The legacy of the block size debate is it exposed the politics behind how Bitcoin actually works. I remember when I got into Bitcoin, just like everybody else, the first thing I admired was how this system was designed without anybody in control. Nobody could freeze your transactions, nobody could charge you back, there was no central authority. Bitcoin doesn't care whether you're a murderer, saint, North Korean dictator, or a 12 year old. Bitcoin just is, it works for everybody without passing judgement. When you start out, it's really easy to see Bitcoin as being something that exists in objective reality, just like every other piece of software, and even physical gold. The problem though is that this isn't true; Bitcoin is subjective money. Satoshi didn't fully understand the implications of his invention, and that's not a dig at him either because most inventors don't.
Hey Cøbra, mucho gusto conocerte. I know that we have had interactions previously, but I am getting to know that you have a lot of nonsense in your thinking.
I will admit that frequently when I kind of get to know a poster, I will not even read his/her response before I start creating my response. That way I do not get mixed up with all of the muddle, and I can just start to respond to each point. Here, I had to read just past your third paragraph before I recognized that something is wrong with your thinking in a variety of ways... not that you are totally bonkers, but surely something is wrong, and I do not expect to change your thinking, so in that regard, I am not really responding to you personally, but just the variety of your ideas, which I mentioned that I recognized are surely devolving into various levels of nonsense.
In other words, for the good of the members and maybe even the public who might read this thread, your nonsense ideas should not be allowed to stand, even though you have had a lot of authority and power in the bitcoin community.
I did bold your above statement: "Satoshi didn't fully understand the implications of his invention, and that's not a dig at him either because most inventors don't." Maybe that statement was a reason that I had to read a few paragraphs to try to figure out if you were saying something that might be important in regards to some kind of Satoshi misunderstanding, and you did not.
Think about it. Your statement is a bit crazy. I accept the idea that no inventor is necessarily going to be able to see several steps ahead in order to know how his/her invention is going to play out or how it is going to be used, but surely Satoshi knew enough about what he was inventing to be able to understand what it was attempting to achieve, so your criticisms of Satoshi's purported lackings are presumptuous at best, and really show your own seemingly lack of understanding of the topic in which you are trying to spout out knowledge.
No way am i saying that you are any kind of dummy, Cøbra, but surely from your statements in regards to Satoshi's supposed lackings in understanding, you are really overstating the case in a way that just seems to be motivated to make your own nonsense points and to try to show that you know something material that Satoshi had not accounted for, and your post really fails in that direction.
Let's take physical gold as an example. Gold exists in objective reality, whether you ascribe value to gold or not is up to you, but were somebody to give you physical gold and you had the tools to verify the purity of it, you can't deny the reality that it is gold. Gold is the most objective form of money, but even fiat money is quite objective. With fiat money, the value and trust comes from government, this leaves less room for interpretation and subjectivity than you might think. Even though Donald Trump might be president, if you were to take the angriest liberal alive, somebody who doesn't even believe in the legitimacy of his presidency and government, even he won't refuse dollars because "those dollars were printed by Trump, his government is illegitimate, therefore those aren't real dollars, sorry". Even if this liberal has lost trust in the legitimacy of the head of the executive branch of his government (the branch that prints money), the power of fiat money is so strong that it blocks him from following his beliefs down to their logical conclusion, he still holds on to the collective delusion of the dollar, to do otherwise wouldn't even enter his mind.
Can't really disagree with what you are saying here, yet you seem to be describing a kind of objective value rather than subjective value. Currencies achieve values that are systematic and does not really matter what the individual assigns to it or the various actors within those systems.
For whatever reason, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general behave more subjectively.
Makes little sense. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are not really behaving differently, except that you are trying to make a distinction that does not have a difference.
Of course, we can attempt to get to considerations regarding which of the crypto currencies are the most sound of moneys, and that leaves us with bitcoin, and then the category of cryptocurrencies are either a bunch of lame imitations (snake oils) or they are trying to provide another kind of value that may or may not be as recognized as bitcoin with the passage of time.
So there remains a need to differentiate bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies in making this kind of assessment in order to recognize both how it compares to gold and fiat and how it differs from gold and fiat in that bitcoin is more sound than both gold and fiat.. Of course, there is a bit of a spectrum with gold being more sound than fiat and less sound than bitcoin, but some of these matters are sometimes questioned too and speculated on, and maybe that is where you are trying to play out the subjective matters to some extent, which surely cause individuals to act in different ways in trying to recognize the differing values of different asset classes - including assessing how present value might diverge from future value and how others might be getting their calculations right or wrong in regards to future value.
Perhaps it's because these systems are individualistic; you verify the blockchain yourself, you don't trust anybody else to do it for you, why would you?
