To quote adamstgBit because I could have said it better myself: i'd argue that not changing the 1MB is a change in and of itself, we were promised this limit would move up as needed. satoshi knew what that would do, and he talked about SPV clients becoming more important as time went on. not changing the limit is changing the game plan in a big way. Even though it is factually incorrect that a protocol fork of Bitcoin is an altcoin. If you where to use such faulty logic then it would actually be the other way around. Since not increasing the blocksize could essentially be considered as equivalent to breaking the social contract of Bitcoin. There is no such thing as a social contract. This is a typical socialist diversion. It won't work. A protocol fork of Bitcoin, unless it obtains support from the economic majority, is absolutely and without doubt an altcoin. It's not just socialist "diversion". In fact it is socialist authoritarianism. Enforcing contracts upon others without their consent is good old-style dictatorship. This is exactly the kind of mind set Gavin and Hearn embrace for their hostile fork-attempt as well. It is 100% contradictory to the idea of Bitcoin. I'm sure that with the help of its competent developers, Bitcoin will ultimately scale in a smarter way than FUD-pushed extremist BIP101. Having another option for the voluntary choice of running an alternative implementation of Bitcoin is not a dictatorship by any stretch of the meaning of that word. Voluntarism is 100% consistent with the idea of Bitcoin. Would you miss us with your mischaracterization of reality? Bitcoin XT does not propose an alternative implementation it proposes a different protocol. |
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Yes, I know you'd love for Bitcoin to be a tool of wealth redistribution, but that is not how it works and it was never meant to be so. Stop conflating your delusions with reality. If Bitcoin is adopted by the world's economic majority then by definition it has become the standard for money. This necessarily translates into its adoption by the remaining 80% which, as any herd does, will follow. As such, having our financial system operate on the sound economic theory of Bitcoin will benefit EVERYONE, even if the 80% retain little control over it. I'm sorry but you have terrible understanding of economics and how this world operates. You might think your opinion holds value but seeing as most of it is pure delusion and ignorance you don't get to pull the "agree to disagree" argument. How you'd like the world to work is not representative of how it actually does work. Bitcoin does bring about wealth redistribution whether you like it or not. How about instead of telling me that my opinion is one of pure delusion and ignorance you give me a counter argument instead. That would be more convincing. How about you don't bother me with your economic ignorance? Wealth disparity is an inevitable outcome in any economy. Bitcoin is capitalism in its purest form. Stop trying to stick socialist shit to it, it won't stick. Have you had a look recently at the wealth distribution in Bitcoin? It is arguably worse than in the fiat economy. The suggestion that Bitcoin brings about wealth redistribution is laughable really. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution |
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This may alienate home-based full nodes during the transition stage, however, due to the increased potential to handle larger user base and therefore higher overall value (market cap) of the network, people who are committed to running a node should still be able to afford it (using other methods: cloud services or dedicated servers)
No. |
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That's nice and all , however I suppose that BitcoinXT was the only project planning to increase the Blocksize of bitcoin (altcoin) .. now without what are we supposed to do with bigger blocks ? are Bitcoin Core developpers planning to do anything , if not there is no reason to continue using Bitcoin I suppose .. no mainstream = no future .  