I'm not sure we're on the same page. I was specifically arguing against the idea that the amount of energy used to provide a product decides some portion of the market value of that product.
It was put forward that because it takes more energy to produce Bitcoin it must have a value that exceeds PoS. Put another way; because PoS doesn't necessarily cost very much to move and produce, it is a less valuable currency.
Peter Schiff implied the same sort of fallacy when he was insisting that Gold was a good purchase when it fell to $1200/oz because he argued that if it fell any lower than that it would cost more to mine than it was worth. It then fell down to roundabout $1000/oz. The point is that $1200 was clearly not some kind of floor on the price, just because that's presumably the cost of production.

It's putting the cart before the horse. Gold isn't valuable because it costs alot to produce; It costs alot to produce because it's valuable.
Similarly, bitcoin's aren't valuable because they cost a lot to produce, they cost a lot to produce because they're valuable.

It depends on what you meant by "adequate". I took it to mean we don't have a way of even theoretically deterministically arriving at prices. That would be true because value is subjective and non-deterministic.
That doesn't mean we don't have theories that at least show us why it's subjective and non-deterministic.


I can see that the fact that they're valuable, which drove up the cost to produce them, also made it more secure, which may make it more valued by consumers, and so on, but it's important to see the direction of causation here. I know it wouldn't be right to say energy used to produce bitcoin doesn't have anything to do with it's value, that's why I said it's tangential.

I do not see the cost of production as a way to argue in favor of PoW, or to show some failing in PoS. In fact, the whole thing is pretty ironic considering PoS' primary selling point is that it uses less energy to provide it.

Neat.

If you think it’s offtopic then I’ve successfully made my point. After all, I’m not the one that tried arguing that the value of Bitcoin is somehow protected by the energy expended to make them or, following that, arguing that PoS energy kind of does the same thing.
It was no less off topic here, but notice that wasn’t your response;
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1454710.msg14806179#msg14806179

Oof! Hit me right in the feels. Excuse me while I dramatically swoon and collapse, sprawling to the floor.
That’s because value is invented in the minds of Homo Sapiens through economic calculation.
“The value of money, as we have seen, depends upon the subjective valuations of the people who hold it. And those valuations do not depend solely on the quantity of it that each person holds. They depend also on the quality of the money.” -Henry Hazlitt

“Every man who, in the course of economic life, takes a choice between the satisfaction of one need as against another, eo ipso makes a judgment of value. Such judgments of value at once include only the very satisfaction of the need itself; and from this they reflect back upon the goods of a lower, and then further upon goods of a higher order.” - Mises
https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth
https://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson

Again, joules expended to provide a good or service is only tangentially related to the value of said good or service. Bitcoin's value isn't intrinsically tied to it, and whether or not PoS has some similar work would also not tell us anything about the value of a PoS coin. All it could tell us is if the value of work required to create said currency exceeds the value of said currency, then the production won't survive very long in the marketplace.

Now, work expended in Bitcoin does contribute to it's security which people tend to value in their currencies... But that's a different subject.

The economic value of a good or service is not equivalent to the joules required to provide said good or service. They are only tangentially related.

https://mises.org/blog/labor-theory-value-refuted-nobody-cares-how-hard-you-work

There have been a lot of great criticisms; PoW work isn't a "waste", PoS doesn't do the same thing PoW does, Nothing-at-Stake has shown for a long time that distributed consensus isn't possible, markets have not been convinced the PoS is superior, and cartelization.

I'd just like to point out that if you want to dive into this pool despite all the warning signs, you might want to consider what you're getting for this high risk. In the best case scenario we're looking at a currency that, by design, is controlled by a benevolent handful of wealthy stakeholders. Doesn't that sound familiar? There's only maybe a hairs difference between the objectives of PoS and actual existing financial institutions today, except these financial institutions are faster, cheaper, and more secure.

If you're willing to give up decentralized consensus and rely on benevolent stakeholders in your design of a currency, then there are much better ways to do it than PoS.

So it's more profitable to be a single big mining entity.. So what were we debating again?

If it's profitable for smaller miners to "split up" and mine these less difficult blocks, then A Fortiori it's going to be profitable for a centralized miner to mine them. So you haven't shown how this is going to prevent a centralized miner from mining all blocks in precisely the same fashion as they do so absent the protocol.

You're begging the question by assuming the last 144 miners are different entities and so haven't addressed the problem you correctly observed is separate from the block size issue.
In other words, if we can assume the last 144 miners are different, then you've assumed the problem has already been fixed to that extent, and so your solution couldn't be inside the scope of the problem according to your own assumption.

There is a paradox in Bitcoin that we want nodes to be trivially easy to run while also providing a substantial amount of Work. I suppose the goal should be for mining to be unprofitable, to keep big entities at bay, and instead many individuals need to perform the service charitably.

He glosses over the important part in order to make an extremely tenuous inference;
"Most of my brain feels that this is a brilliant trick, except my deja-vu neurons are screaming with 'this is the exact same repurposing trick as in the phone switch.' It's just across software versions in a distributed system, as opposed to different layers in a single OS."
Bolded for emphasis.

That is not "just" a minor difference that can be hand-waved. That is the raison détre of the soft fork. It is not because Bitcoin developers are concerned that they might mess something up, or that it would be a lot more work to do a hard fork, which seems to be the implication in this article.

It's not possible to do that calculation without doing at least two big assumptions.

