Ok, which is it, and what's the difference?

"users take the decision independently" and "making everything up as we go" are just positive and negative ways of expressing the exact same fact: users (nodes) are in charge, not miners or developers.

Furthermore, the whole point of these forum discussions is to explore the ideas of independent users making their decisions about what they want from Bitcoin. That includes both ideas you do and do not like.

So, your meta-discussion angle is a bit bizarre: we're talking independently, right now (or at least we were until this diversion), about what we each separately think. That is the process that gradually evolves into what each Bitcoin user decides to support in Bitcoin. Problem?

Explain how the miners aren't abusing their position when they threaten to fork the network away from the people who are doing the real work on this project: the development team

What does that matter when most Bitcoiners (who aren't here) chose against it. They've done that 3 times now, haven't they jonald

Yikes, that doesn't sound like a good trade off. I'll stick with the risk of the toner on my paper backups degrading, I think

You must be mad, but that's the second time you've expressed tacit support for BitcoinEC.

1. Yet again, the Bitcoin code repo becomes controlled by some dubious outsider
2. As you state EC is a hard-fork-every-Tueday disaster waiting to happen

Why on earth would you consider something like that, especially when the Core team are likely going to activate Segwit a different way

Be honest, you've already started supporting the 4th hard-fork coup attempt: EC-coin.

Out with the old, eh jonald

If you're suggesting the law should protect us, you came to the wrong cypherpunk movement.


If you don't want all the "protection" on offer, the difference between what BU are doing and what the legal system dishes up won't seem so different. Tech should solve tech problems, even political or moral tech problems. If it can't, the tech wasn't good enough.

no jonald

Mining centralisation is entirely a result of the companies selling miners taking advantage of their specialist manufacturer status. It's too expensive for a regular entrepreneurs to compete with these outfits, and even if they could, they need access to another limited resource: processor fabrication plants (which is also a politicised just oligopoly like the Bitcoin miner business is)


Miners aren't to blame, the mining monopolists are. The only way to break that monopoly is to change the technology so that the mining market becomes easy to enter. We must change the PoW algorithm to something that can't be easily made into a specialist processor, to lower the barrier to entry in the mining market.

Agreed.

I think the PoW change is still important, because of the situation with the current ASIC miners. If they can behave so recklessly once, I have little confidence that they will not do so again.

I feel for the small miners in a way, but not that much. They're the ones actually subjugated by firms like Bitmain, as the highly gouged prices they pay to people like Bitmain (surely it's only Bitmain and Canaan still selling to allcomers these days) are what funded the oligopoly to begin with.

If the miners thought more carefully, they'd see that CPU mining would put the ability to compete against the Bitmain mentality back on the table. And PoW changes really should not be attempted in an emergency, it would be highly disruptive and cause a great deal of uncertainty (not to mention the knock-on consequences of all that).


I propose that an orderly, staged PoW change, implemented 5% gradations via a series of soft forks, would do alot to secure Bitcoin's future. It's not my actual proposal, but one that is being discussed in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833391.0

Not only would we decentralise mining from it's current cartel state, we could attract more users keen to compete in a fairer mining market. I see no downsides, executed diligently.

I more or less agree, but the assumption I've bolded is dangerous. There is a significant risk that a "short sharp shock" act of caprice could happen very suddenly, especially now that BU is looking increasingly unlikely to gain any foothold with users. As I mentioned in another thread, the opposition have exceeded their "crying wolf" quota. What makes anyone believe the attackers will not choose a different MO altogether?

Frankly, I would be most surprised if another hard fork campaign would ever be a genuine attempt, I would expect a sudden political act against Bitcoin (via the potential vectors I described before) to happen during the next hard fork campaign, "when it is least expected" lol. We should expect it, and prepare the user community accordingly.

Are you saying I would have to brute force the hashing algorithm of that specific HMAC? I'm getting the picture in which case

These miners aren't hungry, they're greedy. Levelling the playing field will change that. The current miners already have too much, you have it entirely backwards

Explain how changing the relationship between transaction rate and blocksize from 1:1, to 1:1 changes the scale.

Nope

The justification for Lighting is that it allows increases in transaction rate that are impossible with blocksize increases. And Lightning transactions don't need confirmations, because they're verified off-chain.


That's wrong, see above



That's literally not what they would say. You clearly don't know the first thing about Lightning




Completely wrong.

Lightning is only good for what it does well: rapid, small transactions.

On-chain will still be needed for large transactions, and for opening Lightning channels (i.e. getting money onto the Lightning Network) in the first place



Your idea of how Lightning works is nuts, where are you getting this nonsense from?

Blocksize changes are nothing to do with scaling, David

I don't know how I can make that any clearer

Yes, improving the ability of the Bitcoin software to verify both transactions and blocks is a major purpose for Segwit's deployment (commonly referred to as "solving quadratic sighashing")

You're now conflating "scaling" with "processing blocks". They're not the same, even superficially.


There is no relationship between blocksize and scaling except a linear relationship, they're 1:1 at any value. Hence it's meaningless to talk about "scaling the blocksize" and other such expressions.

I think you're getting this inverted. Increasing the frequency of blocks inherently increases the orphan rate, and every orphan produced is a waste of hashing, and hence, electricity from the miner's perspective.

What's the rationale for reducing the amount of energy that miners use, Jetcash?

Give it up jonald


Changing the PoW should happen, too many miners have demonstrated they don't deserve their privileged position. But being forced isn't going to happen, pre-emptive graduated PoW change is the least disruptive way to do it, and I'm going to be making sure that everyone knows the major advantages to Bitcoin pre-emptively changing PoW will bring.


Your scare tactics won't work, your modus operandi has run it's course. No-one is ever going to accept an external hard-fork "improvement" attempt now, 3 times failed should be enough to prove that.


The emergency hard-fork is for genuine emergencies only, you've cried wolf too many times

We want and promote scaling

You want and promote blockchain bloating and hostile takeovers



Remember your libertarianism, jonald: if you need to use force against someone to make them do what you want, it's because they think it's a bad idea.

Quit trying to force people to choose something they don't like or want. If you initiate force, expect to get your ass kicked. Again. (this is like the 3rd time with you punks now)

You're conflating "scaling" with "increasing resource usage"


Both improve transaction capacity. But they're not the same.