Fiat money distribution unevenness is the most clear: EVERY dollar belongs to central bank when they were created, a few bankers hold 100% of all the money in the beginning. Of course central banks immediately spent those money by loaning them out after they were created, bought large amount of land/bonds. So it seems that they don't hold large amount of money, but all the assets they are holding were bought with those money (The amount of assets in the world are still magnitudes larger than money supply)

Imagine that hundreds of years ago, Alice had all the land in a country and Bob had nothing. This is 100% vs 0% inequality

Then Bob started to work as a gold miner and traded between the producers. Soon he became a gold smith that actively manage the gold for merchants around the country, and eventually become a banker. Now he is owning about 10% of the wealth of the country, still 90% vs 10% inequality

Then Bob managed to become a central bank after several centuries, and successfully removed gold standard. Now Bob can print as much money as he want to buy whatever he want, just keep inflation low, if he is too hurry, inflation will pick up quickly

However, at the same time, Alice discovered Bob's trick, she start to raise the price of her land following Bob's money printing, so after a while Bob's money printing will just raise the price of Alice's land, and no matter how much money Bob print, he will never be able to buy enough land to change the inequality landscape, he will just make Alice richer and richer

So, if the ownership is protected by law, then inequality once established, is almost impossible to change, especially it is something that is scarce and have good utility like land

In a communism model you would remove the private ownership for every thing, replace it with collective ownership and centralized planning, that is maybe a way to permanently eliminate inequality, but it is also very inefficient and unproductive

Throw some cactus seeds in first 

Inequality is a natural phenomenon, it exists almost everywhere: A few land lords hold majority of the land, a few bankers hold majority of the gold. This is partly due to each people's different vision and most importantly because the effect of time: Even if every one start with the same resource in the beginning, over time, wealth will shift to those who are interested in accumulating more and more, kind of centralization

And there is also volatility, those who don't have the faith will be shake out by up and downs. I can see that top 100/1000 is reducing their bitcoin holding right now, but who is faithful enough to buy in when those whales are dumping? Many early adopters eventually lost money because they don't have a long term vision

But anyway bitcoin is always generated through work, by the time when block reward reduced to less than 6.25/3.125, the fee would have already approached the block reward, so you never need to worry about not being able to get bitcoin: You can always mine to get bitcoin. The biggest benefit of the bitcoin monetary system is that everyone can create money if they want, but they have to input equal amount of value, no shortcuts or debt financing like in fiat monetary system

Definitely, because price raise is adrenaline  

Consider two different scenario:

1. bitcoin is able to handle millions of transactions per second but price keeps going down every year

2. bitcoin is only capable of 7 tps, but price doubles every year

In case 1 more and more people will leave bitcoin, and in case 2 more and more people will use bitcoin. If you get more and more people interested in using bitcoin, then any kind of solution to solve the scaling limitation will automatically come up, no matter how technically challenging it is

Believe it or not, for majoriy of people, what bitcoin matters is its ability to fight inflation or make some profit, not instantly buy coffee, which they already can do without bitcoin

The Fedwire system which handles transactions between thousands of banks in whole US works at 4 tps. It's much more than enough right now if you don't fill the blockchain with coffee and candy transactions (they usually do not end up in blockchain anyway). In fact the larger the transaction, the greater the benefit of using blockchain

Yes, tyranny of the majority is bad. In order to avoid this, everyone should strive to achieve consensus, instead of persuade others to comply with his idea, everyone should try to find a middle ground that is acceptable by as many community members as possible

Sure, everyone has the freedom to make his own fork and see if his idea realize. But it is a big community, miners, exchanges, payment processors, investors all hold stake in the ecosystem. If you don't go with major consensus, then almost for sure your fork will become another alt-coin that no one cares. Although theoretically you have the freedom to fork, but you can't achieve anything without following the major consensus

Another reason: Why there are thousands of alt-coins but none of them matters? Because in order to adopt a deflationary monetary system, you should only focus on one most mature cryptocurrency with limited money supply. Dilution of the resource to other coins is essentially an inflation in cryptocurrency world, which benefits no one economically

Sure he likes to give order to others, not very comfortable to talk with

Anyway, attitude is less of the concern in a level of discussion of political and philosophy, it is what you want to achieve matters. Basically you need some kind of framework in this area. We are lacking of fundamental spirit or the constitution level rules of decision making

Nick Sazbo said the top priorities are consensus and decentralization, this is a good general principle. People should strive for consensus and decentralization as the first priority, instead of some technical details

You only select one most popular coin because of the inflation concern: If you use many coins then it is the same as fiat money inflation

- Why do you mine bitcoin? 
- To use it to buy miners
- Why do you buy miners? 
- To mine bitcoin

Bitcoin itself is the digital asset on the blockchain

In a top down money distribution model like fiat money, money is coming from top, in the form of government loans to drive many different government projects, and then reach average person as salary, thus become widely used and accepted

But bitcoin distribution model is bottom up: From the miners. Typically miners do not drive projects and employ people, even they spend the coins or sell the coins, after each transaction, a large part of coins will be hoarded, thus there will be less and less coin in circulation

This makes it very difficult for average people to even have a chance to touch bitcoin. So it will not reach mainstream from income approach. There must be another area that everyone is concerned, like things exclusively sold for bitcoin, or long term investment, or anti-inflation

The key is to make sure the third party is not compromised, which is much easier to do than compromising the blockchain