Where did you get the idea that Bitcoin needed to be adopted by mainstream to be successful in the first place? Increased adoption would help Bitcoins survival into the future, the history of file sharing can be considered as a precedent for this. I would also like to see more people benefit from the Bitcoin blockchain directly, because I think this would do much good in the world. Bitcoin is a money protocol. The internet of VALUE. It is not Facebook and therefore the number of users is not representative of its adoption. Increased adoption by capital is what we should be concerned about. It is not correlated with the number of users. In that regard I shall remind you of iCEBREAKER's mention of Pareto's law of distribution. In the context of Bitcoin it means that if 20% of the world's population controlling 80% of the wealth is to adopt Bitcoin then it would bring about more success & change than if the other 80% adopted it. (The actual wealth disparity is by all account much worse) I disagree, since it depends on how you define success. If you are measuring success based on price then you are correct in this scenario. However if we measure success in how it effects peoples lives and how many life’s it has saved and positively changed by using the Bitcoin blockchain then having the poorer 80% adopt it first would be better. If the poorer 80% adopts it before the richer 20% then this would also bring about a redistribution of wealth, which would bring about the positive effect of decreasing global inequality. Yes, I know you'd love for Bitcoin to be a tool of wealth redistribution, but that is not how it works and it was never meant to be so. Stop conflating your delusions with reality. If Bitcoin is adopted by the world's economic majority then by definition it has become the standard for money. This necessarily translates into its adoption by the remaining 80% which, as any herd does, will follow. As such, having our financial system operate on the sound economic theory of Bitcoin will benefit EVERYONE, even if the 80% retain little control over it. I'm sorry but you have terrible understanding of economics and how this world operates. You might think your opinion holds value but seeing as most of it is pure delusion and ignorance you don't get to pull the "agree to disagree" argument. How you'd like the world to work is not representative of how it actually does work. |
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That's nice and all , however I suppose that BitcoinXT was the only project planning to increase the Blocksize of bitcoin (altcoin) .. now without what are we supposed to do with bigger blocks ? are Bitcoin Core developpers planning to do anything , if not there is no reason to continue using Bitcoin I suppose .. no mainstream = no future . Where did you get the idea that Bitcoin needed to be adopted by mainstream to be successful in the first place? I got it from being logic honestly , if Bitcoin was used by couple of people how in the world it will gain any value and become successful ? , it won't . we need more demand and with the "less supply of block halving price is supposed to go UP and that's it , there is other factors but I think the value is the most important thing on this situation and without a value it will simply die . Your logic is wrong. Read my post above. Bitcoin is not a social network. As strange as it may sound its value does not come from more users. |
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That's nice and all , however I suppose that BitcoinXT was the only project planning to increase the Blocksize of bitcoin (altcoin) .. now without what are we supposed to do with bigger blocks ? are Bitcoin Core developpers planning to do anything , if not there is no reason to continue using Bitcoin I suppose .. no mainstream = no future . Where did you get the idea that Bitcoin needed to be adopted by mainstream to be successful in the first place? Increased adoption would help Bitcoins survival into the future, the history of file sharing can be considered as a precedent for this. I would also like to see more people benefit from the Bitcoin blockchain directly, because I think this would do much good in the world. Bitcoin is a money protocol. The internet of VALUE. It is not Facebook and therefore the number of users is not representative of its adoption. Increased adoption by capital is what we should be concerned about. It is not correlated with the number of users. In that regard I shall remind you of iCEBREAKER's mention of Pareto's law of distribution. In the context of Bitcoin it means that if 20% of the world's population controlling 80% of the wealth is to adopt Bitcoin then it would bring about more success & change than if the other 80% adopted it. (The actual wealth disparity is by all account much worse) |
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This is yet to be seen (which I am not really optimistic to be honest), otherwise expect a more aggressive fork that would cause a split. I would gladly support that if it means leaving "bitcoin that doesn't scale" right where it belongs: dust.
