For those that downplay the importance of full validating nodes

[BillyBobZorton]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNk7nYxTOyQ

You should take notes and align your flawed views with reality: Miners are janitors that can be easily replaced, top tier developers working on solid software are very few out there, same goes for the hard task of organic node growth which is what ultimately strengthens the network.

Cheap human labor and cheap electricity are easily replaceable, and that is all that miners are: They get cheap human labor to make cheap ASIC machines and they get cheap electricity to start monopolies. Big whoop. Anybody could replace Jihad Wu. But few can replace the people working on solid code and the people willingly running said software.

Ultimately a cryptocurrency is nothing without real people using full nodes (unlike BUGcoin which is all run by Roger Ver hence why they all crash at the same time when a bug gets exploited) because it can be easily controlled by global attackers otherwise.

You can buy as many nodes as you want but that is useless compared to organic growth of people all over the world willingly running nodes separately.

You will NEVER convince enough people to run Buggy Unlimited nodes or whatever the flavor of the month is.

[cellard]

Good points by Andreas A as always. The importance of full validating nodes is always downplayed by the same people: BUcoiners and miners like Jihad Wu that want to take full control of the network by getting rid of the possibility of people running their own nodes. Truly disgusting to see.

[BillyBobZorton]

It's clear that there is an ongoing agenda to surpress more and more the role of full validating nodes because that is how governments can control bitcoin, which is why government agents like Gavin Andressen, Jihad Wu and Roger Ver will endlessly push the datacenter agenda to get rid of any power the average user could have in the network. Those guys are de-facto terrorists against bitcoin.

[franky1]

i have actually seen many blockstreamists saying nodes dont matter
especially when the blockstreamists went soft with segwit by saying nodes dont matter/count

my view is have MANY different "brands"
because if everything was core.. then its just another centralised titanic/wall street waiting to happen, where people think "too big to fail"... until it fails

as for why BU went down at very similar times. is because some malicious people made a script and the grabbed the ip list (or ran it from a DNS seed that had the list already) to spam all the nodes flagged as BU.

but hey if you want to keep thinking everyone should only run core.. then you really are inhaling the smoke of the titanic chimney stacks singing "im the king of the world".. not realising a iceberg can leave you for dead in the water at any time

running a full node IS important. as is ensuring not everyone runs the exact same codebase. because it diversifies and decentralises control.
dont be fulled into running litenodes, prunned nodes, no witness nodes. if you care about the network security run a full validation node

[BillyBobZorton]

i have actually seen many blockstreamists saying nodes dont matter
especially when the blockstreamists went soft with segwit by saying nodes dont matter/count

I don't know what "blockstreamists" mean.

my view is have MANY different "brands"
because if everything was core.. then its just another centralised titanic/wall street waiting to happen, where people think "too big to fail"... until it fails

The only software that has failed has been non Core software, because it sucks. Satoshi said himself that everyone must stick to the official version, diluting a ton of different software with different rules does NOT strenghten a decentralized network, nodes must comunicate with each other seamlessly.

I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea.  So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network.

People running different Core version guarantee that if a new version has a bug the entire network will not collapse.

as for why BU went down at very similar times. is because some malicious people made a script and the grabbed the ip list (or ran it from a DNS seed that had the list already) to spam all the nodes flagged as BU.

BU went down because the code sucks.

but hey if you want to keep thinking everyone should only run core.. then you really are inhaling the smoke of the titanic chimney stacks singing "im the king of the world".. not realising a iceberg can leave you for dead in the water at any time

The only thing that I smell is bitcoin going on for 8+ years without no downtime thanks to Core's solid code.

[BillyBobZorton]

Gavin Andressen has officially gone full CIA:

https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/865256875658498049

The propaganda machine to steal the ability for common people to run full nodes with the excuse of onchain coffee transactions is now officially on full effect.

They fear the power of the user running full nodes, and government agents are on full effect to remove that power from the end user which is officially all that matters.

Don't fall for their tricks or bitcoin will be dead soon to become a government controlled payment network instead of a decentralized store of value (with the possibility of a payment network on top)

[franky1]

The only thing that I smell is bitcoin going on for 8+ years without no downtime thanks to Core's solid code.

cough 2013 Berkeley locks/leveldb transition event cough

..

