Centralized systems do not need to replicate data to thousands of locations globally distributed nodes over a public network either.
They use many fewer backups, no equivalent transparency and central repositories of hackable data stores.
It isn't really comparable at all other than that they are both including payment systems.

They have a private network.  Yes, it does have MPLS QoS, and lots of nifty security and performance elements, (which those anti-technology, pro-government autocracy whackos prohibit in the USA-internet through their "NetNeutrality" nonsense).

I have a different opinion on this.  I think we can and will "figure this out", once a commitment is made to doing just that.  This is my fundamental disagreement with Gavin's proposal.  It not only makes no attempt to figure it out, it takes away the impetus to do so for 20 years, when we have had Bitcoin for only a third of that time.  This is what makes it such a jaw-droppingly misguided proposal unworthy of someone in his position.

Instead we are expected to undertake new risks without even the promise of the improvements needed to resolve the issue in either a long term manner (using a measured rate based on block-size need) or a permanent manner (removal of the limit based on it no longer being necessary). 

Any democratic system of money is far inferior to Bitcoin.  It is fundamentally the opposite of that, it is an economic system.
An occurrence of democratic action is seen as a threat to Bitcoin, AKA 51% attack.

Voting is in all cases the supreme failure of an attempt to create quality.  Where there is quality, voting is not needed.  Voting is for avoiding violent conflict by replacing it with as much as possible with social conflict.  It is the use of law against others, and it is for subjugating minorities.  We in democratic societies are taught how wonderful it is to have democracy, and it is better than most any other option, but it is also utter crap.  I do not wish for a "democratic" system of money and I am very happy that Bitcoin isn't one.

It is a failing of Gold, that there exists a gold fix, where a small group vote on the price.  There is only democracy in a monetary system to the extent that the system lacks quality.  It is a sign of failure, not success.

We agree that something needs to happen.  Whether this is "it" is debatable.

The Noble Palace Club is also minting and issuing a coin, soon to be distributed to all club members of the nobility.

These depict some of the views from the Noble Palace itself which has the grand views of both the obelisk and the jousting grounds, and has provided the most opulent viewing locations above the dust for our lords and ladies of the Crypto Kingdom since its early construction.

These will be issued sometime during the coming days to all members in proportion to their membership level (providing a short opportunity for all nobility to update their membership or purchase shares from other nobles).  There are 250 of these 5 CKG minted in celebration of this jubilee year.  200 will be distributed, and the remainder to be later placed on offer for future nobility or collectors.

The Duke fancies himself a numismatist and buys each of these four offerings.

I'm more concerned with what the tick box says than whether there is one.
Perhaps the grandest virtue of a consensus system is the mechanism of agreement, rather than voting.  Excellent proposals find consensus a fairly simple matter, for there is not much debate with incontrovertible quality.

Democracy is a 51% attack.

In a democracy, votes happen whenever there is an absence of quality.  The best ideas don't need votes.  Votes are needed when the authority intends to violate the rights of some folks so that the masses can be convinced that those who were violated deserve it.


Perhaps no where else in modern society is the threat of Democracy devolving into Ochlocracy given so dangerous an incentive as it is with Bitcoin. If there is any politics in Bitcoin, it would be this lesson: the necessity of mustering the individuals to prevent this Tyranny of the Majority against the rights of all to the freedom of transaction.

To answer "why debate"?  For myself it is to improve the quality of the proposition.  It remains bad.

Bitcoin supports voluntary clawback agreements through atomic swaps and multi-sig.  Those that seek to have this sort of "consumer protection" can also do so with their favorite escrow agent as a different option.  

It is not the default transaction type to have every transaction facilitate clawback through each and every jurisdictional authority that might claim it, it is voluntary by the transacting parties, and supported within the protocol.

To make clawback provisions mandatory for all transactions, and include arbitrary jurisdictional counterparties in all transactions would be not be a better money.  However if you are using bitcoin in complex legal arrangements, it may be useful to do so.

This is not related to the topic other than that these multiple atomic transactions take up more block space.

Maybe, maybe not...  but maybe also some caution is warranted when the protocol is shifted to make it so?
The result could be that we end up with either: it is government mining, or no mining.

When the door is closed to private individuals (and it is only businesses), businesses MUST register or be in violation of the law and risk seizure of all assets.  This is true most anywhere you stand on the planet.

It provokes the honest question of: How exposed would you want mining to be? 

Should they all register with their local military authority? 
Or put another way: Is it necessarily a "business" and subject to MTL?

I am certainly not suggesting that anyone do anything criminal at all.  In jurisdictions where the local authority forbids an action (or does so by regulating it into unprofitability), it is just better to be elsewhere if you can be.  However, the real estate where one is not disadvantaged by conducting Bitcoin mining, or exposing oneself to theft under color of law and forfeitures... that real estate is dwindling.  There are few such jurisdictions remaining.

As it turns out, only those who simply mine and hold (satoshi) are in the clear on this matter. 

I'd see TOR fixed rather than impinge Bitcoin, but the "Keep Bitcoin Free" folks' points on this matter are interesting nonetheless.  The fork does signal the end of an important part of privacy for Bitcoin mining, so those miners who do desire such privacy, or happen to be an a particularly onerous jurisdiction have the choice of quitting Bitcoin mining, or staying on the 1MB chain.

Bitcoin Mining in China:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8kua5B5K3I

The amount of damage the notion of Democracy has done to human kindness and ethics may be incalculable.

