That's not what I'd call "losing coins because you run a node".  The coins are what they are.  You may be ILL-INFORMED about what's the status of a coin, yes.  But as long as you don't take any action, the fact that you run a node or not doesn't make you "lose coins".

BTW, of course, if you have a node that looks at chain A, this is not saying anything of what happens on chain B.  If you run a litecoin node, it doesn't tell you anything of what happens on the bitcoin block chain either.   In fact, it isn't even your *node* that matters.  What matters are the chain(s) that are existing out there, and which can be found on the miner pool nodes that make them.  So if you take a light wallet, and you connect that light wallet to a miner pool node that makes the chain of your choice, whatever it is, you'll be all right, and get the right information.  A "right" full node can only copy it at best.


That's evident that if the chains have identical signature schemes, and you didn't do anything to split them, of course a valid transaction on chain A will also be a valid transaction on chain B, the famous "replay attack".  The thing to do, is that ideally, the one forking off should modify something in the signature (hard fork !) so that this is automatically solved (a good signature on one scheme will not be a good signature on the other) ; or you should mix in yourself newly mined dust on one of the two prongs.  Otherwise, it is normal that any signature on one chain will be copied over to the other chain.

But all this has nothing to do with "running the right node".  You should construct the right transaction, and that's done with a wallet.  A light wallet can perfectly well make a good transaction.



As I said, the best solution to handle this is by using some mined dust on each of the prongs, to make transactions that are only valid on one branch.  But ideally, those forking off from the original chain should ideally make something incompatible in the signature scheme (hence, making a hard fork).  


More than just restrict activity.  ANY soft fork is automatically imposed by a >50% hash rate collusion over the soft fork.  If tomorrow, >50% of miner nodes decide to impose segwit, then segwit will be.  Other miners have no option.  They will get orphaned all the time according to their own rules.  Because all nodes will accept segwit blocks like "legacy nodes", including the non-segwit miners.

Any soft fork is imposed by >51% hash rate collusion.  

Yes, blacklisting addresses is also a soft fork, and is also imposed by >51% hash rate collusion over that black list.

A hard fork is a whole different affair: you make two coins, and users happen to possess both of them.  Up to them to use both of them, by running their respective wallets (and eventually, their respective nodes).

Of course not.  Whatever happens on a non-mining node doesn't alter anything on a block chain (apart from sending goofed transactions eventually). 


Forking happens by miners.  And as long as the original chain is one of the prongs, your coins exist of course on the original chain.  You are perfectly right that the ETH fork (by miners !) was done to reverse certain actions by one participant (the "dao hacker"), but he kept his holdings on the original (ETC) chain.

Note that the forking is done by people building block chains and in a PoW system, these are mining nodes.  Non-mining nodes cannot alter the block chain, and hence cannot alter any protocol, or any block chain contents ; as such, they cannot "lose coins".  If by running a certain non-mining node, you've "lost coins", you can easily get them back: erase your node, and start another one with the "right" protocol (the one that can read the chain that has your coins out there).

I fully, 100%, agree with you.  What you are talking about, is Fisher's formula for the value of a currency. 

Crypto is abstract speculative greater fool betting tokens, not money.  Bitcoin included.  Because of their emission curves.

One thing is sure: it cannot steadily go there over a long period like 5-10 years.  It would mean all the speculative money out there would see it grow steadily, and not jump the train ?  No.  If it gets there, it gets there FAST.  (and back down after that maybe).

You cannot have an asset that outperforms the market by a huge factor for years and years in a row, with steady certainty.  It has to go in unpredictable bangs.  Do you think hedge funds and so on, who are sitting on huge money to play with, are going to do their best to gain 10-20% or so a year in the classical speculative circuit, when there's an asset out there that has been rising 100% a year, year after year, without touching it, and let them be outperformed by a set of amateurs, year after year, on a sleazy exchange ?

Of course, if you have 10 billion to play with, you cannot play on a chain with only 30 billion market cap, that's for sure.  But what is sure, is that bitcoin, nor any other speculative asset, can steadily and almost predictably rise year after year in a way that makes professional financial speculators look like school kids.

