[Megathread] The long-known PoW vs. PoS debate

[death_wish]

I am not here to debate.  I am here to inform people that POS is a scam, and to warn Bitcoiners about a rising attack on Bitcoin.  This is the beginning of Fork Wars 2.0.

My perspective:  Although I consider myself a Bitcoiner first and foremost, I also do altcoins.  I’ve had long-term investments in some POS coins for years, and some of that has been highly profitable to me.  (Not identifying my portfolio’s winners.  Not here to pump things.)  I have altcoiner friends in the POS world, with whom I have been privately discussing this issue for months.  And until I saw that Solana’s founder recently attacked Bitcoin with a propagandistic claim that it must go POS, I was planning some projects and community contributions in the Solana ecosystem—which is POS.  Hey, I enjoy coding for Solana!

As I have gained longtime experience in POS, I have increasingly come to see that even my most profitable POS investments are built on a foundation of lies and financial manipulation.  But for a long time, I tried to make excuses, and balance my negativity towards POS against other factors.  Even after I fully admitted to myself that POS is intrinsically based on a dishonesty so subtle that it fools innocent buyers such as myself—even after I was alarmed to find that one of my favorite POW altcoins plans to go POS—I was deterred from action by the scope of the problem.  POS is eating the “crypto” world alive!  What can one individual do to stop it?

The breaking point for me, the impetus to break out of passivity and rise to action:  Just over a week ago, Do Kwon and Terraform Labs executed a contentious hardfork of the Terra (Cosmos SDK) POS chain, against massive community opposition.  They pulled off the fork in ten days from first public announcement to fork height.  They needed only the collusion of a small, wealthy group of DPOS companies.  The result was a brazen, bald-faced rugpull to divert value from both UST holders (many of whom lost their life savings in the depeg), and people who bought LUNA in the crash (disclosure: including me).

I will save the details for future discussions and publications—I’ve had a close view of that controversy.

As to the subject of this thread, the question is beyond debate.  We have empirical evidence to test various competing theories.

In 2017, Bitcoin proved that POW is decentralized.  If you were in Bitcoin in November 2017, then you remember those harrowing moments when the Bitcoin blockchain simultaneously faced two large-scale attacks from rich, powerful groups with gigantic hashrate at their command.  The objective of those attacks:  Hostile takeover of the Bitcoin blockchain.

One attack fell flat:  Bcashers’ attempted “flippening” on (IIRC) November 12, 2017 moderately degraded Bitcoin’s performance for a few hours, without lasting harm.  The other attack, S2X, was cancelled by its perpetrators at the last moment:  They backed down and gave up, because they saw that they would lose.

As I have said in one of my recent Wall Observer posts, I don’t idealize POW.  But the theory is proved:  If POW were not adequately decentralized in practice—if Bitmain had the type of power that large stake operators have in POS—then we would all be using BCH or S2X right now.

In 2022, Terra proved that POS is a centralized scam.  You can’t trust a POS blockchain.  A POS blockchain is mutable—Do Kwon’s original proposal had literally been to rewrite people’s wallets!  He only backed off from that because bigwigs like @cz_binance publicly denounced it.  A POS blockchain can be hardforked out from under you to change the rules, to change the nature of your money—just because some big stake operators colluded to back a corrupt dev team.  That’s what Do Kwon did just over a week ago on Terra, as a fraudulent financial shell game to divert value without literally rewriting people’s wallets.  The incumbent majority of stakes preserved their position by forbidding recently purchased LUNA from being staked; then, as Do Kwon loudly boasted of their support on Twitter, they used their position to hardfork to a new token designed to suck the value out of the coins they had prevented from staking, and to renege the peg obligation to UST holders.

When I bought LUNA in the crash, I relied on the premise that LUNA was a cryptocurrency recorded on a decentralized blockchain.  “Decentralized” means that even if Do Kwon goes nuts or turns out to be totally evil, at least, I am protected so that I get what I paid for—right?

I had no idea that Do Kwon could suddenly change the rules by executive fiat, just because he decided that some people had bought LUNA too cheap in honest transactions at market—and who needs those sad-looking UST holders, anyway?  Thanks, POS!

Although the stablecoin meltdown is what grabs headlines, this is one of the biggest lessons from Terra.  And the lesson is generally applicable.  The major POS ecosystems tend to be dominated by big stake operators—often by the same parties, who operate in multiple ecosystems.  What happened on Terra can happen in any POS ecosystem that hits a perfect storm of corrupt leadership, market turmoil, and rich insiders losing too much money.

Do not trust POS to protect you with decentralization when you most need that protection—in exactly the type of circumstance where real decentralization would protect outsiders and small investors from a relatively small, collusive group of corrupt insiders.


This post is a part of the beginning of a series of public messages to document the frauds, failings, and fallacies of POS, and other related activity.  On this thread, and elsewhere—on-forum, and off-forum—I am determined to push back against POS, to stop it from eating the whole crypto-world, most of all to stop it from harming Bitcoin.

What can one individual do against a massive, well-funded, highly organized push to deprecate POW and replace it with POS?  But I must act—and I doubt it will be in vain, for I learned important lessons both from Bitcoin’s Fork Wars, and from recent my observations of Terra.

When Bitcoin was under serious threat from the forkers 2015 to around 2019, and most of all in 2017, it didn’t only survive because of POW decentralization.  Bitcoin survived because its community had a hard core of idealists, who fought tooth and nail against a hostile takeover.  The superior decentralization of POW gave them solid ground on which to stand; it protected them from simply being steamrolled by Bitmain, et al.  But technology without people is nothing.

Bitcoin is resilient.  But a major part of its resilience is in its people, not in technology.  There are no technological solutions to some problems.  Complacency when the writing is on the wall is one of those problems.  I am doing my part right here, right now, to try to help solve that problem.

Recently, in the Terra community, there were some principled, intelligent voices speaking out against the hardfork—including LUNA holders who protested on behalf of UST holders, seemingly against their own short-term financial interests.  There was widespread mass-sentiment against the fork.  And at least one big DPOS company strongly refused to collude with the forkers—they went so far as to shut down their Terra operations altogether, after the fork.  I applaud them for that.  I have zero financial interest in their operations; and as of this writing, I have never before used their services.  I will henceforth urge POS delegators in other communities to switch to them, and I will use their services myself if the occasion arises:  If you need to trust someone with the fate of your fake-decentralized blockchain, then you should at least trust someone with a record of some basic honesty and decency!

There was pushback.  But there was nothing even remotely comparable to the community activism that I saw in Bitcoin during the Fork Wars.

