The problem with the current PoS systems is that they hand out rewards (block rewards and fees).  PoS without rewards and a deterministic preference function doesn't suffer from "nothing at stake", because, well, you don't care.

If you have a PoS system where there is no need for a regulation in the speed of blocks, because there is no block reward, and if you have a preference function that is:

1) slightly more than proportional to total coin-age, and proportional to number of transactions included
-> meaning, a chain with a transaction included is always preferred over an otherwise identical chain with a transaction not included
-> meaning that replacing a transaction by an earlier transaction of the same coins ("earlier double spend") is always going to be refused
-> meaning that putting in a later double spend of coins that have already been spend afterwards, is going to eliminate so many transactions that it is going to lose too.

2) has a random order of preference between chains that have identical outcomes for (1) solves the "nothing at stake" problem because one chain is preferred over another one

3) has, at each block, a random order of preference for stake holders to sign the block

I'm pretty sure you have mostly a unique solution to the consensus problem, and those "false variants" that may be propagated have very little chance of coming into existence, because minters don't mind minting, but are not keen on minting either, and are most of the time, not motivated to making false chains: they can only harm the system in which they have a stake.  As there is no rewards, there are no strategies apart from trying to double spend, and the odds that you can do it because you happen to be the preferred staker on the false chain are small.

There can be regular "multi-stake checkpoint signing" events if ever the probability of double spending is not small enough, but I don't even think it is necessary.

This is de facto PoW converted in PoS, but you still have to pay for electricity !
If the whales REALLY WANTED, they would fork to a proof of stake.  No more miners.  A proof of stake fork would be a good thing for bitcoin.  But again, I don't think it will happen.  In fact, if I had enough time, I would even code a version of bitcoin with PoS.  But I don't.


During this discussion, this also occured to me.  I knew that it was kind of problematic and silly as a system, except for burning seigniorage where it is brilliant.  But as a cryptographic security system, it is about the stupidest thing you can do, and the very fact of separating users/owners and "block chain builders" by specialisation of labor means that the system loses its self-control.

You get industrials producing block chain for users, and the only thing users do, is to pay the industrials, and undergo their ruling.

Again, PoW is great for coin creation.  But that's it.  It shouldn't be given any other value than the value to make a coin while burning a similar value.

I fail to see how their revenue is squeezed by small blocks.  The smaller the block the higher the revenue.  Because demand for transaction is highly inelastic, much more so than 1/x.  It is essentially a wall.  Some people *absolutely need* their transaction to happen, and are willing to pay a high percentage of the transaction for it to happen.  The more desperate you can make people, the higher the fees they will pay.
Of course, in the long run, this hurts the system.  But nobody cares about the long run (apart from those sitting on a bagload of coins of course).  


Nah.  What is the lifetime of hashing equipment ?  1 year ?  2 years ?  That's all you need to look for in the future.  On top of that, the deciders are not necessarily the owners of asics, but the POOLS.  The asic owners are their slaves to a certain extend.

I think if a miner has the choice between pumping a few million $$ in the next two years and have bitcoin broken afterwards, that's by far the option to take as compared to obtaining a few $10 000, with a healthy bitcoin system where in any case, he doesn't know if it is going to be profitable for him.  Miners are not investors in coins.  They are "extractors of money from greater fool players to whom they sell hash rate for their block chain", and their investment only lasts 2 years at most.

So I really, really don't see why miners wouldn't love even blocks of 100 KB, except that they can't, because of their mutual competition.


Again, I fail to see that. Collectively, miners have advantage over smaller and smaller blocks.  Ideally, one single transaction per block.  That single transaction is going to cost a fortune, much, much more than the current block reward.


No, because they are not sufficiently colluding and because the HF would leave the small chain existing as "true bitcoin", losing the only thing bitcoin has going for it: brand name.  

