you say a lot of things.  A LOT of things.  You reply to yourself 20 times.  Your signal to noise ratio is frankly abysmally low.

ok you've made me go to bitcoinity.  This had better be good...

Edit: Big O notation is just a way to describe that the "order" of a function is less than that of another function, not counting the constant factor.

Typically used to describe CPU or memory complexity.  Painfully, people rarely identify the variables in their function or what complexity is being described.  So someone will say: "A bitcoin node scales as O(n)", but should really say "A bitcoin node's CPU use scales at O(t), where t = # of transactions, its disk use at O(b) where b = # of blocks, and memory use at O(u) where u = # of individual unspent accounts (UTXOs)"


EDIT2: ok, broke $250 (on all major exchanges) that IS good!

I'm running it on a used laptop that I bought on ebay 3 years ago for $45 (had to add a disk).  The same laptop doubles as my music player.  Satellite has always been pretty downstream skewed so I'm not surprised if you have issues with any symmetric P2P application.  But your situation is not typical, and you can always purchase a virtual machine for very little if you really wanted a node.

I wish Bitcoin used almost no bandwidth as well... but you can't have your cake and eat it too.



Alright, but I think that if you look at Bitcoin's peer-to-peer architecture, consumer wallets like Bitcoin-qt and SPV phone offerings, writings by Satoshi, scalability discussions on the orginal wiki, and countless presentations by others you will see a strong theme where Bitcoin is presented as a universal currency for everyday use by people.  "Be your own bank"

So feel free to make an altcoin with a limited block size.  But for Bitcoin, please stop trying to morph a temporary "growing pains" patch into "the-way-it-was-meant-to-be" to scratch your own personal itch.  It won't work.  We'll see massive abandonment as loss-of-confidence results in holders selling their coins.  And competitive highly scalable crypto-coins will emerge even if I have to build one myself.

tvbcof, in an alternate universe where we were ALREADY dropping 50MB blocks or so every 10 minutes your arguments would be very sound.  But you can run a full node on a freakin' Raspberry PI!  This very premature limiting of the blockchain size, coupled with Blockstream's possibly competitive technologies, is what makes us cry foul.

We don't need to shunt Bitcoin off into a settlement-only currency just yet.  We could grow 50 times greater before we have to think about doing that, and there is tremendous value in doing so.  For one, it would allow all the layered technologies time to develop.  And also, we'd probably have 50-100x more users, which IMHO pushes bitcoin over the mass adoption chasm.


I think we are at the polarization point in this debate where people are making "arguments" that they barely even believe themselves -- on both sides.  And no one is actually responding to the other side's concerns.  For example, I have not read any response to the problem that if bitcoin becomes a settlement currency it will centralize because the only people who will care to run full nodes will be companies who do settlement.

At this point further discussion is useless.  So we shall proceed with the fork and/or BIP 100 and hope to gain a clear majority.  If that point comes you'll have an interesting choice: you'll be on an old fork that is essentially an altcoin with (as you just described above) significant technical limitations.  So your fork will have neither technical or largest-user advantage.  In such a situation, I hope that you will choose to come over to the majority fork.

I hope so too for you guys.  Go bankrupt -- I believe that that is an inalienable right because the inability to do so results in slavery -- once termed "sharecropping" in the US, but today I think its commonly called "wage slavery".  You seem to be an entire country in wage slavery right now and honestly the people who need to feel the repercussions of the mistakes that led to that are yourselves (done -- you've been bearing the brunt of for years) and your creditors (who so far have escaped unscathed).

Repudiate the debt but don't give the keys to the currency printing presses to your government.  I do not think that they have shown to be responsible enough to handle them.  They may attempt to take them, but you -- every individual -- needs to simply refuse to transact in the new Drachma.  The result would be Venezuela -- and the result of the Venezuela socialist experiment is ironically a 100%-capitalist black market economy (in practice), with an additional leech-class that sucks the value out of the country via artificial commodity to currency exchange rates only available to the politically connected.  You are seeing this to some degree now -- you can't get medical treatment unless you pay under the table in advance in cash.  Imagine that for absolutely everything that can be bought, not that much will be available for sale.   Instead of allowing the above, continue to use Euro, or move to USD (without a local central bank to create monetary units), and keep introducing people to Bitcoin.  I think Ecuador (for one) follows this model using the USD as its main currency unit.

