QFT. That is all.

Not yet having caught the tip of this discussion, I just want to say...

+1!

Oh - and ... well done!

yes...


..aaaaand NO. Consensus is an emergent property of the system.


Nope. As previously stated. Imma run 2 MiB. Try to stop me, mofo*. *ppttthhhbbbllttt!*

*no animosity expressed or implied XD

All right -- I gotta stop you right there.

I have had direct, face-2-face convos with Larken dating back to the last millennium. Yes, he (intermittently) uses Bitcoin. But what exactly are you trying to convey here, that has anything whatsoever about the discussion at hand?

Tell me how this particular interview with Larken has anything to do with the 'death of bitcoin due to starvation' vs. 'death to bitcoin due to centralization' debate.

Or are you just trying to steal some unearned 'my lib is better than your lib' cred?

As posted upthread, I did. Yet still on what you perceive as 'your' blockchain.

Fuck you very much.

Ain't a damned thing you can do about it.

*tee hee* (he muttered, sarcastically) <- picture that in a 'poodle bites' sidebar voice

The most delicious morsel, of course, is how proudly you wear your ignorance on your sleeve.

*yum!*

Jeebus... these block size wars are a bad train wreck of which I cannot look away.

Both sides of this debate has their own untestable axioms, a handful of reasoned thinkers, a passel of follower-droids, and a handful of ignoramuses who repeatedly spout completely discredited shit. Yet for all the noise and fury, for all the pages of fora we have killed and scrawled e-ink upon, the needle moveth not one iota.

The only way to truly determine whether big blocks or reduced utility will kill bitcoin is to run the damned experiment.

For today, I am tired of trying to get the other side to listen to reason. But we're in a field of permissionless innovation. And I know which hypothesis I believe has the overwhelmingly larger chance of leading to a sustained -- and growing -- Bitcoin.

So fuck all y'all cripplecoiners (admittedly loaded term, employed mostly for comedic effect - you can be offended if'n ya wanna). Imma complete my BU review. If I find no cruft, imma replace my Core node with BU. Imma set it to accept 2 MiB blocks. Then I'll start looking at the other bigblockian options. In case one looks better.

The best part: I don't need your fucking permission. Deal.

BULLISH.

Well, no. Bearish, actually, because gives additional motivation to sell bitcoin. But still, that's pretty cool, and I see it as a step forward.

Mea culpa. I apologize for my misunderstanding.


But now you've lost me again. While I don't want to stretch the metaphor of a criminal trial, in such things one typically needs to prove means, motive and opportunity. While I don't believe the chicken feed involved in the Marshal's auction is enough to even register as motive, I'll spot you that. Won't even ask you for any evidence.

But, what is the means by which the USMS 'pumped' the market? What was the opportunity? Are you telling me that they bought enough bitcoin to manipulate the market upward? I thought they wanted to divest. Where is the evidence?


Plausible. The municipal water here is flouridated. And I drink some of it. On the other hand, it may have more to do with the utter lack of evidence you present. Shall we dig deeper?

'state' as in the governmental state? Are you in the US? I didn't think any state depositories performed this service any longer.


Fascinating. I've not logged into stamp for some time. How does one take possession of the gold they've bought with their bitcoins?


That all makes sense...


... but that sounds looney. If the government or some other form of TPTB wanted to herd the sheeple into bitcoin, they're doing a pretty piss-poor job of it. Seven years of herding with no more than a RCH proportion of the population participating in any crypto. What is the reasoning behind your assertion?


huh hunh. "big block of cheese day". I think I've seen you use that expression before. What is the genesis of this expression? Is it yours? Why cheese? What does it denote? Don't get me wrong - I don't mean to denigrate it. It has a certain appeal.


Plausible.


Not as plausible. While many financial assets could easily tank under such a scenario, stocks are at least _supposed_to_ represent a share of actual tangible wealth. Tangible wealth does not vaporize in a financial or monetary calamity. Because it is ... err ... _tangible_. Connect the dots for me?


I don't get it. Maybe if you can identify who 'they' are I might understand. But AFAICT the 'they' that are usually discussed in these terms have had nothing to do with the development of bitcoin or other cryptos. Unless you want to count Mike Hearn. But not only do I not think he is a member of the canonical 'they', but he has not so much advocated for reduced fungibility of cryptos, as much as pointed out that such could be done from a technical standpoint.


Maybe you can explain to me how the blockchain enables 'maintaining international power of monetary control'?

I've not noticed that many countries have been banning Bitcoin. Maybe I just missed it because my country does not. Could you list these countries that have banned Bitcoin?

Well, I'm glad I reiterated it, because that's how I interpreted it. I certainly don't wish to put words into your mouth. Let's see where I went wrong:

1) US Government is planning on tanking the US Dollar. Is this your belief?
2) Bitcoin is a tool they created in order to facilitate this goal. Is this your belief?
3) ... .gov decided to use [bitcoin] to extract vast sums via auction. Is this your belief?

thanks

Absolute crazy talk. Let me repeat back what I think you said, and see if I understand your conjecture.

