Roger Ver and blocksize

[iCEBREAKER]

Similarly here, by putting all the transactions on-chain, you have to strive to find the best possible on-chain scaling technology, like thin blocks doing right now. But if you start to become lazy and try to use the old centralized financial models like payment channels because they can provide millions of transactions per second, then you just drag bitcoin into the old banking model, which will dramatically reduce its usage and increase its risk, especially when there are many other alt-coins provide on-chain scaling

I can't agree at all.

Payment channels are _nothing_ like old centralized financial models.  Who is the trusted third party? No one.  

When you go on and on about "on chain" you're confusing a technical mechanism for a social or business business goal.  Everyone being able to transact with everyone else at low cost and without the risk of censorship or exposure to extraneous counterparty risk is a laudable goal.  "On chain"-- meaning transacting in a lock-step synchronous world wide flooding network-- is a technical mechanism. On that, to the best of our current understanding _cannot_ deliver that business/social goal.  Fortunately, we do know ways to deliver it.

It's like walking up to some aircraft engineers and demanding that the next design be exactly the same but have a wingspan twice as long, when really your goal was to double the number of pounds of cargo it could carry.  Maybe the change lets it carry more cargo, or maybe it just makes the plane unstable.  Regardless, a particular _mechanism_ was confused with the business goal, and as a result an end-run around the science and engineering that could, potentially, have actually met the goal if given a chance and allowed to make the required tradeoffs.

Of course, there is always someone out there that will tell you that you can solve any complex problem with this one weird trick.  But there is a word for them: Scammers and their patsies.  And right now, there is a whole clique of the Bitcoin old timers who were bamboozled by Craig Wright and his 419 scam which predominantly featured a ton of magical scalablity claims... it's going to take a while for their wide and greedy eyes to blink and realize they've been tricked, and that maybe these magical scaling claims were just as fraudulent as everything else.

Klassique isn't about transactions per second, Klassique is about sending a message.

That message ("we have ways of making Honey Badger give a shit") will be best propounded on the upcoming bamboozled.bitcoin.com site, which will serve as Craig Wright's personal vanity platform.  

[topiOleg]

If it is true, it's remarkable and sad-- to own so much bitcoin and yet spend none of it to help further the development of Bitcoin...

I nearly singlehandedly funded the entire first wave of Bitcoin adoption with well over a million dollars worth of money that I earned before I'd even heard of Bitcoin.
Since then I've spent 6.5 years of my life and about $20M USD worth of my own bitcoin promoting the ecosystem, including billboards and national radio ads.
I created the first website to accept Bitcoin for hundreds of thousands of products, kicking off the entire wave of Bitcoin merchant adoption around the world.  I also funded the seed rounds for most of the popular Bitcoin businesses today.

I thank you for your work on the core Bitcoin protocol

Development of Bitcoin consist of both, code and services, and both are equally important. So I thank to both for the effort to make Bitcoin better and more usefull.

[rizzlarolla]

It's like walking up to some aircraft engineers and demanding that the next design be exactly the same but have a wingspan twice as long, when really your goal was to double the number of pounds of cargo it could carry.  Maybe the change lets it carry more cargo, or maybe it just makes the plane unstable.  Regardless, ...

Of course, there is always someone out there that will tell you that you can solve any complex problem with this one weird trick.  But there is a word for them: Scammers and their patsies.  

Why is making wings a bit longer such a weird "trick" for an aircraft engineer?
Your saying any aircraft engineer who looks at making longer wings is a scammer?

You want to reinvent travel via wormholes instead?
(may take a while, and meet unforeseen problems)

But hey, how could anyone want bigger wings. scammers.

Just another unconstructive info-less nonsensical post.
Expecting more reality, disappointed again.

[Assmaster2000]

It's like walking up to some aircraft engineers and demanding that the next design be exactly the same but have a wingspan twice as long, when really your goal was to double the number of pounds of cargo it could carry.  

No. It's like walking up to an aircraft engineer and telling him you need a plane that carries more people, and him telling you that planes can't scale. But the railroad company he works for can, and will handle all the passengers, using your airplanes to deliver train tickets and reservations. Of course, it doesn't need to be your airplane, and no airplanes are needed, truth be told.

BTW, thanks for the hybrid scaling solution. Best of both worlds

[Cuidler]

It's like walking up to some aircraft engineers and demanding that the next design be exactly the same but have a wingspan twice as long, when really your goal was to double the number of pounds of cargo it could carry. 

