... And I'm much more comfortable giving my money to a registered company, and not some guy in NY who can run off with people's BTC. ...
Never mind that the company is 'registered' because they bought the registry from some defunct lab in Colorado to save $100. Something like that, right? |
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...mit would be raised, but the discussions about whether it would be raised at all with opposition from a significant amount of people. That turned the idea of raising the limit into a complete non-starter since it requires a hard fork, despite the fact that changing the maximum block size has been the plan since the very beginning. ...
Do you have anything by way of actual evidence of this? Not that I do or don't believe it, but it is easy and common on this forum for people to pull shit like this right out of their ass. Why did the limit get set as it is knowing that it was going to be a nightmare if/when it ever was to be changed (if you have any real clue?) That realization about the impossibility of raising the maximum block size via a hard fork worried me enough to the point where I actually think that my statement that it would require a hard fork might be wrong.  But seriously, I think that I've come up with a soft-fork version of accomplishing the same thing. A soft-fork would allow us to deploy the rules for increasing the maximum block size in less then a month instead of several years, assuming it was coded ahead of time and it was considered extremely high priority. It's a terrible hack job, but to the users it would be fairly seamless. Not to give too much away just yet, but it'll be fully backwards compatible functionality wise down to version 0.6.0. I'll post the technical details in the next few days. Awsome! A 'terrible hack job' to accomplish something I desperately don't want. What's not to love?  I believe my bitcoind build pre-dates 0.6 so I'll be anxiously awaiting your details. |
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Why can't they just start their own blockchain? I agree that the bitcoin model of clearing transactions is superior to the existing banking system, but I don't see why they couldn't start their own coin so they can get more of the initial mining proceeds and not transfer away as much wealth.
The main reason to start one's own blockchain would be to exercise control (in the ways you mention.) But the main thing that will build user faith in a blockchain is that nobody can exercise control. It brings a smile to my face to think about the aggravation this corundum might cause to control freaks. I project that Bitcoin will enjoy a lead as long as nobody can gain control. And again, keeping it tight and accessible to a large number of potential operators is one of the reasons why I am so fixated on the block size issue. Again also I had not understood Bitcoin sufficiently to recognize this small block size 'shortcoming' (or more accurately, how difficult it would be to 'rectify' it) and thus Bitcoin did not strike me as a suitable solution to act as a nearly perpetual backing store until fairly recently. |
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The 'length' of the entire block chain refers to the chain with the most combined difficulty, not the one with the most blocks.
Isn't amazing what Satoshi thought of in advance? Yes. It blows me away. |
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... <in the interest of trying to maintain the thread topic.> Else I'm happy just to correct the mis-conception that I see a 'show stopper' in a modest block-size limiting the potential of the Bitcoin solution. It's just the opposite in fact...I suspect that it will be the main thing which could save it.
I apologize if I misunderstood you or came across as harsh, I just happen to see Bitcoin's main problems not on the technical level. I don't pretend to know the best solution to each and every shortcoming of the current implementation but I have yet to hear about a single one that's not being actively thought about and where I can't see at least a few convincing proposals to remedy the problem. My general feeling is that complexity, and especially dynamic feedback constructs, scare the shit out of me. What we have now in Bitcoin works(*) and is good enough to build isolated systems off of. Doing so will foster competition and evolution and will serve the purpose of providing individuals with solutions which will best fit their needs. Some of the solutions will be scams and people will get burnt which is a shame, but one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs as they say. Again, a reliable backing such as Bitcoin for independent efforts is a really valuable thing in and of itself. In a nutshell I am of the mindset that it is better to quit while we are ahead. I believe that we've yet to face the biggest challenges which will occur if/when the system starts to threaten other mainstream solutions and we are inching closer to doing just that. Not even 'inching' any more in fact. (*) Actually we don't know exactly how well it works until we run into the block size limit, and probably some other things as well. I believe that in Bitcoin's simplified protocol form of today there is a good chance that it will prove robust to technical exploits. Further developments of more complex constructs will make it exponentially more likely that Bitcoin could suffer a protocol related failure. |
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The 1MB block size limit is completely incompatible with the dream of BTC being used by everyone for everything. Many people seem glued to that fantasy and it colors their vision of the future of Bitcoin.
This is absolutely no problem. Once transaction replacement gets enabled again, we can do most transactions outside the blockchain without any security loss and with the added benefit of instant settlement and much higher anonymity. There are other solutions to this "problem" as well; the Bitcoin protocol is much more versatile as the way we are using it today might imply. If you really think this is a show stopper then I suggest you delve a bit deeper into the Bitcoin protocol. Of course the protocol is versatile. That's why it is implemented with scripting. There's a reason why transaction replacement was turned off you know. Complexity adds risk. If you want to elaborate on your theories about how transaction replacement will act as a cure-all which facilitates the dreams of everyone's skittles, SD bet, and goat cheese sale the world over, I'd listen. Else I'm happy just to correct the mis-conception that I see a 'show stopper' in a modest block-size limiting the potential of the Bitcoin solution. It's just the opposite in fact...I suspect that it will be the main thing which could save it. |
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Trouble in paradise, mi amigos.