US Government is planning on tanking the US Dollar. Bitcoin is a tool they created in order to facilitate this goal. Despite the strategic value of this tool, .gov decided to use it to extract vast sums via auction. Except it wasn't vast sums - it was a paltry ten mil $. And that's not the pump - that's the entire value. In a tril $ economy. This from the cabal that can print money at will. Right.

Sorry - doesn't pass the sniff test.

Both of these statements cannot be simultaneously true. Which one do you consider dominant?

If indeed it is true that 1MB4EVA is part of Bitcoin's social contract, and indeed anything changed in the social contract will alienate the dominant plurality of the socioeconomic majority's critical mass, then you can go back to sleep, as BU presents no risk to you.

But your being here, expending effort in arguing against BU, is an indication that you are afraid that your assertions are incorrect.

If the economic majority does not agree to some new limit, then any fork based upon that limit will die. It requires an economic majority to sustain any fork.

I can only speak for myself, but I do agree with you that there are certain attributes that I feel are sacrosanct -- without which I would divest.

However, I do not agree that 1MB4EVA is even remotely part of these fundamental principles. Further, it seems you've lost that battle even amongst the majority of those that oppose a simple maxblocksize increase at this point in time.

Must suck. Sorry.

No. My point is that multisig necessarily _increases_ the size of a transaction - by replacing one signature with several. SegWit's 3-4x claim for multisig is based only upon the fact that they don't count the signature portion of the transaction in the 'block size' accounting. If there are no -- or an insignificant number -- of multisig transactions, then SegWit's claimed 3-4x due to multisig is either zero, or an insignificant amount, respectively.

In a world where multisig is the norm, yes SegWit will have an effective transaction count increase. But here in the real world, where multisig is very little, MultiSig's claim of 3-4x increase is smoke and mirrors.

Soooo.... centralize the use of crypto by forcing it through gatekeepers? Nope, again - not a vision I can support.


The situation is not dire. Until it is. See that new addition to chartbuddy? Chance that SegWit will even be coded and tested in time for the impending saturation seems nil - let alone time for adoption to do anything. We're outta runway. A modest bump in maxblocksize (e.g. doubling) may put off saturation for enough time for SegWit to become a reality.

As a sidebar, please tell me how multisig increases capacity. I do not believe it does. Multisig actually requires more signature per transaction. Until we have a significant volume of multisig, SegWit's putting the signatures outside the block size accounting does nothing for scalability. SegWit's '3-4x for multisig' is completely dependent upon the proportion of multisig transactions, is it not?

Did you not admit upthread that you know of no way to examine a given transaction, and objectively categorize it as 'valid transaction' vs. 'bogus transaction'? Or was that someone else? If it was someone else, can you explain to me how you can objectively determine whether a given transaction reflects (what you casually dismiss as) 'actual use'?

If not, you offer exactly zero solutions.


Keeping the artificial limit at half-mil/day does nothing to deter such a spammer. Indeed, it only makes it cheaper for such a spammer to completely overwhelm the entire network, as less transactions are required to do so.

But again, you're only debating a second-order effect. The first order effect is that keeping the current maxblocksize ensures that no more than a half-mil transactions per day can be conducted in Bitcoin. Period. No matter how much is paid in fees. Finito. Game over.


Duh. Red herring totally unrelated to the discussion at hand. What you seem to fail to acknowledge is that this advantage applies to many cryptos. These benefits are not the exclusive domain of Bitcoin. I would like Bitcoin to remain the only crypto that matters. You seem hell-bent on suiciding it.


Nobody of which I am aware is advocating an instant increase to 100M transactions per day (Visa-scale). And yet you persist in arguing against a modest increase in the maxblocksize. Did I miss where you divulged the magic transaction throughput where you believe the system will break down?


Again, 'small fee' is a red herring. The issue is inability to transact at any price.


IOW, suicide Bitcoin so that some other alt can absorb its market share. Got it. Not a vision I can support - sorry.

If the current formula accurately reflects the percentage of total potential used block space that had actually been filled, I would advocate no change. To do otherwise turns it into a meaningless statistic. Better to have the simple unvarnished truth, rather than some manipulated figure meant to illuminate some vague outcome.

Yes. A 'spammer' with sufficient resources can clog the system, no matter how high the maxblocksize is. So what? That is not the relevant point.

The relevant point is that, at the current maxblocksize, the system supports only a half-million transactions per day (+/-). Period. No more may be processed, even if every such attempted transaction was accompanied by 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, or more BTC. This is a hard limit currently, and this is an absolute fact. I don't know why you keep trying to deflect the conversation to the less-important 'amount of fees issue'.

In and of itself, the half-million per day limit would be no issue, but only as long as no more than a half-million 'valid' transactions are attempted per day. However, we are currently trending towards saturation. On average, blocks are currently approximately half-full. And in the last year, actual block size has increased 136%. On current trend, we don't have a year to raise this limit before user frustration. We don't have a half-year. If we get a surge in adoption this month (not an unlikely prospect, given the widely-media-discussed doubling in price over the last quarter), we could easily saturate within weeks of today.

When new interested parties arrive, money in hand, but are thwarted by not being able to acquire Bitcoin due to there being no room in any block for their transaction, what do you think the result will be?