100% reserve ratio banking might not be that attractive, even a 40% reserve ratio of gold works very stable after world war II. People gain nothing from a full reserve ratio, but if those savings are bitcoin then it helps to improve the value of bitcoin

And his view about fiat currency and property rights aligns very well with the spirit of bitcoin

"(Part B) Dr. Wright says people are looking at Bitcoin too small (Bitcoin is more than money). In Machine Code, there are none of these limitations. We have a rather rich instruction set in Bitcoin. It's just not well defined. Ethereum is out there developing a new stack because they think we can't loop. But you can in Bitcoin. You have to use a separate control stack. It's not like other control codes where you only have a single stack. It can all be done in the Bitcoin protocol."

This part is interesting, this is the first time I heard about that bitcoin is turing-complete, unlike other guys claimed. If he indeed can demonstrate the implementation in multiple stack, then no doubt he is the most knowledgeable one in bitcoin architecture

Would people choose silver when gold failed?

At this stage, technically it does not really matter who is Satoshi, similar to it does not matter who invented nuclear weapon. But those 1 million coins that possibly Satoshi is still holding obviously attract lots of people, thus the raid

In future, anyone who have more than 1 bitcoin need to hire a bodyguard 

That's one million bitcoins 

This is human's adaptive nature, they usually accept what exists as best. Have you seen those north korean women meeting their leader? They would gratitude to even cry



Similarly, first you have a group of banker invented fiat money system, then you have a group of economists crying that this is the best system in the world

For most of the people it is as real as a foreign currency: The only thing you can do with a foreign currency is to exchange it to your domestic currency and spend. However, each foreign currency have one specific country that you can spend without conversion, for bitcoin this country does not exist physically on the earth, but its inhabitants are living everywhere in the world, so it is a currency that belongs to an invisible country

If the mining cost can be continuously pushed down below bitcoin's exchange rate, then all the buyers will eventually go to mining to acquire bitcoin, and raise its difficulty until the cost is close to market price again. So mining difficulty increase means rising mining cost, it is a positive sign of capital inflow

Another possible reason that mining difficulty increases all the time is that large capitals are fleeing china through buying mining hash power and get bitcoin to spend in another country. Money laundering is very feasible through mining: Kncminer's bank account just been shutdown, I guess that has something to do with flagged suspicious money sending to their account purchasing mining hash power

Let me borrow Peter Todd's famous word: If it is already so then why make it worse 

Yes, soft fork is a much better way to bring in a change, get it thoroughly tested and maybe becomes a hard fork when majority of users have tested it. It also takes time to test. Bitcoin has been tested in live traffic for almost 7 years to reach today's maturity, any large change would also need such kind of test by time

Thanks, but that's Pieter's imagination to re-design bitocin:

"What if we could redesign Bitcoin from scratch? What if you're designing an altcoin, there's really no reason why you would want to do this in Bitcoin. This is actually something we did in sidechain alpha."

Yes, need some more material, especially some examples showing how a transaction is verified in the new design

Ok, so the fully verifying nodes are not going to benefit from the new design, then how does this design improve the communication speed between fully verifying nodes (which is the bottleneck of the current design) ?

The biggest drawback of complexity is it increases the risk of centralization: If only a few guys knows how it works, then if these guys are compromised then the whole system is down. Currently bitcoin is understandable by thousands of developers, but if you go two chain implementation it will take decades to reach that level of understanding, at mean time simple solutions will gain more and more supporters

Even it is a working solution, the gain in that is not even a magnitude, the risk/reward ratio is not worth it. I prefer the simplicity over complexity. I think Lightning network's settlement based design can increase the capacity for magnitudes, that is more worth the effort

Raised level of complexity will bring much more trouble later in robustness and sustainability. That's why those complex network design in early ages of internet eventually died over time

Not only these. I guess chinese mining farms  are mostly driven by large capitals which using the mining infrastructure to move capital out of china due to capital control in China. These investors can hire hundreds of developers in a large project, so they might not be too interested in what devs are saying. For large capitals, the only thing they care about is risk, anything increase the risk will not be considered

Do you really understand what Pieter is suggesting? And the possible consequence in future if it is adopted?

We have observed, even simply raise the blocksize limit to 8MB which is simple enough for anyone to understand will result in huge resistance, this kind of complex solution which requires decision makers to have deep understanding of the inner workings of blocks and nodes would never get serious acceptance if any at all

Back to the basic: How can you validate a transaction without the signature? You can not, otherwise a node will be able to spend anyone's coin and bitcoin will immediately worth nothing overnight

It seems that after the validation and the transaction is finalized in the block, if node can verify the validity of the block, then it requires no detailed transaction data, since everything in that block is regarded as valid

However, if a rogue node send out a block appears to be valid but with transactions with wrong signature, then if other nodes do not validate each transactions in the block, they have no way to know if those transactions are valid, if they approve those blocks and start to build block above this block then those invalid transactions can even spend satoshi's coins

Therefore bitcoin is designed so that any nodes are able to independently verify every transaction, so that it is secure on every node. And that will include lots of data in each block

In order to come over this limitation, Pieter suggested to redesign bitcoin, where the hashes of all the signature goes into the coinbase. But still, without the original transaction data together with signature, you have no way to prove that the hashes are correct, you would still need all those data to prove the validity of each hash. However, those data would be in another chain, then it will reduce the data on main chain, but put the data into a side chain. And in future, that side chain will have all the capacity problem that bitcoin chain have today, even more difficult to deal with