If the Terra community had had that, it still would have gotten steamrolled—thanks to POS.  To those who were fighting in the trenches there, it was made abundantly clear that no matter what they did, Do Kwon and his big-stake backers could do whatever they wanted with the blockchain.  But—to put it delicately—let’s just say that much though I respect and admire some of the people I saw opposing the Terra fork, I was painfully conscious of the overall difference from the Bitcoin community!

Bitcoin needs people to stand up and push back.  Now.  Propaganda attacks against Bitcoin are rising fast.  The push for POS has been converting some significant POW altcoins (other than ETH, which has planned that switch for years), with the apparent objective of strategically isolating Bitcoin; most Bitcoiners don’t seem to care about that, but did you notice how heavily the annoying POS shill in this thread plays that angle?  Legislative and regulatory attacks against POW are arriving in the U.S., in the E.U., and elsewhere.  The time to get organized and start mounting a serious defense is not later.

Instead of being lazy and waiting for someone else to do what I think should be done—instead of idly complaining that others don’t act as I think they should—I should step up and do my part.  When others do similarly for their own parts—when Bitcoiners are up in arms over this issue—then Bitcoin will have the resilience that it needs now more than ever.

When the Bitcoin community as a whole actively defends against the “switch to POS” attack as vigorously as they defended Bitcoin in the Fork Wars, then I have full confidence that Bitcoin will prevail.

[ANN] POS is Fork Wars 2.0

[...]

This is an “all hands on-deck” moment.

For the record:  I made this forum account, death_wish, as a throwaway so that I could vent my anguish at a very bad moment for me personally.  Hey—notwithstanding all those CAPTCHA challenges to prove my humanity, I guess I must be human!  At a tumultuous time with much going on behind the scenes, I returned here specifically to speak out against the POS attack on Bitcoin, and on some related topics.  Depending on how events play out here, perhaps I may switch names to something with a more appropriate level of professionalism.  Maybe.

Disclosures:  I have no past or present direct economic interest or investment in POW mining.  I never did mining; my involvement in Bitcoin and in some POW altcoins has only been in other ways.  Maybe I will get into mining in the future.  If so, that will be motivated primarily by the principle of supporting POW decentralization—not primarily motivated by money, other than “I must do break-even or better here.”  A high-risk, effort-intensive, hypercompetitive business with high upfront capital investment and razor-thin operating margins is not exactly what I personally enjoy doing.  Some people love it—I’m glad they do!

I currently hold some (drastically reduced by financial wreckage) amounts of various POS coins; and I have a long-term holding in a mid-cap POW altcoin that is now planning to switch to POS.

Obviously, I have a financial interest in Bitcoin.  But I first came to Bitcoin for idealistic reasons, and I care about Bitcoin for idealistic reasons.  The foregoing is motivated accordingly.

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[pooya87]

warn Bitcoiners about a rising attack on Bitcoin.  This is the beginning of Fork Wars 2.0.

I doubt it because nobody among the miners would even consider the PoS nonsense because that would brick their ASICs and nobody among developers is even paying attention to the nonsense and very little idiots exist among those running a full node.
Comparing it with "fork wars" there were groups with hashrate like Bitmain and Bitcoin.com trying to convince people to use their shitcoin.

When Bitcoin was under serious threat from the forkers 2015 to around 2019, and most of all in 2017,

Just because some people had a different opinion about how bitcoin should scale doesn't mean they were all malicious and was attacking bitcoin. The main nonsense began in 2017 and ended in 2017.

I’ve had long-term investments in some POS coins for years, and some of that has been highly profitable to me.

I should point out that just because something gives you profit it doesn't make them good. There are lots of pump and dumps out there giving massive profits and none of them are any good. You can open coinmarketcap.com and see these shitcoins every day. For example RVL (something I doubt anybody has even heard of and is pure shitcoin) gave 5000% profit over the past 24 hours. I doubt you ever made this much profit with your PoS shitcoins all the time you bagheld them.

[tadamichi]

What can one individual do to stop it?

You can’t stop altcoins from doing it, because they’re not decentralized, but you already did one important thing by sharing your own experiences to others. So another thing you can do is to keep your friends and family out of them, by putting the facts on the table, so atleast they won’t get scammed. And i dont see the point why people put themselves in vulnerable positions, voluntarily, and still go into these projects, decentralization isn’t just some cool buzzword, but a protection against the wickedness of man, and you should never accept compromises to decentralization, when it comes your money(time). Human stupidity is probably the only infinite thing in this universe, so why elect human leaders to decide about our most valuable asset(time), it just never works out for the majority.

Now to Bitcoin, if an BIP like this will be introduced in the future you can engage in the discussion and give valid points. Then you can always run a node to make sure changes like this won’t run on your Bitcoin. Also i dont see a scenario in which miners would vote out their own business model.

[garlonicon]

POS is eating the “crypto” world alive!  What can one individual do to stop it?

Don't worry, we definitely can. The only missing piece is how exactly it will be done, but there are some ideas, I think I will turn some of mine into proposals if it will be necessary, but so far I took the first step: I informed other people about what is technically possible, and gave some basic technical details. But of course it needs to be designed and implemented, to make a working system.

then we would all be using BCH or S2X right now

They did many mistakes. First was doing that as a hard-fork, and not a soft-fork. Second was using separate Proof of Work, instead of using Merged Mining. Now, we are in a very good situation, because it is technically possible to increase the size of the witness. But in practice, I think about completely different thing: compression. And also about another thing: Proof of Work compression (because I think even with 4 MB block size, we could reach some point, where compressing the history would be difficult, and in that case, it could be needed to design the Layer Zero properly; I mean Bitcoin as the Layer One, Lightning Network as the Layer Two, and I think seriously about the Layer Zero, above the mainchain).

What can one individual do against a massive, well-funded, highly organized push to deprecate POW and replace it with POS?

I can tell you that: we need to make Proof of Work stronger than it currently is. For now, centralized mining pools have a big influence over mining, and I believe it is technically possible to make it decentralized. P2Pool is a good starting point, but it needs to be improved. Proposals like BetterHash or Stratum v2 also sounds promising, but I think we need something far better than that. Another proposal is CoinPool, where people could create one shared account in a decentralized way, but I think it is only a part of a bigger project, we need to connect that with other proposals to make it even stronger. I have some ideas for decentralized mining, but they are still "work in progress", some of my friends are also involved, but still, it is better to join existing proposals, than to form a new one from scratch. Again, ideas are shared here and there, but more work is needed to make it real.

[stwenhao]

Also i dont see a scenario in which miners would vote out their own business model.

Technically, they can. Also, the Lightning Network is based on Proof of Stake. There is no mining inside LN. That means, it is technically possible to transform Bitcoin into Proof of Stake coin, and give users some choice. So, a "coin in a coin" scenario is possible here and now, it is just a matter of pushing things higher, and turning the on-chain consensus into that.

