Who are "They"?

Are you saying that you don't actively participate in the economy (by buying and selling stuff) so that means that you can care about centralization but those who participate don't? That is flawed logic. I participate in the economy, and I care about this. Other people also participate, and they clearly care about centralization and where Bitcoin is going. And it does also affect their profits. If Bitcoin goes in a direction that is bad for Bitcoin, then they are going to lose profits. So yes, they will care if it goes in a direction that makes them lose profits.

According to the commit that marks it as withdrawn:

Right, only those who actively use Bitcoin and don't just hodl. They are the people who actively participate in the economy and they are the ones that can exert influence. It has always been like this and always will be, as that is how every economy works.

Everything depends on the users, those actually spending. Businesses will accept what people are using, exchanges will accept what people are using, and so will miners because then they can use what they are mining.

Those who have a lot of Bitcoin and just hodl don't have any control. They can't do anything because they aren't actually participating in the economy, so they have little influence.

If they do get close to 50% of the hash power, miners will move away from mining on F2Pool. Miners understand that if they give a pool too much hash power they could potentially do terrible things to the network. And there is a precendence for this. A few years ago GHash.io was a huge mining pool, and it actually did reach more than 50% of the hash power. However once miners noticed, they moved away from using ghash.io and went to other pools. All of the miners who mined on that pool no longer did and thus they lost hash power. The same will happen if f2pool or any other pool gets close to or obtains the majority of the hash power.

Would you rather that there be absolutely no chance for a cure for cancer? The fact that we have researchers looking for cures means that the odds of finding one are greater than 0, and that is much better than guaranteeing that there is no cure.

Prevention you say, well vaccines prevent illnesses. But without advances in medicine we wouldn't have vaccines. Without further advances there wouldn't be vaccines for new diseases, and we wouldn't be able to improve the current ones to work better.


While true, it is just as easy to manipulate users away from a dark agenda. It is easy to manipulate people to revolt, as we have seen historically in a number of large revolutions.

We is the users of Bitcoin. There are many users of Bitcoin who, like me, actually give a shit and research things. If we (technologically savvy and actually caring about the code and technical details) are aware of changes being made that could be disastrous, we would let everyone know. And most people who use Bitcoin now are not ignorant and many people do care. It will be the people who join later if/when bitcoin goes mainstream that don't care and are ignorant.

No, you have the wrong philosophy. Everything needs development and improvement. Without improving medicine, the average lifespan would not be in the 70s and 80s; we would not have eradicated diseases like smallpox; diseases that we don't consider life threatening would kill you. In industry, improvements increase output, efficiency, quality among others. Without improvements to our technology, you wouldn't even be here on the internet discussing on an internet forum about a new technology called Bitcoin. If everything simply stopped at the first iteration like you are suggesting, then we would still be using rocks and living in caves. Improvements and development of things are required to advance anything.

It is resilient. Bitcoin right now can survive a lot of things, including forks. But there can be improvements made. If development were to stop, bitcoin would still work, but it would not be its best.

How exactly is it a command and control vehicle for manipulation in the future?

Again, open source. If we don't like what the developers do, then we just fork and use a client created by other developers. Even if one country regulates Bitcoin, that doesn't mean that all countries will. Developers in other countries can simply step in and replace those that were removed due to regulation.

That would be Bitcoin core's wallet file. You have in essence two wallet programs, one is Bitcoin Core and the other is Armory. The one with all of your Bitcoin is the Armory wallet, and that is the one you should care about. The wallet.dat file is for Bitcoin Core and that one is irrelevant to you. The wallet you want is in the Armory data directory.

What version of Bitcoin Core and Armory are you running?

Can you provide us the debug.log from Bitcoin Core and the armory logs? You can find the debug.log by typing
into the folder browser (assuming you haven't changed the data directory) and opening the debug.log file.

The armory logs can be found in
(assuming you haven't changed the armory data directory). There are two of them, and they both have log in the name, so it should be pretty obvious.

Just copy and paste the logs into a post here in code brackets. If they are too long, just post the last 150 lines of each log.

If you are using the term "balances" as the value assigned to an input or output, then you are correct. However in the OP you are defining balances in the way that most people associate the term "balance" with, the value associated with an address. Of course that doesn't exist at a protocol level, and neither do addresses.

Can you explain what you are exactly trying to say using protocol level terminology and not using abstractions like balances?

But it is also the way that pretty much every single open source project out there works. You don't need commit access to the main project if you can just fork it off. The not having commit access is good because it prevents people from inserting malicious code and just screwing with the whole thing.

That is true. Miners carry a lot of weight, but I think the exchanges carry more. Miners aren't going to mine on a fork if they can't exchange it. The same kind of goes with business that accept Bitcoin. They aren't going to use a fork if no one uses it and likewise miners and users won't use a fork if no one accepts it. It is kind of a big convoluted circle, but I don't think the developers have that much weight. They can't really force people to do anything, but businesses and exchanges can because the economy relies on them, and that is what is important.

Communication is open and transparent, at least among the developers. All of their discussion is in the mailing list, irc, or on github. And all of it is logged so people can go back and see what has been said. Of course technical jargon and acronyms are often used so it can be hard for nondevelopers to understand.

