The idea of unlimited blocks is nonsense. Should 32MB blocks really be required, the blockchain will be so bloated that no one except professional datacenters can handle it. Not very Satoshi-ish.  That's nevertheless exactly Satoshi's original vision, with 1 GB blocks and only full nodes in data centers. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1876752.msg18659688#msg18659688 |
|
|
|
Reading the comments i have seen many people criticizing Satoshi that he did not make any changes to the block size limit at that time and so is the reason we are having issues right now,first thing everyone must understand is bitcoin at that time was a prototype and every software needs upgrades to keep up with time and that is the exact thing we need now,we need a good upgrade to solve the issue and what is best must be determined after careful thought process and testing.
The point is that a crypto currency is not "software", it is a contractual protocol. Upgrading a contract is difficult. |
|
|
|
You've gone from dinofelis only miners matter extreme
I didn't say that. The complex interplay between miners and users (in the market) is what matters. But in that story, nowhere, non-mining nodes appear. That's my point. Miners are the only entities making block chains with the protocol's PoW voting rights. Users are the ones that turn "tokens on a block chain" into something that has economic value, by spending value (fiat) to obtain it, and as such, finance the whole ecosystem, miners included. But at no point - apart for the function of *informing* node owners what miners are actually doing - nodes that do not mine, play any role in this. They don't make block chains, they don't offer block chain VARIANTS (allowing for choice in the market), and they don't relate to economic value in the market. A user with 500 000 BTC running a node has just as much "node count value" as one running an empty node without owning any BTC. A potential buyer of BTC on an exchange is maybe not running a node, but has important economic weight for a miner. So non-mining nodes are 1) not offering opportunities of choice, and 2) do not signal or influence any economic choices in the market between the offered choices. You are only considering the block building part of it. The blockchain is a distributed database. Validating nodes distribute the database amongst different actors and ensure the mining oligarchy can't fuck with the blockchain history. Of course not. The source of this database is the miners, and only the miners. And any actor can get its data directly from the source, and doesn't need a proxy server to relay it. Think of it this way. Consider, for the sake of argument, 3 populations: 1) miners (I actually mean, mining pools) and their data-center nodes. 2) users with a lot of coins and cash, that only use online wallets or lightweight wallets 3) bitcointalk idiots like us, that run most of the non-mining full nodes. Now, suppose that the miners change protocol (open in the clear). Suppose that the users (2) don't really mind about that. Suppose that all of us (3) are upset, and refuse to distribute this "corrupt" database. What do you think will happen ? The users (2) will connect their wallets directly to the miner nodes (1), instead of taking a copy of what the miners produce, from us (3). We don't distribute anything. We are optional proxy servers for the database that is produced by the miners, and only by the miners. |
|
|
|
This is a naive vision of money. The fiat system isn't as stupid and cheating as you think. But it took me some time to understand that too.
The fiat system is indeed a CHEAT as I know (not think) it. Cheating through persistent devaluation of around 6% per year, every year, whereby it lost over 90% of its original value since almost 100 years ago. Please don't compare your understanding with mine. I am not an average joe when it comes to financial matter.
It is not a cheat to debase money. Money is not a value holder. It is a promise fluidifier, and the debasement serves for it to be spend. The 6% inflation tax is nothing compared to all other taxes by the state. The whole idea is that money is not a long-term value holder, because otherwise it would be hoarded, which is explicitly NOT the idea. Money should go around quickly, between being earned, and being spend. Any amount of money should lose value in the long term, and be a motivation to spend it. Money is not a store of value. The whole sound money doctrine doesn't take into account the fact that money then becomes an investment asset, with all the volatility that comes with it, and renders is essentially useless as a (constantly decreasing) unit of account. If the devaluation rate (inflation rate) is known, there's nothing wrong with it, because it is taken into account when considering exchanges at different times. It is just an exponential correction factor. But at least, devaluating money cannot be used as a long term store of value, and will not be hoarded, because that's not the function of money. It is true that the resulting seigniorage is lucrative for the privileged in the money business, but it is less so, than states taxing people around 50%, and it serves a purpose, namely getting money go around, and not being hoarded. If you see the rothschilds' wealth is tied to the fiat currency, that shows how ignorant you are about money matters. I sincerely don't think you understand finance.