[JayJuanGee]

[edited out]

I appreciate reading your description of some of the various ways that POS is fucked up and largely emulating a variety of complex systems that already exist in the world outside bitcoin and also have historically existed.

One of the ways that I was struck through my going into some of your description was to get refreshed upon the so many variation of ways that corruption can get embedded into various kinds of POS systems - so none of them seem to be exactly alike because the various ways that they have centralization that can be used to scam people or to provide value can vary to a very great degree in terms of perhaps how honest some of their leaders are when the time comes to actually demonstrate their leadership.

Maybe a distinguishing factor regarding traditional POS systems in society would be that a variety of systems of accountability have been established, and surely some of those systems of accountability do not always work to protect the various stakeholders including the shareholders, customers, workers and public in general.

So an aspect of the POS systems that are built on a variety of shitcoins or other ways of convoluting and camouflaging the scamming would be that these various cyber (crypto/internet only) related systems is that they are faster moving and more difficult to recognize and understanding the players or to verify and identify that they do not have any real intentions to provide value other than hoping for the narrow group in control to be able to take advantage of the broader stakeholders/participants - while at the same time, it may well be known by the vast majority that the whole thing is a scam or a Rube Goldberg machine that cannot work except that some participants know that they are close enough to the Cantillon spigot in order to be guaranteed profits, others have high confidence that they are close enough to the Cantillon spigot, and sure ly there are a number who have no clue that they are the patsy at the card table.

Bitcoin needs people to stand up and push back.  Now.  Propaganda attacks against Bitcoin are rising fast.  The push for POS has been converting some significant POW altcoins (other than ETH, which has planned that switch for years), with the apparent objective of strategically isolating Bitcoin; most Bitcoiners don’t seem to care about that, but did you notice how heavily the annoying POS shill in this thread plays that angle?  Legislative and regulatory attacks against POW are arriving in the U.S., in the E.U., and elsewhere.  The time to get organized and start mounting a serious defense is not later.

I don't necessarily want to minimize the importance of what you are saying, at least in regards to the various ways in which bitcoiner could end up getting lured over into POS baloney - however, in several senses, it seems that a collapsing of all the shitcoins into becoming POS rather than POW shows that bitcoin is winning..

No other coin believes that they even have a chance to compete with bitcoin, so they convert into a scam.

I doubt that bitcoin is any more threatened by the mere fact that bitcoin ends up as the ONLY POW standing, and all the POS systems, banking institutions, governments and status quo rich folks are ganging up against bitcoin.  Bitcoin was designed in a way to be resilient to attack, so not that I would be inviting attacks, but those institutions, individuals and governments who would supposedly be incentivized to attack bitcoin are also incentivized go establish their own financial stake in bitcoin.

In other words, i have my doubts in regards to any supposed attack or threat of attack to be any worse than it has been historically, because even though the attacks get BIGGER and BIGGER with the passage of time, bitcoin is not shrinking either... Bitcoin naysayers are always proclaiming that bitcoin is going to die or it is getting weaker, and really I doubt that getting weaker is actually the case, so part of the reason that the attacks on bitcoin have to get BIGGER and more dramatic is because bitcoin is getting BIGGER and BIGGER.. and it seems that more and more normies recognize and appreciate that they better get some kind of stake in bitcoin whether it is financial or psychological (of course both.. with various ways to get involved with bitcoin, including how to spend time and energies, too).

Instead of being lazy and waiting for someone else to do what I think should be done—instead of idly complaining that others don’t act as I think they should—I should step up and do my part.  When others do similarly for their own parts—when Bitcoiners are up in arms over this issue—then Bitcoin will have the resilience that it needs now more than ever.

I doubt that the resolve of bitcoiners is anywhere as close to as weak or as deteriorating as you suggest it to be.

The fact of the matter remains that Lindy effect continues to live in bitcoin, and each of bitcoin's network effects continues to grow, even if it takes time to really see the growth in clear and unambiguous ways.

When the Bitcoin community as a whole actively defends against the “switch to POS” attack as vigorously as they defended Bitcoin in the Fork Wars, then I have full confidence that Bitcoin will prevail.

[ANN] POS is Fork Wars 2.0
[...]
This is an “all hands on-deck” moment.

Let all the various shitcoins switch to POS.  We already know it is inferior, and I doubt that bitcoiners are going to be inclined in any kind of meaningful way (beyond the minority of possible attackers) to even want to consider switching to POS.

We already know that POW makes bitcoin into what it actually is - a paradigm shifting technology that is likely facilitating the largest wealth transfer in history - so why would we change away from the actual invention of bitcoin in order to uninvent it?  makes no sense.  nobody except the attackers against bitcoin think that there is any kind of plausible or reasonable way that bitcoin would actually switch.. so they would somehow have to gain consensus first, if they even know how to try to change bitcoin's code.. and what happened to Chris Larsen and his lame ass campaign.. not hearing too much about that recently, even though sure, the diptwat attackers have not given up, but whenever their ideas come up, they mostly are laughed out of the room in regards to "not going to happen."  No one in bitcoin who matters actually takes that dumb shit seriously.

Also i dont see a scenario in which miners would vote out their own business model.

Technically, they can. Also, the Lightning Network is based on Proof of Stake. There is no mining inside LN. That means, it is technically possible to transform Bitcoin into Proof of Stake coin, and give users some choice. So, a "coin in a coin" scenario is possible here and now, it is just a matter of pushing things higher, and turning the on-chain consensus into that.

Maybe I am missing something, but it seems to me that decentralization remains on a spectrum, and surely bitcoin has some areas in which people have accused it of not being completely decentralized or not decentralized enough; however, at the same time, it seems that bitcoin ongoing growth around POW and systems around POW have allowed it to push the limits of decentralization in regards to likely being amongst the most decentralized of systems ever to exist - at least in the magnitude of its importance including both current day value held and transacted on it but also future potential value held and transacted on it.

Accordingly, I am a little unclear regarding the point(s) that you are making stwenhao.  To me, it seems that there can be various ways in which POS systems are built upon bitcoin, so in that regard, if the base layer of bitcoin remains decentralized (POW) then other layers can be a POS/POW or whatever combination of those, and the POW base layer still ends up as the grounding that is bringing value and security... I have heard this framed as Bitcoin's objectives/innovations/value proposition having had been achieved by retaining the ability (feasibility) to build centralized systems upon a decentralized system, but not the other way around.