Moving to Bitcoin would actually be best long term since the monetary supply inflation of the Euro or USD will end up being spent not-in-Greece, resulting in essentially a 2-5% yearly tax.  But right now using Bitcoin seems unlikely -- Bitcoin's supply inflation is higher than fiat currencies right now, and asking a country to adopt it en-masse seems far-fetched given Bitcoin's current adoption rate and scalability issues.

I'm tired of your pedantic FUD.  The system originally had a 30+MB implicit limit which was then reduced.  AFAIK the fact that the system didn't enforce the 21million was a bug.  The intention was always sound money. 

Seriously, look at ANY Bitcoin pitch.  Every single one explicitly predicts features that require more transactions than can fit in 1MB.  The promise was NEVER "someday, you'll never use bitcoins but your bank will".  At the same time from the very beginning Satoshi even said that as the network grows, the full nodes would become more centralized.  But he understood that that does not matter because membership is STILL permissionless.  Yes, it might require more money to buy a bigger computer and network but anyone can still join.  Just like it requires more money to mine today.

You have a problem with 20MB, fine.  So propose 8, 4 or something that is not just "wait and see".  However, I never saw a post from you guys about how you tried it with 20MB and it didn't work. But I saw a careful analysis by Gavin showing how it DID work. 

And scalability is harming the network RIGHT NOW, because developers aren't going to base all their work on something that won't work (or won't work without who-knows-how-high fees).

As Cypherdoc will attest, I was Blockstream and sidechain's biggest supporter on this topic.  But now I say he was right.  I no longer trust that you guys aren't trying to steal all Bitcoin's value into a sidechain.

I hate the fact that politics must be played.  But after this debacle, sidechains had better be more awesome than the second coming of Satoshi if they want to make mods that are so much more complicated than changing a constant that there is simply no comparative basis.

My guess is that they want to delay blocksize so they can cram sidechain mods into the same fork as a negotiated compromise.  But this is turning into a huge mistake.  They are burning all the goodwill they had, and making us suspect them of not wanting what's best for bitcoin.  This reputation is going to badly affect their ability to get consensus in the future.

This is a good question.  I will ask around.  We need to first divide the problem into 2 systems:

1. Internal accounting for an external client.  Lawyers and many government sponsored projects need to carefully account for their time, for example.  The ability to track all the coins backwards lets you do that in a way that can't be retroactively "massaged"

2. Straight internal accounting.

I can make some guesses right now though... the point of keeping the actual $ away from the internal txns is to eliminate internal fraud.  However, there can be lots of other non-fraud issues -- like why is it always such a shocker when projects go over budget?  Examination of spending on an internal blockchain can show these trends before the annual monster audit.


In terms of security, there are lots of choices.  The most likely candidate would be where everyone runs SPV wallets, and the finance department runs a few trusted miner nodes.  We don't need to solve trustless consensus for this application -- the finance dept is not going to be 51%ing their own network because no mining reward, and blacklisting addresses is essentially a feature (if someone gets fired their CoCoin is automatically reaped for example).  What they really need is a database with immutable per-record signatures tied to company employees.    

Difficulty is "nice to have" because it makes it very hard in practice to rewrite the blockchain with a fake one starting from six months ago (say).  But even if the finance dept bought 100x its baseline mining capacity to do some massive 6 month ago fork of the blockchain to a completely fraudulent record, it would take massive company-wide participation in the fraud since everyone would have to surrender their private keys.

A lot of large companies, especially those that operate semi-autonomous business units use internal accounting to handle transactions between these units.  So a project manager might have a budget of 1M and he purchases marketing services from the mkting dept, engineering from the dev group, etc.  But obviously money is not actually moved around...

You can see how a private intra-company blockchain could be very useful here, for auditing and real-time tracking purposes.  For external services, you would even "pay" CoCoins to the financial dept. and they would cut and mail a check externally.

