Awesome right back at you!  Core provides a concise technical overview of what is needed for implementing different levels of Segwit support, with links to the pertinent BIPs.

When you’re done, if desired, you may submit a GH pull request to add your software project or company to the list of those which have adopted Segwit.

That will be good for your users, and good for the network.  It will also prepare you to add important future upgrades such as Schnorr signatures and MAST, which will depend on support for Segwit’s script versioning system.  Segwit was not only a capacity upgrade; it was a bugfix (tx malleability, etc.) and a means to add forward compatibility.


As of version 3.0, released last month, Electrum does support Segwit!  You need to generate a new Electrum wallet for this; and if you select “Segwit wallet”, it will only give you Bech32 addresses.  If you want Bech32 addresses, then your problem is solved.  Bech32 addresses are technically superior to old-style addresses; but they are not backward-compatible, so only people with Segwit support will be able to send you money.  I myself hope to switch to Bech32 in perhaps 6–12 months.  Future viewers of this post will see my signature showing an address which starts with “bc”.

To make Electrum give you a wallet of backward-compatible P2WPKH-nested-in-P2SH “3” addresses like the one you see now in my signature, use the following procedure, which I have tested:  (0) Generate a BIP39 seed by some other means.  I wrote a short C program for this, which I should polish up and post online; BIP 39 itself contains a list of implementations, including the Python reference implementation.  (1) In the new wallet dialogue, tell Electrum that you already have a seed.  (2) In the seed entry dialogue, click the button for more options and tell Electrum you’re using a BIP39 seed.  (3) In the next screen, change the derivation path to m/49'/0'/0'.  The only part which needs to be changed is the “49”.  You may refer to BIP 49 (as to the 49, the “purpose”) and BIP 44 (for the two zeroes, “coin type” and “account”) to confirm that I am not giving you bad instructions which will send your money off into the weeds; I mention that because I’ve seen Internet posts get this part wrong.


Though perhaps some of the major players just don’t yet have their acts together, there is much political motivation behind some of these decisions.  I will take it as conclusive evidence when a company adds forkcoin support without letting their users use Segwit addresses.


Perhaps you can tell, I agree about that campaigning!

I hope that my posts have helped with understanding.

If you check my post history, you may notice that I am ruthless and downright nasty to anybody who seems to have ulterior motives.  Especially anybody who openly promotes a fork coin (n.b. that I just tossed that link because it’s handy; here lies a very deep rabbit hole, one where all the rabbits were killed and eaten by poisonous snakes).  But for decent people who want to use Bitcoin and desire to better understand it, I am happy to help.

Let me fix that for you:  “Exactly since the bitcoin price rise up... everyday crypto users are switching to altcoin to avoid... bitcoin.”

Yes, some people are stupid.  So what?  “A fool and his bitcoins”, as the aphorism goes.

I am astonished at the legions of drooling morons who complain about fees—without ever pausing to observe that the value of their own coins has already gone “to the moon”, and is now en route to Mars.  The engineers are working on scaling solutions which will enable you to efficiently buy cups of coffee with Bitcoin.  Meanwhile, what you are complaining about is that Bitcoin is valuable and popular.  Hmmm.

You’re just a hater.  Bitcoin is dead.  DOGE is going to the moon.  DOGE is the future! 🐕

You just made my day.  Dogecoin is the solution!  Now that I have seen the light, I will stop subtly hinting about the 75% discount on Bitcoin fees for using Segwit addresses, and instead advocate that all the fee whiners should dump Bitcoin and switch to DOGE.  Actually, they should invest all their money in DOGE.  They should sell all their possessions, mortgage their homes, mortgage their grandmothers, and invest all the money in DOGE.  Woof!

I should preface this by emphasizing:  On-chain scaling is and always will be a very limited proposition.  This is an engineering reality, not a matter of “opinion” in the sense most people mean that word.  At best, we will see incremental, linear improvements to on-chain capacity.  That’s not enough, and never will be.  I think big.  I want for Bitcoin to compete with Visa; and that will require a transactions-per-second capacity increase of about four orders of magnitude.  Adding layers vertically (Lightning Network) and horizontally (sidechains) will truly turn Bitcoin into the foundation of a global payment internetwork which will leave Visa in the dust.