[stwenhao]

to build centralized systems upon a decentralized system, but not the other way around

It depends what do you mean by "centralized" and "decentralized". I can imagine a scenario, where all coins would flow inside the Lightning Network, then all on-chain transaction fees could be gone, and then guess, what will happen next: you will have a system that will run out of coins. Miners will mine all 21 million coins in circulation, and what then? No new coins, so the basic block reward would be zero. And then imagine that all coins could be locked in some LN channels, and stay there. If so, then miners will stop mining (because of no incentive), and then the whole chain will stop, because the whole life will be present entirely in some lower layers.

So far, the Bitcoin community has no solution for the scenario, when the basic block reward would be zero. Then, doing chain reorganization would be profitable, just to get some coins from the fees of the previous block. That means, this could be the way to disincentivize miners to extend the Proof of Work chain. And then, if no solution will appear, everything will be handled by the Proof of Stake.

Are there any downsides/benefits in doing that? Im just getting into how exactly lightning works at the moment and didn’t go into merged mining yet. Does someone have any good resources to catch up?

It is just an idea. If Merged Mining is possible, then something that I described, could be named "Merged Signing", so it is exactly "a scenario in which miners would vote out their own business model", because then it is possible to vote for anything, just by signing some transaction, and it is possible to prefer that, instead of using Proof of Work to mine blocks. You can always sign a transaction, and then it goes into staking. If you will look inside the Lightning Network, you will see, that there is no mining. So, how to name that consensus, that is inside that network? I would call that staking, because everyone can open a channel, and put all coins at stake, and then take profits from keeping some node online, and signing messages. There is only one difference: it is running on top of the regular Proof of Work chain. But I think it could change, I described the reasons above.

When it comes to the resources about Merged Mining, then see how the NameCoin works. And imagine that instead of reusing some Proof of Work from another chain, you could reuse a signature. Then you will get, how Merged Mining could work in a Proof of Stake consensus.

[tadamichi]

I can imagine a scenario, where all coins would flow inside the Lightning Network, then all on-chain transaction fees could be gone, and then guess, what will happen next: you will have a system that will run out of coins. Miners will mine all 21 million coins in circulation, and what then? No new coins, so the basic block reward would be zero. And then imagine that all coins could be locked in some LN channels, and stay there. If so, then miners will stop mining (because of no incentive), and then the whole chain will stop, because the whole life will be present entirely in some lower layers.

But in practice won’t there always be nodes opening and closing channels? Then there would always remain some activity on the mainchain. And in theory by the time the block rewards run out, technology would be way more advanced than now. Could there be a possibility then that people come to a consensus to increase the troughput of the mainchain to use it more? I mean if the security depends on miners, why would people ignore the problem by the time it comes to this. Also i can imagine scenarios in the future where it could be beneficial(maybe for legal reasons like when someone is buying a house) to have big transactions on a public ledger, instead of lightning, regardless of cost, and then the rational approach would be to choose the most secure chain for this. But I’d like feedback on this.

// Edit: + What if by that time, we have nation state actors and big institutions in it that depend on Bitcoin and the security of the mainchain, they would loose a lot if they didn’t find a way to support mining. But it’s just another idea. Maybe in the end it depends a lot on economics and the degree of adoption on how this problem will be tackled.

It is just an idea. If Merged Mining is possible, then something that I described, could be named "Merged Signing", so it is exactly "a scenario in which miners would vote out their own business model", because then it is possible to vote for anything, just by signing some transaction, and it is possible to prefer that, instead of using Proof of Work to mine blocks. You can always sign a transaction, and then it goes into staking. If you will look inside the Lightning Network, you will see, that there is no mining. So, how to name that consensus, that is inside that network? I would call that staking, because everyone can open a channel, and put all coins at stake, and then take profits from keeping some node online, and signing messages. There is only one difference: it is running on top of the regular Proof of Work chain. But I think it could change, I described the reasons above.

When it comes to the resources about Merged Mining, then see how the NameCoin works. And imagine that instead of reusing some Proof of Work from another chain, you could reuse a signature. Then you will get, how Merged Mining could work in a Proof of Stake consensus.

Thanks for the insight and interesting take.

[JayJuanGee]

to build centralized systems upon a decentralized system, but not the other way around

It depends what do you mean by "centralized" and "decentralized". I can imagine a scenario, where all coins would flow inside the Lightning Network, then all on-chain transaction fees could be gone, and then guess, what will happen next: you will have a system that will run out of coins. Miners will mine all 21 million coins in circulation, and what then? No new coins, so the basic block reward would be zero. And then imagine that all coins could be locked in some LN channels, and stay there. If so, then miners will stop mining (because of no incentive), and then the whole chain will stop, because the whole life will be present entirely in some lower layers.

By the way.. I fixed your quotes to reference that you were responding to different members within your above post.

Well it seems to me that I was attempting to get some clarification from you regarding how you consider the various kinds of intermixing of POW and POS systems, so in that regard I presented my own understanding that there may well be all kinds of variations of systems that might have higher up layer levels that end up being built and then functioning on bitcoin's POW base layer.. and yeah, I am presuming lightning network to be one of those.

Perhaps, I am not smart enough, but your response did not really clarify much if anything for me, except to show me that you believe that some kind of pie in the sky gravitation of value from BTC's base layer to another layer (lightning in this example) could cause bitcoin's base layer to no longer have the correct kinds of incentives to preserve itself. 

Your scenario seems to be nothing that is currently in front of us nor some kind of dynamic that we can really see in our current bitcoin dynamics (as far as I understand) and it does not seem to be any kind of phenomena that appears to pending as likely to be happening or to happen, but still you want to present such a scenario as if it were a current serious consideration that we need to ponder about.

It seems to me that a lot of fringe "what about" hypotheticals come to bitcoin discussions, and they have about a snowballs chance in hell of happening, but we are supposed to seriously consider them?

I would imagine that your theory could take 100 or so years to play out, no?  Do you believe that we might see such set of dynamics coming in advance or should we worry that whatever is happening in bitcoin needs to be fixed right now in order to stop such an inevitability?  would there not be any way to stop it once we see it, or is it already too late?  Perhaps, we need to discontinue all work on lightning network in order to discourage second layer gravitation of value towards?  Oh gawd..   

Maybe I am missing something, and this theory is not as fringe as your seemingly melodramatic description is making it out to be?
 

So far, the Bitcoin community has no solution for the scenario, when the basic block reward would be zero.

Yes.. that is about 110 to 120 years into the future.  Sure, we need to plan ahead, but I doubt that your assertion that no solution has been found is even accurate.  It's not like a solution has to be found for every single hair brained theory when we do not even know if the facts are going to evolve into that direction... Makes no sense to have a solution ready for every single possible problem that could happen.  In other words, there seems to be sufficient and adequate evidence that whatever is happening in bitcoinlandia at this time, is a sufficient and adequate balance of what is perfect (or good enough. .or whatever other qualifier that might fit here) for now and sufficiently and adequately balanced for a variety (if not an overwhelming majority of likely and unlikely scenarios) of future scenarios.