So in real world, this third party must be backed by law enforcement to ensure its authority, typically a government organization under supervise/audit. If there is no consequence of violating the contract, then it is enough to have a group of rouge user to destroy the whole credibility of the blockchain contracts. Protests and lawsuits does not help since the law enforcement are not responsible for interpretation of the mapping: If the mapping is totally voluntarily established, then it holds no legal status

Of course you can built in this interpretation into the blockchain like Ethereum, but it still does not grant it legal status: In a traditional contract, the personal signature once signed have legal status. But so far no law give legal status for a digital signature on blockchain, since it can be stolen, forged, compromised in many ways. Only government issued digital signature have legal status

Money is the only strong use case right now

The blockchain can only make sure the data on its ledger is secure. How to interpret that data is up to each user. The most easy and widely accepted interpretation is using that data to represent money, thus make those data tradable on exchanges and commerce. The exchange rate represent people's acceptance of this interpretation (a price of 0 indicate that no one accept bitcoin as money)

If you want those data to represent something else like stocks, properties, contracts, then there are two difficulties:


1. The ownership problem

You can and only can have total ownership for the data on blockchain, nothing else. In order to have ownership for stocks and properties, you have to rely on some third party authorities that registers the ownership of those things, then it defeats the purpose of using blockchain



2. The interpretation problem

If you want to use blockchain data to represent something else, peopel must reach agreement on the meaning of those data, and the agreement can be breached when one of them refuse to interpret the data as planned. In one word, you have no way to enforce such a mapping between blockchain data and real world objects without the involvement of a trusted third party. Then it also defeats the purpose of using blockchain

This is not the case when data is used to present money, because even if some users refuse to accept it as money, there are others still accept it as money, people can sell it at market price, thus its value as money is decided by all the exchanges around the world and all the merchants accept it as payment medium

Of course you can also establish exchanges for blockchain based stock/property, thus reduce the trading risk. But still, no one can 100% guarantee that the piece of the data you get can get you some dividend or a house to live, there is no way to enforce it without an authority

It's the same for smart contract: If one side of the contract refuse to follow the contract because he presented a different interpretation of the same contract, then the dispute must be solved by an authority, which defeated the purpose of using blockchain: If you anyway have to rely on authority, why do you use blockchain at the first place?

"bitcoin political philosophy list"    yes it is highly desired even here

Forbes list is a joke, it does not count the bankers and large land lords, each are magnitudes richer than the previous one

Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Talks Cryptocurrency Governance

"To discourage a gas limit that leads to high mining centralization, Buterin proposed a target uncle rate. An “uncle” is kind of like an orphan block in Bitcoin—a valid block that doesn't make it into the main chain. So if the target uncle rate were 0.4, it would mean that the network is striving for 4 % of blocks uncled on average, explained Buterin. If the network were uncling at a higher rate, like 0.6, then miners would need to push down the gas limit. The gas limit has this effect because smaller blocks propagate faster and less uncling supposedly occurs in a network where propagation times are less varied."

"Buterin agreed, explaining that Ethereum benefits from development centralization in these early stages. But he doesn't expect that arrangement to last forever. “I think in the long-term something that's highly-decentralized is necessary,” he said. "

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Following his thoughts, for bitcoin, the top priority is decentralization, and a good indicator to measure decentralization is orphan rate. If the blocks process/propagate too slow, orphan rate will rise, indicating centralization risk

So, we can set a range for orphan rate, when orphan rate for the latest 2016 blocks is constantly lower than this range, it can be regarded as the block propagation is enough fast thus achieving full decentralization, then the block size can be raised by 10% following the difficulty re-adjustment

But there is a catch: If orphan rate is constantly low, block size will be raised to 20+MB but all the blocks will have little transactions in them. A 20MB block will create lots of problem under an attack, so there should also be another trigger condition, for example, average block being more than 75% full before raise the block size

In this way, if the PC/network infrastructure can handle, when average block is 75% full, the block size will be raised, so that blocks never become full under normal usage, the fee will be kept enough low while still ensure decentralization

However, if the PC/network infrastructure can not handle larger blocks due to higher orphan rate, then block size will not be raised because of the top priority is decentralization. Blocks will inevitably become full, and trigger the fee market mechanism so that other clearing based solutions will be more used to further decrease the fee for micro transactions. This will continue until the infrastructure of major miners improve

At the end of the interview he mentioned that the communication between devs has come to a halt, this is a problem right now, maybe because there is no clear and efficient way to communicate, or could be caused by totally different view, difficult to reach any consensus

Pretty Romania girl by the way  

The difference lies in how the money is created. If it is created by similar production effort that equal to the exchanged product/service, then its fair trade. If it is created as IOU (a promise out of thin air), then it is a scam: you can keep promising without producing anything, as long as you successfully make anyone else believe its value and use it as payment medium

Raise the block size based on all the fees paid in 2016 blocks: If the fee is too high, then raise the block size to reduce the fee cost of average transaction and include more transactions

It does not matter, the speed limitation is in the hardware and network, not coin specific. An alt-coin would still face the same problem that bitcoin has, you can only increase capacity by 100% by adding an altcoin, but at the same time alt-coin brings more inflation, so the end result is worse for all of the cryptocurrencies

Current network and hardware is only capable of handling 2MB (In fact some 1MB blocks already hit the bottleneck somewhere along the chain). If the common bandwidth raised to 1GB due to mass adoption of 4K TV, then it is possible to raise the block size further

Another problem is the mining motivation, when the next and the next next reward halving happens, the miners will get less and less incentive to run the mining operation, thus the fee must raise to compensate for that