In Marketing 101, the chicken-and-egg problem is an example of what to NOT do.
Bitcoin already solved the chicken-and-egg problem. Have you been in a coma since 2011, when Bitcoin obviously started rapidly taking over the world?  Because the TPTB used their mainstream media to promote it. Not because as you asserted that eventually users learn to become ideological after the discovery and learning about the evils of fiat. You are delusional if you assert you are where you are today without the mainstream media and the elite promoting Bitcoin (in their usual Good Cop, Bad Cop hegelian methodology where they both restrict and promote simultaneously as they do for drugs). You are a noob and so can be forgiven/educated on what actually happened: E-cash had a widespread ideological following since the days of William Gibson and Extropy magazine (1990s). Unnoticed, it gestated in the cypherpunk lists... Decades later, Bitcoin first gained mainstream exposure via the Streisand Effect, when some grandstanding banker-whore Senator (Schumer) held a press conference where his intern or grandson loaded Silk Road up on a laptop to give the press some Shock Horror jollies. Silk Road worked splendidly as an actual Amazon for drugs, to the delight of thousands of 20-30 somethings who ignore any MSM beyond Daily Show, Gawker, and Conde Naste organs like Reddit and Wired (who mostly regurgitated FUD along the lines of 'Is Bitcoin a Ponzi Scheme for Terrorists?') TPTB and their VC flunkies came late to the party. As did you. It was much cooler before all the lamers showed up...  you can't call me a noob. and you probably came after me. what you're missing is that Bitcoin is money born from the internet, by the internet, and for the internet. it works on the same principles; it can route around damage. and a key tenet of it's ability to do that is that it is located widely in different jurisdictions round the globe. even if the US shutdown the internet, it would survive worldwide and the US would be back groveling in a few days wanting to get back on. especially after pressure from the financial institutions. Bitcoin needs to have the same architecture and be spread worldwide to all corners of the Earth for maximum self preservation. it can't do that if we hamstring it where it is now with just 1MB. any idiot can see that. you want it to be a SOV. it has the potential to do that. but it won't happen if you force all tx's offchain to centralized entities, SC's included, that can shut anyone's acct down. this requires increasing the block size. all the core devs "say" they want that but they've been dragging their feet for 3y. as for digital gold, it won't happen if only 0.001% of the global population ever hears about it, let alone uses it. an African kid will never accept Bitcoin as digital gold as he can't touch it, feel it, carry it in his pocket, weigh it, or wear it. thus, he will need to be able to transact with it and be able to analyze that it does in fact not increase in supply. we know that he will have the tools to do this as fiber optic lines are being laid across Africa as we speak. $10 Android phones are now available and soon 21 and phone makers look prepared to practically give away mining phones to grab market share. but they have to be able to transact with Bitcoin in a reliable, cheap manner. only then will they appreciate Bitcoin as a gold substitute. |
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Sorry to pose a stupid question: what are the reasons why the limit cannot be raised?
main reasons that opponents to the increase state are: - centralization - fees discovery price distortion - UTXOs size will increase significantly - Tor could not be used anymore - other things we don't know yet caused by rising block max size. All valid reason to keep developing and not accept the 20MB block proposal as a final solution. To attempt solving those problems buy limiting block size is an expression of a lack of creativity the one i keep hearing getting complained about more so now is the one Ice brought up earlier; UTXO. i don't get that one. the UTXO is stored on disk and has a 100MB cache stored in RAM that limits filling it up. yes, the UTXO set is increasing apparently according to Statoshi, but if it only takes up 100MB, what's the big deal? |
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continuing bleakness:  |
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Mircea and his #BTC-assets brigade has already declared 20mb blocks to be an attack on Bitcoin, so some degree of fireworks/popcorn/tears/LULZ/drama are guaranteed.
Forcing txn fees higher to contain the blockchain bloat would also implode the BTC price because you will destroy the ideological propaganda that caused people to predict much higher BTC prices due to network effects. You would essentially be relegating Bitcoin to a hobbiest experiment on the virtues of small currencies used by a fraction of the population with that population sparsely distributed over the globe. This is correct. Can't believe people can't see this. Or maybe they do but don't care. |
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People can't directly submit txns because they are too expensive due to limited space. So coin used for spending must be held by larger institutions who handle payments internally, and periodically make blockchain transfers among themselves. These institutions will inevitably go fractional reserve even though they claim they won't.
Congratulations, you've reinvented the gold backed banking system of the 19th century!
Nonsense. To quote the great davout, The true value that Bitcoin brings to the table is not "everyone gets to write into the holy ledger", it is instead "everyone gets to benefit from sane and non-inflationary financial instutions whose sanity and honesty are ensured by the holy blockchain". doesn't compute. if we're stuck at only 0.001% of the population even knowing about Bitcoin b/c of 1MB, that's not a definition of "everyone". |
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The experiment will likely fail if it the network is NOT upgraded and the limit eventually removed.
Nonsense. Bitcoin does not "fail." It gains strength when, and only when, faced with adversity. I was being a bit facetious because of this nonsensical comment: If a guy in Venezuala (or Florida) can't be his own private bank by running a full node over TOR on a slow 5mb DSL line, this experiment has failed.
it's reasonable to assume if we get 10x users, we'd get 10x #full nodes, and 10x the value. we can't do that with a technical cap. |
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Bitcoin is revolution and financial freedom, not a nifty gadget to put in retail points of sale. If a guy in Venezuala (or Florida) can't be his own private bank by running a full node over TOR on a slow 5mb DSL line, this experiment has failed.