Then, doing chain reorganization would be profitable, just to get some coins from the fees of the previous block. That means, this could be the way to disincentivize miners to extend the Proof of Work chain. And then, if no solution will appear, everything will be handled by the Proof of Stake.

Again.. pie in the sky about a situation that does not currently exist or even look like it is starting to move in a direction of existing in the future.

Are there any downsides/benefits in doing that? Im just getting into how exactly lightning works at the moment and didn’t go into merged mining yet. Does someone have any good resources to catch up?

It is just an idea. If Merged Mining is possible, then something that I described, could be named "Merged Signing", so it is exactly "a scenario in which miners would vote out their own business model", because then it is possible to vote for anything, just by signing some transaction, and it is possible to prefer that, instead of using Proof of Work to mine blocks. You can always sign a transaction, and then it goes into staking. If you will look inside the Lightning Network, you will see, that there is no mining. So, how to name that consensus, that is inside that network? I would call that staking, because everyone can open a channel, and put all coins at stake, and then take profits from keeping some node online, and signing messages. There is only one difference: it is running on top of the regular Proof of Work chain. But I think it could change, I described the reasons above.

When it comes to the resources about Merged Mining, then see how the NameCoin works. And imagine that instead of reusing some Proof of Work from another chain, you could reuse a signature. Then you will get, how Merged Mining could work in a Proof of Stake consensus.

Well, I am glad that you have a solution. .. not that I understand it, exactly..   But maybe it addresses the potential problem that you had outlined, so then your assertion that no solution exists has been resolved, with a possible solution?  perhaps?

To your knowledge is there anyone working on a BIP in regards to your proposed solution or does a BIP already exist?

[LegendaryK]

why can't you explain how they do it?

It not that the information is not in the google search engine, it is your cult mentality refused to acknowledge reality.
But in your next post, you will just cry fud.

https://algorand.foundation/algorand-protocol/about-algorand-protocol

Decentralization

The Algorand blockchain is entirely decentralized, which means there is no powerful central authority or single point of control.
A unique committee of users is randomly and secretly selected to approve every block.
Nodes are run by entities representing diverse backgrounds across many different countries.
Fair & Transparent

Control is distributed among all individual network participants
Accurate

No risk of data being manipulated, lost or destroyed
Secure

Fault tolerant with no special group of users for an attacker to target
Permissionless
Public & Open to All

Users do not need the approval of a trusted authority to use the Algorand blockchain.
There is a single class of users and no gatekeepers.
Every participant can read every block and have the opportunity to write a transaction in a future block.
Low Cost to Participate

The Algorand platform requires minimal processing power and modest IT resources to join.
All online users who possess algos are automatically eligible to participate in block consensus.
Pure Proof-of-Stake

Algorand uses a pure proof-of-stake (PPoS) consensus protocol built on Byzantine agreement.
This means the system can achieve consensus without a central authority and tolerate malicious users as long as a supermajority of the stake is in non-malicious hands.
The users’ influence on the choice of a new block is proportional to their stake in the system (number of algos).
Users are randomly and secretly selected to both propose blocks and vote on block proposals.
All online users have the chance to be selected to propose and to vote.
The likelihood that a user will be chosen is directly proportional to its stake.
Rewards

In Algorand, the power is in the hands of the users holding stake.
Every user receives an amount of rewards proportional to their stake for every block that is committed to the chain.
We do so to encourage users to join the Algorand platform and accelerate our path to decentralization.
Open Source

The Algorand node repository is open sourced and publicly available for anyone to audit, use, and build upon. The platform is founded in principles of transparency, inclusivity, and collaboration and maintained by a dedicated community with a shared vision of a decentralized, borderless future.
Protocol Evolution

Algorand is rooted in the idea that the system should allow for changes and avoid inflexible policies—enabling both the community and the protocol to evolve.
The Algorand platform takes a consensus approach to protocol changes, which facilitates continuous evolution of the protocol and eliminates potential hard forks that could fracture the community.
This ability is powered by the Algorand consensus protocol that enables the users to reach consensus on anything.
Not just on the next block, but also on a protocol upgrade.

    Proposed changes are posted on the blockchain
    The community uses Algorand’s consensus protocol to vote to accept or reject the change
    When accepted, the community agrees on the block where the change happens
    Everyone switches to the new protocol at the same time

As far as security goes, Bitcoin forks and Algorand never forks,
if this does not immediately point out to you that Algorand is more secure than Bitcoin could ever pretend to be,
well you should just quit reading and go play with your crayons.  

https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-a-bitcoin-fork-4684459

On a basic level, these forks arise out of different perspectives on transaction history,

*Forking is what can allow Double-Spends.*

https://algorand.foundation/algorand-protocol/core-blockchain-innovation

Immediate Transaction Finality

The Algorand blockchain does not fork. Unlike with proof-of-work protocols, two different blocks can never be added to the chain in the same position.
Only one block can have the required threshold of signatures in order to be certified in a given round.

All transactions are final in Algorand.
Once a block appears, users can rely on the transactions it contains immediately, as they can be confident that the block will forever be part of the chain.
Even if the Internet is split into multiple pools of users, only one safe and consistent Algorand chain will exist.

Turing Award-winning scientist, Algorand founder on creating the ideal crypto - Silvio Micali
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttw4DpDNSo8

Silvio Micali is a computer scientist, recognized for his work on cryptography.
He is the recipient of the Turing Award (in computer science), of the Gödel Prize (in theoretical computer science) and the RSA prize (in cryptography).
He has been on the faculty of the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, since 1983.

Bitcoin is the easiest coin to restrict , one call to the power utilities and a automated disconnect by smart meter and bitcoin is dead.

Not as easy as you think, considering Bitcoin network is still running today.

Did I say, they are doing it in the US right now , no I did not.
What I said was they could if they wanted too, and it would be easy.
US Government has to ban btc mining 1st, that is less than 2 or 3 years away.
https://www.ictsd.org/how-do-power-companies-disconnect-service-with-digital-meters/

Can Smart Electric Meters Be Turned Off Remotely?

Yes, of course. Southern California Edison said smart meters can be used to silence a customer’s service remotely.

