Let's compare some 2011-2013 early Bitcoin entrepreneurs



Charlie Shrem

Charlie ran a legally registered, known entity business in the US. The basis of that business (BitInstant) was 100% legal according to US and NY law (BitInstant was based in New York).

Charlie did something foolish: he accepted large informal BTC buy orders from someone who got the BTC from the original Silk Road website (or maybe one of the others, but basically from some online drug marketplace). Charlie got prosecuted when the dude selling to him was caught. Charlie did jailtime for that.

Erik Voorhees

Erik ran an unregistered gambling business called SatoshiDice, while apparently living in the US and definitely accepting US customers. This is all 0% legal in the US, gambling websites serving US citizens is a criminal offence according to US federal law.

Erik did a mysterious business transaction whereby he sold SatohiDice.com (and it's source code) to an unknown buyer. SatoshiDice.com closed very soon afterwards.

Erik then opened Shapeshift.io sohortly after that, from the well known Central American CIA vassal state, Panama. Erik apparently has lived in Panama ever since, and continues to run Shapeshift.io from Panama, presumably with zero interference from the political force that runs Panama, the CIA. And also without interference from the US government, despite his committing criminal offenses publicly while running Satoshi Dice (and in a legal gray area with respect to running Shapeshift.io)



When one considers the gravity of Shrem's crime (small illegal deals in an otherwise legal exchange business) with the gravity of Voorhees' crimes (entirely legal business models from the top downwards), it's difficult not to wonder what exactly it is that makes Erik Voorhees immune to prosecution.

Yes, that's a good way of re-stating what I mean when I say "Blocksize increases do not change the scale".



No.

Do not attempt to police my language. There is nothing wrong with describing foolish ideas as foolish, irrespective of the connotations the descriptions carry.

Gavin's original 2015 plan was foolish, but only because he decided to execute the steps in the wrong (i.e. reverse) order. His advocacy of attacking Bitcoin Core's blockchain was both foolish and reckless, and I absolutely reserve the right to denigrate that behaviour in any way I see fit.

How dare you solicit opinions, only to dismiss well-founded and demonstrated criticism as unimportant. Foolishness is foolish, recklessness is reckless. And really, Andresen was also suggesting to use overwhelming hashing power, in other words brute force, to destroy the Bitcoin project and replace it entirely with a different design of the Bitcoin software that he others favour, when there is nothing wrong with hard-forking amicably and non-destructively.

Calling that retarded is charitable, it's actually vindictive. Would you prefer that I said Gavin Andresen has behaved nastily, vindictively and duplicitiously (it's all dressed up as "I'm only trying to help") ?

Who are you to police the way I express these observable facts in respect of Gavin Andresen's recent despicable behaviour?

Explain to who? For what purpose? Are you suggesting that we should voluntarily provide this information to known thieves, so the thieves can tell us how much of our money they would like?

By example let's say we increase the blocksize from 1MB to 2MB, that's increasing the average amount of transactions from 300,000 per day to 600,000 per day.

So, 1MB:300,000, 2MB:600,000.

And that's the same ratio, for 1MB or 2MB. i.e. 1:3 is exactly equivalent to 2:6

So that's not scaling, the scale is identical. All blocksize increases do to change the capacity is that they change the amount of resources the Bitcoin network uses at the exact same scale, no matter how much the blocksize changes.



I actually agreed with Gavin (but not Mike) on his 2015 ideas to improve Bitcoin's transaction capacity, except for 1 very crucial point.

Gavin had all the right ideas, except he wanted to schedule the changes in the wrong order. He wanted to increase the blocksize 1st, then bring in the changes that counter-balance the impact of blocksize increases after that. Which is odd, but Gavin expressed it pretty much that way, perhaps without even realising the logical inconsistency. He's since gone full retard though, advocating BU's aggressive destruction of the Bitcoin Core blockchain, which was particularly appalling coming from someone who made good contributions to Bitcoin in the past (and also from someone who claimed to be in favour of the free market/open competition).