Who is paying for the mining ?  The greater fools, and the big whales, because they need bitcoin.  The first ones for their illusion, the second ones because it is their fortune.  The miners can't impose anything that is fundamentally different from "bitcoin as we know it" because then the first kind of people will run away, and the second ones will not be pleased at all.  But miners can pretend to KEEP bitcoin the way it is.  Nobody can stop them working on bitcoin as they are used to.  Even if this is not the very absolute optimal (I think it is for miners, in the coming 2 or 3 years), a HF would do much, much more damage to the image of "true bitcoin" than keeping it the way it is and squeezing the fee market.

Bitcoin won't appreciate orders of magnitude any more.  Hell, bitcoin hasn't won an order of magnitude since 4 years.  Apart from a serious overtaking, bitcoin won't depreciate orders of magnitude in the coming years either.   So you can, when thinking logarithmically, consider bitcoin's price essentially constant.  But fees can still win 2 orders of magnitude easily, and the squeeze is slowly setting in.  What better situation can you dream of, as a miner ?


Yes, and because fees are highly inelastic, if you reduce the offer of fee by 2, fees increase by much, much more than a factor 2.  Probably by a factor of 10 or so.  Which means that the smaller the block is, the higher the value of the above expression, until you kill bitcoin.


That would be very reasonable in fact.  But they won't, because it kills one of the propaganda items of bitcoin.


It is much better to have the few guys that need to transfer a few millions, pay a few thousands, than to have to bother with the guy wanting to transfer $10,- and risk that the guy tranferring a million, will not pay more than the guy transferring $10,-.

Amen.  Someone is getting it.

I don't have the time nor the energy for effort to be concise.  As I write on a keyboard about as fast as I talk, my stuff is always very verbose.

Absolutely not.  If you can reverse the hash function (that is, if you succeed in cracking it), you can redo a "proof of work" block chain in half an hour on a PC (well, maybe half a day ).  A cracked hash function is not a proof of work any more.  Note moreover that you do not need to *fully* crack the hash function, but to find simply a way for it to find precedents with leading zeros without having to "brute force" it.  The whole proof of work resides on the assumption that brute-forcing is the only way to find hashes with leading zeros.  


Indeed, but that's just as well the case for a hash function.  And hell, if reversing a digital asymetric key pair is to be envisioned, then the *ownership* of coins is put severely to a test.  (ok, I agree that the hash protection of the public key until you spend the outcome, is a smart protection of that, but in fact, it just MODIFIES the asymetric key pair, it doesn't undo the fact that there is a key pair).

If you look (by sliding the mouse over the orange bars) you will see that there are both Segwit and BU blocks mined several big mining pools !  This is in agreement with my thesis that mining pools just want to keep status quo, and want to keep both antagonist forks away from consensus.  Which is exactly what immutability is about.

This.  Actually, maybe not even the "fractional reserve" thing.  There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that and, I will tell you, *unavoidable* in any financial system.  I think the main reason is to push people into banking again.  Banking is really lucrative.  Look at the only "banking" system there is in crypto: the exchanges.  This is the most lucrative part of the whole thing.

However, I don't think that can ever work: "bitcoin banking" has the worst of both worlds.  In that case, "fiat banking" is going to be preferred by almost all people.  If you are in any case subjugated to banks, just as well use fiat banks, which have some legal framing, and which have centuries of experience, not just "a banking guy on the internet".

Not anyone.  Only those that are not very fluid in cryptographic notions.  Saying that "proof of work is a form of digital signature of the right block chain" is taking a perspective that maybe not everyone had immediately seen, and those understanding these notions may 1) have had that idea already by themselves or 2) have a Aha Erlebnis, in which case I opened their view on things.

Once you realize this function of PoW, you realize also that there must be better ways, and you are less bound to repeat "most secure block chain in the world" and other religious bitcoin nonsense.

It could also be that I've been overlooking something, and then maybe someone could make an *intelligent* comment that helps me in my own understanding.  That's why I am here: to test my understanding of crypto systems.


Mileage can vary

I'm not saying nothing at all.  You may understand nothing of what I'm saying.  You're free to read or not to read my comments.  I don't care. If they are not helpful in your understanding, then simply don't read them.  Your answers are not very helpful to me, but they allow me to fathom the level of understanding (or lack thereof) of others although I don't know how representative they are.