This BNY effort is probably the first step towards a consulting business setting this up for companies.


EDIT: yes you have a great point about gold.  And hopefully the same will happen with diamonds (grown in a lab).  Sometimes I think that the best way to handle some of these areas with horrible human rights records is to leave them alone.  But, as we learned with conflict diamonds, realistically and unfortunately that only works if they don't have anything the first world wants.

What I found most interesting about that article is that the energy could not find a market until the miner showed up.  A long time ago I mentioned that bitcoin mining might allow energy providers to over-provision variable energy sources (wind, solar and to a lesser extent hydro).  This would be a good thing for the world, because it means a lower fossil component during marginal production days (cloudy or not that windy).  

It looks like that's exactly what is happening here -- but coincidentally rather than in a planned manner.  


RE: TPTB, I tend to ignore people who consistently reply multiple times in a row during a conversation.  Because there is a pathology there... they are writing more for themselves than for others.  The exception to this rule of course is the guy who is stimulating conversation in a thread by citing interesting new news, etc.  Cypherdoc in this thread and adam in the classic wall observer for example.

Also since the Chinese were late entrants they got all excited about litecoin (or so I heard from a Chinese friend).  I'd imagine that there are quite a few litecoin bagholders there who would be happy to see bitcoin hobbled by limited transaction capacity.

In my opinion miners are pretty exchangeable.  It would be nice to have an overwhelming majority on the larger blocks but if not, oh well hash rate drops a bit.  I think it unlikely that there would be enough 1MB aligned hash power to BOTH continue the 1MB fork AND wreak havoc on the 20MB branch by 51%ing it with continuous 20MB spam blocks.  


The exchanges and payment processors are the most important players in this decision.

I agree with you, they probably won't be able to do it.  But as ZB said this proposal breaks the "1MB because that's the way its been" mentality even if it happens in 3 months instead of 1, so that is a good thing.  Ironically, if it CAN be done in 1 month, that speaks pretty negatively about decentralization -- in the same sense that all the different central banks don't make the system decentralized.  They are all marchin in step to the same drummer.

Nobody is going to put the protocol in hardware -- its not conducive to such.  

On another subject, the anti-expansionists think that we could hard fork in an emergency in a month.  Maybe we should challenge them to prove it.  Let's hard fork to 2MB (the smallest reasonable increase) or 2MB + 10% a year if they'll agree within a month.  If that works, maybe I'll believe that we can do it quickly when it counts

An elastic supply is very important, but I think it can be accomplished more simply, without a pool.

Allow blocks to be expanded beyond their "nominal" size with high fee transactions.  The higher the fee, the further it can appear in the block.  Formally, define a function fee = T(x), where x is the location in the block.  If a transaction's fee is >= T(x), it can be placed in the block at location x.  T(x) = 0 for all x < 8MB (say) and increases super-linearly from there.


Note that this proposal does NOT look at the fees in aggregate -- the max block size <= S(sum(fees)), where S is some super-linear function.  That does not work because a miner could create a dummy transaction that pays himself a very large fee, thereby increasing the block size to allow space for a lot of low fee transactions.

Meni may have added the idea of a pool to solve the above problem.  But I believe that it is more easily solved by not looking at fees in aggregate.


EDIT: the biggest problem with this class of proposal is sizing the fee.  Especially given bitcoin's volatility.  However, if the fee function chosen starts at 1 satoshi, a high bitcoin price will tighten the elasticity of supply (in practice) but not entirely remove it.  At the same time, we STILL need to grow the "nominal" block size: i.e. 8MB + 20% per year, or risk pricing out personal transactions as adoption increases.  However, this class of proposal allows the network to react in a classic supply/demand fashion.  This reduces the pain when supply is exceeded, meaning that a "last-minute" hard fork as proposed by many of Gavin's opponents would be a lot less damaging to the network (block size increases could trail adoption rather than precede it).

Ok I'll bid 5 BTC

EDIT: I'll match 3.9 although I'm guessing that's a bit under my hourly

so you basically want the exact brainwallet.org code to simply be isolated out of brainwallet so you can use it?