It's very simple


There is more than one way to increase on-chain capacity. Scaling is the best way. Blocksize increases do not scale.


So, blocksize increase are the worst way to increase capacity. It's simple, but not smart. Scaling is better. It's sometimes simple, sometimes complex, and always smart.

You need a project to prove this, you're obviously very determined, you talk about this alot.

Set up a testnet, where you tweak the Bitcoin client's block interval and block reward rate. Invite people to join, and develop a way of benchmarking the performance based on orphan rates (including all the forms of orphaned blocks that you speak of in this thread).

I'd be interested to see the results.

It's a strange topic, one could argue that the EU themselves have a very bizarre prejudice in the way they handle terrorists.


What do the EU/NATO countries do when these recent terrorists, who were born in the UK, Germany, France, Italy or Belgium, attacked the UK, Germany, France, Italy or Belgium?


"Easy" say EU/NATO, "let's bomb Syria, Libya and Iraq". Okaaaaaaaaay EU/NATO, that makes so much sense.

DooMAD, where are you getting all of this from?


You often display fear and uncertainty in respect of Lightning and how it will work.


Here's my suggestion to you: if you could take the time to read about how Lightning does work, you would be less afraid. It's easy to be afraid when your knowledge of a new subject is incomplete, but you seem determined not to plug the hole in your learning.

And please, stop parroting this "available as an option, certainly, but it's not the complete answer" line. It only serves to show how willfully ignorant you are in respect of Lightning: no-one in favour of Lightning believes it, and so no Lightning proponent has ever expressed that desire. It's all in your imagination, you are very paranoid about the Lightning network, aren't you?  

Calm down, knowledge and learning are your friends, not your enemies.

It's good to remember that the EU (and other authoritarian political projects like it) sell authoritarianism using a very intelligent argument, so intelligent that huge numbers of people buy it.


Epithets like "Only the law can give you liberty" (Goethe, a lawyer by training, said something like this), and more subtly "With freedom comes responsibility", all conspire against true liberty. Tyrants love these expressions, as it takes careful thought and analysis to argue against such apparent truths.


Once these sorts of phrases are popularly accepted as wisdom, top-down centralised government just wants to help us make it real (the soft-kill approach: "we're from the government, and we're here to help"). They propose more and more restrictions by law, in the name of responsibility and freedom.

And that's the trick. People can be convinced that responsible behaviour can only happen when all people are forced into blind order following. And that's not responsibility at all.

Responsibility cannot, in truth, be attained through compliance or force. Because we are taught what to do to be responsible, we are never given the opportunity to see for ourselves why responsible behaviour is so important, and so we are shielded from the consequences of irresponsibility this way. We are deprived of huge amounts of important lessons in morality, lessons that would make our communities stronger through highly developed and widespread instincts for the logic and principles of responsible behaviour.


So remember, we have been bred to be lazy, that morality and responsibility are simply instructions to follow. The truth is that learning good moral judgement is what stops us from thoughtless and selfish behaviour, not these stupid punishment systems called "the law". Fortunately, Bitcoin has shown us that morality can be defined using a far stronger code, a truly unbreakable law: pure maths and logic. Thanks Satoshi.

There's some kind of "insane fee" logic in Bitcoin Core, can't remember how that works exactly.... But it's there to stop people accidentally sending 100 BTC as a fee, that sort of thing (which has happened before a few times, usually because someone writes the script for the transaction themselves and forgets to send themselves the change in the script they write, i.e. regular users don't have to worry about it)

No

Bitcoin is used before, during and after Lightning transactions are sent. Not just after, as you falsely state.


1 Bitcoin transaction is used to open a channel to start with

That transaction is used to check that the BTC being sent over Lightning is the real thing (how else do you stop people just faking that they have some BTC on the Lightning Network, huh?)

1 Bitcoin transaction closes the channel


Furthermore, Lightning Network isn't a blockchain at all, it uses Bitcoin's blockchain, and that's the only blockchain involved. You don't know much about it, you need to actually be informed on a subject before you can make such confident comments.

