It is not, at extremis, about a little bit of profit margin more or less... It is about total PWNing of everyone not in the top however many percent you have to be in to get the limit raised to where you are just fine thanks and all the moaners and crybabies who were, afterall, just cutting into your top percenter obscenely vast income, people who you can employ far better as menial codemonkeys or sysadmins or branch-managers or whatever than by letting them run around encroaching into your top-percenter domains of rulership, are PWNed.

It is a slippery slope, and there might not even be any mechanism to prevent the already existing pre-bitcoin establishment's 1%-ers from remaking the entire resistance movement against them that bitcoin once might have been into just another back forty of their empire.

So far our primary stength has been the world's most difficult proof of work, in the hands of we the people, a power hopefully sufficient to enable we the people to finally, after all these centuries escape the whole paradigm of 1%-ers versus the 99%.

Now some of us seem to suspect we are starting to see the arguments of the 1% insidiously arising ready to corrupt and undermine the entire experiment, turning it into just another too big to fail, too big to hide from Big Brother therefore too vulnerable to being seized by Big Brother tool of, ultimately, good old Big Brother himself, in poison.

-MarkM-

I suspect it is more about exactly how much to increase the block size, including how many years the increase will give us before we end up relenting to yet another increase, then another, then another, then another, as the privileged and entitled and elite continue their normal expectable gameplan of disenfranchising everyone else.

Oh and maybe also forcing the footprint of a full node to such a scale that they can easily sniff out all resistance cells and free speech movements and dissidents and so on.

-MarkM-

Is sheer number of individuals "adopting" the big main essential metric?

What about sheer number of dollars adopting it, or sheer acres of prime real-estate adopting it, or some "value" type metric?

It is said that receiving a dollar each from a thousand people is better than receiving a thousand dollars from one person.

But is a dollar each from a thousand people better than two thousand dollars from one person? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?

Are the 1% utterly valueless without the 99%? Are the 99% actually really the real value, so the 1% are maybe even just leeches preying upon them so that the whole system would be better off with just the 99%, none of the 1%-ers?

Isn't the exchange rate driven more by how much value is transacted than how many peasants hold a token penny from a faucet?

-MarkM-

Yes but low value is not necessarily a bad thing.

If primary chain coins reach a trillion dollars per coin, the 0.005 fee for transacting on it might very reasonably deter people from moving their trillions back and forth just for fun or practice, and also deter them from buying lunch and some rounds of drinks with them for the folks who happen to be at their favourite upscale restaurant-and-bar to show off their eliteness. Meanwhile they still might prefer to use a lower-fee chain, probably with lower value coins on it, when the Joneses are not watchng them waiting to be unimpressed.

Meanwhile I am now wondering just what kind of footprint you do actually need in order to slip under the radar of your local repressive regime while running your local fifth column's backbones?

-MarkM-

A lot of the appearances of the word bitcoin in this thread might be more usefully replaced by the term blockchain based currency, or possibly one might limit that to lbockchain based currencies that can be merged mined alongside bitcoin.

There is absolutely no reason to have the masses running in and out of fort knox every day, but there is every reason to have them able to fire up the primary chain to check that their gold is still there, that it still has the properties they selected it for, that no one has snuck in some subtle timebomb, a change of hard limits or something that will in the long run deny them access by increasing the technical limits that made that particular chain appealing to them in the first place.

Hopefully the primary chain coins will be so valuable anyway that putting your yearly retirement savings in there once a year will be plenty enough transactions on that chain.

Multiple chains seems to me far more scalable, with far more ability to stick to the constants assigned to the particular chain.

All this fuss has in fact led me to think that putting lower limits initially when first deploying a chain than one intends as the permanent and final limits of of that chain, is not a good idea.

At one time I had thought hmm maube to get people initially into a new chain one might get uptake faster by pretend, baby values, to bait and switch people into thinking aha here is a currency my particular level of hardware and connection capability can handle, that I can confidently commit to for life, might be reasonable so that spammers in the earliest days could not immediately push the thing to its max size of blocks and max speed of blocks and max transaction fees and so on to scare people way, making them think oh gosh sounds nice but there is no way I am the kind of person who tends all my life to have that much computer power and connectivity at my fingertips.

So now I think we should be careful whenever deploying a chain not to dress it up in baby values to sucker people into thinking it is something it is not.

If we want to make a blockchain based currency suitable for Google, Mastercard, Visa, Amazon, Paypal, and so on and so on to all use for all their daily transactions and all their customers' daily transactions while every adult and child on the planet also uses it for all their lunch purchases and pocket money and penny-ante wagers we can look at how large we would need block size to be to accomplish that, but I do not think we should pretend that that "establishment megacorp-to-megacorp network" is a grass roots person to person, small enough footprint any normal machine anywhere might be one of the backbone servers "the man" is looking to "take down" power to the people network such as bitcoin was sold to us as being.