Because the Rothschilds are not in (fiat) banking and are not on the receiving end of the seigniorage flux ? |
|
|
|
1. core bypassed consensus with the going soft backdoor.
This is not really the case as long as they maintain the 95% threshold, no ? And no, node count explicitly doesn't matter, because bitcoin is a hashrate consensus system, explicitly rejecting node counting, which has no meaning, because it can easily be faked by Sybil attacks, and has no relationship to economic stake either. People with essentially zero stake in bitcoin have just as much voting power than whales owning several percent of the stash if you count nodes. Maybe even more, because bitcoinless geeks or people with special interests may have more nodes running than busy coin holders that are not technically versed into doing so, and have, for instance, most of their stuff on exchanges or online wallets, or are using a light wallet like electrum. The danger is when they turn to less than 95% blocks soft fork, like LTC is doing. pool X can have 20million exahash. and other pools can have just 5 peta hash meaning the blocks from pool X could show as most common block being solved and hitting the threshold. but if at a certain event. they were to make something that doesnt meet the rules of the nodes. its rejected in 2 seconds Well, if until that point, they were following the rules, they have cranked up the difficulty on the "right" chain by a factor of 20 billion, right. So now that they "stop making valid blocks" the rest of the world, with its 5 peta hash, will be able, at the given difficulty, to make a block in about 300 000 years, and hope to get somewhat smaller difficulty in about 600 million years. That's about the time it took for jellyfish to evolve into humans. But it is true that your faithful nodes will reject happily all the blocks that come every 10 minutes from the nasty pool, and will wait for 300 000 years before they get a good block again. As such, all people having "good coins" will at least hodle for 300 000 years  Or, they will finally accept those "illegal blocks" in order to finally get rid of their coins against a bargain, but at least, before their superdupergreatgrandchildren are old. |
|
|
|
That is the very reason why the community has established an UASF so that the one who will have the power to adopt and approve changes to the bitcoin network will be us the bitcoin holders and the miners will be forced to follow to what our dictates are or else their production will go to waste. But set your worry aside since the exchanges are already doing their job screening the bitcoin that are entering their site.
You've gone from dinofelis only miners matter extreme I didn't say that. The complex interplay between miners and users (in the market) is what matters. But in that story, nowhere, non-mining nodes appear. That's my point. Miners are the only entities making block chains with the protocol's PoW voting rights. Users are the ones that turn "tokens on a block chain" into something that has economic value, by spending value (fiat) to obtain it, and as such, finance the whole ecosystem, miners included. But at no point - apart for the function of *informing* node owners what miners are actually doing - nodes that do not mine, play any role in this. They don't make block chains, they don't offer block chain VARIANTS (allowing for choice in the market), and they don't relate to economic value in the market. A user with 500 000 BTC running a node has just as much "node count value" as one running an empty node without owning any BTC. A potential buyer of BTC on an exchange is maybe not running a node, but has important economic weight for a miner. So non-mining nodes are 1) not offering opportunities of choice, and 2) do not signal or influence any economic choices in the market between the offered choices. |
|
|
|
1. core bypassed consensus with the going soft backdoor.
This is not really the case as long as they maintain the 95% threshold, no ? And no, node count explicitly doesn't matter, because bitcoin is a hashrate consensus system, explicitly rejecting node counting, which has no meaning, because it can easily be faked by Sybil attacks, and has no relationship to economic stake either. People with essentially zero stake in bitcoin have just as much voting power than whales owning several percent of the stash if you count nodes. Maybe even more, because bitcoinless geeks or people with special interests may have more nodes running than busy coin holders that are not technically versed into doing so, and have, for instance, most of their stuff on exchanges or online wallets, or are using a light wallet like electrum. The danger is when they turn to less than 95% blocks soft fork, like LTC is doing. |
|
|
|
Big blocks proponents never seem to to consider the centralization that big blocks would inevitably lead the network to. I would respect big blockers if they were clear on their motives and finally admitted that they simply don't care if the network becomes centralized, as long as they get to have their on-chain coffees.