The amount of hashing is the clumsy equivalent of a "digital signature" on the "original" so that it cannot get modified, exactly like the digital signature of a document proves that it is the original and not a modified version.  That was the analogy which visibly you didn't understand.

However, the difference between PoW and a digital signature is that with PoW, the "security" is not larger than the effort (waste) put in by the "signer" (the miners that made the first, original chain) and can hence be redone by anyone wishing to put more effort into it ; while with a genuine digital signature, the effort to make the signature is negligible, and the effort needed to fake it, is astronomical.   You essentially have that the cryptographic "proof of authenticity" with PoW is 1:1  (original/modified copy) while with a digital signature it is close to 0 : infinity.  That was my point.


I was not talking about the transaction signatures.  I was talking about the cryptographic function of PoW as a proof that it is the "original block chain".  PoW has the FUNCTION of a cryptographic signature, but a very bad one that is.
(it has other functions too, like resolving consensus by organizing a lottery and burning seigniorage).

How do you know that, amongst 3 different block chains, one is the "true" one ?  You check total PoW, and the largest number indicates you which one is the "true one". 

How do you know that, amongst 3 different digitally signed documents, one is the true one ?  You check the digital signature against my public key: only one will match. 

The certainty of the first (PoW) is only as good as your belief that an attacker will not have wasted MORE than the "good guys".  The certainty of the second (digital signature) is that an attacker couldn't have wasted an ASTRONOMICAL amount of work to brute force the key pair, while the true signer spend a millisecond of his PC effort on it.

You see the difference in security between a digital signature of a document, and PoW "signature" of a block chain ?  And do you see the difference in COST of that security between a digital signature (almost nothing) and PoW (400 million $ per year) ?

That's my point.  PoW as "security" signature of the "right" block chain is horrendously bad.

In PoS, the PoW is replaced by digital signatures by stake holders.   You can simply not fake a PoS chain, and its security is that of a digital signature.  PoS has a theoretical consensus problem (nothing at stake), but its cryptographic security, on the other hand, is total.  There is no way for an *external attacker* to do the PoS chain over.

This.  Well, "us", the idiots that are willing to pay for that joke, calling it "investment", while it is just a money pump.


But who is "BU" ?  Those few devs ?  The only ones that are *capable* of hard forking are the mining pools, when they DECIDE to make big blocks.  And they aren't.


Yes, and that is their function, as PoW providers.


Mining pools have no megalomania world views, they are just in this business to make money.  Like exchanges.  They don't need world-domination.  They couldn't care less.  They want income.


I'm 99% convinced (I always leave 1% of existential doubt) that there will NEVER BE a BU fork.


They need a HARD LIMIT on block size, in order to be able to squeeze the fee market.  Whether that limit is 1 MB, 10 MB or 50 GB doesn't matter (well it does, it only starts to be profitable when the market is squeezed, so 50 GB blocks is still too far off).

The reason is, as you pointed out yourself, that if there is no hard limit, the Tragedy of the Commons makes that each miner, individually, will be tempted to make larger blocks, having a somewhat larger gain at an instant, but will be doing so at the expense of releasing the pressure on the fee market, diminishing SEVERELY the fee income of all miners, himself included.  So *ideally* a miner would like to be able to make large blocks himself, but having his peers make small blocks.  That won't work of course.  So if there is no hard limit on the block size, to which to SQUEEZE the fee market, the temptation to increase block size will make that this market is never squeezed.

By sheer coincidence, there is, at the moment, a hard limit on block size: 1 MB.  That is a god-given present to miners.  This keeps them mutually in place, and allows them to escape the Tragedy of the Commons drama where they will kill one another's fee market.  So they absolutely want to keep this, because once this limit falls, ALL limits will fall in the same way.  There is only one wall.  If it crumbles, all of them are known to be able to crumble.