That is not a correct comparison. Gold and the concept of Bitcoin being an item are there. However what we are improving is the method of transacting and transferring Bitcoin. The same thing happened with gold. Gold itself never changed, the same with Bitcoin (if you abstract the technicalities of Bitcoin to be actual coins). The methods of moving gold around have changed. It used to be lug around a ton of gold and hand it to someone else in a transaction. It became give your gold to someone else who gives you paper which represents that gold. Without those constant improvements to the way gold was transacted, we would still be lugging around chunks of gold, hacking off a bit, weighing it, and then handing it over in a trade. That transaction method is still in general the basic method of transacting, and is the basis of higher level easier transacting of gold.

The same thing is happening with Bitcoin. There are improvements being made into how it is being transacted. Currently we use send to addresses. Improvements were made for payment requests, multisig transactions. Improvements are being made for locking outputs so that they can only be spent at a later date. There is work done to reduce the amount of data you need to store. There are improvements being made in the ways that we are transacting Bitcoin just like there were improvements in transacting gold.

THAT IS NOT COMMUNISM. YOU CLEARLY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT COMMUNISM IS!!! DO YOUR RESEARCH INTO WHAT COMMUNISM ACTUALLY IS!!!

That is simply planning, and it may be centralized. BUT IT ISN"T COMMUNISM!!

You can also draw the comparison for planning things in advance into everything. Are you telling me that you live your life without planning a few years in advance? If you do, by your logic, you are a communist! Also, everything has future plans. Huge tech companies like Google and Apple plan things several years in advance.

It isn't communism, it is simply good organization and actually knowing what the hell you are doing. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH COMMUNISM!!!!!!!!!

They do. But they can also be replaced. If people don't like the government, they revolt and replace the government with another. Likewise, if people don't like what the developers are doing, they can simply move on and go to a new fork which has different developers.


Again, open source and the freedom to choose what you want to run protects against that. People don't like where Bitcoin is going, they switch to use another fork.

0.12 of what software? Bitcoin Core?

No its not. Please do your research about the differences between communism and socialism. There is no central planning in communism. In communism people agree to share equally and adhere to those ideas. In socialism, there is a central authority who is forcing everyone under their command to adhere to communistic ideas, whether they want to or not. There is a huge difference between the two.

Balance between what? Developers don't have the "ultimate power". They can only publish something, its up to the users whether they want to use it or not. No one is forcing the users to use certain code, it is all up to the users to decide.

What exactly are you concerned about? They also do not and cannot despotically decide over what happens to Bitcoin. Again, it is up to the users to decide whether to use their code or not.

If you don't like the developers, then what do you propose we do? How are you going to restrict their power without giving someone else power? I think the current system is fine. There are many many developers, not just the core developers, who contribute to discussions and code. Even if one person wants to go in one direction, there may be opposition. In fact there often is opposition to proposed ideas, from both the community and other developers. Yet they always reach consensus before merging something in through various compromises. No one developer holds absolute power, and there will most definitely not be a collusion of developers to force Bitcoin in one direction. There are simply too many people with too many differing opinions for that to happen.

Communism isn't centrally planned. Communism is everyone sharing and reaching consensus without a leader. I believe what you are thinking is socialism, which leads to dictatorships.

But that's not the point. Development allows improvements to the software. It fixes bugs and adds new features that people want. Without development you are basically hoping that no one at any point in time will want any other features and that there will be no vulnerabilities in the code for people to exploit. It is predicting the future, and that is impossible. We need further development to improve Bitcoin.

Another thing is the open source. While yes the developers have power because they can change the code that people use, the open source nature means that not everyone has to use what the developers want you to use. You can at any point fork the code and modify and write your own client. It doesn't have to conform to the rules that the developers have set, you can set your own. If people don't like where Bitcoin is going, they can switch to use another client, or just use another altcoin.

There is no way to make it any faster besides getting better hardware. The thing that you are doing now isn't actually a full resync. It is reindexing which takes significantly less time since you already have all of the data. It just needs to organize it into databases. This step depends on your hardware. Faster CPUs do this faster.

If you don't want to wait, you can export the private keys from the wallet and import them into another wallet like Electrum. If you want to do that, we can help you. Just that if you do, you must NEVER SHARE the private keys you export with anyone else.

If it takes you that long to sync, then I would advise that you not use Bitcoin Core. Try using a lite wallet like Electrum. It doesn't need to download and sync the full blockchain. It works better for people who have slow internet connections.

Are you saying that something is broken or are you just wondering why you should upgrade when nothing is broken?

If it is the latter, the reason you should upgrade is because the latest versions have bug fixes that fix some important issues and they implement new BIPs. The latest version fixes a vulnerability in UPnP which made it possible to crash a node with a malicious UPnP server on the network. There are fixes to reduce the effects of spam attacks on the network so that your node doesn't crash from an overload of transactions. There are fixes to optimize memory and reduce memory leaks. Lastly there are additions to support BIP65 and BIP113. BIP65 support means that a soft fork will happen which enables OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY. Although soft forks are backwards compatible, sometimes soft forks can be problematic like the issue that happened with a soft fork back in July. However those running the latest version will not be affected by most forking issues, especially those like the one in July.

Yes. P2sh can be used to create any address using any type of script and it should be considered a standard transaction.

I'm not sure how this would work, but it is one of the ideas that I have been thinking about. I just don't have time to do it though.

The idea is a mixer that is automatic but does not rely on trusting the mixer like traditional mixers do.

Or a mixer where it is impossible to trace the coins even if they kept logs.

You don't need to wait for blockchain.info to drop it. It looks like most other nodes have probably dropped it already.