But that rising BTC price in the present is ultimately supported by people who DO care and DO research and BUY COINS when the price is NOT rising.


Let's buy ourselves 5 years so we can solve the UTXO.


Bitcoin's "intrinsic value" is its future promise of certain functionality -- functionality that is described in every intro to bitcoin and VC pitch in existence.  This functionality -- hell even the simplest BTC P2P transfer -- does not work with 1MB blocks once the network transactions exceed its capacity consistently.  Even lightning network people calculated that overlay networks DO NOT WORK with 1MB blocks.

This ship is going to hit an iceberg, stop dead in its tracks and start leaking water as soon as the 1MB limit is hit consistently.  But  you are right the cat is out of the bag. For the technology.  The US government, in partnership with major banks, are going to be right there ready to deploy an "decentralized" solution but actually only banks can run full nodes (permission-required decentralized).  And it will trade USD.  And only banks and the govt can issue the "coinbase" txn or see the full blockchain, or allow the creation of new addresses (accounts).

Bitcoin's functional advantage will disappear and it will be reduced exactly to digital gold.  Except there's no reason to hold it vs gold or any other altcoin because you can't fucking transfer it anyway.


The problem with Bitcoin is that so many people didn't get on the train.  So now they hope it will fail so they can board a new train -- Monero, Etherium, whatever.  And they go onto these forums concern trolling as if they are actually Bitcoin proponents.  But suck it up. There is no other train available to you -- the next train will have exclusive membership and will actually be a rocketship (think Apple ipay) deployed simultaneously onto millions of POS, default installation in your phone, automatically connected with checking accounts for several major banks etc.

I don't believe in real time audits.  Perhaps I haven't studied them enough.  But it seems to me that all you need to do is get a group of large holders to agree to basically keep their mouth shut (large hedge, retirement or other mutual funds for example), and you can then "pile" the fractional part (the missing Bitcoin) into their accounts for the purpose of the audit.

Or you pile the fractional part into fiat, gold, real estate, stocks or other assets that have traditional auditing practices.

Or you just play it completely above-board: have a "100% reserve" portion of your business, and also an "investment" portion.  The investment portion is fractional, not the "100% reserve" portion.  Of course, in the eyes of the law, its all one company and account holders DO NOT OWN THOSE COINS.  They simply own a promise that the company will pay them those coins.

Like that classic XKCD comic about beating passwords out of people rather than breaking encryption, you can nerd out on provable audits but the reality is a lot messier.

And when push comes to shove and the bank goes belly up, all assets are totaled (just like Mt. Gox) and then divided among all holders of liabilities according to a judge, byzantine rules, and negotiated contracts.  But there are a few things that you can be sure that will happen during that big mess:
1. It will take forever
2. The process will cost a fortune, massively reducing the payout.
3. The little guy, with no lawyer and no pre-negotiated contract will end up with shit.

Wow, I think I really raised the temp in here!  But let me point out that I said that iCEBREAKER's vision sucks, not himself -- that is I wasn't attacking him, just the idea.

But I can't resist saying one thing ad-hominem about MP since others have brought him up.  He seems to post in an obfuscated, I know more than thou manner, but when you finally decode his meaning it typically turns out to be pretty boring and predictable.

And one note to those of you trying to label the 20MB patch "Gavincoin":  That's not how its going to go down.  Its going to be called Bitcoin V0.11 (or whatever), and your 1MB fork is going to be the old V0.10.

And finally, in a 1MB block world its likely that Bitcoin will never grow because it will not find acceptance due to high txn fees.  But if it beats those odds, in places like Venezuela and Argentina, institutions will "back" their accounts and fiat with bitcoins, but then just like gold surprise surprise the world will discover that they are 10 to 1 fractional and all the account holders are wiped out.  In other words, as I previously stated, back to 19th century banking.

iCEBREAKER, your vision sucks. 

People can't directly submit txns because they are too expensive due to limited space.  So coin used for spending must be held by larger institutions who handle payments internally, and periodically make blockchain transfers among themselves.  These institutions will inevitably go fractional reserve even though they claim they won't.

Congratulations, you've reinvented the gold backed banking system of the 19th century!