But for on-chain capacity, now that we have Segwit, following is a description of two improvements which Core has in the pipeline.  There are and will be other ideas, too; I list here the things I reliably expect to happen in the not-so-distant future.  Note that these improvements depend on Segwit, and were blocked by the blocking of Segwit.  Segwit was not only a capacity upgrade:  In addition to fixing bugs such as tx malleability, Segwit also introduced script versioning.  The script versioning system will provide a smooth upgrade path for adding these technologies without any forking drama or headaches.

• Schnorr signatures with signature aggregation will improve block space usage (thus, scalability) and help making spam attacks economically prohibitive, as well as improving privacy.
• Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST) will permit payment to large, multi-conditional scripts, while only revealing the pertinent part of the script when the output is spent.  Those who use such scripts will thus drastically reduce their use of block space.  MAST will also improve smart contract flexibility and privacy.
  

I think those are the two big things to watch right now.  Capacity-wise, I think Schnorr signatures will have a much bigger impact; with the mix of transactions on the real-world blockchain, it will probably give about a 25–30% increase in capacity.  Incremental, as I said.


Those numbers not correct.  Segwit lets capacity approach a theoretical limit of 4MB; best estimates I’ve seen are that we will eventually see blocks a bit over 2MB.  As recently discussed in another thread, if a block contains only old-format transactions, then it is still effectually limited to 1MB.  See BIP 141’s block weight calculation.  (You are absolutely correct about Segwit’s main purpose.)


I must emphasize that point about “the node resource problem”.  Pruning reduces disk capacity needs for the long-term storage of data at rest; but that is the smallest problem with big blocks!  Too bad it’s what everybody talks about.

If that were the only issue, then I would advocate 32+MB blocks right now.  Why not?  Buy another few terabytes of disk and snap it in.  Or prune.  Yawn.

Much bigger problems are latency in block delivery (=orphan rate), network bandwidth, CPU and IOPS for validation, and most of all:  UTXO set size growth.  Pruning nodes does not help with these problems, not at all.  On a forkchain with huge blocks, if the blocks were used to capacity (in which case fees would skyrocket just as in Bitcoin), even if you prune, you will still need a beefy computer with a fast SSD and lots of RAM plugged into the sort of connection you find in datacenters.  Or don’t run a node.  I think that’s part of the point—the other part being that mining would be even worse centralized, due to the orphan rate issue.

Parenthetically, I note that unlike some wannabe competitors, Bitcoin is sufficiently popular and valuable that big blocks would be promptly full.  That’s not only a matter of whatever mempool backlog you see, but also of people suddenly making transactions they currently choose to avoid due to fees.  So, big blocks would not even “kick the can down the road”, as some people say.

Back of the envelope, 8MB blocks would get us to somewhere around 1/40 of Paypal’s average TPS, and less than thousandth of Visa’s peak TPS.  Gargantuan 32GB blocks would get a few supernodes in datacenters processing transactions at maybe a tenth of Paypal’s average rate.  For my part, in the long term, I will accept no less than a ten thousandfold increase in Bitcoin’s TPS capacity on all layers.  Blocksize increase is not a scaling solution.

Of course, you are also right about weakening security.


Shoo, shoo.  Go back to Roger Ver’s padded playpen where you belong, and chat there about your funny scamcoin all you want.  This is a forum for discussing Bitcoin.

Miners are not “the ones who verifies the transactions”.  All full nodes are responsible for verification and validation.  Miners perform exactly one function:  They choose an ordering of transactions in a Byzantine fault-tolerant manner.  That is what miners do.  Important though that is, it is all miners do.

The rest of your post was mostly incomprehensible gibberish; but I gather that you are concerned about fees.  Therefore, I😠 must 🚨advise🚨 you that you can get a 💸💎💸  75% instant discount on fees by using 🐲Segwit addresses. 💸💎💸  Check your wallet’s documentation.  If your address starts with a “1”, then you are overpaying 4× on fees!  Your fault.  Don’t 👶whine.

