It is obvious to me that the arguments stated in those articles are at the very least a little biased, and I don't think they should be blindly accepted as fact- which is how the author tries to portray them. Somehow I doubt you're a neutral, objective observer: Also, presenting arguments based on logic and evidence as fact is very much the correct way to present an argument. The expectation being that if someone wishes to dispute the conclusions they will identify the logical or factual error in them rather than saying "that can't be true because I don't like it." I don't have the time right now to debate some of the debatable points that he made, but a lot of the arguments that the author portrays as facts that are not as clear cut as he makes them seem. Great. When you take the time to form a proper rebuttal, then what you say will be worth paying attention to. |
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The NSA is caught in a death spiral from which it might not recover. Eventually I assume that 100% of their resources will be devoted to internal surveillance.
LOL. I just imagined a large, secretive government agency, who's purpose is to monitor itself and everyone in it to prevent word of its existence getting out. It was funny because there's a good chance this agency already exists... I know we spend money on less productive ideas. See also: http://college.usatoday.com/2014/07/22/nsa-targets-college-students-to-fill-cyber-professionals-shortage/ |
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That's part of another positive feedback loop: 1. Low morale makes potential whistleblowers more likely to speak out. 2. The management response to whistleblowing is to clamp down on internal dissent and increase employee monitoring. They turn their surveillance increasingly inward to stop the find and stop the whistleblowers. 3. These responses reduce morale in the agency. 4. Goto 1 The NSA is caught in a death spiral from which it might not recover. Eventually I assume that 100% of their resources will be devoted to internal surveillance. |
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I don't think the two are necessarily linked (gold, for s.o.v. without m.o.e. functionality, local currencies in high inflation regions for m.o.e. functionality without that of s.o.v.). How good is gold as a store of value, really? |
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If you have to receive money from multiple people you reuse a single address. This is how everyone does it. The anal retentive among us can do multiple addresses but you don't have to be like that. If you have toxic waste to dispose of just dump it in the East River. This is how everyone does it. The anal retentive among us can properly dispose of their waste, but you don't have to be like that. Thanks for proving me right: Alternately you can add to the privacy pollution by giving out a single static donation address. That's a solution that's easy for you and will cause harm to other people in the future, but lots of other people are doing it...
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Bitcoin continues to outpace all altcoins no matter what they've promised. and that's despite Bitcoin's 1MB limit.
Because it hasn't become an issue yet. But ultimately if Bitcoin isn't the best medium of exchange it won't be a store of value. "Store of value" is an emergent property of a good medium of exchange. It's not something that can be separated as if it were independent. |
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Why would most of the world's population not have just as much access to off-chain solutions as they do to bitcoin directly? I realize m of n oracle systems are not completely decentralized but they should be decentralized enough and they would be completely digital and global. If it was possible to build an off-chain transaction system that provides the same properties as Bitcoin, then we'd just use what ever that system was and abandon Bitcoin entirely. |
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that's not necessarily true either. with small blocks and fewer tx's, fees would increase substantially (hundreds of dollars) to hopefully compensate for diminishing block rewards. if Bitcoin is used as a world reserve currency, then tx volumes wouldn't have to be high and could be used to settle international balance of payments btwn nations. Those two conditions are mutually exclusive. Few advantages an altcoin might have could overcome Bitcoin's network effect, and a three or four order of magnitude reduction in transaction fees is one of them. |
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The main chain would be more of a backbone chain being used to settle side chains and other major transactions periodically. Bitcoin would be primarily used as a store of value and transfer of major value. This is in line with you thoughts of bitcoin being a reserve currency. We shall see how it plays out.
That can't work. Mining has to be paid for via usage fees, not the block subsidy. The only way that works is if the cost is amortized over an very high transaction volume. Again, forcing most transactions off-chain also denies the benefits of Bitcoin to most of the world's population. |
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maybe you like Gavin more than you think...