Let's just stick with bitcoin.. fuck trying to equate other cryptos... so in regards to bitcoin, you are presuming everyone is running node? Many people are not running a node, but they are trusting that there are enough nodes to verify... so I am not verifying, but sure, if I want to increase my no need to trust, then I can run a node to do that.
I doubt that whether any of us is running a node or not is very relevant in terms of our ability to attempt to assess the soundness of the money, bitcoin compared with fiat and gold and other assets such as equities.... bitcoin is more sound, and sure some of that soundness comes from the fact that a lot of individuals can run nodes and make sure... so bitcoin becomes assessed as being sound than gold or fiat.. so we would rather spend our fiat or gold first before spending our bitcoin.. (that is if we have a choice and options and apportionment of different assets in our various wallets).
Bitcoin exists as an idea in your head, each Bitcoin user is different with respect to changes they would accept or reject.
Almost all Bitcoiners would reject the 21 million limit being increased; but there exist gray areas like block size, where the tolerance and threshold for change is really subjective and varies wildly from user to user. I'd probably be OK with the block size being doubled. You might not be. You might want it reduced.
In the end, who gives any shits about your various subjective values. You either choose to use bitcoin or you do not, and you can also choose your level of allocation, it is not an all or nothing decision. I might have 25% of my value in bitcoin, and the other 75% in a variety of other assets.. maybe a couple percent in shitcoins and gold and maybe I have several assets that are tied to fiat values in various ways which might include having a few percentage points in actual cash for a kind of floating balance which is going to vary from person to person depending on a variety of individual reasons including how far they need to project out their expenses (whether a few months for someone who lives with mom and dad or maybe 18 to 24 months for someone who has a variety of complicated business arrangements or needs to support various families), and I might have some property (real estate), so if I have less confidence in bitcoin or where I perceive it to be going then I will reduce my allocations in it or decide NOT allocate into it or to use it versus some other assets or currencies.
Let's hypothesize there was a change that split the community cleanly in half: for whatever reason, one half of the community accepted the change, the other half rejected. This then led to a blockchain fork, with equal amounts of hash power, would anybody be able to objectively say which fork was the real Bitcoin?
Again. A big so fucking what? If half of the people use one bitcoin and the other half uses the other bitcoin, then who cares? People can choose to use what they want, and if there is no real perceivable difference in their soundness of money including network effects, then maybe some kind of balance will be reached there in which people allocate 50/50 in each. Most likely with the passage of time, however, one might show itself to have a more sound money aspect which would likely cause more people to allocate towards the asset with the more sound money aspect.. but in the end, who fucking cares if they gravitate or not or if they recognize one for being more sound or not, and even if they pick the one with the less sound money aspect for utility reasons or something, I don't see why it matters. Individuals can decide to allocate however they like, even if they are wrong from an objective viewpoint.
Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV are years ahead of us with some of these issues,
First of all, those both should be referred to as bcash variants, and second of all they are NOT ahead of bitcoin in any regard because they are just inadequate imitations (snake oils) that are trying to pose as if they have the same or similar qualities as bitcoin when they do not. They have very few network effects, which also seems to be reflected in why they have way lower prices than bitcoin to the extent that either one might also be artificially pumped up by bullshit smoke and mirror nonsense.
rather than ignore the politics present in these systems, as Bitcoin is doing, they seem to be fully embracing it. Economically this will damage them short term, but by figuring this stuff out, they are learning some important lessons. With the BSV fork, we saw that it's possible for a divergent chain to be valued more than it's competing origin chain, even if it's only temporary.
I doubt that whatever jockying of position in the various bcash camps teach much to bitcoin, except maybe what not to do, but sure, can give you some benefit of the doubt in that sometimes there might be some things that can be learned about preferred ways to attempt to approach some issues that might be divisive... and sometimes some variation of a scenario might come up in one of the bcashes but it could also come up in some other shitcoin, too.... sure the bcashes have some greater similarities to bitcoin, which could cause greater similarities in some regards, so i doubt that their various ongoing dramas need to be completely ignored.
At the same time, sometimes it might be a better practice to just ignore some of the drama of the bcashes, too... because sometimes like a misbehaving child, their behaviors might improved if they are ignored because they might be seeking attention without any real constructive or meaningful purpose... so whether to ignore completely or to attempt to learn from the child might not be a blanket rule.