Man, I really don't know what you are doing here, since you are so unsatisfied with Bitcoin the way it is (currently zero issues with blocksize for non-spam transactions despite Hearndresen-FUD the system would break). Personally, I came to Bitcoin because it is a one-of-a-kind decentralized and secure store of wealth and transaction system without counterparty risk. Otherwise I would have been satisfied with Paypal. It seems to me that you want "scaling" at all costs, even if there is no current demand and this means giving up decentralization. Also, you want to scale the dumb way by implementing extremist block size increases only, instead of using much more efficient second layer solutions. Therefore I don't think it's Bitcoin you want (as indicated by the message in the genesis block) - you want a Paypal 2.0. There's a promised altcoin* out there that promises to satisfy this need: It's named Hearndresencoin / GavinCoin (short: HDC / GVC). Although it seems to be failing to get sufficient support to achieve its mere existence, competent altcoin adopters like you will surely push it for success... so I suggest you should join the altcoin boards full time and don't waste your time in a Bitcoin forum any longer. *) Why promised altcoin? Because Hearndresencoin doesn't even have its own blockchain (it tries to live on Bitcoin's resources) it is not yet able to execute its core altcoin functionality (other "features" like IP filtering already work though). Therefore HDC is a promised or double-virtual altcoin. ya.ya.yo! To quote adamstgBit because I could have said it better myself: i'd argue that not changing the 1MB is a change in and of itself, we were promised this limit would move up as needed. satoshi knew what that would do, and he talked about SPV clients becoming more important as time went on. not changing the limit is changing the game plan in a big way. Even though it is factually incorrect that a protocol fork of Bitcoin is an altcoin. If you where to use such faulty logic then it would actually be the other way around. Since not increasing the blocksize could essentially be considered as equivalent to breaking the social contract of Bitcoin. There is no such thing as a social contract. This is a typical socialist diversion. It won't work. A protocol fork of Bitcoin, unless it obtains support from the economic majority, is absolutely and without doubt an altcoin. |
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That's nice and all , however I suppose that BitcoinXT was the only project planning to increase the Blocksize of bitcoin (altcoin) .. now without what are we supposed to do with bigger blocks ? are Bitcoin Core developpers planning to do anything , if not there is no reason to continue using Bitcoin I suppose .. no mainstream = no future . Look for Scaling Bitcoin workshop, it is meant to address scalability at least mid-term. The answer is already here. Increase the block size and if Core takes to long to do it then an alternative implementation of Bitcoin will. This is not the same as an altcoin, embrace the freedom of choice. If enough people want the block size to be increased then it will be increased, even if that means we need to fork away from the Core development team. Your mistake is assuming the economic majority is supporting reckless increase of the blocksize. It's increasingly obvious this isn't the case so your opinion of what "people want" is irrelevant to the reality. |
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The danger of centralisation of power and tyrrany of development would be to great of a cost to pay for not diverting resources. Since decentralisation implies the diversion of resources. Having multiple implementations would make the protocol more robust over the long term. Bitcoin has multiple implementations. There also exists multiple implementations of the Bitcoin protocol, they are called altcoin. Bitcoin is absolutely voluntary and there is no such thing as "tyrany of development". If you are not satisfied with existing protocol you are welcome to either submit your own pull request, develop your own altcoin or adopt an existing one that fits your need. You should not and can not enforce network consensus in the case of a split. In the case of a split the two groups will each reach consensus. It's likely one group will retain the economic majority, their fork will be considered Bitcoin, the others will fork into their own altcoin. You are advocating tyranny of the protocol, I disagree. Bitcoin is and should be voluntary. It absolutely is. If you don't agree with the Nakamoto consensus protocol you are free to abstain yourself from using it and creating your own version. If you think that we should all rely on the internal decision making process of Core. Then we will run into some of the same problems that large corporations and states run into, since if we wanted the Core development to reflect the will of the economic majority or possible another measure of consensus. Then we would need to attempt to construct a type of centralized governance structure on top of Bitcoin in the form of Core development, this in my opinion would be in conflict to the principles of freedom and decentralization that Bitcoin was founded upon.
Bitcoin is an engineering project. Core has attracted the best mindshare in this industry and until another development team come forward with proper credentials there is no reason we should diverge from Core's leadership. |
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That's nice and all , however I suppose that BitcoinXT was the only project planning to increase the Blocksize of bitcoin (altcoin) .. now without what are we supposed to do with bigger blocks ? are Bitcoin Core developpers planning to do anything , if not there is no reason to continue using Bitcoin I suppose .. no mainstream = no future . Where did you get the idea that Bitcoin needed to be adopted by mainstream to be successful in the first place? |
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You misunderstand, it should not be centralized under any development team. There should be many developer teams with many competing implementations of Bitcoin this is where the decentralization of development should lie.
It is interesting that you say we can not crowd source engineering decisions. If that is the case then it would make sense that different implementations of Bitcoin have their own internal decision making processes, and some like XT would decide on having a "benevolent dictator" so to speak. I believe this is rather common throughout open source projects. The consensus and the choice lies with the miners, the economic majority and the users in terms of the code they choose to run. This is how Bitcoin can remain free and decentralized.