P.S imagine if core was the only codebase. and it had a bug.. all the network goes down.
by having many brands means if any brand crashes it doesnt take the network with it.

though some brands are not complete and do have issues, yep even core has issues. we need to protect the network by keeping to the diverse decentralised ethos of bitcoin. not have just one brand 'owning' bitcoin.

if you want to strngthen many brands then the devs should not band camp themselves into one band but actually be independent like they pretend to be to help and actually peer review other brands.

yes satoshi couldnt do it single handedly and he admitted having many brands would be too much to handle.. but thats when he woke up to the big picture. no one should be relying on just him. and no one should be relying on only his codebase.

is also noted that satoshi's codebase was on sourceforge but the github version that evolved and rebranded to core was actually begun by gavins fork in mid 2010.. not satoshis sourceforge. so try not to pretend core/blockstream are following satoshis code./vision, as that has been tweaked/changed and moved around since satoshi made an exit


gavin andresen is just the distraction drama of core. if you check gavins BLOQ business and follow the money. it all leads to the same portfolio as blockstream, which all lead to thinking bitcoin is just an alphatest 'experiment' where in the future they all want to work on the big money projects like hyper ledger.

check out the names
BLOQ
Blockstream
http://dcg.co/portfolio/#b

BLOQ
Blockstream
https://www.hyperledger.org/about/members



even the craig write drama is all drama to distract people into not asking about what really happens at the satoshi roundtables/ consensus closed door invite only events.

check out the timing of the latest craig wright drama.. oh look the last satoshi round table announced their big discussion was about craig wright .. pfft.
same at end of 2015 and mid 2016 around the times of th other table events.

its all just drama to point fingers in soo many directions to not point fingers in the real direction.. blockstream/DCG dominance authoritarian regime

[European Central Bank]

Gavin Andressen has officially gone full CIA:

https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/865256875658498049

what the hell happened to this guy? i don't understand how someone who was heading up bitcoin for so long comes out with stuff like this.

[iluvpie60]

Gavin Andressen has officially gone full CIA:

https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/865256875658498049

what the hell happened to this guy? i don't understand how someone who was heading up bitcoin for so long comes out with stuff like this.

The globalists got.to him probably paid him some good money to stop being reasonable. He is very out of touch. They could have used MKUltra on him too. You never know....

[franky1]

Gavin Andressen has officially gone full CIA:

https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/865256875658498049

what the hell happened to this guy? i don't understand how someone who was heading up bitcoin for so long comes out with stuff like this.

The globalists got.to him probably paid him some good money to stop being reasonable. He is very out of touch. They could have used MKUtra DCG-Culture on him too. You never know....

FTFY

[BillyBobZorton]

The only thing that I smell is bitcoin going on for 8+ years without no downtime thanks to Core's solid code.

..

P.S imagine if core was the only codebase. and it had a bug.. all the network goes down.
by having many brands means if any brand crashes it doesnt take the network with it.

Why do you keep saying this bullshit when there is a variety of satoshi client versions (so in the rare occasion Core devs with a new bug, the network wouldn't crash, unlike BUg).

Also, where the fuck is the point of variety, when "variety" is just idiot devs like BUg copy-pasting 99.99% of Core's code then making the code crash with the 00.01% they added.

Same for XT, Classic etc, they all just COPY-PASTE core and change some bullshit, whats the point? Get real.

Also, don't make me quote satoshi again for the 1000th time saying how bitcoin was designed so all nodes are unique and everyone should stick to the official version and if you don't like something then request a BIP and if it gets rejected because it's shit then create your new altcoin or gtfo.

[dinofelis]

It is perfectly logical that non-mining full nodes have no decision power other than inform their owners of the discrepancy between the protocol programmed in the node software, and the actual emerged protocol that is defined by the block chain out there.

But I realized that this is against bitcoin's religion, and that this erroneous argument as of why these nodes do have power plays a significant role in maintaining false arguments for political reasons.

Indeed, if it were realized that bitcoin is actually the industrial product of 20 nodes, and that Joe in his basement has zilch to say, that would hurt the fake image of bitcoin "for and by the people, decentralized and different from a club of governors of the central bank or of all those centralized shit coins" ; it would also drive into the ground the false arguments that have been used to push certain solutions and to hold back other solutions, and now people are too much entrenched into this to be able to consider simple logical, technical and game-theoretical reasoning.

