The overlooked existential threat of centralization

[turvarya]

Well, it seems as though this might be a valid argument. The software used to determine the total amount of nodes, was fine tuned lately, and it has been determined that there are a lot less fully functioning nodes out there, than was initially thought.

Some people will also run nodes with Bitcoin XT and others with Core.

So there will definately be less nodes... This might become a problem in the future, if things continue at the trend is going now.  

If you run a node, make sure it is 100% configured for optimal performance.  

This is the problem I see with XT move, we should avoid politics in bitcoin, it should function like gold, no human can change the basic properties. Gavin threw out this XT version without reaching enough consensus, its intention is very unclear, bitcoin should not become a tool for people to realize their political interest

You obviously don't understand what XT is doing. There is no chance until a 90% consensus is reached. Inform yourself before you write BS.

[gustav]

You obviously don't understand what XT is doing. There is no chance until a 90% consensus is reached. Inform yourself before you write BS.

Well and then people will pretend to update and switch back to core later. You'll be looking how many guns come out the woodwork after the fork to run core... prepare your anus.

Core won't die and two chains are inevitable. Gavincoin doesn't stand a chance longterm with or without "supermajority".  

Supermajority does mean nothing. The waters are poisoned by Gavin and his mob. Nothing will grow from it.

[turvarya]

You obviously don't understand what XT is doing. There is no chance until a 90% consensus is reached. Inform yourself before you write BS.

Well and then people will pretend to update and switch back to core later. You'll be looking how many guns come out the woodwork after the fork to run core... prepare your anus.

Core won't die and two chains are inevitable. Gavincoin doesn't stand a chance longterm with or without "supermajority".  

Supermajority does mean nothing. The waters are poisoned by Gavin and his mob. Nothing will grow from it.

Why would anybody do that? Sure, there are always idiots, who do things like that, but that is luckily not a majority, they are just the "loudest" people on the internet and therefor think they are a majority.  So, yes, please kick yourself out of the system, by doing stupid things like that, I wouldn't mind a few idiots less in the Bitcoin-economy.

[yayayo]

You obviously don't understand what XT is doing. There is no chance until a 90% consensus is reached. Inform yourself before you write BS.

Well and then people will pretend to update and switch back to core later. You'll be looking how many guns come out the woodwork after the fork to run core... prepare your anus.

Core won't die and two chains are inevitable. Gavincoin doesn't stand a chance longterm with or without "supermajority".  

Supermajority does mean nothing. The waters are poisoned by Gavin and his mob. Nothing will grow from it.

Exactly. Andresen and Hearn know very well that their XT-fork would fail to get enough support. The reason they mention it is solely to put pressure the other developers to integrate their changes in Core.

I'm happy to see that (among others) Maxwell, Todd, and Garzik have so far withstood this pressure. They have far better arguments and solutions to offer and imho they are in general more competent than Andresen and esp. Hearn to work on a financial software. Andresen and Hearn have both a corporatist, pro governance world view that is largely incompatible with and dangerous for the core aspects of Bitcoin.

ya.ya.yo!

[johnyj]

You obviously don't understand what XT is doing. There is no chance until a 90% consensus is reached. Inform yourself before you write BS.

Well and then people will pretend to update and switch back to core later. You'll be looking how many guns come out the woodwork after the fork to run core... prepare your anus.

Core won't die and two chains are inevitable. Gavincoin doesn't stand a chance longterm with or without "supermajority".  

Supermajority does mean nothing. The waters are poisoned by Gavin and his mob. Nothing will grow from it.

Exactly. Andresen and Hearn know very well that their XT-fork would fail to get enough support. The reason they mention it is solely to put pressure the other developers to integrate their changes in Core.

I'm happy to see that (among others) Maxwell, Todd, and Garzik have so far withstood this pressure. They have far better arguments and solutions to offer and imho they are in general more competent than Andresen and esp. Hearn to work on a financial software. Andresen and Hearn have both a corporatist, pro governance world view that is largely incompatible with and dangerous for the core aspects of Bitcoin.

ya.ya.yo!