Rather than get into specific examples (and there are many types of businesses with freemium models), it might be helpful to consider that there may be other potential sources of revenue for miners beyond just TX fees.
Some of these might be considered unsavory by folks that have privacy / freedom / political goals.  There may well be reasons a miner may have to include TX irrespective of the fee in the TX.


Although I strongly favor reason over authority and don't much care whose face is on a position so much as what that position may be... I'm not political at all myself (though political people tend to assume that I am), and only hope for the success of Bitcoin.  It is the most important development in money in hundreds of years so I remain very grateful for its creation and development.  

For that I am grateful to both Gavin AND to MP (and to the many that came before them), and most all of you involved in this discussion to the extent that the information presented here advances the state of the art of crypto currency.

Yes.  Though this is still a bit off topic, it does relate a bit.

A high microtransaction economy may be functionally difficult to distinguish from a DDOS.
When you also throw in mixers, dice, and other oddities..  the traffic can grow quite large.

Rather than arbitrate what it is to be legitimate traffic, the fee-for-TX incentive structure should do this work.

The "do you have a superset?" issue from IBLT also encourages transaction queueing.  TX that didn't make it into the last block are more likely to be in the peer's set than a newly broadcast TX, and so may have a slightly higher value to the miner due to reduced orphan risk.

Security remains the guiding issue.  In order for Bitcoin to remain trustworthy, and increase its trustworthiness, is not enough to build something that might possibly work, it has to resist attempts to actively break it at its most fundamental levels.

No, not entirely.  Mining incentives are complex, and so also is the marketplace.  I do not see this as absolute.  It is a bit orthogonal to this discussion (or at least my part in it).
I do agree that it very much lowers the orphan risk bar for miners with respect to transactions that have been broadcast.  The benefit comes from the bandwidth reductions and also from smoothing of the traffic.  I see it as probably a pretty good thing.

Miners may include 0 fee transactions, and may not include fee transactions at their whim.  Miners may have their own reasons for doing things.  These reasons may or may not have anything to do with Bitcoin.  This is why not just decentralized mining but also distributed mining and pools is an important factor for Bitcoin to continue to exist.

I would also like to see some better reasoning.  Here are just a few of the reasoning deficits.  There may be some work on these out there in the interstices of the internet somewhere.  If you have a link, I'd like to see it please.

1) Why the jump in size?  Why not 2MB, or 200MB?  It is arbitrary, so why is this picked?  Why not start the exponential growth from where we are now?   Or from when the 1MB was set?  (I think this proposal starts it too high)

2) We are perhaps losing the TOR nodes with the increase.  This is more TOR's problem than Bitcoin's problem to solve though.  (Trading TOR for enabling micropayments is probably going to be OK though Bitcoin may tragically lose some important users and use cases)

3) Why 20 years?  Bitcoin hasn't been around this long, why is there such confidence?  Why not 2 years or 200?  (I think it is too long).  I also think that the wrong "exponential growth" is being looked at here.  This is a "Bitcoin Developer Growth" problem as much as it is a "bandwidth increase" growth problem.  The END of this problem comes from development and innovation, not from picking arbitrary values for these variables forever.  20 years is a long time and I think this problem can be fixed sooner...if we make the effort to do so.

YES

I am not of the opinion that a scarcity market for transactions (at the protocol level) produces greater net mining fee than one which "could" include all transactions that a miner wants to include.  Mining pools can include and exclude transactions and set their own pricing and their own max sizes independent from the max block size in the protocol.  I am happy to let the miners create the market for their own blocks rather than at the protocol.

My "not this fork, please" is not based on the mining incentives from fees at all.  It is about the safety of Bitcoin

At about the time satoshi put the limit down at 1MB from 32MB he wrote:


My problems are:
1) I see both that both the 1MB limit and the exponential growth path of the latest proposal are broken.  The 1MB is acknowledged as broken, at the time of its inception, and ultimately would need to be changed.  I simply see the "20MB Fork" as more broken (and that is a really bad name for it because that isn't the proposal at all).

2) I would rather Bitcoin grow slower and keep is security and robustness than grow faster and lose that, because losing those destroys its reason to be what it is.

I do like what Gavin has done so far, curating the opinions and knowledge of what a good size and growth pattern might be.  However fundamentally iCEBREAKER is right about bigger not just being more, it is also different.  Too big does exist, and exponential growth for 20 years is not a good plan to avoid that.

Like it or not, we are approaching a world of automation.  It isn't going to be "just people" creating transactions for much longer.

Thank you for refining the statement further.  Yes, this is part of what I do not like about the proposal.  Having worked in concert with global telecom and datacom capacity managers for the last 20 years myself, it is just not something that makes sense to predict this far out.  As much as we might find it convenient, the past is not a prediction of the future.

Fundamentally, I also still would like to see the real problems addressed, 1) of why we need to set an arbitrary limit, and then 2) why to have a limit at all.  Taking a shot in the dark and calling it good enough for 20 years, yes that is hubris.

Not impossible, uneconomical.  A high fee microtransaction would be included.
Fees will still vary.  I purposely left "microtransactions" undefined there.  
Zero fee transactions still get into blocks today.  Old coins still get preference.  
What we would lose for sure in a scarcity market for transactions is the small TX with new coins, low fee, at high volume.

This adversity to risk may also be echoed by pools, who can restrict the blocks to <1MB indefinitely if they so choose.  The fork doesn't happen until a >1MB block hits the chain.

We could very well have a scarcity market for transactions for a period of time regardless of the merit (or lack of merit) in the proposal.  Miners may simply wait along with sardokan until there is some better assurance that creating a block isn't going to be invalidated, or that mining on it is going to end up on an orphan chain.