No. It's like walking up to an aircraft engineer and telling him you need a plane that carries more people, and him telling you that planes can't scale. But the railroad company he works for can, and will handle all the passengers, using your airplanes to deliver train tickets and reservations. Of course, it doesn't need to be your airplane, and no airplanes are needed, truth be told.

I have no info gmaxwell works on altcoins as well, but some other smallblockers defending 1 MB onchain blocksizes obviously exploiting the status quo and the need for wide consensus - it is the obvious Bitcoin weakness, the funny part is the attack dont come from governments, but from those who want to profit from higher altcoin usage. The point is consensus model can be easily exploited, as it doesnt takes much to block further improvenments.

[Oceat]

According to the Core development road map, SegWit should be out by now. The 2MB block size should also be implemented in July, is there any news?

[chopstick]

So the real reason why Core prefers soft-forks over hard-forks has now been revealed.

They don't want to lose control of "their" project to free market forces.

They want to be able to push through whatever change they want without anyone else being able to have a say in it.



https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43h4cq/they_coreblockstream_fear_a_hard_fork_will_remove/

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43bgrs/peter_todd_sw_is_not_safe_as_a_softfork/czhav9y?context=1

    The soft-fork deployment of SegWit is a political decision which is overriding the technical wisdom that this should only be done via hard-fork.

    Defending the political strategy requires tortuous positions on the block limit such as asserting that Back's 2-4-8 is OK, but Classic's 2 is not.

– /u/solex1

    Hard forks are "dangerous" because they put the market in charge, and the market might vote against "us experts" [at Core/Blockstream].

– /u/ForkiusMaximus

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43bgrs/peter_todd_sw_is_not_safe_as_a_softfork/czheg0d?context=1

    They [Core/Blockstream] backed themselves into a corner with hard fork fear mongering, to the extent they're willing to push something ten times more risky as a soft fork just to avoid the precedent of a painless hard fork.

    Because painless hard forks mean the block size would probably rapidly be raised to 8 MB and their [Core/Blockstream's] sidechain subsidy would be gone.

– /u/persimmontokyo

    If they [Core/Blockstream] lose their status as "reference" implementation they lose the inertia effects that make it so much easier for them to push through everything as a soft fork. Use it or lose it, as they say.

    The incentive is for the dominant team to try to do everything by soft forks so as to avoid a market referendum on their implementation.

    XT messed with this, BU really threatened to make mincemeat of it, and for now it is Classic that is actually delivering the blow.

    They [Core/Blockstream] will bleat and bray about hardforks to get as many people as possible scared of them, but it is only they who are scared.

    They [Core/Blockstream] fear a hard fork will remove them from their dominant position.

– /u/ForkiusMaximus

[iCEBREAKER]

So the real reason why Core prefers soft-forks over hard-forks has now been revealed.   

They don't want to lose control of "their" project to free market forces.   

They want to be able to push through whatever change they want without anyone else being able to have a say in it.   

[ Reddit Army Agitprop ]

I'm loving the last ditch effort of the Gavinista hivemind to stave off complete obsolescence and irrelevance.

As if dozens of gossipy shitposts fixating on GMAX are going to help Klassik recover from its death spiral.

One is reminded of the Imperial Japanese "fanatical defense" at the end of WW2.

The True Believers knew in their minds they were not winning the war, but their hearts could not accept the Emperor's (nor their own) fallibility and loss.

Likewise, the Gavinista kamizakes are blowing up what little credibility they have left (and trying to buy more) in this desperate gamble to justify their governance coup "Because Evil GMAX."

It's almost as if some cynical/smart-ass small-blocker infiltrators are pretending to have Hearnias and are intentionally toxifying rbtc with endless discussion of personalities....

[TheMage]

Similarly here, by putting all the transactions on-chain, you have to strive to find the best possible on-chain scaling technology, like thin blocks doing right now. But if you start to become lazy and try to use the old centralized financial models like payment channels because they can provide millions of transactions per second, then you just drag bitcoin into the old banking model, which will dramatically reduce its usage and increase its risk, especially when there are many other alt-coins provide on-chain scaling

I can't agree at all.

Payment channels are _nothing_ like old centralized financial models.  Who is the trusted third party? No one.  

When you go on and on about "on chain" you're confusing a technical mechanism for a social or business business goal.  Everyone being able to transact with everyone else at low cost and without the risk of censorship or exposure to extraneous counterparty risk is a laudable goal.  "On chain"-- meaning transacting in a lock-step synchronous world wide flooding network-- is a technical mechanism. On that, to the best of our current understanding _cannot_ deliver that business/social goal.  Fortunately, we do know ways to deliver it.

