Why Gavin is so desperate about his fork? Is he hiding something?

[SebastianJu]

As far as I see it Gavin is desperatly trying to save Bitcoin.

but there is no need to save anything at the moment. so far, bitcoin dealt with problems in a good manner.

Right? Its like these "big blockers nao" are under some Reddit spell, talking about problems that are not problems and promoting some solution that is not a solution anyway..

I'm always impressed how non big blockers can say with a straight face that there is no problem leaving everything at 1 Megabyt blocks.

Let's say blocks are half full now. What happens when legit transactions are constantly, on average, 150% of 1MB? It would mean that 33% of all valid transactions will never confirm. Can you imagine a currency where 33% of all transactions never confirm and that currency had somehow a chance to survive?

And fee market... you realize that if constantly many legit transactions are waived, then the fees will rise constantly too. There would simply be no end because even if everyone raises their fee, still 33% can't get confirmed. What would happen? 33% of all users who use bitcoin would drop bitcoin. Surely that would be a great day for adoption.

non big blockers? im just a regular bitcoiner man

anyway, to answer you, imho i'd tend to say lets revisit blocksize once block reward < fees.

i do want to see a fee market emerge before cutting into it.

its been fun until now, low cost transactions and all, but seriously im in bitcoin for a bit more than a visa competitor.

monetary sovereignty, censorship resitant and truslessness y know...

Yeah, no offense. I only wanted to group the ones that don't want big blocks.

> i'd tend to say lets revisit blocksize once block reward < fees.

This sentence sounds VERY dangerous. Do you honestly believe that it is possible to make up for block halving by fees? Then you should calculate it through. The fees would be so high that i would make one last bitcoin transaction. Selling them on an exchange and that was it.

And for what would we need such high fees at all? See what i wrote about that we have way way too many miners because mining is way too profitable at the moment.

I see what you write about your vision but i honestly can't understand how you think this will be received with a fee market. A fee market would mean bitcoin is expensive and unreliable. Since you can never know if your fee is too low at the end.

Besides... why do you think your vision can not be done with 8 mb blocks? In fact i think we would come way more near your vision with bigger blocks.

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[SebastianJu]

...
That's not even possible at 8 gigabyte blocks, some off-chain solution is needed no matter what. So it's the best place to start. Blocksize is basically the last scaling factor that needs adjusting, not the first.

True moving from 1 MB (the present situation) to 8 GB (Bitcoin XT / BIP 101) is like moving from punched cards 80 bytes each to computers with 640 KB of RAM and two floppy drives. (The infamous Bill Gates limit).  Now who says we have to stay at 640 KB of RAM for ever. Baking these kinds of limits into the Bitcoin protocol is fundamentally wrong. The proper solution here is to have market driven adaptive blocksize limits.  

Edit: Now that we have moved from the 1950s to the 1980s we still have a way to go.

Yeah, that was an infamous, troublemaking limit. And nobody could understand why the heck he implemented it. There was no real need for it. I hoped bitcoiners would be better. But it looks like putting bitcoin in a cage seems the plan for many.

If you do this with a woman then you will lose her. Give her her freedom and see how things develop. Everone i learned to know who tried to hold his wife away from other mans or tried to take their freedom away did this out of fear and insecurity in himself. If the wife is cheating you then she did not love you and she was not worth your love. End of story. But having a wife you put in a cage is of no real value.

Hopefully the fear doesn't win in the community.

[SebastianJu]

...

To follow your analogy consider that miners are dealing with 640KB RAM boxes while typical nodes still uses 80 bytes punched cards.

That was the situation in 1950 when the Diner's Club Credit card first came out. For that reason it could only be used a very small very wealthy portion of the population. The critical mistake that Diner's club made is that for the most part they stayed with their 1950s business model so by 2013 they accounted for a mere 0.2% of the credit card market share. http://www.nilsonreport.com/publication_special_feature_article.php. The bank networks VISA and Mastercard started in the late 1960s and early 1970s and saw the mass market potential of credit cards with the advent of the mainframe computer. In the 1990s we saw even wider use of digital payments with debit cards then networks such as PayPal etc. These were each only made possible by further advances in technology. Yet is all of these cases the concept comes back to the original Diner's Club credit card of 1950.

The problem with the small block fans is that they want to bake 5 year old technology into the Bitcoin protocol forever effectively turning Bitcoin into the Diner's Club of crypto-currency. There are alt-coins already that have adaptive blocksize limits for those that care to look in the alt-coin section. These coins have this problem solved. The issue in my mind is not whether individuals will be using crypto currency to pay for coffee and store the corresponding blockchain in its entirety on their devices or computers. They will. Technology will see to that. The real issue here is will be they use Bitcoin or some other crypto currency to do so.

In short who will be the Diner's Club of crypto-currency and who will be the VISA of crypto-currency.

Edit: When one is old enough to have transferred data from punched cards to 5.25 in floppies, I have. One understands that technology simply does not stand still.

Diner's Club was/is a PRIVATE company. Is Bitcoin a private company? Well, it will be if it will fork to XT.
Then, the shareholders who backup the big exchangers will own the entire Bitcoin XT system.