Hello?  Is this thing on?

You’re welcome!  To your question:  Yes, you understand correctly on that point.  Segwit’s benefit to block capacity is proportionate to adoption; and if nobody were to use Segwit addresses and tranasctions, then Segwit would have no effect at all on block capacity.  But fortunately, to the flipside, the Segwit design implicitly incentivizes Segwit use.  Anybody who uses an address starting with a “1” is overpaying (approximately[1]) fourfold on fees, because their transactions “weigh” so much more than Segwit transactions.

Looking at it from the opposite perspective, switching to a Segwit address will bring you (approximately[1]) an instant 75% discount on fees.  I have spent a bit of time on the forum (futilely) trying to inform people who complain about fees that they can get themselves an instant 75% discount, in bold letters.  (Perhaps I should try adding emoji—ick! :-( )  I myself have been using Segwit addresses for months, largely for this reason.  Well, I do like showing off in my signature; and I am a Segwit supporter.  Still, I’ll admit that for actually making the change, the fee difference was an awfully nice incentive!

But it’s not there to be “nice”; and it must be emphasized, what I am here calling a “Segwit discount” is not some arbitrary rule made to push Segwit.  Rather, as I said, it is implicit in the design.  If you use an old-style address, then your bytes are consuming about 4× the block weight; that is, you are selfishly consuming about 4× the amount of a globally shared resource.  This pushes the network toward the position you just described, of still being effectually limited to 1MB blocks.  Whereas if you use Segwit, then byte for byte, you consume about 75% less block weight.  That frees up more space for use by others, increasing the network’s capacity and relieving fee pressure.  Thus it is a natural, logical consequence that you will pay about 75% less.  Fair is fair; and as with all else in Bitcoin, the system is carefully designed to align people’s selfish interests with the common good.

(This leaves two practical issues:  Choice of Segwit address type (nested-in-P2SH vs. Bech32), and actually using Segwit addresses with currently available software.  Earlier, I started writing an exceedingly long post about these issues.  It didn’t get done; and for discussing wallets and usage instructions, this is the wrong forum, anyway.  Generally, here or elsewhere, I would be happy to answer questions in so far as I am able.)

---

1. The fourfold increase/75% discount is approximate.  As quoted in my previous post, the precise equation for block weight from BIP 141 is “Base size * 3 + Total size”, where “Base size is the block size in bytes with the original transaction serialization without any witness-related data, as seen by a non-upgraded node”, and “Total size is the block size in bytes with transactions serialized as described in BIP144, including base data and witness data.”  That is the equation which miners now must use when selecting transactions and, it is to be hoped, trying to fit as many as they can into a block.  The witness data are by far the biggest part of any ordinary transaction; and when the size thereof doesn’t get multiplied, the difference swamps everything else.  Thus in practice, calling Segwit a “75% discount” will suffice for a rule of thumb.

Bitcoin users can get a 75% instant discount on fees by using Segwit addresses.  Check your wallet’s documentation.  If your address starts with a “1”, then you are overpaying 4× on fees!  Your fault.  Don’t whine.

Forks are bad.  They are foolhardy attempts to attack Bitcoin.  But Bitcoin is stronger than all attackers, thus leading to an observed rule in practice:

You fork, you die.

Genuine Bitcoin has crushed numerous forks and attempted forks:  “Bitcoin XT”, “Bitcoin Unlimited”, “Bitcoin Classic”, and the “New York Agreement”, to name but a few.  These no longer exist.  Anything from “Bitcoin Cash” to “Bitcoin Diamond Plus Plutonium With Ponies” is only a scam; and these scams will die sooner or later, just as did their antecedents.  I will laugh, as feckless witlings who invest in forks lose all their money.

Incorrect.  The calculation of fees has nothing whatsoever to do with the mining difficulty (the latter of which I previously explained to you).