It's like walking up to some aircraft engineers and demanding that the next design be exactly the same but have a wingspan twice as long, when really your goal was to double the number of pounds of cargo it could carry.  Maybe the change lets it carry more cargo, or maybe it just makes the plane unstable.  Regardless, a particular _mechanism_ was confused with the business goal, and as a result an end-run around the science and engineering that could, potentially, have actually met the goal if given a chance and allowed to make the required tradeoffs.

Of course, there is always someone out there that will tell you that you can solve any complex problem with this one weird trick.  But there is a word for them: Scammers and their patsies.  And right now, there is a whole clique of the Bitcoin old timers who were bamboozled by Craig Wright and his 419 scam which predominantly featured a ton of magical scalablity claims... it's going to take a while for their wide and greedy eyes to blink and realize they've been tricked, and that maybe these magical scaling claims were just as fraudulent as everything else.

Not knocking you at all, but this is a really poor example of what going on. In the real world, you dont just walk up to an avionics engineer and say "hey I want the wingspan to be twice as large" with the assumption that larger wingspan = increased load. What really would happen is that the avionics engineer is flowed down a set of detailed requirements from the program manager and systems engineer, which they would get from a RFQ/RFP (request for quote/request for proposal) from the customer. If its an internal development and the product is being sold as is, a group internal to the company would develop requirements and those are sub-allocated to the various engineering disciplines. Either way, there is a large list of requirements that as they are flowed down to each discipline, they are refined more and more.

Need larger wings? Sure, you can carry both more load and fuel. But the engines would need to increase in size in order to achieve lift. Larger engine sizes could also provide more prime power internal to the plane as well, powering some sophisticated and high power radar systems.

Start with "plane needs to carry 5 tones max internal load", and work from there.


This is the inherent problem that I have argued ever since this scaling issue became apparent. Bitcoin, and every other coin (with maybe the exception of a few) lack bare bones requirements. There is a significant gap and lack of proper skill sets with the lead developers of most coins that would have put the scaling issue to bed years ago. Not saying that developers are not skilled (all of you are very skilled at software engineering), but software engineering is software engineering. Software engineers are not program managers, engineering managers, systems engineers, business managers, and so forth. Yet at the same time those with the proper skill set can be ostracized from conversations for lack of coding skills (per the comment made to Lauda about not knowing C++).


Back to Bitcoins requirements, the entire multi year conversation can be summed up with one question. Is Bitcoin a means of storage of wealth, or is it a payment system? If the developers of all coins can answer this, than the quest for real solutions can start. Right now Bitcoin is hobbling along and will continue to do so with half assed attempts to fix an undefined requirement.

[Atdhe]

Is Bitcoin a means of storage of wealth, or is it a payment system?

If Bitcoin has to be a currency, it certainly must be both.

[dooglus]

Is Bitcoin a means of storage of wealth, or is it a payment system?

If Bitcoin has to be a currency, it certainly must be both.

The US dollar is a currency and is neither.

[Cuntabula]

Is Bitcoin a means of storage of wealth, or is it a payment system?

If Bitcoin has to be a currency, it certainly must be both.

The US dollar is a currency and is neither.

It's certainly not a storage of wealth (which is a weird concept, you can't store an abstraction like "wealth" any more than you can store "love" or "respect"), but it is a payment system. It was a payment system long before credit cards and electronic payment processors, long before commercial use of electricity

[hv_]

Is Bitcoin a means of storage of wealth, or is it a payment system?

If Bitcoin has to be a currency, it certainly must be both.

Bitcoin is nothing without us - just like the Internet, E-Mail,....

but can be all / multidimensional - just what you make of it

so: limiting Bitcoin (in any dimension ) is a joke  and will be corrected sooner or later

[TheMage]

Is Bitcoin a means of storage of wealth, or is it a payment system?

If Bitcoin has to be a currency, it certainly must be both.

The US dollar is a currency and is neither.

It's certainly not a storage of wealth (which is a weird concept, you can't store an abstraction like "wealth" any more than you can store "love" or "respect"), but it is a payment system. It was a payment system long before credit cards and electronic payment processors, long before commercial use of electricity

The irony of your post is the exact reason why the block size debate is going on. No one can answer what Bitcoin is. Yes is acts like a payment system, but if one were to hold their coins then it acts as a storage of wealth.

[dooglus]

It's certainly not a storage of wealth (which is a weird concept, you can't store an abstraction like "wealth" any more than you can store "love" or "respect"), but it is a payment system. It was a payment system long before credit cards and electronic payment processors, long before commercial use of electricity

There are payment systems which use the US dollar, but the US dollar itself is not a payment system.