I agree to some extend since when hearn is the developer who decides, then the community would surely eat some frogs with new releases. But if that is your analogy then what about the lightning network invested core developers? How do you see them? An independent organization? I can't see that. They invested a lot into lightning network, as far as i read, and if you invest you want your investment back and possibly make more out of it. Then how would you see these devs then? Would it not look like they work for the company blockstream (lightning network) and since the lightning network would be used more when bitcoin is not working perfectly, they use their position as developers to make sure that bitcoin will not work perfectly in the near future. That surely looks like politicians that work in fact for a private company and misuse their position as politician to rule things in their companies favor.

Be honest, if you want to accuse that way then admit that both sides are highly questionable.

[wachtwoord]

Why do you think the security of the network will be killed when there is no fee market? You realize that the network is 100 times more secure than needed? And that means that the reward for mining is way too high at the moment.

The whole thing should be over-secured. That is the unique selling point.

Besides that... it doesn't really matter if the reward is as high as now or only 10% of that. It ALWAYS would mean centralization since corporate organisations will scale up their operations. And small miners are not lucrative anymore since ages. It doesn't matter how high the reward is, the centralization will go on regardless. I'm wondering why satoshi foresaw this and did not think it is a bad thing.

There is still decentralization. Changing the block size will kill that.

Regarding Nodes... who says that nodes have to work in millisecond areas? Why should bigger blocks mean centralization at all? Harddiscspace? It's dirt cheap. Internet bandwith? Is growing nearly exponentially in most countries. So as long as you don't live in developing countries or in the landside of the US ( ) then you should be fine. In no way it could mean centralization like you seem to vision it.

Hard drive space anyone? The blockchain is taking up a huge amount of space on my HD.

And only because you think Bitcoin is a currency that should not be used to pay for a coffee doesn't mean that is the vision normal bitcoiners has. In fact you should look around you, microtransactions are one big hit of bitcoin. You surely won't find many fans with the idea of waiving that.

And why should it? Bitcoin should replace bank money. If you can't use bitcoin for the everyday life then it's usefullness is so very much limited that it would turn out to be some black money coin only at the end. The use cases for legit transactions would simply very limited.

Satoshi never mentioned a vision of bitcoin being a currency for the rich. If bitcoin really would turn out to be a high amount transfer system then this would mean only some people can use it. And because of the nature of bitcoin those people would be not seldom those who want to do bad things with money. Bitcoins fame would turn way more negative. Simply because the normal use cases of money does not really exist anymore. The couple of people that would use it for legit things could be counted on one hand. And the rest? Would use an altcoin. And surely not the controversy lightning network. Way too many "great" altcoins tried that.

No it should not. The current system (yes with cash and even credit cards if you wish to give up your privacy so much) is working perfectly well for small transactions, we must stop the government from stealing from us. The mere fact that a huge amount of socialists have joined the Bitcoin forums and communication doesn't mean they should have a say (this is not a democracy for fuck's sake). This is the domain of Libertarians (as is Satoshi! He would hate your arguments and attitude!) and socialists used to make fun of it. Now they want to join! Fuck that. They should just fuck of and DIAF (and they will have no big influence in the end anyway, they are utterly unimportant and non-influential)

Bitcoin is to challenge their dominance of the world and change it for the better, not to let them infiltrate and corrupt the very concept. Just fork Bitcoin and make your socialist coin or whatever, it will die anyway because your economic concepts don't work (Keynesians anyone?  ). Don't try to drag Bitcoin down with your retarded ideas of how the world should work.

[SebastianJu]

Blockstream is a private company lol (and Bitcoin Core is now their project), BIP101 isn't (and XT is just an implementation, you can even use Bitcoin Core + BIP101 if you prefer)

Any effort which includes Maxwell, sipa, and Back working together is totally cool with me.  I don't care if it is a private company, corporation, NGO, politburo. or garage workshop rap session.  These people have proven themselves (to me) over the last number of years that I've been paying attention.

Hearn, and to a lesser degree, Andresen and their shitty Bitcoin Foundation have also proven themselves (to me) over this time period.  In that case they have proven themselves to be completely untrustworthy and antithetic to everything I hope for in distributed crypto-currencies.

A few wild-cards have proven themselves to be a surprise.  On the negative side, Ver, and on the positive side (given his involvement with TBF), Matonis.

I think even when they now do what you would like to see done, it is never a good idea to trust persons with conflict of interests. Especially when a lot of money is involved. You might be happy now with their deeds but what if they do something you don't want anymore? Then you let it happen that structures be built that prevents you from preventing these new changes. No, conflict of interests should always be watched very cautious. Because they often enough don't act for the general good but for their own good. Matching that with your own good at one time does surely not mean that will be always the case. It is risky to support such actions.

[SebastianJu]

As far as I see it Gavin is desperatly trying to save Bitcoin.

but there is no need to save anything at the moment. so far, bitcoin dealt with problems in a good manner.

Right? Its like these "big blockers nao" are under some Reddit spell, talking about problems that are not problems and promoting some solution that is not a solution anyway..

I'm always impressed how non big blockers can say with a straight face that there is no problem leaving everything at 1 Megabyt blocks.

Let's say blocks are half full now. What happens when legit transactions are constantly, on average, 150% of 1MB? It would mean that 33% of all valid transactions will never confirm. Can you imagine a currency where 33% of all transactions never confirm and that currency had somehow a chance to survive?

And fee market... you realize that if constantly many legit transactions are waived, then the fees will rise constantly too. There would simply be no end because even if everyone raises their fee, still 33% can't get confirmed. What would happen? 33% of all users who use bitcoin would drop bitcoin. Surely that would be a great day for adoption.