1st states ban btc mining and eventually the Country
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/06/03/new-york-clamps-down-on-bitcoin-mining-in-newly-passed-bill/?sh=7ae439c76de5
And why will the bans increase
https://www.wsj.com/articles/electricity-shortage-warnings-grow-across-u-s-11652002380

Electricity Shortage Warnings Grow Across U.S.
Power-grid operators caution that electricity supplies aren’t keeping up with demand amid transition to cleaner forms of energy

Because energy is not in abundance any more thanks to climate issues , war , and sanctions.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/01/1042209223/why-covid-is-affecting-chinas-power-rations
https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/uk-news/956911/what-is-power-rationing-uk-electricity
https://www.ft.com/content/13b06f9a-20cc-4499-9137-6299c0b81643

The failure by the btc cult to recognize that the energy abundance of the past few decades is changing ,
so that for most countries holding 1st world status will be unattainable.
In short, governments are most likely not going to be able to keep the lights on 24x7,
much less have the capacity for an overly wasteful PoW mining using up resources that are in short supply.
So unless one of the BTC cultist can build a Dyson sphere, even the current energy % wasted by PoW mining will be unsustainable very soon.  

* The secondary danger of low energy resources, is economic.*
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/energy/2022/06/02/were-in-trouble-electric-rates-in-texas-have-surged-over-70-as-summer-kicks-in/

Electric rates in Texas have surged over 70% as summer kicks in

With the Price of energy increasing and the loss of free investment capital going away because of the baby boomers shifting to safer investments like cash/bonds/tbills for their retirement, a large % of miners might go bankrupt before the bans occur.
Most miners survive off investment of venture capitalists , not the actual mining itself.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-06-01/in-crypto-downturn-startups-are-still-getting-venture-capital-dollars

venture capital investing in crypto overall appears to be slowing

It appears to me you just quoted some out-of-the air claims from Algorand again and presented already disproven arguments from earlier in the thread, such as 'argumentum ad autoritatem' (Turing award winner.....).

For instance, not forking is not a measure of security. Besides the fact that you never explained how they want to have a decentralized system but at the same time never have a fork. Not to mention that this was never the question. The question was never 'Is it more secure?' or 'How is Algorand more secure?', but it was: 'How do we solve these 2 essential problems we believe PoS to have?'.

Goes to show you can lock a btc cult members in a library, But you can't make them learn,
so at the end of the day all they sprout is the cult speak they started with.
Like I said in the post above, if you can't understand why no forking is more secure, you should go play with your crayons.

This is also why , most PoS supporters no longer comment, as not only does PoW waste energy,
talking to PoW cult members wastes our time.
I gave you the above info, and even a video.
So to keep the btc cult from wasting anymore of my time, I shall leave you to make false assumptions at the glory of your dying PoW tech.
 

[tadamichi]

Yes.. that is about 110 to 120 years into the future.  Sure, we need to plan ahead, but I doubt that your assertion that no solution has been found is even accurate.  It's not like a solution has to be found for every single hair brained theory when we do not even know if the facts are going to evolve into that direction... Makes no sense to have a solution ready for every single possible problem that could happen.  In other words, there seems to be sufficient and adequate evidence that whatever is happening in bitcoinlandia at this time, is a sufficient and adequate balance of what is perfect (or good enough. .or whatever other qualifier that might fit here) for now and sufficiently and adequately balanced for a variety (if not an overwhelming majority of likely and unlikely scenarios) of future scenarios.

I think this is also important, the people that will need to solve this arent alive yet. And we cant know what their world will look like.  Its all just speculation. I think Bitcoin will give them best possible basis to find a sound solution to this, for the reality they will be living in. We cant design a system for a world that doesnt exist yet, so we gotta make sure Bitcoin fits the needs of our reality first, to even survive this long. Its like someone in the 1900s trying to plan how we should live now. But thats what shitcoiners dont get. Systems are also about the people using them, its not about fancy founders with 10.000 prices and fancy features. A system needs to serve its users first, once it stops doing this it will just get abandoned or circumvented. It doesnt matter if a network has 10 trillion tps or 5.000% yield, if i cant even run a full node myself and a small group of people has control.

[stwenhao]

But in practice won’t there always be nodes opening and closing channels?

I don't know. It depends. It is true for now, but I am not sure it will be true in the future. For example, there are proposals like CoinPool. In general, there are proposals to put more people into a channel. Also, there are some ideas flying around, how to solve the problem with on-chain interaction. You know what does it mean? It means Bitcoin could end up in a scenario, where there would be no need to open or close channels, because it will be resolved by more deep layers. So, it could be possible to have some opened LN channel, and then create some coins on L3, without touching L1, everything inside L2. Then, it could be possible to extend "a coin in a coin" or "a layer based on a layer" to that extent, that it could require no interaction with on-chain coins.

And in theory by the time the block rewards run out, technology would be way more advanced than now.

More advanced does not mean "better". Also, the current consensus has its limitations, and the whole chain will stop, unless there will be some hard fork. But as far as I know the Bitcoin community, they will use hard forks only if they will be forced to do so. And by "forced" I really mean "forced". Maybe 2038 year problem will be resolved by increasing timestamps in a soft-fork way? Maybe when the chain will stop, the last block will be endlessly replaced? Maybe people would start making the blockchain smaller, by completing "D" in the "CRUD" model, so that "Delete" operation will be executed by overwriting the chain, and adding the hash of the previous chain in the first block after the Genesis Block? Why not? We could start mining on top of the Genesis Block, and produce 2016 blocks so strong, that they will be stronger than ever (so that will trigger the biggest chain reorganization ever), and then we can pretend that the Genesis Block is not from 2009, but from "2009+offset"? And what then? Because there are a lot of ways, how soft-forks or no-forks can save the day, and be used to avoid hard-forks always and forever.

Could there be a possibility then that people come to a consensus to increase the troughput of the mainchain to use it more?

I can see a different trend. People think that no block size increase is needed, so also no increase in the use of the mainchain is needed. I think it could be reduced, because a lot of soft-forks and no-forks can be used to make things happen, no matter what developers want, and without their permission.

The networks need to have separate fates.  BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices.

I think that will be true in the future. Exactly that last sentence about "getting tyrannical". And I mean "really tyrannical", so not increasing the max block size is one thing, but I can also imagine making the whole chain smaller than it currently is, so for example going from the current ~450 GB to ~1 GB in the future. All that is needed is reaching consensus, and creating some Proof of Work that would overwrite the chain. I think it is possible, if miners could be rewarded directly in the Lightning Network. Another thing is that doing it once is more than enough. Some soft-fork or no-fork could make it permanent, and alter all rules.

I mean if the security depends on miners, why would people ignore the problem by the time it comes to this.