Nothing except blocksize increases, eh, jonald?


No need to explain your position, you're like a CD skipping or a vinyl record stuck in a groove


You're one of those neeky characters man, going on and on about size, bigger, larger, longer, wider etc. Got something to prove, eh


Why do you never listen to the arguments about increasing on-chain capacity in a smarter way, that actually scales up (which blocksize increases cannot achieve)?

Privacy is enhanced hugely using Lightning.




No it doesn't. BTC can remain in Lightning channels forever in cases where participants don't force one another to settle on-chain.


No-one can force you to use it, and given that your fears are uninformed FUD, you're forgetting about the benefits, and concentrating solely on imaginary downsides.

Explain why on-chain is "better in most conditions", and please learn how Lightning works before you do so

I think the fact that Lightning involves more trust (some attacks can be performed using Lightning's characteristics) is actually a good fit for its best purpose: bricks and mortar businesses, just like Room77.

The customers that go to Room77 all the time know the people working there, and the staff will know those customers. It's bad business to attack your own regular customers, and the clientele will run out of places to go shopping if they keep attempting attacks against places with good merchandise. So it's a little over-blown to say that Lightning is a big risk.

Online, it's a little different. I suspect middlemen Lightning processors, the infamous hubs, will be more popular on-line, especially with new or small businesses. But the centralisation criticism is overblown here too, there won't be any political or regulatory barriers to operating a hub style node, all you need is clients and cashflow. Competition amongst Lightning nodes should, therefore, be strong. (and of course, on-chain transactions will always a better option the higher the stakes are, no-one will be buying cars, houses, or making business deals on the Lightning network)

I'm ever so slightly amused by the new "affiliation medallions" (which is the name I just made up for them). Accordingly, goatpig and Ente are "Dogecoin followers", TraderTimm is an unlikely "ETC proponent", droark still supports NXT, and most amusing of all IMO, I'm "Ripple chief scientist" 

But where's the "Armory Army" medallion?

What if "climate change" means hurricanes the size of Norway in Norway? You obviously haven't heard enough of these ghost stories about the weather to make meaningful comments, even for a believer in this particular breathing-tax religion

Well, I really hope that BIP180 gets accepted and implemented before a possible BU fork (although in fairness it's looking less likely, but that's only on the basis of wat these untrustworthy characters are saying, which isn't wort alot). The situation could be even worse without BIP180, as SPV clients like BitSquare won't be able to distinguish between the BU blockchain and the Bitcoin blockchain without it. And that's without the problems of the empty block or chain re-merging attacks that the BU miners could perform.

Well, most countries with significant economies already do use Bitcoin.


But if it was more than 1% of commerce? (of which it's less than 1% now)


More capacity. We need more capacity for transactions.


And no matter what blocksize maniacs wish you to believe, blocksize increase can't meet worldwide mainstream demand. Even doubling or quadrupling the blocksize is at the limits of what the whole world could handle, Bitcoin would cease to be decentralised if we tried to use blocksize to meet the needs of billions instead of the millions of users that exist today.


So really, we need scaling solutions, not blocksize increases. Making more efficient use of blockspace is one route (with many different ways to get there), but these are often hardforks, and so need alot of user support. 2nd layer protocols are much more suitable to scaling up massively, but Lightning (current major proposal for a 2nd layer) does come with drawbacks, in that it's not as trustless as on-chain transactions are now (but there are ways to mitigate that risk to arguably zero).

"Your laws are minimal
And you won't even think about
looking for the real criminal" KRS-1, Sound of the Police


Slave language, from corporate slaves. Quelle surprise.


I want real capitalism, where I can vote for regular people by giving them real power: money.


Fuck this charade, where the price of goods is set by a tiny amount of overly rich pencil pushers at the stock exchange, and where the price of money is set by the central banks

(and where regular everyday wage&tax slaves act like the police towards people they should be respecting, like this idiot writing for Forbes, as if the corporate tycoons they write glowing pieces about pay their taxes, like I say, money is real power).

Thanks achow101.