fifth I would like to thank the syndicate bidders for their patience, everyone that actually replied (via PM) to my numerous posts about forming syndicate bid knows who they are.

a) none of them were taken out

b) I was forming that before Risto's pump and before missive rumors started. Go look, that wasn't my first post about the syndicate bid

It is called openness. It is very precious(expensive), and hopefully appreciated by the "people".

I will start buying 24 hours from my announcement to do so, but the price is already up 20% and 24 hours have not even passed yet 

The announcement is important, because it adds to my glory as a person who can predict market movements, and starts a playful competition about how long the sellers can keep the price down.

The fork is exactly about money supply. The primary argument used by those in favor of Gavin's proposal is that the fork is needed in order to make bitcoin more inclusive. If we make concessions to these demands now, what is stopping the same people from insisting we create 5 million bitcoin to airdrop into the wallets of some 3rd world country? When getting "mass adoption" is the primary focus, you end up with things like the dollar. I don't want mass adoption; I want sound money.

The fat guy named karpeles aka magicalTux will never go in jail. If he will put in jail I'm sure it will be an huge pump (and we will reach 1k dollars per bitcoin ).

when you're downloading the entire blockchain, that includes orphaned blocks

there also used to be a bug where it'd spit out some godawful amount of orphan blocks when you were DLing from several different sources.  i think that was fixed, not sure

The guy doesn't have much clue seeing how he speaks of DRK, though. I find it so ridiculous when people happily throw away fluff terms like "instantX", "DarkSend 2", "Telepathy"...
I'm pleased the only fluffy thing we have in Monero is a pony.

nope, it will incur the exact same transaction fee no matter where you send it. it might be easy to get rid of the dust, but it's plain stupid to waste it if you have multiple BTC in dust.

Article discussing some of the problems and how not all nodes are alike:

https://medium.com/@lopp/bitcoin-nodes-how-many-is-enough-9b8e8f6fd2cf


Some various ideas-

1) Peter Todds Tree Chains may include ways to encourage decentralization
2) Justus Ranvier method of adding price discovery - http://bitcoinism.liberty.me/2015/02/09/economic-fallacies-and-the-block-size-limit-part-2-price-discovery/
3) TBF - https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/incentive/ to pay nodes directly can be done on a larger scale
4) Multi-use VPS's could be created that were discounted or free and run full nodes for profit or non profit
5) 0.11 Prune node feature will add a different type of "full" node to secure the network
6) further optimizations within core to make nodes more inexpensive to run and operate(most of the cost is not disk space but bandwidth)


Anyone else is free to contribute more to this list.

I've gotten lucky quite a few times in this crypto-game. I try to remember that whenever I'm unlucky.

Yes, I think we should have a mix of full archival nodes, DHT sharded nodes where the owner decides the percentage of the whole blockchain they want to download and share, and full pruned nodes, and SPV clients.



We cannot and should not force users to do anything, but can always build in incentives outside or within bitcoin core that increase node count and distribution. Some have already been discussed and some not.

I believe there are solutions to increase decentralization and security with larger blocks, and before we discuss those options in detail we should first address how much decentralization is needed for nodes.

The scale goes from every user having a full unpruned node on all the time to no decentralization at all and a single database. We currently have ~6,400 live nodes on average for 3-5 million BTC users. Thus 1 node per 468 to 781 users.
what ratio and other considerations(I.E.. ASN distribution) should we aim for?

Personally, the concern for full node centralization is valid but not nearly as much as the security vulnerabilities we have from mining centralization where we essentially have a 4 of 7 multisig between the largest pools.

We need to tackle both issues however.

I am not claiming security will decrease with the fork. I am merely suggesting the ones against this hardfork have fears that aren't completely illusory, and we might see more centralization as they fear due to the costs (mainly bandwidth) being too high to support full unpruned nodes.

I am just suggesting that we can take steps or possibly incorporate other changes to address these fears and add more decentralization at the same time we increase block size conservatively. We need to be more specific however of what degree of decentralization and security is appropriate. I haven't heard many details as of yet of what we should be aiming before besides mostly vague fears and opposition to change.

Downloading the whole blockchain from a single torrent or source is fine if it is verified with other unpruned full nodes .
What is mainly being discussed here is either:

1)  Many pruned full nodes of ~1GB in size boostrapping and creating a verified UTXO from a combination of archival full nodes which are unpruned (how many of these should be sufficient is the question)

2) Many pruned full nodes of ~1GB in size + another 1-5% of a redundantly sharded blockchain using DHT on each node verifying each other
or
3) Combination of the above

0.11 will likely include the feature to create full pruned nodes and is expected to come out in approx. 6 months so you will now see 3 types of clients in the future-

SPV clients
Full pruned nodes with verified UTXO that are around 1GB in size
Full nodes with the whole unpruned blockchain

Thus the conversation will shift from increasing the current amount of full nodes from 6400 back to 10k , to focusing on this and talking about how many Full pruned nodes we want out in the ecosystem as well to secure the network.

I would like to hear what degree of security and decentralization the people against this hardfork would like so we could both work towards a common objective.
 

No, verifying one full archival node with many pruned UTXO full nodes is not sufficient enough. It could work, but at the expense of security where the full content of those archived blocks could be manipulated.

No, the people arguing against this hardfork do indeed have some valid concerns. We don't want one or a few centralized sources to store archival or reference full historical nodes for us to bootstrap pruned nodes or partial DHT based nodes.

Personally, I would want a large distribution of Full (non pruned ) nodes on different a wide distribution of ASNs and with many different competing groups of people with different interests.

We definitely do not want a central organization like a government or TBF controlling this.

The question is how much would be sufficient to secure the network because the mere fact that we have increased the blocksize limit to 20MB doesn't mean we have to sacrifice the values we share with the people against this hard fork?

I think you have that backwards. How can you create the UTXO if you don't have a full copy of the chain?


I don't think it can ensure that. All the nodes storing a certain block could disappear from the network at the same time. Where's the full copy now?