^ Hahaha, brilliant!
In the context of Bitcoin, "consensus" refers to "technical consensus" at the protocol level, not "economic consensus" at the user level or "political consensus" at opinion level ...
You don't get it, even if it is demonstrated right before your eyes. The "consensus" of the technicians is meaningless, if it is no "consensus" / "compromise" with the miners. This is Bitcoins security against a a failure in development.
I don't want to say core failed. In fact I think they do the best they can and do a hard, brillant work, and they don't deserve what happens to them now. But they have been warned for a long time and it would have been easy for them to prevent it. It's just a fact, that the economy lost it's patience in core and is not satisfied with core's scaling roadmap.
It's a fact that you have the
impression that "the economy lost [its] patience in core and is not satisfied with core's scaling roadmap". What I'm saying is that that impression seems to have been generated as a reaction to a contrived "problem" (urgency of block size scaling) for the purpose of getting non-technical people to naively seek a
compromised (in both senses of the word) "solution".
If a large majority of users and economic acteurs agree - it's not relevant, because they could be manipulated.
But if 35 developers agree, even if it is against the will of users and economy - than that's the way. As if they couldn't be manipulated.
It's not that they couldn't be manipulated, but where's the evidence of that? I mean, for Gavin, Hearn, Garzik, and a few others, quite possibly. You have to look at who it is that has reasons to destroy Bitcoin, who it is that has (or perceives to have) the most to lose. It ain't the core developers, it ain't the users, it ain't the miners.
Coinbase is just a business trying to benefit from a particular technology, without much regard for the direction of the technology -
Sure. Just a greedy and instrusive business, hem?
Coinbase enables people to buy/sell bitcoins. Entrepreneurs like Brian Armstrong risked their freedom and their wealth to make this real. Think on Charlie Shrem. Which developer got imprisoned for submitting a bip? Which one got highly indepted because a hacker had stolen a mass of bitcoins from the website?
Without companies like Coinbase Bitcoin would be not more than any loosy altcoin.
Armstrong is technically clueless. He's running a business -- that's his concern. Shrem was thrown under the bus by most of his fellow crypto entrepreneurs when the USG kidnapped him; hardly conducive to your point. As I
pointed out back then, "If we don't stand up for Shrem, we are complete idiots waiting for the next blow." The next (or another) blow is here, I would suggest.
The question is, why are you into Bitcoin? To make money? Or to help move us toward a fairer economic system free from central control and manipulation (debt-based fractional reserve fiat bankster "money")?
Why is this the question? Mind-check? Are you Stalin?
Read my answer: curiosity, ideology and money. In this direction. ok?
That's the correct order, yes, though I would change "ideology" with "understanding".
The question is that because you don't seem to understand what exactly it is that Bitcoin, or rather cryptocurrency, fundamentally and most relevantly addresses, in our world. How do you suppose your grandfather or great-grandfather (nothing personal, just playing along with your Stalin remark) fell for the rhetoric of authoritarian collectivist clowns? It's because of exposure to particular information sources to the exclusion of others. That's how people are easily led, their energy herded and harnessed into desired destructive results, usually by means of making them feel as if they are part of a collective, by promoting vague/abstract ideas such as "economic majority" or "democratic majority".
Ok, I don't like politician either. Unfortunately their talents - negotiation and diplomacy - are needed, whenever humans built something like society.
The only reason you believe they "are needed" (and that their acts could be called "talents") is, I would suggest, because you are paying attention to sources of information that make it seem that way. In this context, "negotiation and diplomacy" really means "peace-maintaining communications between warlords".
I never believed or told the blockstream-conspiracy. But I don't understand why you are heavy paranoid when it comes to Coinbase / Andresen, but not a bit paranoid when it comes to Maxwell/Blockstream.
It's not paranoia, it's research/investigation. Maxwell has, to my knowledge at least, never done anything suspicious in regards to the direction of Bitcoin, and his posts paint him as quite the gentleman, always sticking to the technical arguments, which are what is relevant for Bitcoin's long-term health.
I think you're missing the idea that it isn't actually as urgent as it is repeatedly alleged, and that SegWit does essentially the same thing (with bonuses) in about the same timeframe.
And also that a hard fork is riskier and harder to carefully pull off (i.e. more unpredictable) than the big blockists want to believe.
And you seem to be assuming that a Gavinista hardph0rk would somehow not increase centralization by moving developmental control/influence toward a smaller number of developers.
And soon enough they would feel (or pretend to feel) the urgency of increasing it to 4MB, perhaps after attempting "stress tests" to see if they can execute withholding attacks that may become viable due to the increased block processing time of 2MB blocks.
Core could gracefully acknowledge that perhaps on this one thing they might have been wrong, or they could instead make threats about switching POW algorithms to try and maintain their grip on the one true bitcoin. Are they really going to do that over this one issue,
is gmaxwell *that* obstinate, are the the other devs really going to back him?
You may have missed Maxwell's next post down, where he says: "I was just answering to feasibility. Changing the POW is a well understood, though extreme, measure available to address dysfunction in the mining ecosystem.
If miners do something that harms some network of nodes; thats exactly what they'll do. And Luke-Jr had already offered a patch to Classic to address the complaints Mike's article was making."
Alternative implementations are not a threat they are a means to the end of consensus.
Hardly so. Does fungibility and antifragility mean nothing to you? There is a reason why hard forks are supposed to be, and should be, extremely hard to do unless there is an overwhelming consensus (i.e. virtually no opposition).