Imagine by analogy that there were literally a single old-fashioned paper ledger to record the financial transactions of everybody in the whole world.  The ledger has pages.  Obviously, each page has limited space for writing.  People with specialized equipment called “miners” choose the transactions to put on each page, then seal the page with a magical security stamp which makes the page impossible to change for all eternity.  Miners get paid for this service, because the magical stamp is difficult and costly to produce.  Moreover, there is a rule:  One new page is sealed every ten minutes, whether it is empty or full; and new pages can’t be filled any faster than one per ten minutes.  This rule is a property of the magical stamp which keeps everything secure.

If too many people want their transactions included in the book, then each person needs to compete with everybody else by offering the miners more money to include their transaction instead of somebody else’s.

Fees are based on simple supply and demand.  There is a certain amount of space in each block, constrained by the block weight limit as defined by BIP 141; that is a common resource, shared by everybody who uses Bitcoin.  Blocks are produced at a rate of one block every ten minutes (on average; I am intentionally oversimplifying).  Each transaction has a certain weight, based principally on its size in bytes and whether it uses Segwit.  Those weights all add up.  When there are too many transactions with too much total weight for them to all fit into a block, then people need to compete with each other on fees to entice miners to select their transactions instead of somebody else’s.

By the way, Bitcoin users can get a 75% instant discount on fees by using Segwit addresses.  Check your wallet’s documentation.  Now, see my signature; look at my address, and the adjacent note about Segwit.  If your address starts with a “1”, then you are overpaying 4× on fees!  Those who still use addresses starting with a “1” are consuming 4× the aforementioned shared resource; so it is only natural and fair, they wind up paying 4× the fees.  They should either upgrade, or shut up and quit whining about fees.

Enjoy your kittens, Etherfan.  But for serious use, Ethereum will not be replacing Bitcoin anytime soon.  Or ever.

By the way, Bitcoin users can get a 75% instant discount on fees by using Segwit addresses.  Check your wallet’s documentation.  If your address starts with a “1”, then you are overpaying 4× on fees!  Your fault.  Don’t whine.

Use Ether instead, only if you wish to die of acute cuteness.

For chat:  Jabber (for OTR), Ricochet, Tox.

Simply for use of the fields:  Straight-up PGP key fingerprints!  Please.  If possible, with means to time-lock them instead of pasting ad hoc messages into the “stake your address” thread.  That could solve so many problems.

Keybase users could also post their PGP key fingerprints, of course.  But that way, the fields would not be Keybase-specific.

Perhaps also add more fields for extra Bitcoin addresses, to aid transition from the old address format to Bech32.  (Of course, there can also be similar issues with PGP.  See my signature.  Just like PGP2/PGP5 in the 90s!)

If the number of available slots equals two, I would say:  PGP fingerprint, plus another “Other contact info” field.

(P.S., thank you for summing your question in terms of security!)

Forks are bad.  They are foolhardy attempts to attack Bitcoin.  But Bitcoin is stronger than all attackers, thus leading to an observed rule in practice:

You fork, you die.

Genuine Bitcoin has crushed numerous forks and attempted forks:  “Bitcoin XT”, “Bitcoin Unlimited”, “Bitcoin Classic”, and the “New York Agreement”, to name but a few.  These no longer exist.  For upcoming forks, if you wish to claim some fork coins, then dump them in exchange for real Bitcoin, and enjoy your free bitcoins.  Otherwise, simply ignore.  Anything from “Bitcoin Cash” to “Bitcoin Diamond Plus Plutonium With Ponies” is only a scam; and these scams will die sooner or later, just as did their antecedents.


...so, there you have it in layman’s terms.  Yes, there are many pretenders.  However:

There is only one Bitcoin.

Thank you, theymos, for getting the site back up.

(Sysadmin is tough.  Users are demanding; I know I certainly am.  It gets noticed when the site is down.)

From the perspective of a paid Copper Member with current “Newbie” rank:  Please do not permit the purchasing of ranks.  Ever.

Copper Membership makes sense, both for the user and for the forum.  It unlocks important posting functionality for newbies.  It makes throwaway account creation cost-prohibitive for spammers and sock armies.  It adds a dash of prestige, in addition to one’s canonical rank.  It’s an all-around good idea.