The 1MB block size limit is completely incompatible with the dream of BTC being used by everyone for everything. Many people seem glued to that fantasy and it colors their vision of the future of Bitcoin.
For my part I was aware of this issue but I was not technically clued in enough to realize the nature of the mechanics involved to change the blocksize. Since I've always felt that the biggest chance of Bitcoin failure was indeed associated with increased growth, I am delighted by this hicup. But that's just me.
I make this post because it illustrates the kinds of things that are likely to crop up with a new technology. Especially one which the core developers continue to classify as 'experimental'. This will almost certainly not be the last such event (unless it results in an implosion of Bitcoin generally which I currently doubt.)
To the extent that I am taking a victory lap, this is because it illustrates why I choose to continue to label my Bitcoin holding as a highly speculative adventure and balance my diversification accordingly. PM's also are in a bit of a state of flux due to the increased influence of derivatives, but at the end of the day a chunk of physical gold is a very well understood thing.
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Side note: Thanks for being such an intelligent community. I like the "newbie jail" idea and I've been pleasantly impressed with the rational thought talking place here. Then again, maybe I just haven't been around long enough. Enjoy this mis-conception while it lasts. There are some gems here, with great reasoning, but they float upon a sea of twats. Or 'sink beneath'. I suggest that anyone who is serious and dedicated and may have some skilz focus mainly on the dev forums, but jack-offs poke there heads in there from time to time as well. I am lazy and more comfortable among the flotsam and jetsam and more typical plonkers of the community. |
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wait....there's a backdoor in uTorrent?  There is a close source torrent application that anyone actually uses?!? It boggles the mind. |
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Side note: Thanks for being such an intelligent community. I like the "newbie jail" idea and I've been pleasantly impressed with the rational thought talking place here. Then again, maybe I just haven't been around long enough. Enjoy this mis-conception while it lasts. |
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So, let me be clear: what set me into panic mode was not the discussions about how the limit would be raised, but the discussions about whether it would be raised at all with opposition from a significant amount of people. That turned the idea of raising the limit into a complete non-starter since it requires a hard fork, despite the fact that changing the maximum block size has been the plan since the very beginning. Even worse, we have prominent devs playing fast and loose with the truth, claiming that raising the limit was never the plan when they posted in the same threads in which it is made clear that it was the plan. Jeff's input on this topic and his actions and statements on other topics is giving me a lot of hope for Bitcoin. A while ago I was scanning some older conversations which occurred after Satoshi exited. Seemed like certain of the main devs (Gavin and Mike I think) were sort of scratching their heads and shrugging at Satoshi's fixation on retaining a light weight system. Clearly there have been differences which probably go back to day one. I find it neither surprising nor unhealthy that the various primary developers have different ideas about what is important. Like I said in the conversations about the Bitcoin Foundation, it is important to me as a community member to have visibility into the workings of the 'core team' such that I can take actions which are appropriate for me as situations arise. |
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Already controversy is brewing... Already businesses are starting to back away from bitcoin because if the block limit isn't raised then one of three things will happen: 1. Bitcoin fails. 2. Bitcoin gets used only for moving large amounts of money and other cryptocurrencies take over eventually displacing bitcoin itself. 3. Bitcoin gets used for only moving large amounts of money and "bitcoin clearing houses" fill the gaps, which increase the risk of fraud/theft/unaccountability, add avenues of attack, and form REAL centralization. Not some hypothetical BS.
1 - seems doubtful. 2 - seems 'so what?' 3 - seems that Bitcoin would fall into a role where it can provide a solid and reliable backstop against which other solutions may built and evolve. Some will be scams or maybe even fractional <gasp!> but those which don't work or are mis-managed will die and those which do and are well managed will thrive. Critically, Bitcoin may still be used...possibly at some cost...as a shuttle between competing solutions when the need arises. Of course I would like to see Bitcoin be everything to everybody. Perfect in every way and all that. But it's not realistic. #3 would still be one hell of an achievement and a great leap forward. |
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...mit would be raised, but the discussions about whether it would be raised at all with opposition from a significant amount of people. That turned the idea of raising the limit into a complete non-starter since it requires a hard fork, despite the fact that changing the maximum block size has been the plan since the very beginning. ...