Just for the fun of it, I really would like to see the dynamics of a UASF against the miners to force them.  So in a way, just for sake of experiment, I'd like to see that happening, because I think it would be a major fiasco, it simply doesn't make sense.

Of course, if the miners decide to HF before, you could always say that they did so because they were scared in the same way the Japanese could claim that the US was so terribly scared of their superior army that they threw them a few nukes on their head in 1945, proving the superiority of the Japanese army.  Yeah....

I'd like to see the experiment done with a UASF, honestly, to see how it turns out, so in a way, I hope the miners don't HF before, and spoil the experimental setup.

In as much as I cannot speak for jonald, I do understand an idea of relief, that people are not *forced* on segwit and LN because of artificial block room scarcity.  One can use segwit (and eventually the LN) if one wants to, but one can also keep on transacting in the old-style bitcoin way, on the block chain.  I think the relief of jonald is that bigger blocks are in sight, not so much that segwit gets, or doesn't get, activated.

That said, I still want to see it happening.  In as much as bitcoin is decentralized, and hence nobody colludes with more than 51% of hash rate over any deviation of rules, it should remain immutable.  It can only change, if "enough hash rate colluded over a plan", which, in my book, is centralization.  Which is not impossible.

If you have a list of "20 phone numbers of governors of bitcoin" that you can call, and see if they agree with your plan, you have, essentially, a central governance, not so different from any other hierarchical system with central governance.

I know that it was presented that way, and maybe it was even *intended* that way.   But a desirable outcome is not necessarily the actual outcome of a design.  If I make a rocket to go to the moon, and I put propellers on it, even if my intentions are to get to the moon, my rocket will never leave the atmosphere.  Arguing that propellers should bring me to the moon because that's why I put them on my rocket in the first place, is an erroneous form of reasoning that takes desired outcome as provable consequence.

If one puts a hard limit on something, you make it artificially scarce.  One has put an artificial limit on the number of bitcoins that are made.  Nothing technical would stop you from making more of them.  Changing the >>= into <<= in the calculation of the coinbase reward is all that is needed to have doublings instead of halvings every 210 000 blocks.  But one put halvings, to make bitcoins artificially scarce and hence expensive.

Whether this was the intention or not, one did the same with the number of transactions by limiting the amount of produced transaction room to 1 MB/10 minutes.  This could actually be a very smart move, because the scarcity of transaction room makes it expensive: the fees.  Given that sooner or later, the whole of bitcoin's PoW security must be paid by fees, it wouldn't be crazy to make fees expensive.

Why 1 MB and not 10 MB ?  That's similar to "why 21 million coins and not 210 million coins ?".  Arbitrary choice of scarcity.  But it *is* a scarcity parameter, and its price is the fee, like the number of bitcoins is scarce and its price is the market price of a coin.


I agree with you on the idea that *if bitcoin were not to be scarce in transactions*, but it wasn't designed that way.  I also think that the uncapped value of bitcoin is wrong.  I think bitcoin's value should be regulated automatically (I already said how).  But no, people want scarce coins that can go moon.  Well, they  also have scarce transaction room that can go moon too.

Both of these are bad for a currency.  A currency should have fluid transactions, and should have stable value.  Bitcoin is designed to have speculative value by scarcity of coins, and is equally designed to have expensive transactions by scarcity of room.  The coin emission lowers, the transaction "emission" is constant.  Hell, it would even be funny if block SIZE halved also every 210 000 blocks !  Then the total block chain would have finite length and the last transaction would take place in some 10s of years when the block size drops under 1 KB, in the same way as the emission rate drops under 1 Satoshi.

Can't help it that it is designed that way, even if it was not intended that way.

I thought (but I'm still learning) that the txin were in the witness data, which is entirely new, and could hence obey any new rules.  Maybe I'm wrong there.
Can you see in the legacy block chain, without witness data, that a segwit output has been spent ?  Because only the legacy block chain has the no-double-spend rule backed into it as of now.  What you do with the witness data is "new stuff" and could, as far as I understand, very well include a rule of "no triple spend" but allow "double spend" (it would be crazy, of course, but I think technically possible).