There are many reasons, feel free to pick anything, or even extend that list:
1) they don't have good and working solutions for some problems
2) they don't care, they hope that things will be fixed automatically, when we will get there
3) they don't want to implement it now, when something is too crazy to reach consensus right here and right now

Also i can imagine scenarios in the future where it could be beneficial(maybe for legal reasons like when someone is buying a house) to have big transactions on a public ledger, instead of lightning, regardless of cost, and then the rational approach would be to choose the most secure chain for this. But I’d like feedback on this.

I don't care about "legal reasons", because in many countries, the law is outdated, and it cannot catch the crypto world correctly. For example, imagine that Satoshi invented the simplest tax system that is possible: transaction fee. If you govern a country and use crypto, you can keep being just some user, even if you are a government, and it will work fine, it will just be a different scale. If you want to mint new coins, you don't have to reinvent the wheel, and create CBDC for your local currency, when you could just use existing crypto, right? Also, you don't have to force your citizens to fill some papers, to go through the whole system of "spaghetti law", you can just collect transaction fees, and not require any additional fees than that. If you want, you can require an explicit payment, you can show each user the explicit amount they have to pay, and you can make things very simple. So why governments don't want to go that way? I have no idea, maybe they are missing the bigger picture of what is possible, and the whole reason that such ideas can also be beneficial for them.

they would loose a lot if they didn’t find a way to support mining

It is already solved by Merged Mining invented by Satoshi. Another way is Merged Signing for Proof of Stake. I think, technically it is not a problem at all, it is just a matter of making things happen. So it requires some coding skills, some time, and patience, to get there. And I hope we will.

I fixed your quotes to reference that you were responding to different members within your above post.

Some users told me that, and I agree, that quoting should not point to users. And I am not the only member of "quotes without nicknames" club. It makes life easier, when it comes to writing posts, but it is only opinion (and there are exceptions, like quoting posts that are far away, for example written by Satoshi). So, I prefer "userless quotes", but feel free to "fix" them if you want.

Do you believe that we might see such set of dynamics coming in advance or should we worry that whatever is happening in bitcoin needs to be fixed right now in order to stop such an inevitability?  would there not be any way to stop it once we see it, or is it already too late?  Perhaps, we need to discontinue all work on lightning network in order to discourage second layer gravitation of value towards?

It depends on what do you want. Because if you want Proof of Work, then you should use that in lower layers. But if you want Proof of Stake, then it can simply take over, if no Proof of Work will be added to some lower layers. Then, if Proof of Stake is superior, coins will gravitate towards staking. But if Proof of Work is so good, then why it is not present in the lower layers? Why Lightning Network transactions are not Merge Mined with Proof of Work, but only signed?

But maybe it addresses the potential problem that you had outlined, so then your assertion that no solution exists has been resolved, with a possible solution?  perhaps?

Maybe. But still, it has to be confirmed or rejected by other people. It is always a matter of consensus, for either Proof of Work or Proof of Stake, or Proof of Whatever. So, ideas are flying, but they are only ideas, unless implemented and enforced. And there is still a lot of work to reach that.

To your knowledge is there anyone working on a BIP in regards to your proposed solution or does a BIP already exist?

As far as I know, no BIP yet, but I think some people are generally interested in the concept of Merged Mining. For example, I guess this guy wants to do that in a Proof of Work way: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-June/020532.html

I think this is also important, the people that will need to solve this arent alive yet.

I think the basic idea of creating a separate chain with zero supply, that could accept deposits and withdrawals from other chain, is mature enough to be implemented. It can be implemented in a very general and open way, then it can be later limited by soft-forks in the future. Another thing is that if this additional chain has no coins, then it can be easily created (by making signatures), and easily destroyed (by moving coins on mainnet), so recreating the whole additional chain will be quite easy, just all users will move from the additional chain v1 into the additional chain v2 by making a single on-chain transaction.

[death_wish]

Stepping in here to add some perspective:

Goes to show you can lock a btc cult members in a library, But you can't make them learn,
so at the end of the day all they sprout is the cult speak they started with.
Like I said in the post above, if you can't understand why no forking is more secure, you should go play with your crayons.

This is also why , most PoS supporters no longer comment, as not only does PoW waste energy,
talking to PoW cult members wastes our time.
I gave you the above info, and even a video.
So to keep the btc cult from wasting anymore of my time, I should leave you make false assumptions at the glory of your dying PoW tech.
 

Garden-variety shill strategy:  Ad hominem attacks based on canned talking points about a “btc cult”.  In an irony that is surely unintentional, this slop is delivered with a preacher’s airs of smug conceit about the quasi-religious righteousness of the POS position.  Yawn.  Could you be a worse cliché?

Although I had planned for months to get active on this issue, a part of the immediate impetus for me to start posting here about it was that the day before, an altcoiner called me a “bitcoin maxi cunt”.  The trigger:  I politely, but firmly and cogently corrected his technical misconceptions about Bitcoin.

I was only talking to him because we are both invested in different aspects of the same POS altcoin ecosystem:  Terra.  We were on very friendly terms.  Out of humane compassion for someone who got wrecked very badly with UST, I spent significant amounts of my time corresponding with him and consoling him about his losses.

Although I am a Bitcoiner first and foremost, I’ve been doing altcoins for years.  Before my recent months-long trainwreck of financial losses, I had a beautiful portfolio of altcoins (both POW and POS) that would give Jay here a heart attack.  In an altcoin venue, I had befriended a downtrodden altcoiner who had apparently just lost his life savings.  But suddenly, I am a “bitcoin maxi cunt”.

Why?  In reply to my observation that what Do Kwon did to the Terra chain could never happen with BTC, he insulted Bitcoin and made some ignorant remark about Bitcoin’s energy use.  I offered him facts—as I am well-qualified to do, given my level of technical expertise.  Therefore, my new pal declared me a “bitcoin maxi cunt”, and sent me a stream of harassing emails with such subject lines as, “suck a bag of dicks fuckface” (quote-unquote).

Well, he may also have been peeved that I refused to indulge his desire to discuss illegal hacking activity that he bragged he would do—evidently to show me that his technical acumen is superior to the fuddy-duddy Bitcoiner’s.  He also threatened to hack me—LOL.  His ineloquence was less less astonishing to me than his audacity.

Although I have no reason to care for the opinions of some random loser on the Internet, the whole scenario neatly illustrated to me that POS buyers who aren’t either dupes or shills are deranged.

I admit that I was duped—not wholly, never enough to believe that POS was better than POW, but enough to compromise and make excuses.  POS is promoted with potent propaganda, and its worst problems are quite subtle.  I love charts and graphs and maths and stuff; the economic and security analyses in various whitepapers seemed reassuring to me, at least on a “not so bad after all” level.  Thus, if a POS coin attracted me for other reasons (programmability, innovative features, etc.), I was willing to tolerate POS—go with the flow—buy, delegate stake, compound my stake income in the POS monetary perpetual motion machine, and then get sad that my money was locked up when I needed the liquidity.  Whoops...