New paid levels which add higher additional prestige or practical perqs would likewise make sense.  I know that when I see a “Donator”, this is someone who cares about the forum to the degree of an endearing foolhardiness.  It’s impressive.  Lesser degrees of the same effect could be had with hypothetical Gold and Silver memberships.

But the basic system of activity ranks measures socially useful, productive creativity.[1]  Buying higher rank would be as if paying for the “right” to pad one’s résumé.  It would be like buying the “right” to brag to new friends about achievements you never made.  For the highest ranks, it would directly place at market a status tantamount to “pillar of the community”.

If you be wealthy, then you can move to a small town and buy a certain amount of instant goodwill by, e.g., donating money to build a park.  But you cannot buy the status of having lived there twenty years.  The difference ought be obvious.

Myself, if I could purchase higher membership ranks, then I would never want to obtain any higher membership rank—by purchase, or otherwise; for it would be worthless.

---

1. At least, in theory.  (“Assume a spherical cow.”)  Too bad, it seems that mods now face the task of emptying a landfill with a spoon—whilst the garbage trucks keep rolling in, just as they are paid to.

Remember what I said:  Miners provide only one component (albeit a very important one).  The validation of the network is done by all full nodes.  That’s critical to security; and miners can’t override full nodes, because full nodes will reject consensus-invalid blocks from miners.  Miners provide ordering of transactions, which full nodes could not otherwise agree upon.  But the validation rules are written into the nodes’ code, and change very rarely.

Full node operators don’t get paid for the security they (we) provide.  We do it for other reasons:  Using a full node is the most independent, most private, and most secure way to use Bitcoin.  Also, some of us have altruistic ideals about Bitcoin and want to see it succeed.  It is not necessary to pay nodes, because the cost is negligible compared to the cost of mining:  An ordinary computer with a few hundred GB of free hard disk space and a good Internet connection, all preferably being run 24/7.  Core has a policy of keeping node resource use low enough that anybody can afford to run a node.  I know a story of a (literally) homeless person who ran a node (!), with a second-hand laptop and public wifi hotspots; though that was rare, and it did not work out so well in the long run.  By contrast, as you know, even a small mining outfit requires a huge upfront investment and ongoing cost.

Now, back to the main issue here:  There is a connection between mining cost and Bitcoin value, but it is rather the inverse of what you say.

For their part of securing the network, miners must provide security which no single person or entity in the world can break.  This requires that no single person or entity can have a big enough proportion of mining power to execute a so-called “51% attack”.  Subtler attacks to corrupt the network could actually be done by a single entity with only about 30% of hashrate; but let’s not complicate the discussion for now.  The point is, it must be impractical for any single person or entity to control a majority of hashpower on the network.  In this context, “impractical” means somewhere between so expensive as to be ridiculously unprofitable, and infeasible to the degree that nobody could do it even if they were willing to lose money.

Well, you may ask:  Couldn’t somebody rich just go out and buy lots of ASICS to boost their hashpower?  Yes, yes indeed.  The reason why this does not result in a single party having “51% attack” power is that miners are in constant competition with each other.  Each wants a greater percentage of the hashpower, because a greater percentage of hashpower translates directly to a higher probability of finding blocks (and thus getting paid).  Miner X will buy a bunch of new hardware, and then Miner Y will buy new hardware to keep up, and Miner Z will compete with both of them.  That way, each miner’s selfish interest prevents the others from taking over the network hashpower.  This is by design.

It is an ingenious design, by the way.  Unfortunate in certain aspects—but ingenious!  In this and many other ways, Bitcoin secures itself by relying on the power of human selfishness.  Everybody’s greed forces everybody else’s greed under control.  It is the most reliable system ever yet conceived in this world; for in the realm of human affairs, there is nothing more reliable than depending on people to be selfish!