This is why I propose a soft fork to 1KB blocks.  Then everyone is constraint to hodl, and will not stupidly sell his coins and regret it later !
 

Hell, it will vastly improve the decentralization, you will be able to run a full node on your iphone-5.

You never lose bitcoins because you run a non-mining node.  The only things that matter is what is recorded on the block chain(s).  Whether your local copy gets fucked up or not doesn't matter.  The only thing you can have as an accident, is that your old software makes a funny transaction that is nevertheless accepted in some way by the miners and put in a chain, but is in a way screwed up that you cannot use its outputs any more.

But by running an old node, you never "lose bitcoins".  And if bitcoin forks in two chains, you have your former coins on both of them.  Maybe you don't SEE them, because you're not using an appropriate node, or an appropriate wallet, but they are there.  If my secret keys are safe, even if I wipe my hard disk and erase my full node, I didn't lose my coins.  (and the keys are in my *wallet*, not my *full node*: hell, at home I have an empty full node, and my bitcoins are in a light wallet on another computer which connects to my full node, so whatever I do to my full node doesn't affect my coins).


It doesn't, simply because of the mechanism of immutability, which, however, can break down if centralization occurs and there's a collusion of more than 50% of the consensus (= hash) power over a change.

But at least I'm happy that you consider block size just as well a hard economic parameter as inflation rate.   I think that the block size limit as an economic parameter, introducing scarcity of transaction room, was a stupid thing to do in bitcoin's design, but so is its inflation rate.  So, bitcoin being designed as a system with a scarce and finite number of coins, I don't see the problem with bitcoin as a system with a finite and scarce number of transactions per unit of time.  I have to say I think the economic model of both is stupid if the idea was to make a currency, but then, that's how bitcoin was designed, and I think that is the way it should live its life.  The economic design looks more like the one for "exclusive famous paintings" which are rare to come by, and difficult to transact, in other words, a kind of highly speculative and not  very liquid asset with high price that is rarely moved, and only to move big amounts of value (not a currency at all, but a "settlement layer for rich guys doing things where fiat cannot go").  


The point is, you can ask for the books of PayPal, or you can ask for the books of the miners.   That's what you do when you use a full node.  But you cannot change them, and there's only one book out there.  If you think that PayPal has been cheating in the books, you could go to a judge.  If you see that the miners have been cheating, I don't think you can go to a judge.  You can just curse them, and that's it.   If the one book that is out there is not to your likings, what are you going to do about it, apart from shouting, cursing, trying to tell everyone not to use bitcoin because it is a scam ....
Suppose you hold, I don't know, 10 000 BTC, and you see that the miners are cheating.  Suppose that you see suddenly that they are giving themselves a 200 BTC block reward.  Your node stops.  There's no other chain around.  Are you really going to shout that bitcoin is a big scam and that the miners are screwing everyone ?  If you run an exchange, are you going to stop all transactions of your customers ?  Or are you silently going to modify your node software to be able to transact *your own 10 000 coins* and, maybe, sell them before the shit hits the fan ?



Ah, I didn't know you could go back from a segwit address back to a legacy address.  How can the old node check that transaction, given that he doesn't have the witness data ?
Suppose that I had coins on a legacy address A1.  I transfer them to my new segwit address S1.  Now, Joe, running an old node, has address A2.  Can I transact coins from S1 to A2 ?
But, suppose now that I had coins in S1, and I pay Jack, running a new node, in S2.
I could try to spend S1 to A2, because Joe, with his old node cannot see my transaction from S1 to S2.
But of course, the *miners* will not accept my transaction from S1 to A2, because that would be a double spend.  In other words, Joe, with his old node, cannot see that I'm doing a double spend, and would cheerfully accept a chain with a spending from S1 to A1 (if this is even possible ?), but he TRUSTS THE MINERS that they won't allow that.

What's the point for him to run his old full node, and not a light wallet connected to a miner node ?