Now, you say that miners want maximum (fee x volume) x market price.

Yes.  But fees are a very INELASTIC market.   That is, from the moment that there is more transaction demand than can be delivered, fees SKYROCKET.  Because people NEED to transact.  Their coins are worthless if they cannot transact them.  Of course, if they think it is a temporary problem, they will wait.  But if there is a general scarcity of transactions, people will pay bigger and bigger fees to transact.  The small transactions that can be left alone, will not be done, and on bigger transactions, the fee is not a problem, so BIG transactions will pay BIG fees to get through.

As such, fee x volume, when the market is squeezed, will increase with smaller volume !  If there could only be 1 transaction per block, you would get only THAT SINGLE VERY IMPORTANT transaction of 50000 coins, with a fee of 20 BTC.  Of course, at that point, bitcoin would be dead. 

But by squeezing the market, you can probably PUMP UP the (fee x volume) AT LEAST AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE maybe even two.  The market price will not readily increase an order of magnitude by not squeezing the market, and even if it FALLS an order of magnitude, you are still winning.

SWIFT has about 2-3 transactions per second.  Do you imagine the VOLUME of money they process ?  The 1 MB limit would be sufficient for SWIFT.  Can you imagine the FEES you can collect if ONLY swift-like transactions happen with bitcoin ?

Why would miners be bothered with peons paying for a book on Open Bazaar ?



... and nothing will happen as a result --> immutability !


But they too, suffer from a Tragedy of the Commons problem.  The danger of dumping on a chain by a whale, to get the others buying his stash and then seeing this chain becoming the valuable one, is too big.    You wouldn't go in such an adventure and loose your fortune.


Exchanges don't care about whales.   They don't care AT ALL about crypto tokens, only by idiots wanting to exchange them.  They couldn't care less about bitcoin, ethereum or whatever.  They live off people paying (cash) to exchange stuff.  Whatever stuff. So they cannot get "spanked" by a guy with a lot of crypto tokens.  The guy with a lot of crypto tokens needs them, not the other way around.  Contrary to miners who invested heavily in mining material.  Exchanges sell "exchange operations".  If they are careful, they are never exposed to price fluctuations of coins.


I know, as long as the mining production can follow, as long as there are enough asics around.  But if tomorrow, you switch to scrypt, for instance, there's not enough material available, and it will take months to install all this capacity.  In the mean time, those few miners with material (former Litecoin miners I suppose) will, at ridiculously low difficulties, make tons of benefit if this is the real bitcoin, and that chain will be very lowly secured in comparison with what it used to have as hash rate protection.


Yes, but before the same amount of asics is produced for the new algorithm, difficulty is extremely low, and the cost of PoW will be ridiculously low as compared to the rewards.  The one or two producers of ASICS may very well hold back some production, to easily give a 10-fold hash rate to one of their friends, taking over entirely the system.

Imagine that the difficulty of the new chain is 100 times less than the PoW cost when the full capacity will be installed.  That is, the world now has to produce 100 times more asics than are available at the moment.  If you have a factory (one of the 2 or 3 that do this), and you've produced 20 times the current amount of running asics, you are in a perfect position to give someone a 95% hash rate majority at a given moment with the 20 times more asics you have produced and not yet exported.  

We're not talking about a 51% attack, but a 95% attack: the guy with the 20 times the number of currently used ASICS can dictate the chain and is still doing only 1/5 of the total PoW cost in equilibrium.

For instance, if it is scrypt: LTC has a market cap of about 200 million.  Bitcoin is rather 100 times more.  So my idea that at this moment, in the world, the total scrypt hash rate available is only 1/100 of what it would be if it came to equilibrium is not crazy.

Do you see the danger for the integrity of that scrypt bitcoin chain ?  After 5 attacks, people run back to the normal bitcoin chain.


Tail emission would be a good thing.  Miners could decide not to halve any more.  They would be right.

Because they contain valuable logical arguments, that go against some religious dogma that doesn't stand up to logical analysis by "bitcoiners".  