The problem is, this results in constantly increasing resource use.  There is a limit to that increase:  The limit is the value of Bitcoin.  Miners X, Y, and Z will cool down their competition a bit and reach a sort of equilibrium, when the cost of more hardware and electricity exceeds the value they would get from having more hashpower.  The higher the value of Bitcoin rises, the higher that limit is raised.

Thus, as you can see:  The difficulty and expense of mining does not control the value of Bitcoin.  Rather, the inverse:  The value of Bitcoin limits the difficulty and expense of mining.  If Bitcoin were to crash and stay that way, then many miners would go out of business; and the survivors would continue operating on a smaller budget, using less hardware and electricity.  They would compete less, because further competition would be unprofitable.  Mining difficulty would drop.

Note also another ingenious feature:  The higher the value of Bitcoin, the fiercer the miners’ competition to secure its Byzantine fault tolerance—and thus, the higher the difficulty of breaking that security, commensurately to the value which must be secured.  That is how Bitcoin could stay secure both in the beginning, when the coins were almost worthless, and now, when the network as a whole secures the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars in value.  Higher value causes higher security—indirectly, but nevertheless.  Again, this is by design.  Satoshi’s design.  It is a thing of beauty, in itself.


I appreciate that last sentence, particularly.

If you want to learn with an open mind, Bitcoin is a beautiful and challenging world.  I suggest you should brush up on the basics with the documentation at bitcoin.org, as well as the Bitcoin Wiki.  Then, you will be better equipped to ask smart questions here on this forum.  There are plenty of helpful people here.  For my part, I like being helpful, too (although I am not so nice as others when I see something I think is stupid).

I would also suggest you “lurk” awhile.  Make fewer posts, read more posts, until you get a feel for things.  Unfortunately, there is currently a surfeit of low-quality posts; that is why I get so angry, you see.  But you will still find many intelligent threads; and the archives here are a gold mine of information, if you know how to search them.  Satoshi Nakamoto used to post here, before he vanished.  The Core developers also used to post here much more frequently, although most of them don’t post much anymore.  Some do.

I’m happy to help here, if/when I see that it’s actually building something in a positive direction.

The principal benefit of that particular aspect of Segwit is that it avoids a hardfork.  Hardforks are anathema to a currency which holds huge amounts of real-world value, although there is Bitcoin hardfork research ongoing to plan how to do one with absolutely no mistakes if/when it becomes necessary in the relatively far future.  Increasing the blocksize limit would have required a hardfork—where all nodes must be upgraded on deadline, and any which didn’t upgrade would suddenly break, badly.  But with Segwit, old nodes will continue to see blocks with a 1000000 byte block size limit, whereas new nodes will see blocks with a 4000000 byte block weight limit.  Old nodes can continue to send transactions, their old way; they simply will not know how to validate transactions sent the new way.  It’s ingenious!

Note that Segwit does not make blocks smaller at all.  It raises the block capacity, up toward a theoretical limit of 4000000 bytes.  In practice, best estimates are that with full Segwit adoption, we will get blocks a bit more than 2MB in actual size.  It was aimed to be an approximate doubling of block capacity, which so many people had been requesting.  Research indicated that such an actual size of blocks would be safe for the network and for nodes, but that much larger sizes would not be.

There are other important fixes built into Segwit—most importantly, a fix for tx malleability; but the foregoing summarizes the reasoning behind the part of Segwit which magically raises block capacity without instantly breaking anybody’s use of Bitcoin.

You seem to be suggesting that “money” be a credit system in favor of the holder of money, which can be used as a “demand or request” against arbitrary persons “for something considered one’s due.”  Is that an accurate characterization of what you mean?


No, you are 100% incorrect.  You clearly do not understand how mining works, or what it does.  I just wrote you an explanation of the purpose of mining on one of these other threads you spawned; I suggest you read that first.  Further than that:

Incorrect:  “Each BTC that is mined increases the difficulty of the next computation.”  No.  The difficulty increases based on a calculation of how quickly the network is generating blocks.  There is a 10-minute generation target; every 2016 blocks (intended to be about every two weeks), the difficulty is raised or lowered based exclusively on whether blocks were taking shorter or longer than 10 minutes, on average.  It has absolutely nothing to do with how many BTC are mined.  The number of BTC mined is set by a schedule by block height.  This is basic stuff—you should a beginner-level introduction to how Bitcoin works, so as to avoid such mistakes.

