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Lots of chatter and speculation, but still no real-world examples of how a restrictive quota for the quantity of services a producer is allowed to provide results in increased decentralization.
It is amusing, however, to watch tvbcof confuse cause and effect and argue for the opposite of his conclusion.
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I think that's rather harsh. People are processing Bitcoin problems (scalability, block size, etc.) in different parts, from different aspects, and with differing information. I don't think calling anything obvious is fair.
I didn't necessarily mean it should have been obvious to you, but it should be for the person you were quoting, especially since it's been brought up many times in the past. |
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Hang on a second. Am I missing something? I don't think miners need a hard block size limit to have incentive to stop accepting transactions. They will do so because there is always a time limit.
The difficulty target is adjusted to regulate time between blocks, and results in a target with a probability a correct hash will be found within a certain time (regardless the total hashing power of the network). Every second a miner waits to include more transactions in their block the probability is increased a competing miner will find a correct hash for their own block.
When the network receives more than one valid block version within close time proximity it holds both and waits to see which is extended longest breaking the tie. Again, every second a miner waits to announce a block it increases the chance their found block won't be permanently regarded as valid. Physical block size is not a factor in that, and miners will naturally stuff their block with most profitable transactions first. This is exactly true, and rather obvious. The fact that solutions are being proposed to a problem that can be so trivially shown not to exists calls into question the real motives of the people pushing said solutions. |
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However, there are several reasons to think that a completely unlimited block chain capacity (or even one that's only limited by hardware capabilities) will destroy the decentralized nature of Bitcoin mining. It's not worth discussing those reasons in this thread (there are other threads for that), but if one of those reasons is true/plausible, that would justify a limitation of the block chain capacity in my opinion, even an "artificial" one. "Artificial" isn't as bad as it sounds: the 21 million BTC limit is equally "artificial", and nobody wants to get rid of that, for good reasons.
Call me biased if you want, but I'm afraid that completely removing the block size limit will make mining a centralized business, thereby destroying (nearly?) all advantages Bitcoin has over fiat currencies. I don't care if you are or are not biased - all I care about is whether or not your concerns have a basis in reality. I've asked for this several times already, but nobody has ever been able to answer this: please show me a historical example where imposing a production quota results in decentralization. All evidence I am aware of shows the exact opposite happens: production quotas aid the formation of cartels. |
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Increasing the blocksize limit is a possible short- to midterm solution and it's increasingly discussed so this might be undertaken in the near future. I imagine a blocksize of 10 MB is possible thus increasing the limit to 70tr/s. This is already quite impressive and should be enough for a couple of years. Gavin has all but said an increase will happen in his last development update. Bigger blocksize does not only increase the storage requirements but also the time other miners verify a block and thus the risk of producing an orphan block. I've not yet heard of a solution how this might be circumvented. That's a feature, not a bug. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140233.msg1503099#msg1503099I think the longterm solution IF Bitcoin becomes a transaction currency instead of a speculation object is more off-blockchain transactions. How to make those secure and reliably integrated in the main blockchain will be a challenge.
Off-blockchain transactions are a terrible idea, and aren't even necessary. The optimizations needed to overcome the challenges you are referring to are not a mystery. |
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Dammit, jinxed! This thread seems to be losing its power to jinx the rallies. |
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But it somehow seems to me that there is no way to make morality perfecty rational. It will always require a viewpoint and choosing the viewpoint is a moral choice in itself. Is it good, per se, to decide what is good? It's actually not difficult once you understand what ethics actually are. (I'm going to use ethics from now on because morality is a subset of ethics) People use ethical arguments to influence the behavior of other people, either that the other person should or shout not take an action. Ethical arguments differ from other means of persuasion in that they appeal to some universal standard instead of the personal preference of the speaker. If you can convince other people that it is consistent with a universal standard of "good" to give you their best lamb every Sunday, they will be more likely to do so that if you just tell them that you want them to give you their stuff for free. We appear to have an instinctive understanding that the personal preferences of other people do not create obligations in us, but universal principles apply to everybody. Once you know what an ethical argument is, you can examine it rationally. If somebody proposes an ethical rule that can not reflect a universal principle without creating a contradiction then the rule is false. Weeding out all the false arguments will leave behind the truth by elimination, just like how the scientific method is used to weed out incorrect hypotheses. |
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I can use Bitcoin to store wealth Actually you can't store wealth with Bitcoin or anything else because wealth is not storable. Because the number of Bitcoins can not be arbitrarily increased a saved bitcoin balance will retain or even increase in purchasing power over time ceteris paribus. |
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The only real, long term value a currency has is its utility as a means of exchange. If Bitcoin is successful then 20 years from now there will be no exchanges, and no speculation, because there won't be any other currencies to trade against. The purchasing power of a bitcoin will be driven by the needs of commerce instead of speculators, exactly as it should be.
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Does anyone know of an Android app for YouTube that is reliable enough to watch an entire video without crashing, and that allows one to skip to a timestamp and actually expect to have the video start playing from that point?
The one from Google does none of those things for me. Videos usually start playing reliably, but long ones won't go all the way through before a data transfer problem hangs the stream. If I pause a video and later try to resume playback I've found this only works about 10% of the time. If I try to load the video again and skip forward to where I left off this basically never works.
Even over wifi, watching a YouTube video on my phone feels like it's 1993 again and I'm trying and failing to download a 1 MB file from a BBS.
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https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=135There is a non-voluntary, hard-to-change, 1,000,000-bytes-of-transactions-per-block limit that needs to be raised.
And there is… uhh, “vigorous”… debate over when and how to change it. There are always debates over changing things; after the huge kerfuffle last year over multisignature transactions I had to step back and take a break when it was all over, I was so burned out from trying to respond to all the fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
I think a consensus on what to do is starting to emerge; I expect by my next development update we’ll have a plan.
The good news is we all learned a lot from that experience, so I’m confident that raising the 1MB limit will be only slightly painful for most people– you’ll just have to upgrade old Bitcoin software (which you should be doing regularly anyway).
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Is there any way to start earning BTC's, besides mining?
Start a business. |
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I just had one go through and it was only 5 days. Pretty simple and cheap too. For larger orders the fee is much better than Coinbase. How many five day intervals have occurred this year in which the price increase was less than 1%? |
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For cash deposit I'd normally recommend Bitinstant, but they are apparently overwhelmed at the moment so you might have better luck with Bitfloor since they accept cash deposits at BoA.
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Perfect.
The best protection Bitcoin has against being attacked by large criminal syndicates is to convert them to users instead.
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Your 401k will be worthless after it's nationalized, so almost anything would be a better investment.
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Basic morals is a loaded term. 'Basic Morals' have been fluctuating since humans have been alive. There is very little static 'truth' in the world, if any. If there is it's probably only that 'things change' -- including 'Basic Morals'. The principles behind chemistry have always existed, unchanged, since long before humans discovered them. A thousand years ago people thought it was possible to turn lead into gold by reading chicken entrails while smoking peyote, but the fact they were wrong doesn't mean chemistry is flawed. Morality is the same. Everything that has been put forward historically is self-serving and uselessly contradictory. All that means is we're in a pre-rational state with regards to morality. |
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The word anarchy is too charged, and therefore fails to get the actual ideals across. People should just use "decentralized" instead; eg, "Decentralized Capitalism" instead of "Anarcho-Capitalism", and "I'm a decentralist" instead of "I'm an anarchist". etc... I think "voluntarism" is a great term. Sometimes I use the term "atheism" to mean the same thing, since the story we're told about government has just as many supernatural elements in it as any bronze age zombie-worshiping cult you could compare it to. |
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