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

[SebastianJu]

I might be amateur to this but I think a larger blocksize will eventually be needed.

Probably +95% share that view.

The difference is that: some think that we should use blocksize to solve all scaling problems (when that's not even possible), the other camp wants to do everything possible to increase the transaction rate before increasing the blocksize.

I'm in the latter camp. The former camp likes to mischaracterise this as 1MB4EVA, but it's as obvious to me as to anyone else that the limit will have to go up, but let's minimise that.

I want to see fees > block reward (at least getting close to) before reconsidering the blocksize.

It is a pretty simple equation imho, and it gives us the Time to investigate and balance the whole ecosystem (nodes, Blockchain growth rate, Miners, sidechains, etc) and monitor the fee market whilst the block rewards shrinks.

Hmmm, I see where you're coming from there. It's possible that could happen next year; once we're at 12.5 BTC for the block reward, getting up to, say, 10 BTC in fees might not be so unrealistic. I'm sure the miners are aware of that possibility too, no wonder they rejected BIP101 and XT also.

I was of the impression that the bigger miners spoke out for changing the blocksize limit to 8 Megabytes. Which looked interesting to me since they did not set the shortterm income over the longterm development.

At the end high fees will lead to less transactions, which leads to less total fees again. Well, i hope miners are thinking longterm. Though the difficulty is not really promoting this way of thinking. If you don't have your investment back in the first 2 or 3 months then you most probably will never. So the shortterm income is everything, nearly like trained into miners.

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[HostFat]

Maybe users will just prefer to pay directly big pools to be sure to get an earlier confirmation.

[SebastianJu]

Miners have full discretion of whether to include a no fee transaction, or not. Forcing a fee market from "on high" is central planning, which can often have the desired effect, in addition to several other (unintended??) side effects.

What's the alternative to central planning when it comes to developing the software? I've not heard one, and I am certain no credible alternative has been proposed (or could logically exist).

Remember also that the dev team isn't set in stone: it's self organising. Gavin Andresen voluntarily ceded control of the github repo commit keys to Wladimir van der Laan, and there's no good reason why something like that shouldn't happen again: Wladimir moves onto other things, so he hands the keys over to someone he finds trustworthy.

I fail to see any other possible way of doing any of this, although I'd certainly be happy to hear it if a good alternative is suggested. I'm not expecting much, though; many, many people much sharper than me have come to a similar conclusion.

Neither the Internet nor the 'Internet of Money' (Bitcoin) need central planning. Development is based on competition.

Right, except that when one internet standards body tries to develop a new standard, competing teams compete by proposing their own system, not hijacking the system of another team so as to change the way that standard works. Get it?  

Yes, a company hijacked the team to establish a new standard (full blocks).

Lol, I seem to remember Gavin volunteering to leave, and voluntarily joining the (fraudulent/failed) Bitcoin Foundation. Any more jokes?

Yeah, it's a pain that the idealism from the beginning of bitcoin seems to be lost. All developers act like politicians that have their side job at a bank or insurance company. Effectively not working for the people anymore but for the company.

[SebastianJu]

Everybody knows that there is a company that bought a team. That this leads to a fork of the dev team shouldn't surprise anybody.

The evidence.

Evidence exists that Hearn and Andresen intend to take Bitcoin over, they state it themselves openly. Where is the evidence that Blockstream bought the Bitcoin dev team? (there is abundant evidence to the contrary, but none that supports your claim)

Not bought but it was always said that the developers in question invested in blockstream. So they own the company partly and obviously that means they await to get their investment back with profits.

Well, this is all so dark that you can't really tell what is true and false. :/

[SebastianJu]

The poisonous attacks on Blockstream and the core developers doing their best (and what they believe is best for Bitcoin), is unhelpful and divisive .

I think their intentions aren't questioned without good reasons. If someone wants to save bitcoin then he would save bitcoin. And not come up with a solution that practically means not to use bitcoin.

[tvbcof]

Lol, I seem to remember Gavin volunteering to leave, and voluntarily joining the (fraudulent/failed) Bitcoin Foundation. Any more jokes?

The phraseology makes it sound like Gavin's role in TBF was a bit more passive than it probably was.  Remember that it was Gavin himself who floated the idea of such a foundation pretty early on in this forum.  The organization didn't even have a name.  There was a thread on this forum about the possibility, structure, etc.  I remember it because Theymos and I were among the distinct minority of voices warning that there were risks.  Almost everyone else was all rah, rah, rah about the idea.