Do you have anything by way of actual evidence of this? Not that I do or don't believe it, but it is easy and common on this forum for people to pull shit like this right out of their ass. Why did the limit get set as it is knowing that it was going to be a nightmare if/when it ever was to be changed (if you have any real clue?) --- BTW, as far as I am concerned, Brad and his company can go fuck themselves. |
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More use of Bitcoin means significantly less trust to me. The crypto-currency world is rife with participants who have difficulty running a reliable forum (and I like it just fine this way.) The suggestion that the class of ordinary citizenry who currently move Bitcoin are going to be able to run a reliable economic solution at scale (with load-balanced processing clusters, high quality provisioned bandwidth, etc, etc) is absurd to me. Throw in the potential to need to deal with coordinated state level attacks and the trust I would have in the solution is next to nill.
The alternative is that if the infrastructure required to operate the Bitcoin network shifts to well capitalized corporate entities. My 'trust' in this solution is nearly nill as well. And it is much less palatable from a philosophical level besides.
You like it fine that people using the currency have a hard time with it? I don't even understand what you are saying. You don't want it to be run by "ordinary citizens" or "mega corps", you want it run by a select few with specialized skills. That's the definition of centralized. I could have said it more clearly. I favor a situation where the network is perfectly stable running on people's hardware who can barely afford a low-end car and can barely have the technical skills needed to keep a forum operational on the Internet. That is what we have today and I don't want to lose it. But to your point about big fee-savings advantage, fewer transactions = higher cost per transaction. Higher cost per transaction = less advantage over existing methods, which equals less value at all. It also means, fewer use cases. Why, on earth, do we want fewer use cases?
Almost certainly wrong. The transaction cost at current scale is so close to zero that it is not worth thinking about. The cost of performing a transaction is not related to the BTC size of the transaction. Even at the current block size the Bitcoin solution could handle a fair part of the worlds need for high value transactions (I suspect.) It's probably about perfect for balancing between other crypto-currency systems...accident???
The dream that my skittles purchase, your penny-ante Satoshi Dice bet, and someone's goat cheese sale in outer Mongolia coexist in a common block chain is nice and cool and all that, and I like it, but it is something I would trade for a robust solution which looks vaguely like what we see today.
Its not wrong, its very simple math. A hard limit of 7 transactions per second means that once we hit our transaction bandwidth (already 25% there!), the price of individual transactions will go up. Free transactions will disappear and paid transactions will enter into an increasingly expensive auction. If you think this is wrong, explain why. I think you are wrong for the following reasons. The actual cost on a per-transaction basis is so low currently that the fees required to operate profitably are not all that high. Severe gouging by miners would destroy the system and/or draw out competition who wish to see the system survive. In fact it might be the case that some people will fund mining simply to preserve the system for their own use rather than trying to make a huge profit on it. But as the developers say, it is kind of hard to know exactly what will happen. I'm all for finding out empirically. I said nothing about the BTC size of the transaction. Also total value from transactions may end up going down because even with higher individual transaction prices, so many previously possible cheaper transactions will become impossible to perform, and total value (all fees paid on all transactions) may decrease by removing the ability for those other transactions to exist at all.
And with the individual transaction price going up, many use cases (micro transactions, retail transactions) will disappear. Huge numbers of individuals will not be able to participate as users at all (except perhaps to validate transactions that they themselves cannot take part in, but at least it works a 56.6k modem.... give me a fucking break). Centralization of ACTUAL USE will increase and total usage stops growing by the network limiting to 7 transactions per second. The remaining advantage over expensive wire transfers will be diminished as the price difference decreases. And ultimately the value of Bitcoin as a payment network and currency of the people will disappear.
The dream that my penny-ante dice bet, your skittles purchase, and someone's cheese sale in mongolia coexists in a common block chain IS THE REALITY TODAY. It needs to be the reality tomorrow as well. Anything less than that is total failure.
Going forward you will be able to live your dream and I will be able to live mine. Which of us, if either, finds ourselves on the Bitcoin block-chain will be an interesting thing to find out. As far as I am concerned Satoshi's main work is done; peer-2-peer crypto-currencies are proven to be a workable concept and nobody can deny this. I'm personally attached to Bitcoin because I have a lot of respect for certain parts of the community and separately because I have a significant 'speculative bet' on it. But I'm not glued to Bitcoin specifically, and I will dump it if it turns sour. Probably I am not alone. |
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Uh by all means increase the blocksize, I'll move on and have a long hard laugh at you guys during the grind to the bottom.
It will be the dumbest ever thing Bitcoiners have ever done.