Should? So what? How do you enforce it? We already have several implementations, and where are they? Development skills are a scarce resource, and having multiple 'competing' implementations is actually wasteful. In a sense, Bitcoin Core is a kind of natural monopoly, because only this way it can attract sufficient expertise, and thus be robust and stable. Maintaining a fork of Core code is actually much easier than maintaining different implementations, and XT, when it appeared, was OK -- it did implement some client-side BIPs that didn't make it into Core. It only became controversial when it started pushing changes to the protocol. If you mean many competing versions of Bitcoin protocol, that's a completely different domain. Having multiple 'competing' implementations is indeed wasteful. So is sending every transaction to every full node on the network. The point is that decentralization is wasteful and very inefficient. However the cost of decentralization is worth paying because of the benefits it brings. Bitcoin would become more robust and stable once such competition and decentralization exists within development. Having multiple 'competing' clients would most likely eventually lead to having competing versions of the Bitcoin protocol, this might be unavoidable. I do hope that this block size debate will not cause a split but future issues might justify this however. Increasing the supply of Bitcoin for instance in the future might cause a split, I would not support such a change. However for people that strongly believe in inflationary economics as opposed to the deflationary model of Bitcoin this might make sense for them. One of the beautiful things about Bitcoin at least is that there would be no tyranny of the majority since people can choose what side of the fork they wish to support for themselves. You are totally off the track. "Competing versions of the Bitcoin protocol" = altcoins. There are multiple implementations of these as we speak supported by different teams of developers. You are welcome to look their way if you are not satisfied with current Bitcoin protocol. |
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whats disheartening is seeing how poeple are so afraid of the tiniest changes, bitcoin development grinds to a halt.
Even if people make a hard fork to 1.5MB, it wouldn't be tiniest of changes. Stopping mining pools to run a new daemon is easy and all, but the problem is that the world wouldn't update all at once, and the whole Bitcoin "ecosystem" would have a temporary problem with the "2 blockchains". I think they can all update at once, like BitcoinXT planned to do, everyone run the new software which runs old code until some high percentage of blocks are hashing with the new version. and one time there was an emergency hard fork without any of this fancy way of updating everyone all at once and it took a few hours for the new chain to catch up. i'd argue that not changing the 1MB is a change in itself, we were promised this limit would move up as needed. satoshi knew what that would do, and he talked about SPV clients becoming more important as time went on. not changing the limit is changing the game plan in a big way. "i'd argue that not changing the 1MB is a change in itself" <--- I like this point. I would add that not changing is not the same and shouldn't be evaluated as a proxy for something else that isn't yet invented or otherwise ready-to-go as an alternative (ex: sidechains or LN). From what I can understand, sidechains and LN will be groundbreaking/important regardless of blocksize. I get the feeling that a lot of folks see sidechains/ln as mutually exclusive w/ XT or any other blocksize increase BIP. Related question: If you have time, what are the best two or three arguments against raising blocksize in your (or anybody else's) opinion, notwithstanding whether you agree with them? My background is not tech, and I'm positive I'm in the same boat w/ tons of folks, so some short bullet points would be helpful for us non-techies. From what I can tell, the best arguments against increasing blocksize are things like: 1) security (decreased node count), 2) unreasonable economic barriers (objections based on specific BIPs (Blacklisting argument against XT) seem less concerning b/c they're fixable and negotiable). Are there obvious solutions to the strongest arguments (whatever those are to you) that resolve the concern and still increase blocksize? 1. Centralization of nodes 2. Centralization of miners |
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True, LN seems to be very similar to how banks and institutions work in a closed loop. However, in legacy financial system, one weak link on the chain might trigger a systematic failure like Lehman brother's case, because the whole system have very little real money in circulation. If LN chains are widely applied, it will also have such kind of risk, and without central bank bailout
Not sure, what kind of systemic risk are you talking about? If a link fails, one simply has to wait until contract expiration. I might've missed something. Not really sure, but I guess the LN nodes might be practicing FRB by then, and the failure of one nodes will trigger a large scale of withdraw to blockchain from every nodes customer, thus collapsing them all. How to make sure an exchange does not do FRB? I suppose most of them do today LN nodes are not custodian therefore cannot do FRB. |
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whats disheartening is seeing how poeple are so afraid of the tiniest changes, bitcoin development grinds to a halt.