People will learn to pay a fee for a quick Bitcoin transaction.

Yes, but for one we should not enforce high fees. Why do we need to have a network that is 100 times safer than needed? Leading to one standard bitcoin transaction using the electricity of 1.57 average us households per day? One transaction! Bigger ones use even more.

That simply means we have too many miners and that means the reward is too high. Speaking about a needed fee market because we will lose miners is really not the problem at hand. Miners had to switch off unprofitable mining hardware all the time, there is no sense to try to compensate block halving with higher fees. That is impossible and if really done would be deadly to bitcoin.

Second thing is, yes, with 1MB blocks people would learn to pay higher fees. But it would be useless! You can't win that game. I mean imagine constantly 300% legit transactions than we have now. It would mean constantly 33% of all legit transactions could not get confirmed. Which means bitcoin would be HIGHLY unreliable. And even if you want to beat the system with higher fees... you can assume that all other users will try the same. The fees used might rise exponentially, leading to a very expensive currency. No jokes anymore about the paypal fees, they would be heaven then. No jokes about transaction time, your transaction time would be higher pretty sure. Since even when you think you paid more than enough, others had the same thought and raised their fees. So you have a good chance to have your coins caught in limbo, not confirming.

No, the bitcoin we would have then would be a nightmare.

1/ there is never enough safety, lets be serious.
2/ we are not enforcing anything but the protocol (read rules) we all signed up for, inculding tx/s, 21M cap, POWalgo etc...
3/ people are not forced to use bitcoin.

1. Yes, you are right. But it means that bitcoin can be attacked as a not green tech. And it's done, you know that. Besides, it is a statement that bitcoin mining is VERY rewarding. Which means we don't need a fee market because the miners earn not enough.

2. Yes, you  might enforce these things too, that is fine. But the blocksize limit is artificial and was a temporary measure. Acting like it is an important part of the protocol like 21M cap simply is not correct.

3. Oh well, that is a sad argument. You say if you don't like what we do then leave. Well, you are only one side of the bitcoiners. The question is what will the majority want. I mean who has the power in bitcoin? It might be the miners, yes, they vote with their hashing power about which fork wins. And as far as i read the majority of miners already spoke out for 8 MB blocks. But even if they would want 1MB blocks because they are greedy and shortsighted, the real power behind have the users. All bitcoiners. If bitcoiners majority would decide to use a fork that uses 8MB blocks then this will become the new bitcoin. The value is established by trust in the value. And if majority thinks that is the real bitcoin then it would be the case.
So no, it is no question of "I do what i want and if you don't like it then don't use bitcoin."

[SebastianJu]

Why do you think the security of the network will be killed when there is no fee market? You realize that the network is 100 times more secure than needed? And that means that the reward for mining is way too high at the moment.

The whole thing should be over-secured. That is the unique selling point.

I agree. Better oversecured than the opposite. But it shows that mining is way more rewarding than needed. Which means we don't need a fee market to support the miners now. And that is the main point i see in that.

Besides that... it doesn't really matter if the reward is as high as now or only 10% of that. It ALWAYS would mean centralization since corporate organisations will scale up their operations. And small miners are not lucrative anymore since ages. It doesn't matter how high the reward is, the centralization will go on regardless. I'm wondering why satoshi foresaw this and did not think it is a bad thing.

There is still decentralization. Changing the block size will kill that.

Why? Only because in 2 years we might have to constantly download 2 MB blocks since 8 MB surely won't be filled completely then? That argument sounds way far fetched.

Regarding Nodes... who says that nodes have to work in millisecond areas? Why should bigger blocks mean centralization at all? Harddiscspace? It's dirt cheap. Internet bandwith? Is growing nearly exponentially in most countries. So as long as you don't live in developing countries or in the landside of the US ( ) then you should be fine. In no way it could mean centralization like you seem to vision it.

Hard drive space anyone? The blockchain is taking up a huge amount of space on my HD.

How much? Did you check prices for harddiscs? Dirt cheap. And really no argument anymore. Besides that, we have already a solution where not the full blockchain has to be stored on the harddisc. Besides that, the blocksizes will only slowly rise. Probably slower than the harddisc space costs for the same price.

And only because you think Bitcoin is a currency that should not be used to pay for a coffee doesn't mean that is the vision normal bitcoiners has. In fact you should look around you, microtransactions are one big hit of bitcoin. You surely won't find many fans with the idea of waiving that.

And why should it? Bitcoin should replace bank money. If you can't use bitcoin for the everyday life then it's usefullness is so very much limited that it would turn out to be some black money coin only at the end. The use cases for legit transactions would simply very limited.

Satoshi never mentioned a vision of bitcoin being a currency for the rich. If bitcoin really would turn out to be a high amount transfer system then this would mean only some people can use it. And because of the nature of bitcoin those people would be not seldom those who want to do bad things with money. Bitcoins fame would turn way more negative. Simply because the normal use cases of money does not really exist anymore. The couple of people that would use it for legit things could be counted on one hand. And the rest? Would use an altcoin. And surely not the controversy lightning network. Way too many "great" altcoins tried that.