The recent chatter about it has given me extra incentive to explore cracking open some of my dusty deep storage wallets. If we stay on the current price trend I'll probably want to dump around $12k worth of BTC in a month or so, and do it face-to-face, incrementally, in a bank, and in the NW part of the US. I'm willing to take a certain amount of a hit in order to avoid supplying Mt. Gox with an identity theft kit. Almost all my coins came through Tradehill. Anyone who is potentially interested is welcome to PM me. --- BTW, good post ~hazek. I agree significantly with most of it. |
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This would ruin some people's idea of using bitcoins as "hard money" for their retirement savings.
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I guess the developers warnings that Bitcoin is 'experimental' was not enough. |
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Our big fee-savings advantage is on the big-ticket transfers, not on puny sums.
-MarkM-
I disagree. More usage is more trust. More trust is more value in a crypto-currency. More use of Bitcoin means significantly less trust to me. The crypto-currency world is rife with participants who have difficulty running a reliable forum (and I like it just fine this way.) The suggestion that the class of ordinary citizenry who currently move Bitcoin are going to be able to run a reliable economic solution at scale (with load-balanced processing clusters, high quality provisioned bandwidth, etc, etc) is absurd to me. Throw in the potential to need to deal with coordinated state level attacks and the trust I would have in the solution is next to nill. The alternative is that if the infrastructure required to operate the Bitcoin network shifts to well capitalized corporate entities. My 'trust' in this solution is nearly nill as well. And it is much less palatable from a philosophical level besides. But to your point about big fee-savings advantage, fewer transactions = higher cost per transaction. Higher cost per transaction = less advantage over existing methods, which equals less value at all. It also means, fewer use cases. Why, on earth, do we want fewer use cases?
Almost certainly wrong. The transaction cost at current scale is so close to zero that it is not worth thinking about. The cost of performing a transaction is not related to the BTC size of the transaction. Even at the current block size the Bitcoin solution could handle a fair part of the worlds need for high value transactions (I suspect.) It's probably about perfect for balancing between other crypto-currency systems...accident??? The dream that my skittles purchase, your penny-ante Satoshi Dice bet, and someone's goat cheese sale in outer Mongolia coexist in a common block chain is nice and cool and all that, and I like it, but it is something I would trade for a robust solution which looks vaguely like what we see today. |
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IMO, it's the same for bitcoin, it really doesn't matter how difficult the transaction will be, as long as bitcoin holds it's promises, it will gain people's trust and support. When you have the support of merchants/exchanges/miners, no matter what kind of problem there will be, all of these people will come out with brilliant ideas and help. But if bitcoin could not hold what it promises, people will just simply abandon bitcoin
Well-said, and people worried is not just a block size issue, but an overall trust issue. ( If bitcoin protocol could change via a easy route, then it is a worring sign). To me the over-arching issue related to blockchain size, or more generally how to modulate growth and deal with scaling issues, is not really one of trust per se. It relates to whether the system remains distributed, or whether it grows into a solution where it is, for all intents and purposes, controlled by a small fraction of the community. I prefer that it does not since if it does it opens a variety of new failure modes. Framed differently, I would prefer a small and robust system to a large and at risk one. I already have my foot in the door to Bitcoin-land which probably influences my personal feelings on the matter, but I think that it goes deeper and exposes my general tastes in system design. 'Brilliant ideas to help' sound to me like one of the most likely of things which could causes a complete system collapse. |
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What I've not run across are surgery techniques required to make use of the secret key in order to re-claim value in a safe manner.
Redeeming a private key is the same as redeeming a Casascius Coin. Simple method: 1. Create a throwaway wallet at Blockchain.info 2. Import private key(s) 3. Send your funds Takes less than 5 minutes in most cases. Thanks for the pointer Mike. I'd not really payed much attention to blockchain.info's wallet. Seems pretty good. I like instawallet slightly better for certain things due to password convenience, but everything has it's strengths and weaknesses, and blockchain.info is certainly much more feature rich. The ability to import wallets is nice, but it's to bad that drag-n-drop is the only method supported. I'd have to dick around with my preferred windows manager on my primary workstation to support it. Most drag-n-drop UI's also have a select file option, but not blockchain.info that I can see. Funny because I would have anticipated a general correlation between those with interest in Bitcoin and those running fringe (and often more secure) operating systems. --- In other news, firing up my ancient client worked OK for receiving some BTC from my instawallet, but did not seem to send very appropriately (judging from blockexplorer.) Probably associated with transaction fee settings, or who knows. I'll wait a few days to see if the missing value materializes. Edit: Update: I was reading blockexplorer wrong and my send transaction off of the old client did work as expected. |
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Nice plan Phinnaus; you, Goat and Maria on a farm declaring sovereignty under the 10th amendment. It's almost biblical.
It's a start, but needs some natural disasters, murder, sodomy, etc stirred in. I have the sodomy aspect covered.  Might be 'an idea worth hoarding.'  |
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