-MarkM-

Or if the hard limits increase faster than those efforts bear fruit.

-MarkM-

That seems precisely reversed / backward.

It is only if YOU allow a change to the rules YOUR full node accepts which change permits bandwidth and space attacks which the current rules absolutely prevent that further acceptance of Bitcoin could lead to bandwidth and space issues beyond the scale your normal everyday class of equipment running your existing full node can handle.

That is precisely because the current rules absolutely, totally, utterly do NOT permit ANY block to be larger than one megabyte and even with massive massive uptake of ASICs spewing out blocks faster than one per ten minutes that can only result in so many gigabytes per year that your full node needs to be ready to handle, while whatever class of machine and connection you are already successfully using to run a full node continues to increase in power.

For example if your machine has the normal mass-retail-system disk drive, check how large a normal mass retail system disk drive is today compared to how large a normal mass retail system was one year ago, two years ago, and so on. Basically the price of a "normal consumer grade machine" tends to stay about the same while what it is capable of is more and more each time you go shopping for a normal consumer grade machine.

Even if every block is the absolute maximum size, and uptake of ASICs keeps accelerating so that the maximum rate of increase of difficulty cannot keep blocks from being spewed out at an average rate that never manages to reach the full ten minutes the software tries to target, there is still every reason to suppose that whatever class of machine you are running a full node on, the machines of that class, of whatever future time we project forwards in time to, will be well able to handle it all.

The danger is that someone will lure you into agreeing to download and use a node that permits larger blocks, or that targets a faster time between blocks, or both, so that the fastest speed largest possible blocks scale outpaces the rate at which the class of equipment you are accustomed to using to run your full node grows naturally in the course of your normal day to day obsoleting of your computer hardware.

As it is, if you do not get sucked into changing the crucial limits in the code, you can probably expect to handle your node with the hardware that is handling it now for another few years, by which time normal consumer machines will be so much more powerful than what you are currently using that simply putting in whatever connection and disk drive is then the norm should do you for another few, or maybe even several, years.

It is all very safe currently. It is only if the lure of putting more and more eggs in one basket, as in people onto one blockchain, lures you into hacking at those hard limits built into the current software that you are in danger.

If instead of butchering the existing system you deploy more and more blockchains (which your node's ability to serve as primary chain for the merged-mining of is already programmed in), as many blockchains can be deployed as adoption of the blockchain based currency concept might require in order that all people who need or desire to perform transactions on a blockchain get to do so.

Very likely the more they pay for their transactions the more ancient and respected and secured - and full to the brim every block - the specific chain their comfort level of fees affords them the use of will be. The elite might prefer to pay massive fees for the cachet of utilising the primary chain, the original bitcoin; others might feel the fee level of that chain is too high thus prefer to use the first secondary chain, and so on right down to those who use the latest and leastest chain that demand has caused by any given date to have been added to the panoply of merged mined chains (that the biggest, richest miners are able to mine every one of all at once despite the large number of them...)

Basically, putting the chain you use now out of your reach can pretty much only be done by luring you into hacking at the hard limits that are there to ensure it remains forever within your reach; if at some level of mass demand for blockchain based currency some folk feel it is not fair that there is no room for them on that chain, so what, plenty more chains can be created and all of them secured together using the merged mining ability that is already in the code.

Be very very very cautious of any attempt to make you vulnerable to untenable-for-you bandwidth and space problems that people unwilling to pay the price of the adoption rate pressure they try to apply to you might try to convince you to let yourself in for by changing the limits that currently protect you from any quantity of "adoption pressure" they might try to pressure you with. There is no need to let the masses force you out of "your own" chain, the chain you are already running a full node of. If they need more transactions per day, let them deploy more merged-mined chains...

-MarkM-

Great then, set it up, if people like it they will use it, if it is free open source they will be able to decentralise it which seems to be what you want them to do, yes?

So put it on github or sourceforge or the like, give us the link, we'll download the code and give it a whirl...

-MarkM-

The well heeled elite's "norm" is likely to be out of reach of some people somewhere, but being the entitled, the elite, with their natural disdain of anyone who cannot afford enough sufficiently weighty law firms or enough sufficiently advanced ASICs or enough well enough armed troops or whatever to defend themselves are natural prey, the commons belongs to whoever has the troops to seize it, and if having your and your peers', your similarly elite, similarly entitled buddies' troops actually come to blows cuts into profits well maybe it is better to simply co-operate in having them keep lesser beings out instead of raising your corporate health plan costs by wasting your troops on each others' troops.