As you can see, Satoshi himself considered that mining would be centralized, with a backbone of data centres of miners, and all users connecting directly to one of those data centres, no more P2P. BTW, the P2P network doesn't mean zilch if the mining is centralized, which it is already. The problem is, their narrative is twisted and intentionally misleading, they never admit the tradeoffs or claim the centralization factor of big blocks is exaggerated.
But no matter what, any system with competitive rewards will always lead to centralization, whether it is block rewards or fees. The LN is worse, in fact, because to become a competitive LN hub, you have to own a lot of bitcoin that you can put in channels, before exhausting them. There are always economies of scale in competitive reward systems. In fact, small blocks make it worse. The network aspect is only a very small factor as compared to other means of competitive advantage with scale. As of now, the majority of mining is in the hands, officially, of 5 pools, and in reality, most probably of 1 or 2 guys. But mind you, these people will be very strict on the respect of the bitcoin protocol, because they are hugely invested in it ; not in coins, but in hardware. So you have your faithful bitcoin central bank already. It is in China. |
|
|
|
e
It is understandable that the guys couldn't yet fancy how to make off-chain transactions in a decentralized and reliable way which would principally solve the issue and allow for virtually unlimited scaling of Bitcoin.
We still don't. LN is banking. We already knew that banking works, if all people have accounts in a connected net of banks and have deposited their holdings there. |
|
|
|
By validating the miners work, they are alerted to the fact that miners are changing the rules and can choose how to respond to the situation. If they blindly accept the miners work, they won't be alerted to the fact that the rules have changed. Hence they scrutinise the miners work and can choose to either change to the miners rules, or stop accepting that coin altogether.
I would say: by "observing" the miner's work. So yes, a full node informs its owner. That's about it. That's helpful if the miners were doing something sneaky. If they openly announce that they don't apply the next halving, then your node just informs you that they did what they said, they were going to do. Whether 5000 nodes tell you that, or just one, doesn't make much of a difference, does it ? |
|
|
|
So I think economic validation nodes have their purpose, since it stops miners from making up the rules without scrutiny.
My point is that there's no such thing as "economic validation nodes". There are economic actors, USERS, that have of course their economic weight in the market on available choices. Whether these actors run a node or not doesn't change their economic choices in the market. And running a node, or not, doesn't increase the economic choices of actors, nor their economic weight. So I fail to see the purpose that "running a node" has. The economic power of the actors is independent of them running a node or not. And the choices the economic actors have, are independent of them running a node or not. So what changes between economic actors voting in the market on the choices that are available, when they run a node, or they don't run a node ?Think about this: a) Suppose that the economic actors don't agree with the miners, and refuse to buy their coins, even though they don't run a node themselves. Is the situation now better for miners than if on top of that, these actors were running a node that stopped working because it didn't agree with the block chain that miners were making ? b) Suppose that many economic actors run a node that stops working because it doesn't agree with the chain that miners make. But enough actors buy their coins on exchanges. Did those running a node annoy the miners in the slightest bit ? You see, the nodes don't mean shit. What means something, is the market value at which the miners can sell their coins, but that is also the market value of coins held by the whales. There are also the newcomers, the most interesting party in this game, that have no stake but are most probably the ones buying up the new coins from miners. In all of this, whether you run a node or not, doesn't matter, because it doesn't alter anything. |
|
|
|
This is always the same confusion. You're talking about *economic* nodes. But there are no economic nodes, there are simply economic USERS. The fact of them having a node or not, doesn't matter, does it ? The only thing that a full node can do, is INFORM its owner. But that's it.
Suppose that you are a whale, holding 100 000 BTC. You are running a full node, to watch those evil miners. Now, suppose that those evil miners have decided to increase the block reward (that is, they change the protocol so that the next halving won't happen). They keep on mining blocks with the old reward, and refuse to apply the halving. They are not doing this in a sneaky way, they simply announce that they will apply a hard fork so that halving is not going to happen any more, for this and that reason. 95% of the hash rate is behind this move.