No it should not. The current system (yes with cash and even credit cards if you wish to give up your privacy so much) is working perfectly well for small transactions, we must stop the government from stealing from us. The mere fact that a huge amount of socialists have joined the Bitcoin forums and communication doesn't mean they should have a say (this is not a democracy for fuck's sake). This is the domain of Libertarians (as is Satoshi! He would hate your arguments and attitude!) and socialists used to make fun of it. Now they want to join! Fuck that. They should just fuck of and DIAF (and they will have no big influence in the end anyway, they are utterly unimportant and non-influential)

Bitcoin is to challenge their dominance of the world and change it for the better, not to let them infiltrate and corrupt the very concept. Just fork Bitcoin and make your socialist coin or whatever, it will die anyway because your economic concepts don't work (Keynesians anyone?  ). Don't try to drag Bitcoin down with your retarded ideas of how the world should work.

Socialist is who wants that everyone can use bitcoin? Elitist view. And surely no good view since when history has shown one thing then that the people have the power and not some elitists that try to rule.

Bitcoin is not a democracy? And who the fuck told you that you have the saying in the game? This sounds ridiculous. As if you feel some right to make the rules. Well, i tell you what. This is a democracy. And users vote by using the fork they want. You might use your old bitcoin then but you can be sure that the real bitcoin will be the bitcoin who most believe is the real bitcoin at the end.

Corrupt the concept? The concept was how bitcoin worked until now. YOU want to change how bitcoin works. With high fees and unconfirming legit transactions.

Yeah, bitcoin is for libertarians. Though only because you have an elitist world view and thinks you can decide who has the right to take part doesn't mean that you can decide on that. It would only be your opinion.

And no, they don't want to join, the normal users were there practically from the start. Your definition of what happened doesn't change history.

[wachtwoord]

Besides that... it doesn't really matter if the reward is as high as now or only 10% of that. It ALWAYS would mean centralization since corporate organisations will scale up their operations. And small miners are not lucrative anymore since ages. It doesn't matter how high the reward is, the centralization will go on regardless. I'm wondering why satoshi foresaw this and did not think it is a bad thing.

There is still decentralization. Changing the block size will kill that.

Why? Only because in 2 years we might have to constantly download 2 MB blocks since 8 MB surely won't be filled completely then? That argument sounds way far fetched.

I think this has been discussed to death? It's latency, big miners can push out small ones very easily.

No it should not. The current system (yes with cash and even credit cards if you wish to give up your privacy so much) is working perfectly well for small transactions, we must stop the government from stealing from us. The mere fact that a huge amount of socialists have joined the Bitcoin forums and communication doesn't mean they should have a say (this is not a democracy for fuck's sake). This is the domain of Libertarians (as is Satoshi! He would hate your arguments and attitude!) and socialists used to make fun of it. Now they want to join! Fuck that. They should just fuck of and DIAF (and they will have no big influence in the end anyway, they are utterly unimportant and non-influential)

Bitcoin is to challenge their dominance of the world and change it for the better, not to let them infiltrate and corrupt the very concept. Just fork Bitcoin and make your socialist coin or whatever, it will die anyway because your economic concepts don't work (Keynesians anyone?  ). Don't try to drag Bitcoin down with your retarded ideas of how the world should work.

Socialist is who wants that everyone can use bitcoin? Elitist view. And surely no good view since when history has shown one thing then that the people have the power and not some elitists that try to rule.

Bitcoin is not a democracy? And who the fuck told you that you have the saying in the game? This sounds ridiculous. As if you feel some right to make the rules. Well, i tell you what. This is a democracy. And users vote by using the fork they want. You might use your old bitcoin then but you can be sure that the real bitcoin will be the bitcoin who most believe is the real bitcoin at the end.

Corrupt the concept? The concept was how bitcoin worked until now. YOU want to change how bitcoin works. With high fees and unconfirming legit transactions.

Yeah, bitcoin is for libertarians. Though only because you have an elitist world view and thinks you can decide who has the right to take part doesn't mean that you can decide on that. It would only be your opinion.

And no, they don't want to join, the normal users were there practically from the start. Your definition of what happened doesn't change history.

You truly think the common people have the power? That's hilarious   (and cute)

I don't have the saying either. Big money does. Everyone will make choices in their own best interest so it's likely to get there anyway (but if it doesn't it will die and be overtaken by a clone which does things right). Majority rules won't be the deciding factor here. Thank fuck for that.

[hdbuck]

As far as I see it Gavin is desperatly trying to save Bitcoin.

but there is no need to save anything at the moment. so far, bitcoin dealt with problems in a good manner.

Right? Its like these "big blockers nao" are under some Reddit spell, talking about problems that are not problems and promoting some solution that is not a solution anyway..

I'm always impressed how non big blockers can say with a straight face that there is no problem leaving everything at 1 Megabyt blocks.
Let's say blocks are half full now. What happens when legit transactions are constantly, on average, 150% of 1MB? It would mean that 33% of all valid transactions will never confirm. Can you imagine a currency where 33% of all transactions never confirm and that currency had somehow a chance to survive?
And fee market... you realize that if constantly many legit transactions are waived, then the fees will rise constantly too. There would simply be no end because even if everyone raises their fee, still 33% can't get confirmed. What would happen? 33% of all users who use bitcoin would drop bitcoin. Surely that would be a great day for adoption.

non big blockers? im just a regular bitcoiner man
anyway, to answer you, imho i'd tend to say lets revisit blocksize once block reward < fees.
i do want to see a fee market emerge before cutting into it.
its been fun until now, low cost transactions and all, but seriously im in bitcoin for a bit more than a visa competitor.
monetary sovereignty, censorship resitant and truslessness y know...