It is fairly obvious that non mining nodes have no consensus power, because it is not only so that bitcoin was explicitly designed that way, but one can also easily demonstrate that this aspect of bitcoin's design is actually working correctly.

But I've argued this already too many times.  In the end, people always come up with counter arguments that are straw men, of two kinds:
- confusing the non mining full nodes with the behaviour of miners ("my full node in my basement convinced miners to fork, while before, they didn't dare")
- confusing the non mining full nodes with users in the market ("my full node in my basement convinced miners that their coins would become useless if they didn't follow my protocol")

In the end, they accuse me of having an agenda.  I have about a similar agenda as Pythagoras, when he proved his theorem.  Hell, his agenda must have been to destroy the notion that all geometry was based on rational numbers, that evil man with his false theorems.

It is somehow sad that bitcoin must be based upon false concepts, but I underestimate the religious side of monetary systems (or huge piramid games), most probably.

But no, non-mining nodes have no consensus decision power what so ever.  People claiming otherwise are misguided, don't understand the system, need psychological safety in the comforting illusions that firm belief offers or I don't know what, but are technically wrong.

If bitcoin's protocol gets adapted, say with bigger blocks, or with segwit, or with I don't know what, then the only reason for that to happen, is that the main representatives of the 20 nodes making bitcoin's block chain (only 4 or 5 are really needed) went sitting together in a meeting like the governors of the central bank, and came to an agreement, like they did with Litecoin (most probably the same guys to a certain extend).  So when the few governors of bitcoin have decided to change something in a central meeting of the bosses of bitcoin, they will do so.  And Joe's node in his basement will not change anything to that.
Joe simply has to make sure that the node he's running in his basement is in agreement with whatever consensus protocol is decided in that meeting of the governors of bitcoin, or his node will stop.

"full validating nodes" are free proxy servers that distribute the product that the 20 industrials of bitcoin produce for their customers: a block chain.

[franky1]

dino, go back under your bridge with your 1 dimensional over view...

instead, spend a few months learning bitcoin.
i feel you have not yet had the "ahah eureka" moment of finally understanding the symbiosis of bitcoin and what makes bitcoin so much better than fiat.

"Joe simply has to make sure that the node he's running in his basement is in agreement with whatever consensus protocol is decided in that meeting of the governors of bitcoin, or his node will stop."

translation and finishing the sentance

"all merchants have to make sure that the nodes they run is in agreement with whatever consensus protocol is decided in consensus of the community, or their nodes will stop seeing pools rewards/blocks... and pools then cant spend rewards with all merchants"

do you not get it!!
if pools cannot spend their funds because no one is seeing their new funky crap the pools wont do funky crap. they end up giving up and going back to the rules the merchants will accept.

pools will not waste months waiting for pools to review, tweak and run any new funky code, simply because pools make a change..
and pools wont make a change unless nodes would happily accept it.

its a symboitic relationship

[spartacusrex]

    

lol.. Franky!

I was just about to post this link.. Then I read your post..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosis

The relationship between mining and non-mining nodes has many moving parts..

[franky1]

Also, don't make me quote satoshi again for the 1000th time saying how bitcoin was designed so all nodes are unique and everyone should stick to the official version and if you don't like something then request a BIP and if it gets rejected because it's shit then create your new altcoin or gtfo.

lol repeat yourself all you like but you take it out of context.

satoshi was one man and he could not peer review all different brands he only had 2 hands.. thats when he realised he had become too dependant by others and decided to move back and let others take over.

so your taking satoshis quotes out of context of what his hands can manage, vs what bitcoin security needs

again you think core would only have NEW bugs.. pfft.. the 2013 issues wiped out all versions 0.1-0.7.. not just 0.7
so sticking with only core would cause network issues if the bug was in the code from previous versions.

this is why i see diverse VARIETY
btcd (implementation wrote in Go language)
nbitcoin (implementation wrote in c#/.net language)
bitcoinj (implementation wrote in ruby language)
and so many more..

all of which are good for bitcoin because they are complete re-writes.

billy you are the kind of person that sounds like they only want to connect to an AOL internet service using only AOL software. and things like internet explorer, firefox, and all other web browsers should be nuked.