Your node sees this, and stops. The last block it received and accepted, was the last block before the halving. The next block in the only chain around is considered invalid, because the coinbase transaction is not correct, it isn't halved, as it should be, according to your node.
Now what ? You decide to sell all of your bitcoin because you're not happy ? What do you do with your 100 000 BTC ? Where do you send your transaction ?
You're hoping for the 5% minority miners that wanted to keep the old chain ? Maybe they do. But the difficulty is now 20 times too high for them. They can only mine one block every 3 hours or so, with HALF of the reward that their competitors win on the other fork.
Are they going to keep the "true" chain alive ? With one block every 3 hours, for the next year or so ? Or are they going to put their effort in the new bitcoin ? Suppose they do. Now, bitcoin has undergone a hard fork with no more halvings. Your node is not happy about that. What are you going to do with your 100 000 BTC wallet ?
Perhaps you would like to comment on my attempt to analyse the situation of economic weight in the event of a UASF. It is very difficult to foresee. But you're missing the point: non-mining NODES don't matter in this affair. This is between "miners" and "(economic) users", not "nodes". The users can (try to) vote with their money and transactions, with or without a non-mining node. Suppose that the "economic majority" has its say. It will have its say through the exchanges, not by running a node in its basement. The interplay between economic users and miners is complex. But whether or not these users run a node in their basement doesn't matter. Exchanges will follow their customers, they don't care about the value of coins, they only care about the amounts of fiat that users trade, because exchanges take a fee on every flow of value, no matter to or from which coin. What would a UASF mean ? One vote per node ? Does someone running a node, and holding half a bitcoin, have as much importance as the guy with his 100 000 BTC and also a node ? And if the guy with half a bitcoin fires up 500 nodes ? Does that mean anything to an UASF ? On the other hand, if you disgruntle 20 guys with each of them 100 000 BTC, maybe that matters ? Finally, the miners sell their coins to whom ? To whales ? Or to NEWCOMERS that don't even have a node, nor a coin ? Of course the economic vote matters, but the economic vote matters in the market, on the available choices, not on the non-available choices. Miners decide what are the available choices (as long as the system is PoW). Hell, even any dev can make a new available choice, by just making a new coin that forks off bitcoin, using PoW or even PoS. Economic actors vote on those available choices in the market, but cannot create themselves, available choices. And in all that, non mining nodes don't mean anything: they don't represent economic actors (certainly not proportionally), and they don't make new choices available. They are only useful for their owners, informing them. |
|
|
|
speculative value is more about active humain decision than natural forces  Money is all about added value from natural order in the bottom I consider the emerging dynamics of the *interplay* of all human decisions as part of "nature", and not as a human decision itself. Speculative value is at the same time a guess of the outcome of that interplay, and an input to the dynamics itself. My point is that this complex dynamics is, apart from some general principles, essentially not predictable. It is a more global version of the efficient market hypothesis in a way: all the obvious is already taken into account, and the rest is essentially entropy to us, which we can only guess, and sometimes, be lucky, and make us believe that we understood something, while we only played at the lottery and won. |
|
|
|
What is required to implement segwit on altcoin?
That the alt coin contains the same bugs as bitcoin that need to be fixed |
|
|
|
You think we really know what we are doing or we are governed by things who escape all control ?  By thinking that we know what we are doing, we are governed by a dynamics that escapes all control. But that is not controlled by anybody in particular, but is an emergent dynamics nobody masters. We are like the molecules in a liquid, thinking that we know how to decide when to boil off. My (essentially only, with some reserves) goal in life is to try to understand this phenomenon, and then die happily Human mind power > electrons  Not for long any more in my opinion, but that's besides the question. I'm not saying this. I'm saying: Human mind power <<<<< nature is what I claim. |
|
|
|
So non-mining nodes have a role to play by keeping the miners honest.
