Who is going to be these reliable people? And what if they have a conflict of interest? Trust and hope should never be in the decision making of bitcoin, research and understanding is the way to go

I think there is a safe way: You simply ignore all the upgrade unless you fully understand those BIP proposal. I know today lots of people upgrade without understanding BIPs in new version, so there is a need for user friendly presentation to translate each BIP into language that everyone can understand thus make their own decision

You can not have better connectivity since you already have the best available, the bottleneck is on intercontinental internet backbone. In fact the speed between Chinese miners inside china is very fast, so the rest of the world is struggling catching up with their blocks since the connection into and out of china is miserable and they have the largest hash power

Just check your CPU usage, it is always 100%. I think this has something to do with those dust transactions that was flooding the network during the spam attacks



If a single block took 30 seconds to clear on a mining pool server (Which should be running on very high end hardware), then on legacy hardware it would take minutes to clear

This is also the reason 8MB blocks would never work, if you had just a serials of these kind of block at size of 8MB, nodes will never be able to catch up with the network for days, the whole network will fall apart

Many countries are phasing out petroleum based cars in coming decades, thus the oil demand will keep going down for decades to come. But due to there are still petroleum based electricity power plants, the demand will not drop that significantly, anyway the power for electric cars still have to come from petroleum

A normal open source project is different than bitcoin, since bitcoin is money. Because of billions of dollar of value involved here, this central point of control will attract careerist/capitalist like rotten fish to flies. How can you make sure they are incorruptible, given average developer are not super rich elites in today's society

Exactly. Unfortunately exchanges and businesses usually do not process enough IT expertise at code level, so they are the target of lobbying. You can see that a large exchange coinbase joined XT club, means they don't really understand what that means (If XT forked without super majority, they will face millions of coins sell from the core chain)


That's the problem here, to communicate with businesses and exchanges, developers should describe their idea clearly in understandable form, or with good examples, however they usually have different aspect than business people, so the communication is almost impossible. When you have a communication difficulty or a conflict of interest, then you end up in a political way, to rely on the one you trust, and this will make some politically weak devs to be compromised

At least all the decisions must be backed by concrete data from research and statistics, not imagination or wishful thinking. I suppose that most of the community members are sane and literate 

True, in theory it is so, but in practice it is more complex.

1. Not everyone possess the skills and time to work on github, and most importantly not everyone have commit access, that is the point of centralized control. Even for core devs it is difficult and time consuming to understand the meaning of a complex scheme promoted by their colleagues

2. You can fork to another set of code easily, but you can't fork the whole ecosystem, e.g. community, investors, miners, exchanges, etc... Not everyone have the same weight in this ecosystem, miners and exchanges almost decided which version is "currently official". And the investor who has the most coins can decide which chain can survive economically if there is a fork (trying to fork your own coin and establish your own exchange? The moment your exchange is up and running, you will face millions of coins dumped from pre-fork coin holder)

I think it is very important to keep the communication open and transparent, that is not easy due to the knowledge gap between different actors' expertise in their specific area

Stop right here, give the coins to her and a nice story!  

All story have a bad end if it lasts enough long

Everyone including me who learned about bitcoin will start their own alt-coin (or so called blockchain technology) in 6 months, and in another 6 months they will find out working on alt-coins is a waste of time, then they will return to bitcoin. Now it is banks turn for bank's alt-coin experiment

Do you have any data backing your claim?

You can look at my signature, there were two polls I did years ago towards the users of this forum, you can see clearly majority of the people hold their coins for a long time and they spend a little later on

And I have been working as a bitcoin broker for years, I clearly notice that over 90% of my customers never do more than 1 transaction per week, and a large part of them do one purchase per month, after the salary day. It is also possible those transactions are for international remittance, e.g. people sending money to their family once a month

The people who are interested in high frequency trading are those trading on exchanges, but that does not require the bitcoin traffic. Gamblers are also heavy users since they frequently sending small amount of bitcoin for gambling, but I think it is easy to communicate with those sites and let them change their deposit policy

Exchanges, wallet providers and gambling sites indeed have the requirement to do lots of bitcoin transaction, but since they are a few, they can easily establish their own clearing channel to dramatically reduce the traffic on bitcoin network. That's why Lightning Network seems to be a future direction, but anyway its implementation is very complex thus does not show the benefit over traditional clearing channel. It would require years of review and test before commercial use. And maybe by that time off-chain clearing is already the norm so there is no need for on-chain clearing

I believe there is such kind of possibility, since fiat money is taxation. If bitcoin is widely used, it will reduce the ability of taxation of the government, this is hurting them big and they will find a way to stop it

However if some small country accepted it as official currency, then the situation will be totally different. First this small country will immediately become an economy of 6.6 billion USD, which is much larger than many small countries. Second there will be international law protecting bitcoin from being abused by other governments

So let's wait for the 1st official currency moment, Atlantis is the first one but still lack of formal acknowledgement from UN

Coffe or candy bar analogy is totally non-sense, forget about it. No shops will allow you to do that since the exchange fee to convert bitcoin into and out of fiat money is much larger than the sale they get from coffee or candy bar, only large transactions are interested for merchants

Might be driven by large capital fleeing china

All of these money are printed by FED after 2008 crisis, and large banks successfully sold their crashing assets to FED in exchange for these money

However now they have a big problem: FED printed 5x more money but there are no 5x more products and services in society, in fact maybe less and less due to average people's income is dropping. So if they start to spend these money or loan them out, there will be a hyperinflation that raise the price of almost everything more than 5x, thus make the USD worthless

So in order to maintain a low inflation level and keep the credibility for their money, they won't let those money out, for decades to come. In fact the inflation for capital goods is already sky rocketing, that's the reason FED start to raise the interest rate

The ultimate question is: If blocksize does not increase, will bitcoin die?