As long as people are involved, there will be politics. But I don't think bitcoin should have anything to do with politics, any kind of political practice will just make things more complicated, the XT is obviously such a movement (Gavin using XT to test his support rate)

The consensus is easy to reach when the majority of transactions are queued for at least 1 blocks, and that will happen long before the 1MB cap were reached for every blocks

Here is a good article from tradeblock researching the capacity

https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-capacity-analysis-part-4-simulating-practical-capacity

[BombaUcigasa]

Imagine Bitcoin with less than 1000 nodes ... it wouldn't be secure at all anymore.

Correct me if i'm wrong.

You are wrong. You may stand corrected.

The only nodes that matter for Bitcoin security are the miners, of which less than 50 nodes are actually mining (maybe 100 with possible Unknown agents). There will never be mining nodes that are not reachable or reaching, otherwise they would get orphaned and forked off.

The other nodes that matter are the exchanges (so you spend some of the BTC made from mining to pay bills).

The other nodes that matter are services (like merchants, explorers, APIs, trackers, etc).

Your shitty cloud VPS node does not matter. If it's on or off, Bitcoin is unaffected. The benefits are smaller and smaller for each supplemental relay node added to the network and there are no benefits to the node.

There are altcoins with 3-5 nodes online that still function after more than one year. There are some where only one node is online (exchange). And somehow Bittrex managed to fuck up and keep a coin with 0 network nodes online, the coin still had value before delisting.

[X7]

It's true that we are having less nodes, and that's why nodes are incentivated and there is also dedicated hardware for nodes... But what makes you think that bigger blocks means less nodes? The only thing that would make us have less nodes is simply people feeling like shutting down theirs. There isn't really a reason to have less nodes...

Nodes aren't incentivized

they should be then, there was a proposal to give something, to who will run a full node, this should in part diminish the possibility of such scenario

There isn't any centralization for a simple reason: Most people could run a full node, if they wanted to.
Centralization means: You can't join the club.
Just because some guy in the outback of china with a crappy internet connection can't run a full node, doesn't mean anything is centralized.
Are torrents centralized, because the same guy couldn't upload a HD-movie?

What would really happen, if the number of nodes decline too much? Some companies and enthusiasts, would just make new ones. Like I said, in the beginning, it is not hard to do so. I could just buy one of this full setup full nodes, go to a friend, who has ridicilous fast internet, he doesn't need and ask him nicely to just keep it connected to the internet and buy him some beer in return. No problem there at all.

what if some companies whould start to provide services to help you setup a full node(because you have bad connection, because you are poor, because you can't trust running a full node on your machine ecc...), would this be considered centralized?

Problem becomes the exploitation of bad nodes which will pop up when people try to exploit node incentivization - the idea was the security of the network was enough incentive. Not sure what the solution is for this

[blablaace]

bitcoin is already centralized in a sense .. consider the number of people with control over the software, which is basically a form of centralization

[johnyj]

bitcoin is already centralized in a sense .. consider the number of people with control over the software, which is basically a form of centralization

Indeed, political power of programmers are on the rise in almost every industry. However there are many basic properties are prohibited to change, like total number of coins, POW mining, difficulty adjust mechanism, block generation speed, reward halving scheme etc... So core devs are mostly doing performance oriented improvements. Even so they would raise the debate of block size limit to political level, that is too much

[yayayo]

Well data depends on the area truly, I am pretty sure europe has way better than the US for data and here you can get 50mb/s up and 5mb/s upload at 50$ a month with specials or 60$/m without and i can double it to 100mb/s for 75$ a month without specials forand 10mbs up a second. This is an extreme speed increase from the same provider from 3 years ago was 20mb/s same price as 50 mbs . Internet speed is definitely following suite at least here in america.

If you agree that data depends on the area, then why do you keep repeating the same invalid arguments over and over again? Or do you think that US+EU = world?

Then you say you're "pretty sure", that Europe has better connection than the US. Are you just "pretty sure" or do you know it? In fact - in contrast of what your depiction suggests - Europe consists of more than one country and connection speed varies widely among European countries.

Here's some data (which is most likely nominal upload speed, not permanent high-volume (most providers will reduce speed if certain volume thresholds are reached)): http://www.netindex.com/upload/

ya.ya.yo!