The experiment will likely fail if it the network is NOT upgraded and the limit eventually removed. The limit has already been reached anyway. Running a full client is ALREADY too resource-intensive for average Joe. The blockchain.info model is better suited for average Joe. That model has proven to solve the problem of trust in an environment where trust has been violated a majority of the time. Average Joe will be his own bank with a simple web interface where he has full control over his keys. yes, the avg Venezuelan doesn't care about running a full node. he cares about reliable, cheap tx's. sad thing is, if we stay at 1MB blocks, he might never know about Bitcoin. and he certainly will never learn about the more complex concept of digital gold. |
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need some opinions on this, from Reddit:
"Second, if push comes to shove and we end up with a fork battle then whoever holds the most will have the most power in choosing which wins out anyway. They can simply sell on one fork and buy on the other to shift the relative values. Whichever fork ends up most valuable will attract the most miners. Stronger value and security will attract more users to that fork."
is this viable? this could be interesting...
I think it is interesting to speculate what happens if most nodes implement the suggested 20 MB patch. It means that they will accept both large and small blocks, so it is not really a hard fork at that point. Let's say the miners are not sure about the other miners. Eventually, someone will produce a large block, hoping that others will build on it. If some does, and some does not, this will be seen as an orphaned branch by the nodes, not a fork. The longest branch will win as normal. If the large block does not win, it will be a costly experience for the miners who made the large block, and also for those who build on it. It could be that the first attempt does not succeed, and it will be clear after only 2 blocks. Then another attempt could be done a few weeks later, after maybe a discussion among miners and others. I don't see the hardness of the fork.The "hardness" is in your example elimiated by the assumption you made that most nodes already upgraded. This is just the definition of hardfork - all nodes have to upgrade, otherwise they may be left behind when the chain with large blocks becomes the longest one. But I also see it like the others, as long as there is not universal consensus about the fork, miners may not create large blocks by themselves. It becomes interesting when they see a large block by someone else, because they they have to risk either building on it and being orphaned if the majority does not agree with them, or building on the preceding small block and being orphaned if the majority accepts the large block. if Gavin goes ahead with his fork, i suspect most miners and nodes will upgrade; just in case. this allows them to build on any block that comes thru, whether it is under 1MB or over. and if this happens, i suspect everyone/miners goes back to the long tested strategy of accepting the longest chain as they always have, as this limits the chances of orphans. |
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I used the term 'permission-minimized.' How many times has someone been prevented from spending their coins? None that I am aware of. It's just another theoretical attack that doesn't work in practice.
Either it is or it isn't [permissionless]… I dunno; that doesn't seem like a useful way to look at it. By similar logic, could one not state: Either Blockchain signatures are forgeable or unforgeableand then, since there's a 1 in 1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542975 odds of picking a private key that will allow you to forge a signature, conclude that: Blockchain signatures are forgeable It's technically true, but practically useless. Anyways, is this not just semantics? According to my definition, Bitcoin is permissionless. If it ever becomes non-permissionless, then it would cease being Bitcoin. Maybe that's a more useful way to look at it. The question then becomes, will it ever stop being bitcoin? I thought Adrian-X made a great comment about this (riffing on the point ZB often makes, and the point Cypherdoc makes above): Bitcoin does what the economic majority want, the only question in my mind is does the economic majority want to adopt the immutable rules of Bitcoin, or does the economic majority want to tweak the rules by manipulating politics.
Does the ecomonic majority want permissionless, borderless bitcoin or something else? There is no "practical uselessness" to this property of the bitcoin system in anything like the way you present with your comparison; there is no similarity in the logic at all. One is a question of statistical probability of guessing a number from an impracticably sized domain. And the resolution depends only on the math. The other has nothing to do with any branch of mathematics at all, it's about decisions made by humans, dependent only on social or moral values. I do not take your comparison seriously, Peter. And you're saying the same thing that anyone else seems to: that because miners do not and have not censored transactions, they never will. This is clearly not the case, and I would argue it's an unwise assumption. in honor of John Nash: https://twitter.com/cypherdoc2/status/602533856290349056 |
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need some opinions on this, from Reddit:
"Second, if push comes to shove and we end up with a fork battle then whoever holds the most will have the most power in choosing which wins out anyway. They can simply sell on one fork and buy on the other to shift the relative values. Whichever fork ends up most valuable will attract the most miners. Stronger value and security will attract more users to that fork."
is this viable? this could be interesting...
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Huzzah!  |
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Larry Summers once again. That means he's now an advisor to both Xapo and 21. whereas TPTB will scream "conspiracy!", i take it for what i think it is, a darn good bullish thing. this is promoter of Gibson's Paradox, the tie btwn interest rates and the gold price. he understands Sound Money. for him to get behind Bitcoin means he understands the Sound Money aspects of Bitcoin. that can only help. |
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Diving:  |
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Almost! but, no cigar?:  |
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food? who need food? actually, this is a good thing. poor ppl need cheap deflationed food:  |
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FCX, largest copper mine in the world. crapping the bed:  |
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RUT, lame retest of the highs. re-rolling:  |
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BHP, the largest mine in the world, about to go off the cliff. note numerous stick saves similar to $DJT:  |
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Oh Lordy, again:  |
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