Even if people make a hard fork to 1.5MB, it wouldn't be tiniest of changes. Stopping mining pools to run a new daemon is easy and all, but the problem is that the world wouldn't update all at once, and the whole Bitcoin "ecosystem" would have a temporary problem with the "2 blockchains". I think they can all update at once, like BitcoinXT planned to do, everyone run the new software which runs old code until some high percentage of blocks are hashing with the new version. and one time there was an emergency hard fork without any of this fancy way of updating everyone all at once and it took a few hours for the new chain to catch up. i'd argue that not changing the 1MB is a change in and of itself, we were promised this limit would move up as needed. satoshi knew what that would do, and he talked about SPV clients becoming more important as time went on. not changing the limit is changing the game plan in a big way. Satoshi spoke of SPV clients that would provide fraud proof. Something that doesn't exist right now. |
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For many holding, it isn't a choice. Just not enough places to spend Bitcoins, yet. I can't wait to be able to spend them locally at more places.
It's a chicken and egg.
Why? Bitcoin rewards delayed gratification. The coffee you buy today might be worth a new TV in a year. Careful what you wish for. |
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Do you pride yourself in being a sheep? bigger blocks are coming. deal with it. You're cute  |
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Do you pride yourself in being a sheep? |
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Now that BitcoinXT (GVC) is pretty much dead in the water I wanted to get opinions from the community on why exactly it died.
The main reasons I think it died was
1. The roaring egos of the devs
2. The increased ability to control the coin through centralization
XT failed because in a policy debate presumption is negative and the burden of proof belongs to the affirmative. There was no problem for XT to solve, only a false sense of urgency and an attempted governance coup's social engineering attack. "Because Zomg Full Blocks" and "Because BlockstreamTheymos 2 Minutes Hate" were nowhere near good enough reasons for the socioeconomic majority to give a fuck about the Gavinistas' stupid XT Manifesto, much less bother running the software. TL:DR - See parts in boldI don't think the debate is over and it won't be won on inherency take-outs and presumption, not when there has been little substantive response to the analysis provided by G and M (and Peter__R, more recently). I stopped reading here  |
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XT was a huge success in helping a proper debate blossom. Whether it becomes widely used as a client doesn't really matter.
There has been a ongoing "proper debate" about scaling Bitcoin for the last five years. ...and in five years no scalability got accomplished.
XT only succeeded in turning that debate into a civil war, at the cost of ~$1,000,000,000 of our market cap.
takes two sides to have a war. couldn't have been one unless a huge number of people felt there was merit to their position. The market cap dropped like a rock the instant Gavin confirmed the coup had his full support. In five years, Bitcoin has been scaled from nothing to 1MB. You silly hyper-entitled children have no idea how hard that was, and just demand more in an 'are we at the moon yet' refrain. A civil war can be started by one belligerent party, whether or not the other is aggressive. (Yes, I know you Gavinistas redefined doing nothing as doing something.  ) Rhetorical flourish is fun. But what would happen if a mass of people (just say) wanted to adopt Bitcoin as a 'means of exchange'? Their welcome wagon would be crippled by transactions. That wouldn't be unlike proposing a mass of people wanted to adopt gold as a "means of exchange" |
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XT was a huge success in helping a proper debate blossom. Whether it becomes widely used as a client doesn't really matter.
There has been a ongoing "proper debate" about scaling Bitcoin for the last five years. ...and in five years no scalability got accomplished. That's only true if you are a disingenuous troll completely ignorant of the extent of work that had been put in the last 5 years to get Bitcoin to where it is now. Yes, I'm talking about you |
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