How so ? They can SEE it, but they cannot do anything about it. If the miners decide to make a given block chain, and not another one, what can the non-mining node do apart from noticing that there's no "good" block chain around and stopping to download it ? If economic nodes stop accepting the miners blocks, then the miners cannot do anything with their coins. This is always the same confusion. You're talking about *economic* nodes. But there are no economic nodes, there are simply economic USERS. The fact of them having a node or not, doesn't matter, does it ? The only thing that a full node can do, is INFORM its owner. But that's it. Suppose that you are a whale, holding 100 000 BTC. You are running a full node, to watch those evil miners. Now, suppose that those evil miners have decided to increase the block reward (that is, they change the protocol so that the next halving won't happen). They keep on mining blocks with the old reward, and refuse to apply the halving. They are not doing this in a sneaky way, they simply announce that they will apply a hard fork so that halving is not going to happen any more, for this and that reason. 95% of the hash rate is behind this move. Your node sees this, and stops. The last block it received and accepted, was the last block before the halving. The next block in the only chain around is considered invalid, because the coinbase transaction is not correct, it isn't halved, as it should be, according to your node. Now what ? You decide to sell all of your bitcoin because you're not happy ? What do you do with your 100 000 BTC ? Where do you send your transaction ? You're hoping for the 5% minority miners that wanted to keep the old chain ? Maybe they do. But the difficulty is now 20 times too high for them. They can only mine one block every 3 hours or so, with HALF of the reward that their competitors win on the other fork. Are they going to keep the "true" chain alive ? With one block every 3 hours, for the next year or so ? Or are they going to put their effort in the new bitcoin ? Suppose they do. Now, bitcoin has undergone a hard fork with no more halvings. Your node is not happy about that. What are you going to do with your 100 000 BTC wallet ? |
|
|
|
Blockchain technology is nothing more than a new type of distributed database. Oracle, IBM and many others have been trying for decades to come up with a truly secure distributed database. Most companies settle for a centralized database for security reasons even though a distributed one would be more efficient.
There is a difference between "distributed" (a matter of *location*) and "decentralized" (a matter of non-trusted reciprocal administration). Distributed databases are still under the authority of a central command and administration hierarchy. Decentralized databases must take into account bad actors/peers over which there is no hierarchical control. By far most corporate applications have no need for decentralized systems, which bring in a huge overhead and security head aches, but go for distributed systems. This is why bitcoin's block chain tech is not really suited for corporate applications. You'd think that different branches in a corporation, under the same hierarchical command, don't need the trustlessness of decentralized systems, and hence, shouldn't cope with the unnecessary overhead such things bring in. |
|
|
|
So non-mining nodes have a role to play by keeping the miners honest.
How so ? They can SEE it, but they cannot do anything about it. If the miners decide to make a given block chain, and not another one, what can the non-mining node do apart from noticing that there's no "good" block chain around and stopping to download it ? |
|
|
|
Satoshi it appears did believe full nodes where mining nodes, and these would be run by specialised mining farms. I think there is a quote somewhere where he anticipated (numbers seemingly picked out of a hat) around 10,000 nodes and millions of users.
Could you point me to that ? (honest question, I didn't see that) I had the impression he only had a FEW nodes in mind. Ok, I guess "less than 100 000" was a safe bet 5 is also less than 100 000 It is funny, because in a way, Satoshi's "LAN" looks exactly like a pool with its miner/customers connected to it. Clearly, Satoshi understood that there would be an upper limit to the number of miners ; but you're right that he didn't realize how a global competitive market is usually distributed: there are a few market leaders, not 10 000. There are not 10 000 "amazons" or "googles". There are not 10 000 leading car brands in the world. There are not 10 000 leading airplane manufacturers. Mining pools are distributed like any other market: there are about 5 visible market leaders (most probably in the hands of one or two guys). |
|
|
|
Bitcoin will be the entrance into this market of digital assets.. just like it is today, we must first purchase some bitcoins before we can get our hands on a specific altcoin. Or purchase bitcoins in order to get out of a specific altcoin. This might continue to be the case.
I don't know where you get that. On kraken, for instance, you can buy eth, xmr, dash, ltc, .... directly with fiat, without going through bitcoin. And you can sell them again to obtain fiat directly. The list is not as long as on poloniex or bittrex, but most of the "big" crypto can be bought without ever passing by bitcoin. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
