I am not great on explaining my thoughts and my primary language is not English, so there are things that get badly "lost in translation".
But you felt it right.
Regarding language: Whether you are a native English speaker or not, you are correct that it is possible that sometimes ideas or tone can come out in a funny and/or inaccurate way in writing. So, I understand that sometimes it may take a few interactions back and forth before working out what we are saying.
Also, involvement in these forums can also be a kind of learning process, so we may tweak and or adjust our ideas, as well by interacting with others and learning some of the perspectives of other folks.
While I can't say I'm a big fan of increasing the block size (for example I feel like dynamic value could be a better approach),
Regarding dynamic value: What is that? There is no one in charge of establishing the value of bitcoin, and therefore the value of it is whatever the market will bear. Different people come to different assessment of value, and different assessments about whether bitcoin is over valued or undervalued based on a lot of the things that are going on, and no one really has perfect information. In the end, people and companies have varying levels of information, and some are going to approach their investment in different ways that are profitable - whether predicting the price to go up or down and whether they buy into it short term or long term. Also, manipulation is going on and attempts to push the price based on information and disinformation and using the exchanges, so there is a lot going on that affects value based on what is already there in existence and what is anticipated to be coming down the pike.
the overall feeling was that Bitcoin devs are afraid to do changes (Any changes. And this is bad and scary.).
I think that the big blocker proponents and those folks who are pushing for change sometimes seem to get caught up on changes for the sake of changes and want to get rich and think that the solution is big blocks etc.
In other words, there is a lot of mischaracterizing of the position of devs. Seg wit is a big change, and it likely takes a lot of work to implement.
The thrust of the matter is that the big block change has not been convincing to be an actually necessary change without downsides.. Furthermore, some of the early proposals regarding blocksize limit changes were coupled with changes in governance.. and to make bitcoin easier to change in the future (changing consensus). The agenda was somewhat hidden and not merely focused on technical solutions, but instead attempts to make bitcoin easier to change which is neither necessary and would have been dangerous and possibly the downfall of bitcoin...
I am glad that there are enough devs out there who recognized the underlying coupe of the big blocker agenda.
Especially as there was another change requested and that didn't happen either (sadly I don't remember what was that).
Part of the issue and maybe even part of the underlying dynamics of this thread is whether there is an emergency.
Yeah, we have some uncertainties that come about with unconfirmed transactions and sudden delays in transactions, but is that such an emergency to rush out some change that could potentially undermine the whole of bitcoin and make it vulnerable to either getting coins stolen or creating backdoors or bloating (is the problem that is fixed greater than the problems that could be created?)
I know that it was more talk and politics and the decision is the one hard to do, not as much the code.
Of course there is some politics as well when we are talking about money, but you seem to be suggesting politics as merely personal battles.... yeah, people like to characterize these matters as personal battles, but the fact of the matter still remains that there is already a consensus plan in place involving seg wit, and there is a failure to reach consensus regarding blocksize limit increases... despite the loud voices of various whiners who are really a minority - not the majority that they claim to represent.
I've just read today about the segwit release (although it will take more time until it will be active) and I became happy. A big change did happen finally.
Yeah, but we have known about seg wit for nearly a year, and it had been being worked on. Code was initially put on the testnet in April and May.. so these kinds of things take time and it is a process. The process is not done. There are going to continue to be battles. There are going to continue to be sabotage attempts. There are going to continue to be folks trying to say seg wit is too complicated. There are continuing to be proponents to increase the blocksize limit and to change bitcoin's governance.
At the same time, seg wit seems to be a very great development that is progressing well and going to bring a lot of good things to bitcoin, even if it does not bring everything that everyone wants, but as individuals we figure out how we are going to approach it, how we are going to use it and how much of our value we are going to store with it (investing into bitcoin).
I've seen these arguments a lot of times (stability is better than changes). And they are 99% valid. (The number of petahashes are more related to businesses earning big bucks from mining imho, not with how sturdy or useful Bitcoin is)
You can characterize the petahashes any way that you like, but it is a big ass system of computers that are involved and invested into bitcoin and seem, for the time being, to be securing the network and the coin. Anyone can get into mining, and surely now you need a lot more capital than you needed a few years ago, but it still remains competitive and decentralized. Even governments could get into developing mining systems and attempting to influence the direction of bitcoin, who knows how it is going to develop, exactly, but it seems to continue to go up to the extent that folks in mining continue to see bitcoin mining as profitable or potentially a good way to secure coins and/or attempts at control of the process.
The incentives are created to earn big bucks, so I am not sure why you seem to be criticizing it for being what it is incentivized to do. People (and companies) will try to be creative and try to figure out how to earn "big bucks" from bitcoin mining, and to the extent that they feel that they are not earning "big bucks" or that they can earn "bigger bucks" in other ways, they will get out of mining, no?
Security results from the incentives to earn big bucks, and bitcoin is attempted to be designed around such incentives and not trusting anyone to attempt to undermine the system... Is bitcoin perfectly designed? Are there going to be ways to exploit and undermine it or sabotage it? Surely there have been a lot of attempts to undermine it in a variety of ways, and since we do not know the future exactly, we invest in accordance to the level of faith that we have that the system is secure or is going to remain secure and since there are various increasing ways to get in and out of bitcoin, we can get in or out or reapportion if we believe that bitcoin is overvalued or undervalued (whether that assessment is based on our concerns about security or centralization or whatever).
And I will come back to these spam attacks (or whatever they are). They show that Bitcoin is not perfect yet and it has to be improved further. And for that Bitcoin has to be changed, however difficult it is.
And yes, I know that such things cannot happen overnight, but as long as they are on an agenda, it's OK.
From my distorted layman's perspective, I thought that seg wit was going to potentially bring some more tools in terms of how to deal with spam attacks and what kinds of attacks were possible, but surely, it could also open up some new attack vectors, as well.
I think that there have been folks working on plugging up attack vectors in bitcoin since 2009, and surely the more valuable it gets, sometimes the more resources that may be expended in order to attempt to attack it. This is not any kind of centralized committee in which some folks can tell other folks what to do or even that they are necessarily rewarded for sealing up an attack vector. Seems to be a lot of unrewarded work when it comes to developing (and coding), and yeah there are some public faces and announcements, too, but efforts to propose code and address issues is voluntary, too... and likely all over the place in terms of the amount of code proposed and the vetting of the code and time to do each of these processes.
It's not me who asks for this (for me, if a transaction happens in 1-2 days is fine), it's the "general public" that starts to grow impatient.
Yes, I know this too. There are a lot of expectations in bitcoin, including the expectation that it should provide services similar to credit cards (which seems a bit unrealistic at this point). But many of these kinds of micropayment things are likely to be developed and to evolve in bitcoin.. even though at the time being, micropayments may not be the best use case for bitcoin or even realistic in terms of current expectations.
You know, I feel like most would like to have the speed and fees of Dogecoin, but the price and network power of Bitcoin.
Maybe segwit will bring some fresh air into all this. We seem to need it.
debates and controversy and differences of opinion and perspectives is not going to go away.
The debates may seem stronger in certain forums, but does not mean that they are even reflective of various uses of bitcoin and various choices that people make regarding when or if to buy bitcoin and how much to buy, if at all.