[Oceat]

It's certainly not a storage of wealth (which is a weird concept, you can't store an abstraction like "wealth" any more than you can store "love" or "respect"), but it is a payment system. It was a payment system long before credit cards and electronic payment processors, long before commercial use of electricity

There are payment systems which use the US dollar, but the US dollar itself is not a payment system.

So the bitcoin is both a currency and the payment system. That is very convenient for the bitcoin holders.

[Atdhe]

Is Bitcoin a means of storage of wealth, or is it a payment system?

If Bitcoin has to be a currency, it certainly must be both.

The US dollar is a currency and is neither.

If USdollar is currency, it must be both. For the record, there is nothing like a pure currency. USD is definitelly getting less and less currency. Bitcoin is getting more and more currency.

But honestly there is nothing to debate over. Definition of money is:
#1 a medium of exchange
#2 a unit of account
#3 a store of value
#4 standard of deferred payment.
(money is all 4 points at once)

So the logical implication is that if bitcoin (or anything else) has to be a currency, it must be a storage of value and payment system=medium of exchange. Another logical implication is that if you believe that USD does not fulfill all 4 points above, then you do not believe it is a currency. (Maybe you have your own definition what currency is, but then we really have a problem.)

Last remark: far the biggest problem for bitcoin will be #2; everyone thinks in USD or fiat even when using bitcoin. I pay people in btc always based on exchange rate. Their salary is 4K USD, not 10 BTC.

[hv_]

Is Bitcoin a means of storage of wealth, or is it a payment system?

If Bitcoin has to be a currency, it certainly must be both.

The US dollar is a currency and is neither.

If USdollar is currency, it must be both. For the record, there is nothing like a pure currency. USD is definitelly getting less and less currency. Bitcoin is getting more and more currency.

But honestly there is nothing to debate over. Definition of money is:
#1 a medium of exchange
#2 a unit of account
#3 a store of value
#4 standard of deferred payment.
(money is all 4 points at once)

So the logical implication is that if bitcoin (or anything else) has to be a currency, it must be a storage of value and payment system=medium of exchange. Another logical implication is that if you believe that USD does not fulfill all 4 points above, then you do not believe it is a currency. (Maybe you have your own definition what currency is, but then we really have a problem.)

Last remark: far the biggest problem for bitcoin will be #2; everyone thinks in USD or fiat even when using bitcoin. I pay people in btc always based on exchange rate. Their salary is 4K USD, not 10 BTC.

Still all this is trying.
Maybe the internet started as an experiment (or still is) but there is no categorical definition what it is.
We just have some protocolls living in it like smtp or html.
Bitcoin is next such a protocol / experiment. Could be that the biggest experiment to us is yet to find out what it is?
Best answer: it is a full new category and we only can project some of it to lower dimensions we can better understand because we can touch it.

[Atdhe]

I do not argue with that. Bitcoin can be something new. It can be many other things. But if bitcoin has to be used as money then it must fulfill the requirements of money.

It is the same like with fiat money. You can pay with them and you can use them as toilet paper for example. Once can pay with bitcoins too (in limited way), but bitcoin can be used for smart contracts [but probably not as toilet paper].

[franky1]

ok lets clarify some things..
currency is an umbrella term.. nearly anything can/is a currency. it only needs to hit one point. #medium of exchange
EG in prisons, cigarettes are a currency

then below that umbrella term are different forms of currency that not only meet the one point mentioned, but also have their own points added, that categorize what they are aswell as being a currency.
for instance bank notes(money) are not actually a #store of value. in the UK it says on a bank note "i promise to pay the bearer the sum of"
so a UK bank note is not a store of value, but an IOU
it is a #unit of account because it promises X which can be accounted/quantified

however a £1 coins is a #store of value and a #unit of account..

FIATs points/requirements which makes money money, is that it is made law to be accepted as payment for goods services, and taxes. (#standard of deferred payment)
EG you cannot pay taxes with cigarette for instance. but cigarettes are a currency but dont have enough points/requirements to be in the "money" subcategory.

bitcoin is a #currency
beyond that bitcoin is also
#unit of account
#store of value

but its not universally accepted as #standard of deferred payment, because retailers swap it to fiat to 'settle' the debt in most cases

to me bitcoin is not a monetary currency, but instead an asset currency. which is what it should remain. it should definetly never be something that is directly taxable by one government because then it becomes owned by them.

once people realise the true nature of "money" they will get put off of it and prefer to use "assets" EG after an apocalypse, money is useless but assets rule supreme. in africa people dont like money but love Mpesa.(yes phone call credit/time is an asset)