another analogy, your a windows fanboy that will only ever use internet explorer and microsoft office/paint. whre anything not microsoft cerified should get hit by viruses

screw it billly...

ill let you argue with yourself.. here is a correct statement by you in the past,, to show how you in this topic have failed

Smart miners will follow the majority of users. If 90% is running Core software and want to follow Core's roadmap, and exchanges, merchants etc want segwit (and mostly do, and reject BU) then it's obvious that if those stubborn miners don't follow, new miners will see the business opportunity and jump to mine BTC while the Jihad etc still mine BUC, with barely no users and rejected by every relevant exchange and merchant. Good luck with that.

smart miners follow the users the miners get to spend their rewards with


... pre-empting billy response:
bill: "yea i love knots, Nbitcoin"....
me: "yea because blockstream employees wrote it.. but atleast your now opening your mind to the security benefits of different code bases wrote in different languages to mitigate risks"

[dinofelis]

"all merchants have to make sure that the nodes they run is in agreement with whatever consensus protocol is decided in consensus of the community, or their nodes will stop seeing pools rewards/blocks... and pools then cant spend rewards with all merchants"

Consensus in bitcoin is defined as that which has been determined with proof of work.   A past transaction is part of the historical transaction consensus if it is part of a block that is part of the consensus.  A block is part of the consensus if the following blocks are built onto it.  And in the end, the idea is that there is a single continuing chain of blocks, which is each time confirmed with PoW.  When there is a single maximum chain with PoW, then that chain is *by definition* the consensus, and whatever were the rules that were used to build that chain, is the consensus protocol. 

do you not get it!!
if pools cannot spend their funds because no one is seeing their new funky crap the pools wont do funky crap. they end up giving up and going back to the rules the merchants will accept.

But merchants, exchanges, users, .... need to transact, or their business stops.  The only thing they can do to transact, is to ask a miner to put a block on the UNIQUE block chain with their transaction in it.  If they do not accept that chain, then there are simply no transactions.  True, no miner transactions.  But no other transactions either visible by their node and hence their wallet.

Hell, if I fire up, I don't know, a litecoin full node, but I reconfigure the ports to be the bitcoin ports, is my litecoin full node now going to impose the litecoin protocol upon bitcoin's miners ??  Hell no.  My piece of crappy software is simply not going to work.  Do you think that exchanges are going to make fun of themselves by replacing their working bitcoin full node by a modified litecoin node, and then tell their customers "dear customers, we just changed our bitcoin full node, and our new protocol is not yet accepted by the bitcoin miners, so you cannot withdraw, and you cannot deposit for the moment, but no worry, the miners cannot transact to our full litecoin node either, so we will starve them to death until they switch bitcoin to the litecoin protocol".

No.  Users of all kinds want to be able to transact, and therefore they need to be able to read the SOLE bitcoin block chain that is out there, and they need to ask the miners to add their transactions to that sole chain that is out there.  If they install software that doesn't work with that sole block chain out there, that is THEIR silly problem, and nobody else's.

[dinofelis]

   

lol.. Franky!

I was just about to post this link.. Then I read your post..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosis

The relationship between mining and non-mining nodes has many moving parts..

I think that this is the kind of cosy picture we would like to believe, was sold to us, and is supposed to supplant "corrupt banks and states with power structures".  The naked truth is that bitcoin contains design "features" that has installed a very similar power structure.  Yes, there is a symbiosis, but that symbiosis is very similar to every commercial relationship between a business and a customer, and has partly an aspect of predator and prey too: it is a balance of power.

However, in that ecosystem, non mining full nodes are not players.

The two "species" are:

- the miner industry: which is a two-tier system: the "industrials" who are the pools, and their subcontractors, who are the mining hardware owners.  Their product is a block chain.  They obtain fees and block rewards on it, which they sell to their customers.

- the customers: the bitcoin users, who transact, hodl, speculate, pay, gamble, exchange, .... do whatever they want to do with the tokens (bitcoins) for which they need a secured ledger: the block chain, sold to them by the mining industry.

This is the fundamental business model of bitcoin.