It's a real cunt trying to find these old threads so I won't bother.  I've called attention to it several times in the past.

[SebastianJu]

Blockstream employees are only but a minority of Core developers

Though they are the ones who can deny changes to the code, isn't it? There is no democracy where the majority decides which code parts get into the next release or am i seeing that wrong?

[HostFat]

Just to remember that the only thing that Gavin wanted was increasing the block size, from 2/3 years ago.
All other things about the fork are after he saw that it wasn't possible with the current Blockstream team.

[Cconvert2G36]

Miners have full discretion of whether to include a no fee transaction, or not. Forcing a fee market from "on high" is central planning, which can often have the desired effect, in addition to several other (unintended??) side effects.

What's the alternative to central planning when it comes to developing the software? I've not heard one, and I am certain no credible alternative has been proposed (or could logically exist).

Remember also that the dev team isn't set in stone: it's self organising. Gavin Andresen voluntarily ceded control of the github repo commit keys to Wladimir van der Laan, and there's no good reason why something like that shouldn't happen again: Wladimir moves onto other things, so he hands the keys over to someone he finds trustworthy.

I fail to see any other possible way of doing any of this, although I'd certainly be happy to hear it if a good alternative is suggested. I'm not expecting much, though; many, many people much sharper than me have come to a similar conclusion.

Neither the Internet nor the 'Internet of Money' (Bitcoin) need central planning. Development is based on competition.

Right, except that when one internet standards body tries to develop a new standard, competing teams compete by proposing their own system, not hijacking the system of another team so as to change the way that standard works. Get it?  

Yes, a company hijacked the team to establish a new standard (full blocks).

Lol, I seem to remember Gavin volunteering to leave, and voluntarily joining the (fraudulent/failed) Bitcoin Foundation. Any more jokes?

Yeah, it's a pain that the idealism from the beginning of bitcoin seems to be lost. All developers act like politicians that have their side job at a bank or insurance company. Effectively not working for the people anymore but for the company.

It weirds me out that these guys don't even admit the possibility of a conflict of interest. Or they do, but only on one side. Personally, I think the Blockstream employed contingent of core does legitimately have these concerns about relay node incentives, and for good stated reasons. Legitimate concerns don't necessitate complete stasis though. I see potential conflicts of interest on both sides.

[tvbcof]

Maybe users will just prefer to pay directly big pools to be sure to get an earlier confirmation.

Remember Hearn's quote about 'no difference between freezing coins and keeping them from being spent for 20 years.'  I see no indication that he has not worked toward that goal (extreme miner consolidation far beyond what is practical at 1MB) since that time.  All the while fostering other potential attack vectors as well of course.

[HostFat]

Remember Hearn's quote about 'no difference between freezing coins and keeping them from being spent for 20 years.'  I see no indication that he has not worked toward that goal (extreme miner consolidation far beyond what is practical at 1MB) since that time.  All the while fostering other potential attack vectors as well of course.

What's the point about mike here? I'm totally missing it.

Now that the space on the blocks is becoming a very rare resource, then it will be the same for the confirmations.
So it's logic that who manage this space (like pools as BTCC) is trying to get more income from it.

The Blockchain is secure thanks to the avidity of the miners, it can't be otherwise.

[SebastianJu]

I might be amateur to this but I think a larger blocksize will eventually be needed.

Probably +95% share that view.

The difference is that: some think that we should use blocksize to solve all scaling problems (when that's not even possible), the other camp wants to do everything possible to increase the transaction rate before increasing the blocksize.

I'm in the latter camp. The former camp likes to mischaracterise this as 1MB4EVA, but it's as obvious to me as to anyone else that the limit will have to go up, but let's minimise that.

I want to see fees > block reward (at least getting close to) before reconsidering the blocksize.

It is a pretty simple equation imho, and it gives us the Time to investigate and balance the whole ecosystem (nodes, Blockchain growth rate, Miners, sidechains, etc) and monitor the fee market whilst the block rewards shrinks.

Hmmm, I see where you're coming from there. It's possible that could happen next year; once we're at 12.5 BTC for the block reward, getting up to, say, 10 BTC in fees might not be so unrealistic. I'm sure the miners are aware of that possibility too, no wonder they rejected BIP101 and XT also.