Gosh when I think of it this way I start to think the middle east is a commons of oil, and remember hearing of various send in the marines type of stories... Get those ragheads out of the commons because the commons contains something we have the brute force / violence capability to seize regardless of what the ragheads want or do not want...

Heck the ragheads are maybe not even rapiing the planet's resources at max possible speed, a real outfit needs to get in there and get all that oil out and burn it quick to maximise profits because profit now is better than profit later...

-MarkM-

It pretty much *is* "increasing the block size limit".

Don't increase that limit and the total full blockchain will keep seeming a tinier and tinier little database as improvements in technology keep making larger and larger storage systems the norm of the day.

So such a monopoly is pretty much ruled out right now, unless/until someone does start increasing the max block size limit.

Then it becomes initially qualitative: is it a monopoly of the 90% over the rest of everyone? Or of the 80% over the rest of everyone? Maybe it is of the horrible 10% over the rest of everyone, or even the atrocious 1% the anti banking protesters go on about?

Maybe we should try to keep it a monopoly of the more-than-50%, so it is a monopoly of the majority over the minority instead of a monopoly held by a minority over the majority?

Max block size can choose that percent for us; leaving it forever unchanged could keep the the "monopoly" in the hands of an ever-growing majority; allowing it to change over time, whether smoothly or simply by changing more than once, could let the "monopoly" be in the hands of an ever-smaller minority.

That is why max block size is such a "sensitive" issue. Do we want to create a 1% or a 2% or a 99% or what as the holders of that "monopoly"? Do we want it in an ever growing number of hands or an ever decreasing number of hands?

-MarkM-

Here is a much much simpler system.

Instead of trying to "be fair" by divvying up one cryptocurrency among all people regardless of the wishes of those who started that currency up in the first place, lets give anyone who wants one an entire cryptocurrency of their own!

Anyone and everyone can have their own personal cryptocoins!

Luckily for this grand plan RIpple.com migiht let me say "the IOUs you issue on Ripple are those personal cryptocoins!" otherwise I might have to face objections about four bytes of connection handshake magic bytes or four bytes of port number space isn't enough to sufficiently differentiation each and every person's blockchain-based personal currency to keep them from colliding when connecting...

So go ahead, start your own cryptocurrency! Issue them as fairly or unfairly as you wish!

It is unfair, however, to insist that others should distribute theirs according to your preference rather than their own...

-MarkM-

Are you aware of Ripple.com?

-MarkM-

Doesn't Ripple basically make every normal user a fidelity-bonded bank, with the "gateways" as the fidelity-bond vaults?

I say this because it seems to me one can regard a "gateway" to be functionally equivalent to, or at least quite akin to, placing a fidelity bond sum of value somewhere. Any of the IOUs backed by that "bond" can be made good at the fidelity corp aka "gateway" instead of by the "bank" (the person who actually transfered to you such a "fidelitous" IOU instead of one of their person IOUs).

Or is the key distinction in your "fidelity bond" concept a kind of "fractional fidelity" system wherein the amount of IOU "insured" by the bond can exceed the amount of the bond itself?

-MarkM-

Loonies aren't legal tender where you're from, eh?

-MarkM-

Isn't part of this whole cool story the tale of the brave defenders of the original one true bitcoin who will do just that?

-MarkM-

Various ideas have come up from time to time to lock-step exchange rates between chains, but I think in the kind of scenarios we are usually hoping / projecting for that stuff is kind of a bit anal, in that whether or not a coin or few more or less does or does not exist in the primary chain isn't actually a big deal. For one thing we don't even know already how many coins actually really exist right now "in practice", just how many were minted and a bunch of cool stories about how this that or the other poor fool managed to purportedly lose some coins. Have any of them even proven they are really lost? Can it ever even be proven?

If we turn out to only have 20,999,999 trillion-dollar coins instead of 21,000,000 trillion-dollar coins how much difference does that make, really, to the value of each of those coins? Especially with variances as new technologies and products come into existence to be bought and sold, and old technologies decline in attractiveness to be bought and sold less and so on. (Ultimately its the universe you can count with the beans that measures the per bean value, yes?)

Is the first secondary chain likely to be worth even one whole trillion dollars? If so then how many trillions? Of the first ten secondary chains, about how many trillions is each entire chain likely to be worth?

Meanwhile don't think fiat is going to up and walk off into the sunset in the meantime. And how many ounces of silver are out there? And how many ounces of gold? And how many lower-class-family full lower class conveniences housing units? And how many middle-class-family full middle class conveniences housing units? And so on and so on and so on. There is an ocean of value to count the drops of and a lot of beaches of grains of sand of value and humanity keeps creating more value out of less materials all the time, as Bucky Fuller famously pointed out.