Yeah, no offense. I only wanted to group the ones that don't want big blocks.

> i'd tend to say lets revisit blocksize once block reward < fees.

This sentence sounds VERY dangerous. Do you honestly believe that it is possible to make up for block halving by fees? Then you should calculate it through. The fees would be so high that i would make one last bitcoin transaction. Selling them on an exchange and that was it.

very dangerous? imo its the change of the protocol to please some social media shitstorm that is very dangerous.

and please do provide the data and actual calculation for this last argument: "The fees would be so high that i would make one last bitcoin transaction."

else its just fud and lame noobish projections that i would not give a heck about, for i do not have such certitudes but am simply curious as to how the fee market will develop once the block will be full.

And for what would we need such high fees at all? See what i wrote about that we have way way too many miners because mining is way too profitable at the moment.
I see what you write about your vision but i honestly can't understand how you think this will be received with a fee market. A fee market would mean bitcoin is expensive and unreliable. Since you can never know if your fee is too low at the end.

Besides... why do you think your vision can not be done with 8 mb blocks? In fact i think we would come way more near your vision with bigger blocks.

the vision of a decentralized, trustless and censorship resistant netowrk (which i'd happily pay an extra for) which would only be empowered whilst preserving the possibility of running a home node, for normal people to access the blockchain (ergo run a bitcoin client) without TRUSTING and giving it all to AWS and other big centralized data mining corporations.


@wachtwoord very fine and serious points

[sgbett]

One thing that I take a great deal of comfort from from this XT nonsense; almost none of the so-called supporters are credible members of the forum, most come across as the usual sock puppets. I suspect that very low numbers of real people actually support GavinMikeCoin.

This. I've never seen a reputable member who switched their node from Core to XT. Still XT-lovers brag about their mining power.

Anyone who does is immediately branded as non-reputable by those that disagree.

[hdbuck]

One thing that I take a great deal of comfort from from this XT nonsense; almost none of the so-called supporters are credible members of the forum, most come across as the usual sock puppets. I suspect that very low numbers of real people actually support GavinMikeCoin.

This. I've never seen a reputable member who switched their node from Core to XT. Still XT-lovers brag about their mining power.

Anyone who does is immediately branded as non-reputable by those that disagree.

mhhyea, seems there is a wide consensus after all.

[pogress]

> i'd tend to say lets revisit blocksize once block reward < fees.

This sentence sounds VERY dangerous. Do you honestly believe that it is possible to make up for block halving by fees? Then you should calculate it through. The fees would be so high that i would make one last bitcoin transaction. Selling them on an exchange and that was it.

and please do provide the data and actual calculation for this last argument: "The fees would be so high that i would make one last bitcoin transaction."

else its just fud and lame noobish projections that i would not give a heck about, for i do not have such certitudes but am simply curious as to how the fee market will develop once the block will be full.

Such testing should be done with altcoins. Actually, you dont need much imagination what will happen, SebastianJu summed it up nicely

I'm always impressed how non big blockers can say with a straight face that there is no problem leaving everything at 1 Megabyt blocks.
Let's say blocks are half full now. What happens when legit transactions are constantly, on average, 150% of 1MB? It would mean that 33% of all valid transactions will never confirm. Can you imagine a currency where 33% of all transactions never confirm and that currency had somehow a chance to survive?
And fee market... you realize that if constantly many legit transactions are waived, then the fees will rise constantly too. There would simply be no end because even if everyone raises their fee, still 33% can't get confirmed. What would happen? 33% of all users who use bitcoin would drop bitcoin. Surely that would be a great day for adoption.

Pretty sad Satoshi agreed to change his 32MB max blocksize limit (application limit) to the 1MB "security" max blocksize limit. It was no big deal back when Bitcoin was not used much, but now it limits further Bitcoin adoption. The adoption Satoshi and many current Bitcoin users want - one popular and widely used coin, aka Bitcoin.

[tvbcof]

Blockstream is a private company lol (and Bitcoin Core is now their project), BIP101 isn't (and XT is just an implementation, you can even use Bitcoin Core + BIP101 if you prefer)

Any effort which includes Maxwell, sipa, and Back working together is totally cool with me.  I don't care if it is a private company, corporation, NGO, politburo. or garage workshop rap session.  These people have proven themselves (to me) over the last number of years that I've been paying attention.

Hearn, and to a lesser degree, Andresen and their shitty Bitcoin Foundation have also proven themselves (to me) over this time period.  In that case they have proven themselves to be completely untrustworthy and antithetic to everything I hope for in distributed crypto-currencies.

A few wild-cards have proven themselves to be a surprise.  On the negative side, Ver, and on the positive side (given his involvement with TBF), Matonis.

I think even when they now do what you would like to see done, it is never a good idea to trust persons with conflict of interests. Especially when a lot of money is involved. You might be happy now with their deeds but what if they do something you don't want anymore? Then you let it happen that structures be built that prevents you from preventing these new changes. No, conflict of interests should always be watched very cautious. Because they often enough don't act for the general good but for their own good. Matching that with your own good at one time does surely not mean that will be always the case. It is risky to support such actions.

I'm not sure that there is anyone doing anything which is NOT a 'conflict of interest' in some way.  I, for one, tend to get a little bit suspicious when someone is doing something out of the pure goodness of their hearts, or wants to give me free shit.  Also, it is impractical for most people to spend all of their days doing high quality work with no means of support or hope of a reward so when that it happening it itself can be a warning flag.