Of course I understand the "value of cumulative hashes in a PoW scheme".  It is a cryptographic securing ("signing") of a specific chain over another one ; the only way to make a "false copy" is to spend more hashes on the false copy.

Note that most cryptographic systems introduce an asymmetry in the difficulty for the "good guy" and the "bad buy".  If I provide a signature of an original document, the making of that signature doesn't cost me a lot of effort, but for the one trying to make a false document with my signature, he has to essentially brute force my public key, which is an infeasible amount of work.  This is why a digital signature is an efficient way of securing a given document.

If I were to "sign my document" with PoW, then I would have to spend JUST AS MUCH effort on making the signature, than the attacker.  In fact, the one with more hash power would win: perfect symmetry between the "good guy" and the "bad guy".  This is the problem with PoW.   The "security" comes from the fact that we assume that the good guys wasted most.

If I have two block chains, in order to decide which one is the right one, I have to find out which one has most PoW.  That is then the "right" one.  With digital signatures, this is totally different: I check the digital signature against the public key of the signer, and if it fits, I know that the signer is the owner of the right secret key OR that the attacker has spend an IMMENSE amount of work to brute-force the key pair.  With a block chain, I only know that the "good" one has wasted more heat than the "bad one".

As compared to a proof of stake system for instance, PoW is pretty lousy cryptography.

But it is a great system to waste seigniorage, and to allow newcomers without any interaction with the originators of the system to obtain coins.  

It is a horrible system to "secure" something.  Just any outsider can totally overrule the system, if he spends, say, 50 billion on it.  The day the Chinese government wants to fuck up bitcoin, it generates 20 different block chains, that will cost them 50 or 100 billion dollar, and that's it.  In a PoS system, that is cryptographically impossible.

The current Core threat is BTW funny.  If they would switch to another PoW system, then bitcoin's chain would become MIGHTILY INSECURE, because there's not yet much hardware available for the other PoW system.  So for a while, the amount of PoW (the amount of wasted effort) on the PoW on the new chain would be ridiculously small as compared to what bitcoin was used to, and with relatively small capital, one would easily 51% attack such a meager chain protection.

However, if bitcoin switched to a PoS system, the security would be entirely guaranteed.  There would be no way to FAKE a PoS fork, because they are done by digital signatures of stake holders, not by having somewhat more hash power.

But your (correct) theory is that coin owners will dump on the chain they don't like, to obtain more coins on the chain they like.  Now *where else but on an exchange* are they going to do that ?
This can't be a "friendly over the counter" encounter by 10 equal-minded big whales somewhere on an island in the Pacific, because those BUYING the coins you dump, are in the other camp.  

So you HAVE TO TRUST the exchanges in this affair.  The only way to "dump a chain into oblivion" by a whale, is to put to sale his stash on that chain *to the public*.  Otherwise, the public price wouldn't fall down.  The place where the value of a chain is made, given that there is almost no *economic value* to crypto, is on exchanges.  
The "oh my god, merchant X is only accepting BU coin or is only accepting Core Coin" doesn't play the slightest bit of a role, as this represents maybe $10,- in the bitcoin price (I even think less).
The "oh, my preferred dark market is now only doing Core Coin" won't matter much.  

The only thing that makes and kills coins in this greater-fool game that crypto is, are the casinos: the exchanges.

You only need 4 or 5 of them listing the two coins, and that will do.  And I can guarantee you that they will play the game: THEY will become rich because of this, because THEY take fees on the exchanging of Miner Coin against Core Coin.  


But your "whales dumping" plan HAS to be executed on exchanges.  They don't have a choice.


They are going to dump their Miner coins on who ?  Who will buy them directly from them, and not on exchanges ?
Who are the big whales who will BUY these coins from them, if it is not on an exchange ?

But there's another problem.  How much are these whales trusting one another ?  Because you get a Prisoners dilemma between them, unless they are sitting together in the same room before their lap tops, holding guns to shoot down the cheater.