First, I urge anyone trying to understand the fee mechanism to take a read at this: http://bitcoinfees.com/

Secondly, according to network deficit, fees are not sustainable as of now: https://blockchain.info/charts/network-deficit

How is that deficit calculated? By the current hashrate? That would be nonsense to do because it would look like we need to keep the miner rewards stable. That is not true. Miners switched off nonprofitable hardware all the time and no one was crazy enough to demand we would need fees to make up for the first block halving.

What do you fear will happen when a chunk of miners will drop off their unprofitable miners? The network is more than secure and nothing happened in the past either. I think your fears are unbased.

Thirdly, lets put some actual number on this : nowadays, with half full blocks on average, fee/block = ~0,15BTC
https://www.smartbit.com.au/charts/transaction-fees-per-block

So even after the halving, and unless there is a huge transactio and thus block space demannd (which is different from adoption as people might simply buy and hold - hence not transacting/spending), chances are that fees will stay far far behind the 12,5BTC block reward (also not taking into account the spam and/or bloat attacks, for which the block limit is perfectly justified, yet again, and all over again).

So there is no point discussing the blocksize limit, for it is economically and technically relevant to sustain the order and the security of bitcoin's network.

Besides, again, blocksize is not a solution to scaling bitcoin.

Economically that is nonsense. You sound like we need to raise the amount of miners all the time but it is not allowed to drop. In fact mining momentarely is so rewarding that we have this sheer amount of hashpower that we are 100 fold more secure than needed. Shouldn't that be a good sign that we don't need to feed this useless overhead? It's like a overboarding bureaucracy in a country. Eating a lot of money but politicians say we need all that.

Look at the past, maybe you will see that your fears are unbased.

[SebastianJu]

Question:  Why Gavin is so desperate about his fork? (increasing size)

Answer (for who has missed it): http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/bitcoin-giant-btcc-launches-priority-blockchain-transactions-its-customers-1529730

Just wait for the others.

Well, this business idea was awaitable. If you have such a big part of the networks hashpower then you get such ideas i guess. But 13% is not so much. The speed advantage is not really big. It sounds more like a advertising idea.

But why do you bring Gavin into this? Priority transactions would make way more sense with 1MB blocks because the blocks would be constantly full and you would have no luck getting included often. Then you can easily sell such service.

I'm really puzzled what you want with Gavin at this point. What he wanted to do would make this business model useless.

Or did i misunderstood and you are in favor of increasing blocksize limit?

[SebastianJu]

Maybe users will just prefer to pay directly big pools to be sure to get an earlier confirmation.

The small miners will not get much from higher fees. Big companies would simply scale their operation to squeeze the last bit of reward out of the network. Small miners are a dying species.

[SebastianJu]

Just to remember that the only thing that Gavin wanted was increasing the block size, from 2/3 years ago.
All other things about the fork are after he saw that it wasn't possible with the current Blockstream team.

But why the h... did he join forces with hearn? Someone he criticized all the time already for his dictatoric style and dangerous ideas. That was incredibly stupid. No he lost his credibility. I can't understand him.

[HostFat]

Or did i misunderstood and you are in favor of increasing blocksize limit?

Yes I'm in favor, and Gavin was probably "desperate" because he wanted to avoid even the situation/solution that BTCC is going to do (and I'm sure that it will not be the last)

I don't think that it was stupid, but just the last possibility to save Bitcoin from the corrupted team.

It was just a way to show to the community that it's possible to fork if needed.

[tvbcof]

Remember Hearn's quote about 'no difference between freezing coins and keeping them from being spent for 20 years.'  I see no indication that he has not worked toward that goal (extreme miner consolidation far beyond what is practical at 1MB) since that time.  All the while fostering other potential attack vectors as well of course.

What's the point about mike here? I'm totally missing it.

Discrimination in mining, and Mike being early to realize the 'utility.'  Sorry to have lost you...

If you need it tied back to the tittle of the thread, I don't supposed it has escaped you that Mike and Gavin work as a team now...with an obvious and and amusing hierarchical structure.  Probably when Mike was postulating about mining consolidation and the nice things that that could accomplish Gavin's head had as many question marks hovering around it as 95% of the rest of the readers here.  Things have 'evolved' in the interceding four years.