The point is that if you do a radical change in the protocol, you fork anyhow.  There' s no good reason to keep backward compatibility with software that doesn't understand the new protocol but simply "allows it".  The coin after is not the same coin as the coin before.  The protocol is different.  The only thing that is the same, is the ownership of coins.  



This is what I call religion.  If you talk about "insecure" and "scam coin", that's not rational. Hell, I'm even sure that you can change the inflation rate in bitcoin with a soft fork too.  If you would allow every first transaction from legacy to segwit address to be spent not once, but twice, you'd double in one go, all bitcoin wallets that switch to segwit.  With a segwit soft fork because it is a new protocol that is "invisible" to the old one, so a soft fork.


You could also just run a full node for your customers, and tell them to connect a light wallet to your node.  Or to any other node.  Ultimately, to the source of all that data, which is a mining pool node.  Because all that node does, is copy what the miners produced.   If there's only one block chain out there, and the block headers link together and the last one is "up to date", then cryptographically you know that you have the headers of the sole chain out there.  
A light wallet does all the checking that is needed for the transaction at hand, on the single chain that is in any case out there.
I would consider it "safer" to use an up-to-date light wallet, than a legacy full node.  And in any case, there's only one "book" out there, whether you like it or not.

A (light) wallet is like a web browser, and a full node is like a proxy server.  The original data server is the backbone of miner pool nodes, that make the unique block chain, to take or to leave.

I find this not very convincing.   Let us recall what is the centralization pressure in PoW, that has separated the users from the consensus: it are economies of scale in hardware, in electricity.  However, these economies of scale are only rising a little bit: if you double your investment in mining gear, you do not double your margin.  You augment it with a few percent.  This few percent is enough, in the highly competitive market of proof of work, to centralize the PoW stuff so much as to take it out of hands of users. 

But let us think now about the LN.  Here, the margin is going to be the fee % you are going to obtain on LN transactions, over the price of a settlement on chain.  In other words, if you can transact, say, 10 BTC over a channel before you have to settle and "reload", and the LN fee market puts the transaction % at say, 0.1% of the amount, you will win 0.01 BTC of fees, and you will have to pay a settlement on chain, which is maybe 0.008 BTC.  You won 0.002 BTC.  However, if you can transact, say, 1000 BTC over said channel before having to settle, you will win 1 BTC of fees, while your settlement will still be 0.008 BTC.  This time, you won 0.992 BTC net.   In order to be able to transact 1000 BTC in a channel instead of 10 BTC, you'd have to commit about 100 times more BTC in the channel of course, if the fluxes are comparable.  So with 100 times more investment, you found about 500 times more benefit.  Your economies of scale were a factor of 5 !  You invested 100 times more, and your GAIN went up with a factor of 500.

==> you see that the "economies of scale" are not on the percentage level, but are, in our case, 500%.

We see that the LN has a much, much stronger form of economies of scale, namely the concentration of LN hubs into a few big "bank" whale hubs, that can still be very profitable with very low LN fees while smaller fish cannot compete with that.  If you cannot commit thousands of BTC into channels, in order to keep them open a very long time before needing to settle, you cannot offer competitive LN fees. 

The pressure to centralize by economies of scale in an LN network are much, much stronger than with PoW competition.

But there's still another argument that is dangerous.

The LN derives its security from the ability to settle on chain.  However, if the LN contains many more links than can be settled on the chain, then the block chain becomes like "fractional reserve banking".  Some can settle when they want, but all cannot settle when they want.  If, moreover, the room on chain is scarce, settling becomes an expensive affair, but it also becomes a risky affair if you cannot settle in time.

As such, if there are big LN hubs, chances are they will have bought up room on the block chain in agreement with miner pools, for them to be able to settle if ever they don't like some of their customers.  But the other way around will even be more difficult.  Settling will not be permissionless any more.

If you consider that mining pools are centralized, but they contain the essential security room for the settlement of the LN, then the LN is even MORE dependent on these pools than simple transaction are, because people's funds are locked in.

==> the LN only makes sense as a decentralized and permissionless system, if it can settle entirely on-chain at any moment.  The chain has to be potentially bigger than any LN it supports.