Because there's no more fun than to get your co-whales dump on the wrong chain, buy up their stash at ridiculous prices, and when they are "empty", start pumping the chain they just tried to dump to oblivion, on which they released all of their stash !   You can dump slightly on the "expensive chain", which the whales will buy, giving you a huge amount of cash, with which you buy the "cheap chain".  Especially if it is the "good old bitcoin" : people will see a huge dip, and when you start buying up, the price will go up again, investors will hesitate following the "pumped fork", you start dumping the "whale fork" after a while, your co-whales have to buy in like crazy and make you rich.

The "true bitcoin" name of the miner chain will in the end survive, the enemy whales have nothing any more to dump on it, you have bought their stash on that chain for a penny, and now you have:

1) all their "miner coins" which is the good old bitcoin chain
2) most of their stash when you dumped on the whales chain

"old bitcoin" will have survived the fork, the other whales are "rich in whale coin" and you are rich in bitcoin and cash.

The miners are back in business with a lot of PoW ; the other chain is a pumped alt coin.

Very very dangerous game for whales to dump their "true bitcoin".

What the block size issue is about ?  Very simple: miners want big fees, so small blocks and no second layer.  Exactly the bitcoin of today.  They don't want all these Core ideas.  They simply want bitcoin remaining the way it is (note that this is the true FUNCTION of proof of work: keep the network honest = keep it to the rules).
But how do they counter core which IMPLEMENTS AUTOMATIC protocol modifications ?  By going for a competitor.  Just ANY competitor that kills Core's de facto centralized software hegemony and (as they thought) their governance of modifications of the protocol.

This is why miners will never allow the BU fork to happen.  They will keep BU at 30-40%.  Sufficient to show that Core doesn't have consensus.  If ever Core implements a 50% soft fork, they will augment BU to 50-60% but that's dangerous, because some idiot might pull the trigger.  But now that core threatens to pull the trigger with change of PoW, the "altcoin guys" are on the Core side.

Nothing will happen.  Until after bitcoin has lost its first place.

Absolutely.  I fully agree with you. 

There are essentially two fundamental problems.  The first is with Proof of Work.  Proof of Work needs to destroy value in order to be valuable.  Proof of work is perfect to kill seigniorage, but is a totally horrible way to have "cryptographic security", because there's no advantage for the "good guys".  The "good guys" are those that can waste most, not those that "posses a secret key" (which is the usual form of cryptographic protection).
The race to waste most leads to economies of scale (ASICS...) and hence to a concentration of producers of proof of work.
This leads to two problems: centralization, and the fact that those producing proof of work are not necessarily stake holders in the system.

But there's another problem, which is the fact that blocks are rewarded in the first place in "big lumps".  This makes that there is a fight to make blocks, and to deny others to make blocks.  As such, "making blocks" becomes a huge lottery with big rewards, where pooling together always pays against playing solo.  This is a second vector of centralization: pooling.

Finally, the fact that there ARE rewards to "secure" the chain means that strategies to obtain those rewards are more important than correctly securing the chain, and to correctly process transactions.  If fees are due, then there will be strategies to extract as many fees from the users as the market can bear, and not the optimal point of resource utilisation.

The whole system of blocks, that are rewarded, and that this reward is an incentive for people to "secure" the chain as by-product, leads to a dynamics that is centralizing, and far from optimal for the users and stake holders.

Yes.  Mining pools are the deciders.  I guess that what you call "miners" is in fact sellers of hash rate with their devices.  The only thing these hash rate sellers decide, is to whom they sell their hash rate (usually one of the biggest pools, because they have the smoothest rewards).

I don't even see how this accelerates the "problem", the problem is already there.   In bitcoin, 5 entities have majority vote.  14 entities have "overwhelming 90% majority vote", and the dynamics explaining that are pretty clear: it is PoW investment, and the fact that the lottery of who wins a block introduces high volatility, which can be hedged by using a pool.  This is *inherent in PoW with ASICS*.