For example if we assume totally filled blocks;

A = Transaction Fee
B = Transactions Per Block
C = Target Fee's per Block

We want
A*B => C

"A" is arrived at by market bidding which is dependent on the maximum transactions per block "B".
"C" is whatever funds the mining to some minimum amount that ensures security, which is nebulous and tied into the desire for node redundancy.
One can make an educated guess at two of the three to get a good handle on the third, but at the end of the day that's what they are; Educated guesses.
It would be nice if everyone's guesses would fall in line, but as it turns out it runs the gamut all the way from the status-quo to no block limits at all.

The point I'm trying to make is they didn't pick 1MB, 2MB, or 20MB out of some lack of desire to find some numbers that rise mechanically out of some well-reasoned formula. There's no way to make such a formula without littering it with dubious assumptions along the way. Though maybe there would be some benefit to arguing the slightly more granular points like; What kind of network topology is decentralized enough? What price would people be willing to pay for it, and would the bidding process actually achieve that rate? What block size can be expected to achieve the targeted node and hashing redundancy? (As you can see, they're very interrelated questions.)

There are three ways that "Bitcoin" is trying get out of that rut; Try to develop technology that can accommodate more transactions without increasing block sizes (eg. Lightning Network.), have many alts compete among different use cases, and... Well hardfork a Bitcoin to align it with one's own ideology, and that brings us full circle;

At the risk of beating a dead horse, hard-forking even if it's a "better" solution to some perceived goal, is fundamentally hijacking and changing the rules to align with one's own ideology. It's not just a matter of looking at the options and picking the one that's technically better, regardless of hard-fork, soft-fork, or no fork. There really is a difference between the types of changes, which is why nearly all of the Bitcoin Core developers are very reluctant to go down the path of a hard-fork.

For completeness I probably should argue why resisting political attacks, and populist hard-forks, is important, but I'm not sure how useful that would be, or how useful this post has been so far, so I'll stop ranting.

From what I read it's faster to just download with the client than to download the bootstrap.dat separately, but surely it's faster to use bootstrap.dat if you already have it, right? Maybe I'll give it a try later and see how it goes.

Because you are well informed and have a history of responding to questions based on technical facts and not on emotional or ideological appeal. That makes me pause for a second and want to know how you reached that conclusion.

I misunderstood.

You're right about the derogatory term, and I don't think it was well chosen for that effect anyway. What's so bad about secession?
I find it misleading though to say that they would both be "secessionist", like they are both the same type of change, which they are not. A soft fork involves transactions that are already valid under the current consensus rules, but requiring a more strict subset, whereas a hard fork requires miners to accept blocks that were previously against consensus rules.

Ok, I ran BitcoinQT to make sure I wasn't telling you a bunch of crap and it's working fine for me. I installed BitcoinQT in the default directory and then I did the following two commands after making a folder called "My Path" in the root directory;

C:\Users\UserName>cd C:\Program Files\Bitcoin

C:\Program Files\Bitcoin>bitcoin-qt.exe -datadir="C:/My Path"

Be sure to put the bootstrap.dat file under the "blocks" folder in your data directory. So from my example it would be "C:/My Path/blocks/bootstrap.dat"

I'm genuinely surprised that you support Bitcoin Classic, that should give anybody pause. I thought you were joking earlier. Why do you prefer a simple 2MB hardfork over the Segregated Witness softfork?

I think starting with Windows Vista, you can use MKLink to create junctions to different directories, while giving the appearance that the directory is in the same local directory. So you could use this to move your Bitcoin blockchain pretty much wherever you want.

mklink /j [Directory1] [Directory2]

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/278262-mklink-create-use-links-windows.html

You can also change the data directory via a command line switch when starting your Bitcoin client. The same thing can also be specified in your bitcoin.conf file.

-datadir=<dir>

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin#Sample_Bitcoin.conf

Depends on how you define "cryptocurrency". I think the only way it could be defined without excluding something that currently calls itself a cryptocurrency would be a medium of exchange that exists exclusively digitally. (In which case even fiat currency would be a "cryptocurrency" when they abolish cash, like is happening in Sweden.) I would be interested if anyone could name any other distinguishing feature of a "cryptocurrency" (Something applicable to every variation of a cryptocurrency).
In any case, there are several ways that old transactions can be deleted, including demurrage, pruning, and a "rolling blockchain".

To answer the OP, it's fastest just to download the blockchain with the Bitcoin client. After  you have the blockchain, you can keep it stored somewhere (bootstrap.dat) so you don't have to download the whole thing, the client will verify the blockchain on import and then download the rest of the blockchain from where it left off.

You can create bootstrap.dat by concatenating all of the blk*.dat files located in your Bitcoin directory. On Windows it would look like this;
copy /b blk0001.dat+blk0002.dat ...  bootstrap.dat

https://bitcoin.org/bin/block-chain/README.txt
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10381/creating-my-own-bootstrap-dat

These are not mutually exclusive.

Fits the bill.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1320095.msg13491777#msg13491777

I don't know why I wrote "mining pool", it doesn't matter if it's a pool or a big centralized mining entity of any other kind.

No, it doesn't, that's the point. Centralized mining pools aren't at some disadvantage when it comes to throughput because of some perceived increased risk of orphaning.

Greg Maxwell already addressed this incorrect idea that decentralization is protected because somehow information is better transmitted by being decentralized.


Bolded for emphasis. I would recommend reading the whole exchange.

http://pastebin.com/jFgkk8M3