Now that the space on the blocks is becoming a very rare resource, they it will be the same for the confirmations.
So it's logic that who manage this space (like pools as BTCC) is trying to get more income from it.

In theory, sidecoins are a nearly perfect proxy for native Bitcoin.  And in practice, the Blockstream dudes seem to be making great progress as I see it.  Scaling problem solved.  It is certainly possible that 1MB won't be enough for Bitcoin in a backing roll at some point.  Everyone recognizes this.  It will become more clear how many years off that is once the sidechains ecosystem blossoms.

I don't care if individual side-chains are centralized and consolidated.  I'll balance my risk between whichever ones I choose and draw off my stake in any that I dis-agree with or don't/cannot trust.

I care only that I have one trusted option at the pinicle.  That would be native Bitcoin (currently, and hopefully going forward) as a base store of value which I can use on the irregular instances where it really matters.  Keeping that (and just that) 'free' is the most important thing to me.  I am nearly completely sure that Mike and Gavin see things similarly except just the opposite.  The most critical thing is to contain Bitcoin and hand it over to the mainstream banks.  Why is less clear to me.

Anyway, the mining thing is probably a canard and not really that big a problem.  If the miners became to obnoxious a hard-fork would totally fuck anyone doing sha256 on ASIC so they probably would not dare.  If it came to a hard-fork for that reason a whole lot of other loose-end type things could be rolled in as well.  I've petitioned the Blockstream guys to work on such a thing as a background task so that if such an action is unavoidable (for this reason or others) the outcome will be more positive than negative.

The Blockchain is secure thanks to the avidity of the miners, it can't be otherwise.

Bitcoin would work just fine with me running one CPU miner in the background...as long as nobody attacked it.

I notice that the Blockstream guys were very clever insofar as they started out setting very long expectations.  In the days-range as I recall.  What this means is that a superior resources attack would need to be sustained successfully for a long time and it would be quite expensive and the probability of success against countermeasures would be relatively low.  Smart folks!  (I tend to bet my money on smart folks, BTW.)

[HostFat]

Discrimination in mining, and Mike being early to realize the 'utility.'  Sorry to have lost you...

Do you understand that the discrimination is only possible with a situation of a limited size?

If there is a space for 10 tx on a block, and the block is always full, the entity that makes the block (the pool/miner), then can chose to give a preference to some tx.
So, it can ask for a fee paid to him directly.
If the block now has the space for 100 tx (example), the miner/pool can still try to ask for a fee, but no one is going to pay it, because there is a very high probability that another miner will incluse all the fees directly.

This simple logic doesn't need a genius evil mind. You should see that mike was already clever on giving this warning a way before this has happened.

The most critical thing is to contain Bitcoin and hand it over to the mainstream banks.  Why is less clear to me.

There are many ways so that banks can find the Blockchain as something useful.
And it's useful because it's trustless, and it is trustless because it's decentralized. (banks don't trust each others)
Banks doesn't need to centralize it to make it useful to them, so there are many people with a more open mind that are very happy to make money by helping banks on using this technology (and maybe then converting them in Bitcoin)

Bitcoin would work just fine with me running one CPU miner in the background...as long as nobody attacked it.

If nobody wants to attack it, than it has no value. You can't have both.

All the things that you say about sidecoin/chain are your personal expectations.
While you hope for something, you shouldn't stop looking at the reality.
Expectations can become failures.

[SebastianJu]

Or did i misunderstood and you are in favor of increasing blocksize limit?

Yes I'm in favor, and Gavin was probably "desperate" because he wanted to avoid even the situation/solution that BTCC is going to do (and I'm sure that it will not be the last)

I don't think that it was stupid, but just the last possibility to save Bitcoin from the corrupted team.

It was just a way to show to the community that it's possible to fork if needed.

But he easily could have been able to bring out his own version with 8MB blocks. He is one of the main developers so it should have been no problem. He had high prestige and now he wasted it.

Well, it's his decision. But it's too bad that we now are in this situation. Would he have been created his own version then many many would have trusted him. But so... even when we know a fork is possible, it is useless when there is no integer developer who creates such a version. No one questionable.

[HostFat]

He is one of the main developers so it should have been no problem.

What? Maybe you have missed a lot of the history of this problem or even you are trolling me.