Some people have an earnest interest in doing things because they feel that doing certain things is interesting and cool.  The best way to gauge that is to pay some attention to their work over a long-ish period of time.  The level of transparency that people are willing to provide is also a meaningful factor to me in trying to make good choices here because, as you say, it is appropriate to 'watch very cautiously' for certain things.

From my perspective, Blockstream is undertaking a track of what I used to call 'subordinate chains' to make Bitcoin scale, and I've been of the opinion that this has the best combination of practicability, safety, and auxiliary advantages for about 4 years now.  This makes me naturally positive to their undertaking of course, and as I've said before, I am delighted to see this particular group of people engaged in this undertaking.  Dr. Back has a very long history in working on empowering technology from back in the cypherpunk days and crypto wars several decades ago.  Maxwell and Wuille or a combination of the two have been doing some highly technical and impressive work on crypto-currency more recently (including being central to getting Bitcoin where it is today.)  They have earned my trust, but I would/will always have my eyes open and would be surprised it that bothered any of them.  If it does, my confidence in them would be severely diminished for that reason alone.

I'm also glad to see that Peter Todd seems to be on the outside of Blockstream.  His value as an outside critic has been very good for Bitcoin and crypto-currency development in my opinion.  My guess is that certain of those who've been on the rough side of his criticism over the years would say the same thing.

[SebastianJu]

Besides that... it doesn't really matter if the reward is as high as now or only 10% of that. It ALWAYS would mean centralization since corporate organisations will scale up their operations. And small miners are not lucrative anymore since ages. It doesn't matter how high the reward is, the centralization will go on regardless. I'm wondering why satoshi foresaw this and did not think it is a bad thing.

There is still decentralization. Changing the block size will kill that.

Why? Only because in 2 years we might have to constantly download 2 MB blocks since 8 MB surely won't be filled completely then? That argument sounds way far fetched.

I think this has been discussed to death? It's latency, big miners can push out small ones very easily.

Do you speak about the propagation time? That is no argument since a long time anymore. You know the miners that create empty blocks to have an advantage in propagation time and maybe even orphan big blocks? Some built a network, i'm not sure about the name anymore. Maiks Propagation network or so. If you are a miner and take part there then your full block gets propagated in 2 seconds or so. That will outperform any normal zero transaction block that is normally propagated.

Your argument, when i understand it right, is something like, "we have modem speed internet, we only can have 1kb blocks because otherwise someone with isdn? has an advantage." Though you totally forget that internet speed is developing constantly with time.

No it should not. The current system (yes with cash and even credit cards if you wish to give up your privacy so much) is working perfectly well for small transactions, we must stop the government from stealing from us. The mere fact that a huge amount of socialists have joined the Bitcoin forums and communication doesn't mean they should have a say (this is not a democracy for fuck's sake). This is the domain of Libertarians (as is Satoshi! He would hate your arguments and attitude!) and socialists used to make fun of it. Now they want to join! Fuck that. They should just fuck of and DIAF (and they will have no big influence in the end anyway, they are utterly unimportant and non-influential)

Bitcoin is to challenge their dominance of the world and change it for the better, not to let them infiltrate and corrupt the very concept. Just fork Bitcoin and make your socialist coin or whatever, it will die anyway because your economic concepts don't work (Keynesians anyone?  ). Don't try to drag Bitcoin down with your retarded ideas of how the world should work.

Socialist is who wants that everyone can use bitcoin? Elitist view. And surely no good view since when history has shown one thing then that the people have the power and not some elitists that try to rule.

Bitcoin is not a democracy? And who the fuck told you that you have the saying in the game? This sounds ridiculous. As if you feel some right to make the rules. Well, i tell you what. This is a democracy. And users vote by using the fork they want. You might use your old bitcoin then but you can be sure that the real bitcoin will be the bitcoin who most believe is the real bitcoin at the end.

Corrupt the concept? The concept was how bitcoin worked until now. YOU want to change how bitcoin works. With high fees and unconfirming legit transactions.

Yeah, bitcoin is for libertarians. Though only because you have an elitist world view and thinks you can decide who has the right to take part doesn't mean that you can decide on that. It would only be your opinion.

And no, they don't want to join, the normal users were there practically from the start. Your definition of what happened doesn't change history.

You truly think the common people have the power? That's hilarious   (and cute)

I don't have the saying either. Big money does. Everyone will make choices in their own best interest so it's likely to get there anyway (but if it doesn't it will die and be overtaken by a clone which does things right). Majority rules won't be the deciding factor here. Thank fuck for that.

I think the possibility to create forks is there all the time. Then the question is which of the fork will be seen as THE bitcoin. And who decides that? The users. If 90% of bitcoiners decide that a fork is the real bitcoin now then it is the case and that bitcoin will have the value because they trust in the value.

Though one might ask what happens when the users on both sides sell the coins they own on the other side to push the price of the enemy bitcoin down. Might be that the one with many bitcoins can do a lot more damage then. Or maybe they would not. Because when they sell all these coins and this chain still wins, then they have nothing anymore. It's a gamble.

At the end the bitcoin value is based on trust that it has a value. And that trust gets decided by the users.

[SebastianJu]

As far as I see it Gavin is desperatly trying to save Bitcoin.

but there is no need to save anything at the moment. so far, bitcoin dealt with problems in a good manner.

Right? Its like these "big blockers nao" are under some Reddit spell, talking about problems that are not problems and promoting some solution that is not a solution anyway..