The only thing that can be accelerated by bigger blocks, is that the network topology will adapt somewhat quicker to the reality of the data flow, but the network topology AS SUCH doesn't matter.  So I would think it rather positive that the network adapts more to the reality, to render the network more efficient.  The network has in any case nothing to do with "decentralization" any more, since a long time.

That said, I don't believe ANYTHING will change in bitcoin.  I'm pretty convinced that we are just witnessing the "wars" that are part of the decentralized consensus mechanism that installs immutability (by antagonists not agreeing over change).


My idea is that bitcoin is what it is, and will evolve to what it was designed to be: a reserve currency for unregulated big business.  (or nothing).

That "unregulated big business" can just as well be a "banking layer" on top of it, like LN, but it shouldn't be integrated in the protocol.  The banking layers should be independent layers, in competition with one another, and not one single style frozen in the protocol.  But I have not to say what "should be", as "nothing will be".  Immutability.


Yes.  My implication is comprehension of these systems.  I'm into this for the comprehension of decentralized systems, and the emergent properties and centralization forces.  It are very interesting times.  When I post my views on things, this allows me to put my ideas out for comment, and see where I didn't consider certain aspects.

I used to be enthusiastic about bitcoin, I'm now convinced that it contains several fundamental design errors, and I want to see how these design errors determine the "thing" that it will become.  I think it has something of a Frankenstein creation now, and I wonder what will become of it.  I only see three outcomes:

1) total centralization, huge adoption, and the Troyan horse TPTB will use against people ; but I give it little chance.  This is the Core way.  Worldwide bitcoin monopoly by a few dark forces no-one knows, worse than the current financial system.

2) Oligarchy of miners, bitcoin adoption niche as reserve currency for unregulated financial affairs that cannot be done with the fiat system ; backbone of "underground economy".  Bitcoin for the rich, sleazy business men.

3) Nothing.  Bitcoin losing its crown to alt coins, crashing into nothing.

My only agenda is to understand all the aspects of this kind of system.

Yes, I'm convinced, and I explained you why, "running a node" is a useless exercise, except for yourself.  Not because I have an agenda, but because this is a logical consequence of a Proof of Work system.

Apart from "you have no clue" and "waffle waffle" your arguments are pretty weak.


My "rhetoric" are observations, and logical arguments.  What is the real rhetoric:

"Proof of work systems are determined by those providing proof of work, and now they are, for obvious reasons, and also factually, a group of 5 - 14 entities"

Or:

"waffle waffle" and "you have no clue"

?

Which of both kinds of discourse is closest to "logical argument" and which one is closest to "rhetoric" ?

Yes, that's essentially it.  Non-mining nodes download the block chain, and verify it FOR THE OWNER OF THE NODE.  They also relate those data to other nodes wanting to download the block chain from them, and not directly from a miner node.  If the cartel of miners makes one single block chain, then those nodes have the choice between accepting that block chain, or stopping all together.

And they send upstream those transactions that wallets, connected to your node, want to send, if they prefer to send it through your node, and not directly to a miner's node.

A user wallet doesn't need your node.  It can connect directly to a miner node.  But it MAY use your node for, well, for what ?  Convenience maybe.  A big user will of course have its own node.  For instance, an exchange may install (will install) its own node.  But it can only download one single block chain, because there's only one single block chain "out there".  If it wants to serve its customers with deposits and withdrawals, it better installs a node that accepts the one and unique chain out there, and better transmits its transactions to the miners making that unique chain.  A big exchange better doesn't rely on the feable P2P links of unknown in the network, and preferentially connects DIRECTLY to some big miners.  To be sure to get their (unique) chain.  And to be sure that their transactions are not stopped by the P2P network for one or other reason.

The P2P network configuration, and the propagation of transactions and blocks made sense when miners were "everywhere on the network".  Then, the network as a whole, served as a kind of "filter", and stopped single miners from "colluding".  But that is over, now that there are 5 majority miners.  The P2P network is obsolete in the current configuration which is server/client.