I doubt there is really a whole lot of point in getting anal about the silly bean-counting games that maybe when taken too seriously, especially if allowed to cause people to imagine a universe of scarcity instead of recognising the universe of abundance in which we actually are, xould potentially lead to uncool stuff, hostility, violence, gosh knows what.

There are more than enough forward people-days of lifesupport for everyone, and all the tools to increase the number of people-days of lifesupport going forward, so lets not bother trying to legislate the exchange rates if we don't have to? Why tee off the free market enthusiasts over a few more or less beans, peas, legumes, peanuts, chickenfeed etc etc etc if we don't have to?

-MarkM-

Wow nice idea johnyj, I like it! Well done!

Of course whether it will play out that way remains to be seen, but really nice story, especially if it does play out.

-MarkM-

Can we go with specialisation rather than centralisation?

By keeping the primary chain as small and efficient as possible, focussing on its being 24/7 live-verifiable by as many people as care to verify it as it happens, maybe we can keep mining accessible.

Meanwhile by creating many many many secondary chains, maybe we can also keep the verifying of any one secondary chain, maybe even the primary chain plus one secondary chain, accessible?

Large mining outfits could merge absolutely every regional, niche, and special-purpose chain, smaller outfits could pick and choose which chains to merge, depending on what economic sectors, industries, scales, neighbourhoods or whatever they happen to be interested in verifying at any particular moment.

But hey, we already have lots of blockchains, so if one of them wants to go ahead and use terabyte blocks why not? We all should have plenty of advance notice and plenty of time to trade our holdings on that chain for holdings on other chains, right?

We already see though that folk who favour the "primary" chain which all the merged chains are designed to depend on to provide the world's most difficult proof of work, have quite some tendency to refuse to even consider merged-mining.

Thus maybe we need to abandon merged mining as too impractical in the face of the prejudice of the entrenched / vested-interest "establishment" and urge them to go ahead and make blocks large enough that we can migrate all our altcoins to coloured-coin format, putting them directly on the world's largest blocks blockchain due to the "establishment" wanting to monopolise not only mining difficulty but also blockchain-size?

Or maybe terracoin and litecoin and bbqcoin have it right, that the "establishment" is too prejudiced to merge with; maybe terracoin and litecoin can be the new "primary" chains, one for SHA256 the other for Scrypt, and grassroots power to the people mining afficonados should eschew the "establishment coin" and seek to build merged mining setups that can beat its hashing power? Afterall, ensuring "the people" have more hashing power than "big business", "the military-industrial complex", "the world banking cartels" - in short, "the establishment" is a well established tradition in the cryptocoin world already...

Maybe we need to know what exactly all the various chains have in store in the way of immutable or arbitrarily vast / uncapped block sizes so we can start planning how much of our portfolios to place with how "eatablishment" and how "grassroots" a collection of blackchain projects?

-MarkM-

Hmm sounds like you agree with Cunicula then, that one corporation running the whole thing, providing transactions at the lowest visible fee, is not a problematic outcome.

So for the "dumping" case it does not matter that they are able to use massively deep pockets or massively long term forward-looking to justify to themselves, and to actually accomplish, "dumping" long enoguh to drive all competitors out of the market and to establish sufficient barriers to entry to keep any potential competitors from being able to raise a hand, invisible or not, against them?

Getting ownership of prime tourist hotel real-estate in a quaint and picturesque locale seems like plenty of justification for "dumping" plenty of stuff.

Do you know of any references pointing to these starving people the documentary glibly chose to overlook?

-MarkM-

Yes, but, if we the people cannot ourselves examine the gold-plated bars of tungsten n Fort Knox are we fools to think it is actually gold, as some traditions or propaganda claim but none of our friends or family, or in general no-one we actually trust, is able to assay the stuff?

If we cannot validate blocks aren't we in the position of risking every ten minutes that our "gold" has been replaced, behind our backs and by means of deliberately bloating the network instead of using scalable solutions such as a plethora of merged-mined chains, any one of which we could be careful to ensure is within our means to verify, and thus can monitor it 24/7, checking all of its blocks?

Why this determination to prevent we the people from assaying those bars of unknown but possibly somewhat gold-like in appearance material?

Multiple chains is very scalable. Trying to create one monolithic chain too vast for an ever growing fraction of the people to verify is, it seems, almost deliberately trying to keep the people in the dark, maybe motivated by the lure of one massive ("too big to fail"?) chain.

What is next? Maybe "sorry, you cannot examine the blockchain because that would violate the privacy of our users, only we the lords and masters are permitted to do that" ?

-MarkM-