I'm always impressed how non big blockers can say with a straight face that there is no problem leaving everything at 1 Megabyt blocks.
Let's say blocks are half full now. What happens when legit transactions are constantly, on average, 150% of 1MB? It would mean that 33% of all valid transactions will never confirm. Can you imagine a currency where 33% of all transactions never confirm and that currency had somehow a chance to survive?
And fee market... you realize that if constantly many legit transactions are waived, then the fees will rise constantly too. There would simply be no end because even if everyone raises their fee, still 33% can't get confirmed. What would happen? 33% of all users who use bitcoin would drop bitcoin. Surely that would be a great day for adoption.

non big blockers? im just a regular bitcoiner man
anyway, to answer you, imho i'd tend to say lets revisit blocksize once block reward < fees.
i do want to see a fee market emerge before cutting into it.
its been fun until now, low cost transactions and all, but seriously im in bitcoin for a bit more than a visa competitor.
monetary sovereignty, censorship resitant and truslessness y know...

Yeah, no offense. I only wanted to group the ones that don't want big blocks.

> i'd tend to say lets revisit blocksize once block reward < fees.

This sentence sounds VERY dangerous. Do you honestly believe that it is possible to make up for block halving by fees? Then you should calculate it through. The fees would be so high that i would make one last bitcoin transaction. Selling them on an exchange and that was it.

very dangerous? imo its the change of the protocol to please some social media shitstorm that is very dangerous.

and please do provide the data and actual calculation for this last argument: "The fees would be so high that i would make one last bitcoin transaction."

else its just fud and lame noobish projections that i would not give a heck about, for i do not have such certitudes but am simply curious as to how the fee market will develop once the block will be full.

"lame noobish projections" Um... says november 2013 to june 2011.

And why the heck to you denigrate those that see the problem with small blocks and want a change as social media shitstormers? That doesn't sound like arguments but like something less worth.

If you try to make up the 12.5bitcoins that will be lost in next block halving with fees then calculate for yourself how high the fees for the transactions must be. Or see here: https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000014d2a3a95fcce5d6a884f0f9dd37fe0c91d3926f0481adf

Big block, nearly full. Fee 0.5 btc. If you want to make up for missing 12.5 btc in block reward you would have 13btc fee. 2713 transactions. 13 / 2713 = 0.0048 btc. Which translates to pretty exact $1.5 fee for every transaction. milk maid calculation of course. But expensive like paypal. You would lose the next positive point that speaks for bitcoin.

And regarding your fee market. You realize that the last days and weeks we have delays in confirmations because LEGIT transactions are so many? Bitcoin price is dancing and everyone wants to transact. I lost yesterday some money because my transactions with a really not bad fee were hanging in limbo for hours while the bitcoin price dropped even further in the meanwhile. If that is the great fee market then the future doesn't look bright.

And for what would we need such high fees at all? See what i wrote about that we have way way too many miners because mining is way too profitable at the moment.
I see what you write about your vision but i honestly can't understand how you think this will be received with a fee market. A fee market would mean bitcoin is expensive and unreliable. Since you can never know if your fee is too low at the end.

Besides... why do you think your vision can not be done with 8 mb blocks? In fact i think we would come way more near your vision with bigger blocks.

the vision of a decentralized, trustless and censorship resistant netowrk (which i'd happily pay an extra for) which would only be empowered whilst preserving the possibility of running a home node, for normal people to access the blockchain (ergo run a bitcoin client) without TRUSTING and giving it all to AWS and other big centralized data mining corporations.

Well, you already lost the miner decentralization. And it won't come back. Interestingly satoshi has foreseen that and he was not concerned.

But your fear of normal people not being able anymore like they can do it today sounds slowly like fud for me. There will be no 8mb blocks the next day. And even when, you really argument like running a full node is making a normal computer work at his limits. The truth is far away from that. Why always referring to computers built 10 years ago? Or to developing areas that might bring out another 0.1% nodes if we hold it at 1mb blocks. It simply makes no sense to claim everything will break only because we have to work on 1, 2 or some additional mb of transactions everyt 10! minutes.

Maybe it would be easier when you describe which computer setup you think has to have problem with constant 2 mb blocks. Or 8mb blocks. Please explain which group of computers and or users we would lose then.

[SebastianJu]

One thing that I take a great deal of comfort from from this XT nonsense; almost none of the so-called supporters are credible members of the forum, most come across as the usual sock puppets. I suspect that very low numbers of real people actually support GavinMikeCoin.

This. I've never seen a reputable member who switched their node from Core to XT. Still XT-lovers brag about their mining power.

Anyone who does is immediately branded as non-reputable by those that disagree.

And i can understand it even though iam for bigger blocks because they are inevitable for a healthy grow of bitcoin. Ok, most XT-Fans did not want hearn and only wanted to make a point by support bigger blocks with it. But hearn and his stupid ideas and acts really destroyed a lot. Stupid person. Either he doesn't know what he does or he does and has different plans.

I only hope there is some independent developer who can offer a solution. Why gavin did not do his own thing even though he was critical of hearn... that's out of my understanding. He could easily have changed this topic if he would have acted smarter.

[SebastianJu]

Blockstream is a private company lol (and Bitcoin Core is now their project), BIP101 isn't (and XT is just an implementation, you can even use Bitcoin Core + BIP101 if you prefer)

Any effort which includes Maxwell, sipa, and Back working together is totally cool with me.  I don't care if it is a private company, corporation, NGO, politburo. or garage workshop rap session.  These people have proven themselves (to me) over the last number of years that I've been paying attention.