On another note, since you express desire for “stimulating discussion”, I wish to address this on a technical level.  Speaking here only as to Bitcoin, since “crypto” is such a fuzzy buzzword nowadays:


It is a common and pernicious myth that mining gives Bitcoin its value.  It doesn’t—at least, not directly.  Mining does contribute to the security of Bitcoin, which in turn enables Bitcoin to become valuable.  But it is only one subsystem in an intricate machine, and not in any way Bitcoin’s font of value.

A quick explanation of what mining actually does:

As you perhaps understand (and please say if you do not), Bitcoin is a global, distributed ledger.  A decentralized ledger, which must be kept absolutely synchronized between untrusted and mutually untrusting nodes.  This raises something which crypto eggheads call the “double-spend problem”:  How can a thief be stopped from cheating the system by sending the same money to two different people at once, by creating two different entries in two disagreeing versions of the ledger?

Preventing double-spends requires everybody in the entire world to agree on the ordering of transactions:  If the thief sent the same money to Alice, then a microsecond later to Bob, then somehow Alice and Bob must both know that Alice got the money first, and the second transaction was therefore invalid.

This is where the theoreticians start talking about Byzantine Generals and Byzantine Fault Tolerance.  I would not usually drop a Wikipedia link; but this should give a reasonable overview at a level comprehensible to any intelligent person:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance

In Bitcoin, “miners” provide Byzantine Fault Tolerance to the network’s enforcement of the ordering of the transactions.  That is what miners do.  That is all miners do.  It is a very valuable task—a “large roll [sic]”, as you put it; that is why miners get paid for performing it.  But nevertheless, it is only one component of Bitcoin.

For an excellent overview of all the moving parts in the Bitcoin machine, their various histories, and how Satoshi fit them all together, I suggest this article:

Narayanan, A; Clark, J.  “Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree”.  ACM Queue, vol. 15 issue 4 (2017-08-29)

Now, as you can see:

0. Miners do not create the value of Bitcoin.

1. To make a cryptocurrency which does not require resource use similar to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mining, you must find some other way to provide Byzantine Fault Tolerance.  Well—either that, or discard the decentralized property of the network, and put the network under the substantial control of a central trusted party.  Digicash in the 1990s was a cryptography-based currency which did not need any “mining” scheme, because it relied on a bank to issue notes and prevent double-spends.  But reliance on central trusted parties is anathema to Bitcoin.  Observe too, Digicash failed because no bank wanted to be its central trusted party!

Very smart people spent about two decades trying to overcome the double-spend problem.  Satoshi Nakamoto was the first person ever to proffer a solution which did not rely on a trusted party.  Other schemes (such as proof-of-stake) have been proposed; but none has the security properties of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work.  Perhaps some rare genius may someday outdo Satoshi, and invent a new way to provide Byzantine Fault Tolerance; but thus far, nobody has.  I know I’ve tried.  I have spent endless hours and months and years pondering this precise issue.

Contra what you say, this is not a “New Crypto Idea!”  Not new at all.  But it is really not an easy problem.  It is not a matter of waving your hands and saying, “What if there was a way to create crypto based on saving resources rather than based on destroying resources”.  What if there was a way?  Well, how?

Well, I can see how you made such a misdirected post with so many threads to keep track of.


You say you want reasonable discussion.  I asked you a reasonable question.  Contra what you insinuate, I’m proud that my post history clearly demostrates my own desire for reasonable discussion with intelligent people.  (It also evidences my total intolerance of Bcash shills and abject idiots; and I am proud of that, too.)

So, I am wondering:  How do you define “money”?  Where do you suggest it obtains its “future value”?  I think the crux of the issue is:  Do you posit that “money” is backed by something tangible, or a promise of something tangible which can be redeemed?  That seems to be hinted, but your position is unclear.