Now, the miner industry is, so people say, not supposed to be centrally organized.  This is not certain, because we saw on Litecoin how centralized this was: a few guys in a meeting room could change the segwit adoption from less than 50% to 95%.  That was, in other words, a kind of meeting of the board of governors of the Litecoin mining industry.  But maybe bitcoin's industry is less centrally organized. 

What people always point out is that the industrials have not the full power.  No, of course they don't.  They have customers, and they need their customers to buy their product.   So of course, industrials want to get the most out of their customers.  On the other hand, customers can vote with their money, if they don't like the product sold to them by the industrials.   But there's a caveat: to be even able to use their money, customers have to use the industrials' product.

Now, this image is less attractive than the cosy one where "you are your own money's boss".  After all, it is not so different to what we're used to with banks and so on, in the end.  So we like to think that, by running some software in our basement, we have something to say.  I suppose the non-mining myth is part of that.

It used to be true, that non-mining nodes played the role of "validator" of *propagated blocks*.  That was when there wasn't yet a whole mining industry, and miners were distributed amongst the whole network, didn't know one another and were manifold.  In that case, a miner could only mine on a block that he got propagated through the P2P network, because he didn't know where it came from.  Any block not to the likings of a large majority of P2P nodes would then simply not propagate that block, and so no other miner would even receive it.  The non-mining nodes acted as a kind of propagation filter between mining nodes, and mining nodes were dependent on them to obtain the blocks on which to mine.

But that is not the case any more with pools.  Pools know one another.  They are not manifold.  They want one anothers' blocks as quickly as possible.  So they don't let Joe's full node in his basement filter their communication.  From the moment that the miner nodes form a back bone, the P2P network is not a filter any more, because not necessary any more in the propagation of blocks from miner to miner.  That's when they lost their last grain of power.  Mining became industrial, and the split between industrials and customers was complete.

But this was baked into the design of bitcoin from the start and understood by Satoshi from the start.

[digaran]

If only 20 governor are running the network the only difference is that with enough money and infrastructure you could become the 21st governor as the protocol being decentralized allowing any body to become the central figure.
Being a developer should be enough to spot the differences between several versions and put whatever that is good and useful into one version.
I'm unable to understand how could there be more than one version of Bitcoin protocols? it doesn't matter what you call them they are all part of a single network following and abiding by only one rule.

As an example, airports all function in the same way every where in the world you go, only difference could be your model of airplane but you'll have to listen to the watch tower guys to land or take off safely and properly.
Imagine what would've happened if every pilot wanted to fly in his own path without knowing where are other planes and which lane is clear to land.

And of course every body is free to have a private jet and one can fly with glider but one is insane thinking that they can fly with a submarine lol.

[mindrust]

I just wrote a message a few days ago in this forum that i wasn't running a node just because i wasn't getting paid and there were enough node runners already...

Well, that was before i learned about the UASF stuff.

I'm still not getting paid just because i'm running a node, but now i know my opinion on the scaling issue will make a difference if i run one. That's why i started downloading blocks since yesterday.

http://www.uasf.co/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6bkk3c/by_request_how_to_signal_uasf_a_guide_for_dummies/

UASF! UASF! UASF!

[franky1]

dino still does not get it..

seems he is downplaying validation nodes for a reason..
i thought it might be newbie ignorance he had.. but now it seems more like the tactics of script writers trying to hypnotise people into thinking centralisation exists and should just accept it.

what dino fails to realise is
although "users" hate waiting 36 hours to get a tx confirm... and end up taking days/weeks some even months to review and sync a new node..

a pools would not make blocks for days/weeks/months that are getting orphaned hoping it causes people to change their node

pools realise at the first or second orphan that things are wrong and they wont get paid unless they go back to usual work.. and its pools that give in first.
pools realise their error of trying something new that nodes wont accept and they backtrack to play by the rules.

pools could try to build ontop funky blocks for days/weeks in the hopes the orphan drama would push full nodes to switch.. but thats pools with a nasty agenda..
smart pools that care about the system wont risk doing anything new unless they know the risks are manageable. EG 5% risk at most.

sorry dino
1. if you are newb ignorant. please take more time to research
2. if you are saying what you say for reasons to make people not bother running nodes. then go crawl under a bridge.. smart people know more and been round longer then you. so your wasting your breath.

have a nice day.

if your not happy with people being full nodes.. then go play with fiat.