Not really.  If you keep your old node running, you copy the the old fork, if sufficient miners go with the old fork to still make some blocks.  If you download the new node, you copy the new fork.  

But in all of this, you don't even need to run a node.  You can just connect your light wallet to one of the miner pool nodes.  If you connect to an old-chain miner pool node, then you transact on the old chain ; if you connect to a new-chain miner pool node, you transact on the new chain.  You should be careful to avoid replay attacks, this could be done by slightly modifying something in the signature scheme in the new chain.

There's nothing special about having to download another piece of software if you want to run another coin.  In fact, exactly the same would happen with a UASF or any other such thing.  Monero or ethereum or dash or... nodes also have to upgrade when there's a hard fork.  That's part of the game.


Of course it matters.  That would be nodes that cannot understand segwit transactions.  Yes, they wouldn't refuse the block chain, but they cannot understand it.  It would see funny transactions, but accepted as "anyone can spend".  If I'd pay a user with a segwit transaction, and his light wallet connects to such an old node, he would not see my transaction arrive.  The user of the old node himself wouldn't understand my transaction if I were to have segwit coins and wanted to pay him.  So this would be a crippled node in any case.

As you know in the mean time, I don't believe in the decentralization value of non mining full nodes, but the decentralization value of crippled full nodes that don't have the witness data and don't understand the segwit transactions is even much more of a ridiculous idea.

The thing is that segwit is a radical modification of how bitcoin functions.  I'm not saying it is bad (I think it contains some very good ideas).  But it is a radically different way of doing many things.  Essentially, the legacy bitcoin and the segwit bitcoin are two entirely different things.  A clean hard fork is much more adequate for this.  And a clean hard fork would also allow people to "not be tied to backward compatibility".  Many crypto currencies have such a policy.   There's a lot of clumsiness in the requirement of a soft fork that disappears with a hard fork.  For a radical modification like this one, a hard fork is much cleaner.

The whole "leading argument" in this whole business is the irrational belief that non-mining full nodes have any decentralization value, and that old nodes with old node software are important.   Both of these notions are entirely wrong, but they are the fundamental argument on which all of this dispute is based.

My own thinking is that Core wants to push people out of the block chain, and onto the LN, because that's their toy, and they think that LN has not much to offer (probably erroneously !) apart if people are FORCED off the chain.  I think that *this* is the whole origin of this crazy list of arguments, that culminates in the absolute importance to the security of bitcoin of an old piece of software running on an old PC somewhere on a 56Kbit link in some basement somewhere in Africa or so, as excuse for not having to increase the legacy-transaction room on the chain.

In as much as "increasing block size to 2 MB" was considered a disaster for our old PC on his 56Kbit link in that basement, visibly increasing witness data to 4 MB was not going to be a problem, because somehow, these witness data were not essential to the security of bitcoin, (you could accept that *someone* *somewhere* had checked them, right ?).  One needed an army of full nodes that were constantly checking the single available chain out there in all of its details (was the argument), but suddenly, that wasn't needed any more for the witness data.
Going from 1 MB to 2 MB was going to kill all full nodes, but going from 1 MB to 4 MB of witness data wasn't a problem.

In other words, one cannot be so naive, as a bitcoin developer, not to know that if there's only one chain out there, only a few full nodes would be sufficient to be whistle-blowers to tell the world the miners are making a false chain ; at which point all users could consider leaving all their bitcoin holdings for what they are and never touch a bitcoin again ; or accept whatever miners find a consensus on, and hope they will still accept your transaction.  And that whether that single chain out there is checked 5 times, or is checked 7000 times in a row, doesn't matter.  The guy finding out that it doesn't check, has news to sell (but most probably will first sell his own coins....).

