's supposed to be hidden.

As for the big block mod.  I guess I just don't see the value in it. jumping to 8megs on start, then auto-adjusting for transaction volumes would undermine the transaction fee market that is supposed to develop to priortize transactions.  Also, where are these overlay networks that were supposed to absorb the majority of the lower security transaction volume?  This bitcoin network proper was never supposed to be how Joe Average transacted in the currency, Joe should be using a light client on an overlay network; like Electrum was developing or M-Pesa style light client networks on smartphones.  Why are we still doing the majority of retail business using full clients anyway?

Someone with more intimate knowledge is welcome to correct me on the technical details, but please don't come to me with complaints about how the fee market would never have worked or that Bitcoin proper actually needs to scale to Visa levels; I've been here too long for those arguments to still have any merit.

Not to me.  I was here.

On this forum, I'm pretty sure just the one.

Um, why Elwar?

Wow, that's thread necromancy. I'd forgotten about this thread.

Yes. I see it everywhere I look, and have seen it my entire adult life. You seem to expect to see *novel* interventions, and there are some (although you likely do not recognize them as such) but the majority of interventions have long since been institutionalized.  There simply isn't likely a "need" for new interventions (from the perspectives of the interventionists) because the structure is already in place.

As already noted by others, they just don't really ever work as intended. Too many variables; too many unintended, and often unnoticed until much later, consequences.