Hearn, and to a lesser degree, Andresen and their shitty Bitcoin Foundation have also proven themselves (to me) over this time period.  In that case they have proven themselves to be completely untrustworthy and antithetic to everything I hope for in distributed crypto-currencies.

A few wild-cards have proven themselves to be a surprise.  On the negative side, Ver, and on the positive side (given his involvement with TBF), Matonis.

I think even when they now do what you would like to see done, it is never a good idea to trust persons with conflict of interests. Especially when a lot of money is involved. You might be happy now with their deeds but what if they do something you don't want anymore? Then you let it happen that structures be built that prevents you from preventing these new changes. No, conflict of interests should always be watched very cautious. Because they often enough don't act for the general good but for their own good. Matching that with your own good at one time does surely not mean that will be always the case. It is risky to support such actions.

I'm not sure that there is anyone doing anything which is NOT a 'conflict of interest' in some way.  I, for one, tend to get a little bit suspicious when someone is doing something out of the pure goodness of their hearts, or wants to give me free shit.

I had to laugh. Since yes, this is something you, unfortunately, learn in the bitcoin community. The fact that bitcoin is money tends to bring out the worst of some humans. Well, not much can be done, i was scammed often enough and decided i might help others by providing escrow service. I like to think that i safed a good bunch of people from being scammed that way. In fact i know it.

  Also, it is impractical for most people to spend all of their days doing high quality work with no means of support or hope of a reward so when that it happening it itself can be a warning flag.

I agree.

Some people have an earnest interest in doing things because they feel that doing certain things is interesting and cool.  The best way to gauge that is to pay some attention to their work over a long-ish period of time.  The level of transparency that people are willing to provide is also a meaningful factor to me in trying to make good choices here because, as you say, it is appropriate to 'watch very cautiously' for certain things.

Agree again.

From my perspective, Blockstream is undertaking a track of what I used to call 'subordinate chains' to make Bitcoin scale, and I've been of the opinion that this has the best combination of practicability, safety, and auxiliary advantages for about 4 years now.  This makes me naturally positive to their undertaking of course, and as I've said before, I am delighted to see this particular group of people engaged in this undertaking.  Dr. Back has a very long history in working on empowering technology from back in the cypherpunk days and crypto wars several decades ago.  Maxwell and Wuille or a combination of the two have been doing some highly technical and impressive work on crypto-currency more recently (including being central to getting Bitcoin where it is today.)  They have earned my trust, but I would/will always have my eyes open and would be surprised it that bothered any of them.  If it does, my confidence in them would be severely diminished for that reason alone.

I did not watch them so closely but i will take your word on this. I myself think that blockstream is an interesting thing. It very well can have their share. But i believe it would not be much more then Ethereum or NXT... WHEN bitcoin would work fully fine. IF bitcoin would not work, then blockstream might prosper. And that is the whole problem i have with this. It's like they decided to have their own private "bitcoin" and in order to let everyone switch to their coin they misuse their position to stop the changes that wanted to be done by the other developers.

Well, i might be wrong and they really have no such motives and they really believe all this... nonsense... of centralization, because some old computers cannot be nodes anymore, or that we need a fee market for some reason no one than they can understand. But these arguments seem so far fetched that you ask yourself if they did not find better ones at all.

I'm also glad to see that Peter Todd seems to be on the outside of Blockstream.  His value as an outside critic has been very good for Bitcoin and crypto-currency development in my opinion.  My guess is that certain of those who've been on the rough side of his criticism over the years would say the same thing.

I really really would like to see a idealistic coder who develops an alternative client that can not be attacked so easily like bitcoin xt. My impression might be wrong but i have the impression that the majority of bitcoiners see that pressing bitcoin into that 1mb cage can in no way be a good thing for future development. And i'm sure many would switch. I mean value of a chain gets established by the trust and believe of it's users. Majority should win i think.

[RoadTrain]

Well, i might be wrong and they really have no such motives and they really believe all this... nonsense... of centralization, because some old computers cannot be nodes anymore, or that we need a fee market for some reason no one than they can understand. But these arguments seem so far fetched that you ask yourself if they did not find better ones at all.

I don't understand why you cannot grasp it. Nevermind that 'old computers' strawman, it's quite simple.

Larger blocks create centralizing pressure on nodes by raising the cost of creating and running them. Do you argee with that? Do you agree that we must consider it as a part of security-scalability tradeoff? If yes, then you are much closer to Blockstream guys than you might think.

[cjmoles]

I don't know.  It seems like this debate all comes down to the economics of scaling.  We all agree that it would benefit the bitcoin project if there was a mass adoption.  However, there is no incentive for the masses to adopt the technology if the current protocol cannot handle an adoption rate that would overwhelm the system.  If big business decided tomorrow (which they couldn't due to the current state of the technology)  to adopt Bitcoin as a payment system, the system would break, so why would big business even consider the prospect?  However, if the system was prepared to handle the traffic, the project would become more attractive to big business.  Right?

[Carlton Banks]

However, if the system was prepared to handle the traffic, the project would become more attractive to big business.  Right?

Right. So, which of the proposed scaling solutions addresses the issue so comprehensively? Which has the capacity or potential to scale up to 7 billion users?