This whole story of the necessity of a lot of non-mining full nodes, crippled or not, from the moment they do not allow more than 1 MB of legacy transactions, but without any problem, are blind to 3 MB extra segwit data, smells as a fundamental desire of core to asphyxiate legacy transactions, and ONLY legacy transactions.
The poor African in his basement with his 20 BTC transactions (smaller ones are not going to be profitable given that he needs legacy transactions on his old node, and the fees will be high) that cannot afford a 3 TB disk and a better internet link, but has to pay $10.- for a transaction, running old core node software, brings tears in my eyes

This whole story only makes sense if somehow, one wanted to force people off legacy transactions, and all false arguments are good to sell that.  But there's no technical or game-theoretical justification for that.  This is why the story of "no hard forks" and "importance of full-node-in-your-basement" has been propagated in my eyes, because it is obviously false as a logical argument.

My idea is that crypto is in a bubble since 2009, because that's what bitcoin and the rest of crypto were designed for: assets that are easy to come by in the beginning, and then, get scarce when more people know about it.
I don't know of any instant in time (well, a part from the very first bitcoin years maybe) when the bitcoin price reflected the demand for coins to buy stuff with (that is, as a currency).  I think that bitcoin and the rest of crypto has always been price-determined by:

1) buying/mining/holding coins because they might gain in value, to sell them higher than what we put in it in the long term
2) trading, that is, try to buy them somewhat lower, and sell them somewhat higher in the short term

That doesn't mean that bitcoin in particular has not been used also as a means of payment (especially in dark markets), but I think that the demand for coins "in order to buy stuff with" has rarely been the price setter.

As such, technical parameters rarely matter, and adoption as a currency is rather contra-productive to high speculative value (the more it is circulated as a currency, the higher its velocity, and the lower its price will be).  The price you see has not much to do with, nor, the block chain technology, nor the real world usage (contract, currency, ...) but is the price of an abstract speculative token on exchanges (mainly poloniex).

You can easily see this when coins rise a manifold in price, and their transaction volume on chain remains essentially constant (and sometimes small).  Price setting has nothing to do with what happens on the block chain.

But this is even true for bitcoin.  Given that the blocks are full, essentially, its adoption cannot rise (it cannot be used more as a currency) ; but nevertheless, the price rose by a factor of more than 2 in less than half a year.  When you do a quick estimation, though, you see that bitcoin's market cap has always been a large multitude of the market cap it would have been if its demand were that of a currency.  So bitcoin too, has a price that is entirely disconnected from its block chain happenings or usage, and I claim that this has even always been the case.

I don't know the exact content of the proposition, but I thought it was a single package ?  In other words, a hard fork that includes 2 MB and segwit the way it is right now ? 

Am I wrong in thinking that on the software side, that's quite easy to do with core 0.14.1:

1) change the hard limit on the block size (that's just one hard parameter to change)

2) change the activation threshold for segwit from something like 95% to something like 20% to be sure it gets activated automatically if ever this software is run by more than 20% of miners.

3) change the bit on which the checking is tagged in 2)

4) allow to signal the bit in 3) with an option.

5) by hand, from the moment that 80% of the miners signal this bit, produce a first single 2 MB block, which signals the hard fork.  Now, the two chains exist because old core 14.1 will not accept this block and build on its predecessor, and this modified core will accept it (see 1) ) and make its own chain that is not considered valid by the other nodes/miners.

That's about it, or am I missing something ?

Because this code is itself a hard fork, SW becomes automatically a hard fork even though its implementation as a soft fork can remain.

These modifications don't seem like difficult to do in 4 months, right ?

My question to all of those who don't say "zero":

Suppose that the highest bitcoin price that will ever be recorded, is of value $1 000 000.- (or take any number) in today's dollars.  By that, I don't mean that that bitcoin will be exchanged for X dollars, I mean, it will be exchanged for whatever is worth today $1000 000.- (say a nice villa in a nice neighbourhood).  Now, who's the twit who bought that coin ?  What will he do next with it ?  Remember, that by definition, X was the highest value that WILL ever be recorded for a bitcoin transaction.  We can call the guy who paid X, the "greatest fool".  By definition there won't be another one bigger than him.
Everyone buying a bitcoin after him will pay less for it, because by assumption, X was the maximum.

What will people now do with their coins ?

How can one avoid said situation ?

1) bitcoin will never stop to rise.
2) bitcoin will keep a constant value from a certain point onwards.

Are these two situations realistic ?