Bitcoiners feel a natural disgust when they look at what's going on in these communities, especially when they hear about Bitcoin Cash developers taxing miners and stuff like that, but the disgust they feel is coming from a place of insecurity,
Might not be disgust.. just a need to point out the drama and to denigrate it for what it is... sure if something can be learned from some of it, then no problema...
because these divergent Bitcoin spin-offs are exposing what was always hidden under the surface of Bitcoin too. It's not something that can be articulated well, but after the block size debate it was something that could be felt; a feeling that Bitcoin was a lot more subjective and therefore more vulnerable than we'd hoped.
Sure, of course bitcoin is not immuned from potential drama, and even some of the similar drama that happens in the bcash camps could end up happening in bitcoin, perhaps in some situations.
Bitcoin is not apolitical money, it's hyperpoliticized money.
Too strong of a statement, Cøbra. You want to point out and exaggerate political attributes in bitcoin, when there seems to be a striving to remove a lot of the political, and sure probably the political cannot be removed completely, but that does not make bitcoin hyperpoliticized merely because you are striving to ascribe such a label to it.
Throughout history, when people in communities disagreed with each other, they simply killed each other until a winner emerged. This proved to be a less than ideal way to resolve disputes, so over time more democratic ways of deciding things emerged. Whether through violence or through voting, politics is played in a very narrowly defined battlefield and everybody intuitively understands that it doesn't go beyond its scope. These cryptocurrency systems bring politics into money itself, in ways that aren't predictable and for which there aren't any parallels in thousands of years of human history. Imagine a world in which a democrat and republican can't exchange value with one another, without an intermediate neutral form of money, because they disagree on money itself, one is using democrat dollars and the other is using GOP bucks -- both with totally different ideals and visions.
You are not really describing bitcoin here. Sure people are still going to be political, but bitcoin is not really seeming to address the political aspects, but instead just creating a common money that has incentives that people can act upon. It is not really clear how a lot of the politics are going to play out and if bitcoin can cause incentives for differing people to take a lot of the politics out of money. Just have to see how some of it plays out in terms of ongoing incentives and if bitcoin can maybe allow for some bridging that could take many decades to see play out.
If I were to put you in a time machine and drop you off into the year 2120, and assuming Bitcoin still existed (or something claiming to be it). You would have to spend days researching every split and fork, every upgrade, the history of tradeoffs behind every dispute, etc, to finally settle on which variant of Bitcoin running at that time was the real Bitcoin.
Why? And who cares? Some of this will work itself out, and probably many of the more than 2,000 shitcoins of today will not exist or there will be some other shitcoins.
Maybe bitcoin will be the most soundest of money in 2120 or maybe there might still be competing variants? How does 2120 affect what any of us might do today? Are we buying bitcoin or not, today? If so, how are we allocating ourselves in bitcoin, today? How about how we spend our time? Same thing. Are we spending or time on bitcoin or some shitcoin? We can make these choices today, and of course, there is a theoretical trajectory regarding how bitcoin might progress towards 2120, but seems a bit dumbass to be making our decisions of today based on what might play out in 2120 or even what might play out in 2070. Does not mean that we are blind or that we do not consider the future, but instead that we should attempt to be more grounded in our choices because if we cannot even make it to 2021 because we make stupid ass bad choices, then we might end up dead by 2022, so there remains some need for balancing in our aspirations and making sure that we are in a meaningful allocation in the present based on our own particulars which includes our cash flow, our other investments, our view of bitcoin as compared with other assets, our risk tolerance, our timeline, our time, skills and abilities to learn, trade and tweak our allocations from time to time.
People still hate Roger Ver, years after Bitcoin Cash forked off because he's exploiting Bitcoin's biggest flaw, the fact that it can be subjectively redefined; Roger Ver is just the first, if Bitcoin really catches on, over the next few decades Bitcoin will be redefined again and again by some of the most powerful people and entities in the world, and just like those obscure BCH/BSV guys, one day we too might find ourselves on some dark lonely corner of the internet screaming into nothingness about "the real Bitcoin", to a world that doesn't care.
I doubt people are giving as much weight to some supposed hate of Roger Ver as you would like to believe, and throughout this post, you, Cøbra, seem to be attempting to ascribe and fantasize way more about political nonsense than what really exists. Might be a good thing that you are retiring your Cøbra persona, but I doubt that you are retiring your inclinations to overly politicize matters. I hope you are able to make a good decision regarding bitcoin.org, whether you stay onto the project or figure out a way to fairly pass it on, and surely I don't seem to understand some of the personal politics of the matter including some of the politics of the contributors. I do understand that legally it is probably cleaner to pass onto one or two individuals rather than a group, and sometimes there can be greater confidence in the character of a person because even if you were to pass the domain onto an entity (or institution), frequently entities can become dominated by changes in the personal... and gosh none of us are going to live forever, either, so understandably, even passing onto an individual has problems, too.