There is in fact nothing exceptional to what is presented here as a kind of big conspiracy:
if a hard fork of a coin is made, then of course all owners of the coins, having double coins, will decide in the market.  If there is a large preference by coin owners for one chain over the other, they will dump their holdings on one, to buy more of the other ; this will reflect in the relative market valuations of both market caps.

Whether this is done by "big whales", or by myriads of small owners doesn't really matter: it is the stake holders that split over the two coins according to their preferences.  Of course, if one of the chains is largely preferred by the majority stake, the other one will be "dumped into oblivion" but there's nothing wrong with that: it is stake preference.

However, I think that all these people are missing the point: miners don't want to hard fork.  The current bitcoin protocol is a dream for them.  They simply don't want it changed.  The only ones pushing for forks are the Core guys with Segwit, and now with change of PoW.

The BU are naive instrumentalized guys (or not so naive), that only need to exist to give counter weight to Core's desires to change bitcoin.  BU is not supposed to fork for real.  It only needs to bring sufficient dissent so that bitcoin can stay itself.

As such, the story becomes more involved: the only people *really wanting to fork away* are the Core side because they aren't pleased that bitcoin doesn't want to evolve according to their wishes ; that they have lost centralized control over bitcoin's protocol and cannot dictate the changes as they wish.   Those stopping them, and acting as the guardians of immutability, are the miners.  So the propaganda now wants to picture the miners as the people wanting change (with BU).  But they would be out of their minds to want change.  Bitcoin is a dream for them.

The ultimate scare tactics is to threaten the miners that if they don't comply to the changes Core wants, they will render their investments useless by changing PoW.   If the market (the whales) is with them, then yes, Core could bring out a fork with a new PoW, and the whales would kill the original bitcoin by dumping it to go to the forked Core version.

However, that will be a much, much more risky operation than at first sight, because you would need very strong collusion to do that: all exchanges would need to list "bitcoin" as the FORK, and need to list the ORIGINAL bitcoin as the alt coin.  Note that it worked with ethereum: the fork went with the name.  There WAS strong collusion between the whales, the Foundation, and the few exchanges listing ethereum to keep the name on the fork, and dump the original ethereum (renamed ETC) to oblivion.  Note that they ALSO had collusion of the miners.

But the power structure in bitcoin is different, and the *main propaganda for bitcoin*, the "longest chain, most protected by PoW" is going to be a very strong argument AGAINST such a PoW scheme, which cannot deliver a similar PoW security as the original bitcoin which will have ALL miners behind it (they have no choice !).

The surviving "old bitcoin" would have a more grassroots aspect than the new "big whales" coin with low PoW.  If ever the whales made a mistake, they would have their own coin amongst themselves to play with, and the "greater fools" would swarm to "cheap, true bitcoin": true bitcoin at $20, -, who wouldn't want to buy some !  With PoW like before, solid as a rock.  With the 1MB blocks largely sufficient to sustain the low traffic.  Bitcoin back in 2012, who wouldn't want to jump the train they missed the first time !

I call bluff.

It doesn't need to scale a lot.  In fact, this dumping has to be done on an exchange listing both coins, right ?
So this exchange should get some dust, even before being able to allow deposits and withdrawals in real coins from both coins.  Once such an exchange has "dust" (it can "explode" the dust in single Satoshis if it wants to), it can mix in dust in every withdrawal transaction on the whales' chain.  There aren't so many exchanges.  They only have to have some dust.

But the "trading" with IOU can start immediately of course: that's just a matter of virtual games on the exchange's web site.  But withdrawals will be impossible until the exchange has at least some dust from one chain or the other.  If the exchange is wise, it doesn't list the coins before obtaining the dust, because it could put itself in serious difficulties otherwise.

In fact, the exchanges only need one single time "dust": they need to "pay their big wallet to themselves" once with dust in it.  After that, all withdrawals and deposits on that wallet are chain-only.


Oh, well, that is still 100 years away  Bitcoin most probably won't exist any more then.
And in any case, no tail emission is a disaster if you need to reward people.  I think no inflation is OK, but in a voluntary system only.