One could even argue: bigger blocks => bitcoin not a shit coin any more, one can again do some transactions => all speculation on which alt coin is going to take over becomes moot => alt coin over inflated market crashes => this was what had also pulled bitcoin up as a speculative token too, so bitcoin crashes too because no more uncertainty, hence no more speculation, back to economic reality which is much, much, much smaller than the current ~80 billion market cap, back to $2 billion for crypto.

Or, like on LTC: no effect.

Remarkably it are the miner pools who want larger blocks.  It is Core that doesn't want larger "base" blocks.

Some do.

The purely technical argument I've repeated several times now, that full nodes have no *power* in the decision-making process, still stands unchallenged, and several people understand it too.  Hell, Satoshi and Gavin are part of those people too, even though I don't have to appeal to authority, but just to show you that "others can see it too".  They have an informational role, they can be used in the "psychological game of FUD and FOMO concerning miners forking or not forking", they can give assurance to their owner, they can help with the internet connection, they can help with the privacy of transactions, and they can keep a copy of the block chain if all miner pools get bombed.  I'm not saying they are useless.  But they have no *power*.  As such, they don't play a role in "decentralization" which is a notion of *power* (as contrasted with distributivity which is a technical notion of geographical and hardware spread of a function).

This is why a UASF is a ridiculous notion, apart from the psychological encouragement for miners that suffer from FUD to fork.   And this is also why, apart from their utility for their owner, the number of non mining nodes in the power structure of bitcoin is of no importance, which changes entirely the balance of arguments if this is taken into account.

It is not the first time that I encounter religiously convinced people that lost their ability to think rationally, open minded about a technical/game theoretical issue without clinging to dogmatic truths they accept on authority, but look at the reasoning for its sole value of logical validity.

What is dramatic in this debate, is that a false argument is used, of which not many people are ready to analyse in depth, critically, its validity, and that, based upon this false argument, certain options are considered erroneously "bad" from the start.  I gave the analogy before: if you're convinced that plastic guns are necessary to stop an invasion of the Russians, and if this "known truth" is not put into question critically, then you will end up setting up a whole wrong defensive strategy.  If it would turn out that you need to diminish the number of plastic guns to make enough tanks and fighter planes, you may erroneously call people who are in favour of making more tanks and fighter planes "shills of the Russians" because they would diminish the amount of plastic guns, and "everybody knows these are essential to stop the Russians".

I think both notions are contradictory.  An asset that is mainly "held" is highly unstable in price, because the fluid part is a small, and hence potentially very variable part of the total amount.

In Fisher's formula, this comes down to:

Q.P = M . V

with V = m1/M + 2 m2/M + 3 m3/M + ... + n mn/M

(mi = set of coins that are spent i times in a year).

If coins are mainly held, then MOST of them are in m0, which doesn't contribute to V.  As such, V is a small number, but which can quickly change, if even a small part of m0 (majority in hodl state) decides to move (into m1, m2, ...).

For instance, if 95% of M is held, in m0, and only 5% is liquid, then a 5% spending from the store m0 can halve the value of a coin ; and a 2.5% extra holding will double the value of a coin.

There's some good reading on the so-called stability of the gold standard (which is what bitcoin as a world-wide currency wants to imitate):

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the-gold-standard-is-the-worlds-worst-economic-idea-in-2-charts/261552/

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gold_standard_(economics)

http://www.nber.org/papers/w10171.pdf

to give a few ideas. 

Of course you can put your tin foil hat on and say that all this "research" is part of the Big Conspiration, but I don't believe that.  It is genuine research.

But that is, on the assumption that bitcoin *already became* the universal money.  Gold has been so for a while because *states decided so*.  However, there's no path for it to *become* universal money if it has to compete with close-to-ideal money (big fiat), being a fluctuating, hoarded speculative asset.

In 2012 (the value I took was April) bitcoin was already 3.5 years old. 
LTC was launched end of 2011, so today, LTC is 6.5 years old.

Of course, you can say that bitcoin didn't have competition during its first few years, while LTC has a lot of competition, from bitcoin and other crypto.