I think the answer is a definite NO

The spam attack during October was a good test. It almost filled every block as much as it can, but we just heard little complains from people sending small amount of bitcoins, majority of the users are not affected. This showed how flexible people are when blocks are full. Most important: The exchange rate of bitcoin was not affected by this kind of full blocks

Unlike normal IT business that striving for reaching 100% customer satisfaction, bitcoin is a monetary system. It is no way that FED is striving for average people's satisfaction for their monetary system. In fact, they sacrificed the benefit for almost every one but everyone in the society still adapt to their system and be happy

It is similar here, you should let people to adapt to bitcoin instead of letting bitcoin adapt to people, because bitcoin is money. Service oriented mindset of programmers comes from that they are typically an employee servicing a large enterprise, which in turn provide service for consumers. While the view from FED is different, they create money, every one else beg them for money, so their task is not to make customer happy, but make their money as trustworthy as possible

From this point of view, if something reduce the trustworthy of bitcoin, then it is negative. For example a security hole, an uncertain architecture, or split core devs, these all have negative impact. As long as bitcoin is as robust as gold, I think people will always be attracted and find solutions to solve the capacity problem. The motivation of using bitcoin definitely not comes from its cheap and fast transaction capacity

Imagine that every one uses bitcoin as their retirement fund, how frequent they are going to use bitcoin network? once a month for purchasing, and after decades, once a month for withdraw

True, as long as miners get block subsidy, they will only include transactions if those transactions do not increase their chance of being orphaned. And this will be the case for decades to come, thus make the fee income always small comparing to block subsidy (fee per block = block subsidy x orphan risk)  Is there any chance the fee will rise to replace block subsidy?

I just read a good opinion: Someone pointed out that miners have their own economy wisdom, so when they do the planning, they will calculate the reduce of block subsidy in their business model, thus either deploy more efficient miners (which helps short term wise), or seeking ways to cut maintenance/electricity cost (long term wise). In fact, even without block subsidy reduce, a 50% of jump in difficulty gives exactly the same impact, and I think they are all used to this kind of impact from time to time, so they are very well prepared. This is not something core devs should worry about

Bitcoin might get a higher fee, but it will never lose its most significant appeal in the long run: Long term saving and international remittance

Let's be honest: Bitcoin will never be able to compete with those fast&cheap mobile/3rd party payment solutions that charges 0 transaction fee and instant confirmation (you even get some bonus when using them), and the possibility of refund

For example, Sweden has already over 50% of population use mobile payment. So all of these users will feel angry when they need to pay a fee  to use bitcoin to spend, besides all the hassles about exchange into and out of bitcoin

So, even if you make bitcoin 0 transaction fee + instant confirmation + refund, people would still not use bitcoin to spend, because they gain nothing from switching from existing mobile payment solutions to bitcoin. People who care about bitcoin mostly attracted by its deflative nature for value storage, and they usually buy large amount of coins, so the fee is the least concern for them (I have seen these people paying 5-10% above market price to get 1-2 bitcoin, do you think they really care about the current level of fee?)

If you consider its major advantage against existing financial system, it is clear that the best marketing for bitcoin is either its exchange rate rises (for long term saving), or more and more exchanges are available in each country (for international remittance)

8MB would never work:




Even the Fedwire system that responsible for all the large transactions between FED and thousands of member banks do 4tps only. It all depends on how you use the system. I think it is a huge waste of resource to let thousands of expensive nodes to relay transactions of coffee purchase

Bitcoin gaining popularity not because its payment function, and it will never be. There are plenty of statistics showing that people are not interested in using bitcoin to purchase coffee, they are more interested in use bitcoin to hedge against inflation and make money

This 95% rule is also a rule that can be changed at will, nothing enforce it. If I'm a large mining pool, I will trigger it with even one block and start to produce new blocks immediately

It seems the last defense is exchanges, if exchanges do not upgrade to new software, then all the coins from those new blocks will worth nothing and become useless. You can setup a new exchange for exchanging those new coins, then most possibly they will become some kind of alt-coin exchange with neglectable USD value/volume

I think this is the biggest weakness of bitcoin, e.g. no systematic way to secure the rules from being modified, thus make the software itself a single point of failure

The only measurement we have today is a FOMC like commiter's group, and there is no clear guidance in their decision making, and Gmaxwell has already resigned