Who said anything about liking anyone? I was talking about trust. |
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that's fine, but just don't f*ck it up.  Note that Gavin has said in the past that he wants to see multiple implementations of the protocol, yet somehow the other core developers managed to fend off every attempt by other teams to do exactly this. Finally somebody showed up that was good enough that they couldn't stop by stonewalling them, so now they just ignore them and hope everybody else does too. |
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maybe i'm just more optimistic than you. Probably true. I'd rather err on the side of too many precautions than too few precautions in this area. |
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most of those ppl honestly believe that keeping blocks at 1MB is the right thing to do Of course. That does not preclude their believe being incited from people will less pure motives. That's a pretty standard political movement infiltration/disruption tactic. i must admit, i don't like what i'm seeing on Coinbase's behalf regarding KYC/AML. they're being too intrusive. we'll have to see how this evolves as i'm sure they are under severe pressure to conform which could change for the better with time. What I'm most worried about is fractional reserves once the majority of the coins are herded into off-chain processors. Consider this scenario: The IRS devotes a lot of resources to auditing anyone who withdraws their coins. If you withdraw coins and move them, they assume it's a taxable event with the burden of proof on you to show otherwise. Coinbase/Circle are more than happy to tip them off. Most people don't want to deal with the hassle, so they leave their coins in their online "wallets" that handle their tax reporting automatically (how convienient!) Bitlicences make it unprofitable to operate a Bitcoin company, except for banks which are except. Coinbase and Circle get bought out by JPM and Goldman Sachs. You'll never see your coins again, just like Germany will never see their gold again. you do know that Gavin agrees with you when it comes to increasing tx rates? i seriously doubt he could be manipulated given his political leanings and actions heretofore. i'm just glad he's being paid by the BF while being alongside Matonis, who i think has his head on straight. I know Gavin agrees and I generally agree with what Matonis does. Nevertheless, they are in positions of influence and vulnerable to coercion and so I'll never be able to trust them. I'd love for the situation to be such that they don't have any power that anyone would coerce them to misuse, so that I could trust them. Note that Bitlicenses may have legal implications for both of them. i would say that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. "640k ought to be enough for anyone" |
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When historians look back they might well conclude that the 1MB limit resolution was Bitcoin's "betamax moment", the most important decision point deciding its ultimate fate.
coinmarketcap.com is interesting because it gives a market assessment of Bitcoin's future prospects.
Right now the total cryptocurrency market cap is $8,197,074,397 and Bitcoin's is $7,678,842,953 or 93.68%
(higher if MSC and XCP and other BTC-based alts are included).
So, the cryptocurrency market is effecting pricing a >93% probability of Bitcoin dominating this new asset class - long term. An asset class of such importance that many crypto investors consider could make all fiat obsolete and perhaps even demonetize precious metals as well.
If the 1MB limit is not handled properly, in good time, and is allowed to seriously disrupt organic growth, then that percentage will fall significantly. Perhaps even causing an irrecoverable erosion in the first-mover status, opening the window for alts like NXT and XMR.
This is the stakes in play.
Bitcoin can not disrupt fiat currencies unless it's a network that everyone on the planet is actually capable of transacting on. Pulling out all the FUD/propaganda stops to keep the transaction throughput rate capped is the best possible strategy the defenders of he legacy system could employ to save themselves. If they can force most transactions off chain, into the waiting arms of Coinbase and Circle, then most of the benefits of Bitcoin will remain inaccessible to most of the world's population. Given the stakes involved, I don't trust Gavin to be capable of making good decisions even if he wanted to. A single point of control is a single target for blackmail and extortion. they are very aware of issues like block size limits and bandwidth limitations. What you're talking about are symptoms of a sub-optimal network layer. The fact that the P2P network suffers from a tragedy of the commons effect because there is no price discovery for bandwidth or storage is nothing inherent to Bitcoin - it's inherent to the current design of the reference client. If people who don't want Bitcoin to succeed can stop that problem from ever being fixed in the reference client, they can point to the tragedy of the commons problem as an example of why never to raise the transaction rate, forever. Of course, that strategy only works when a single codebase has a monolopy on the implementation of the protocol. |
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but amongst the general users General users don't matter from the perspective of the future composition of the full node network. Businesses and mining pool operators matter. |
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General thoughts on DApps? A desperate attempt to save Mastercoin that isn't going to work. No matter now much they rebrand, David Johnston is simply wrong about tokens. They aren't going to work and the MSC investors will never recover their investment. |
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i don't see that ever happening as long as Gavin remains lead dev. there's no one even close to him that has the political capital, trust, or good will he has generated.
We'll see. The reference client has already lost the technical lead to btcd, and their dev team is orders of magnitude more functional than Bitcoin Core's. In addition, he doesn't have as much goodwill as you think. I'm not the only person who's noticed that there has been no substantial development in the reference client for about two years. |
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what i don't get is why isn't Gavin moving to increase block size now as opposed to when we're in the middle of the next bubble or two when tx size will have surely increased along with price and his back is against the wall?
he's already shown a reticence to not make changes to the protocol. not that i'm complaining, mind you, as i think he's done a stellar job as lead dev. but at that point, it may be such a political hot potato that nothing may get done at all. It may be the case that we don't get any protocol improvements until Bitcoin Core loses its monopoly on the full node network. |
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