Now, LegendaryK, who is in a “cult” based on empty rhetoric and smear-attacks, not on facts and logical reasoning?

Who refuses to learn?

For my part, I won’t waste my time debating with POS shills.  That is why my first post in this thread announced:  I am not here to debate.


Thanks to others for the replies.  I will catch up later—busy now.  At high risk, I just bought some SOL on margin in the remains of my recently-liquidated BTC account—a very modest amount; not as an investment, but because I’m still trapped!  To make enough dollars to free my remaining BTC, I don’t now have any reasonable short-term prospects that do not involve programming on the Solana blockchain.  That requires rent-exemption SOL for deployment, and I was down to SOL dust after I had dumped my accumulated SOL and MSOL trying to save my BTC.  Too bad I wasn’t paying attention to the recent prices—every dollar counts for me now; I thought I’d better catch some development-fuel SOL while it’s under $40, though I also wouldn’t be surprised if it falls further...  Anyway, LegendaryK, this BTC cult member and proud “bitcoin maxi cunt” will probably not bother with you here.  I have my work cut out for me on multiple fronts; arguing with losers on the Internet is not a productive use of my time and energy.

[tadamichi]

I don't know. It depends. It is true for now, but I am not sure it will be true in the future. For example, there are proposals like CoinPool. In general, there are proposals to put more people into a channel. Also, there are some ideas flying around, how to solve the problem with on-chain interaction. You know what does it mean? It means Bitcoin could end up in a scenario, where there would be no need to open or close channels, because it will be resolved by more deep layers. So, it could be possible to have some opened LN channel, and then create some coins on L3, without touching L1, everything inside L2. Then, it could be possible to extend "a coin in a coin" or "a layer based on a layer" to that extent, that it could require no interaction with on-chain coins.

We gotta see this in practice and the implications of it, it could definitely be a double edged sword.

More advanced does not mean "better". Also, the current consensus has its limitations, and the whole chain will stop, unless there will be some hard fork. But as far as I know the Bitcoin community, they will use hard forks only if they will be forced to do so. And by "forced" I really mean "forced". Maybe 2038 year problem will be resolved by increasing timestamps in a soft-fork way? Maybe when the chain will stop, the last block will be endlessly replaced? Maybe people would start making the blockchain smaller, by completing "D" in the "CRUD" model, so that "Delete" operation will be executed by overwriting the chain, and adding the hash of the previous chain in the first block after the Genesis Block? Why not? We could start mining on top of the Genesis Block, and produce 2016 blocks so strong, that they will be stronger than ever (so that will trigger the biggest chain reorganization ever), and then we can pretend that the Genesis Block is not from 2009, but from "2009+offset"? And what then? Because there are a lot of ways, how soft-forks or no-forks can save the day, and be used to avoid hard-forks always and forever.

But the hardware will evolve, i think its false to assume, there wont be any more significant progress in a timeframe of the next 30-120 years. People in the year 2100 wont be running around with the same rpi4 with 1 tb ssd, its just unrealisitc. So then when people are actually running into limits and they see the hardware is capable to store bigger chains, it wouldnt be rational or economical to keep the chain unusable. Just like it isnt rational rn to increase the blocksize when we didnt run into limits and cheap hardware cant handle a huge chain yet.

Why would the chain stop without a hard fork? And why should the bitcoin community do useless hard forks for no reason? Anyone is free to do their own hard fork at any time, but the majority won’t follow scams.

Blockchains are supposed to be append only, if we’re going back to CRUD we can just go back to traditional databases. I don’t get the point, it’s already possible to run pruned nodes so no need to castrate the whole chain.

I can see a different trend. People think that no block size increase is needed, so also no increase in the use of the mainchain is needed. I think it could be reduced, because a lot of soft-forks and no-forks can be used to make things happen, no matter what developers want, and without their permission.

It can be increased when necessary, it’s really that simple. What’s the rational argument behind increasing the hardware requirements now, when we didn’t ran into a limit yet and adoption isn’t big enough yet. Timing is important in this case, why trade decentralization for scalability now, when we didn’t even run into a scalability limit yet that made Bitcoin unusable. But at a later point in time, the decentralization compromise might be negligible with better hardware and then people can consider it again.

I think that will be true in the future. Exactly that last sentence about "getting tyrannical". And I mean "really tyrannical", so not increasing the max block size is one thing, but I can also imagine making the whole chain smaller than it currently is, so for example going from the current ~450 GB to ~1 GB in the future. All that is needed is reaching consensus, and creating some Proof of Work that would overwrite the chain. I think it is possible, if miners could be rewarded directly in the Lightning Network. Another thing is that doing it once is more than enough. Some soft-fork or no-fork could make it permanent, and alter all rules.

I can see the tyrannical part happening, but then again if most users don’t get served anymore they have the power to fork into a non tyrannical network. But what point would deleting the chain serve and how would it work in practice? No one will agree to this, if you don’t believe me, try it and see how many nodes would follow. The point of Bitcoin is immutability.

There are many reasons, feel free to pick anything, or even extend that list:
1) they don't have good and working solutions for some problems
2) they don't care, they hope that things will be fixed automatically, when we will get there
3) they don't want to implement it now, when something is too crazy to reach consensus right here and right now

Nah i dont think so it just doesn’t make sense psychologically, the playing field in a few decades will be completely different than now.

I don't care about "legal reasons", because in many countries, the law is outdated, and it cannot catch the crypto world correctly. For example, imagine that Satoshi invented the simplest tax system that is possible: transaction fee. If you govern a country and use crypto, you can keep being just some user, even if you are a government, and it will work fine, it will just be a different scale. If you want to mint new coins, you don't have to reinvent the wheel, and create CBDC for your local currency, when you could just use existing crypto, right? Also, you don't have to force your citizens to fill some papers, to go through the whole system of "spaghetti law", you can just collect transaction fees, and not require any additional fees than that. If you want, you can require an explicit payment, you can show each user the explicit amount they have to pay, and you can make things very simple. So why governments don't want to go that way? I have no idea, maybe they are missing the bigger picture of what is possible, and the whole reason that such ideas can also be beneficial for them.

The problem is that individuals in the government don’t benefit from efficiency, it would mean less positions, lower budgets, less control and no one to blame. And laws will probably be completely different about crypto by the time Bitcoin reaches mass adoption. There will be use cases and demand for transactions on public ledgers in the business space for sure, it could just be deducted as a business expense.

[JayJuanGee]

So to keep the btc cult from wasting anymore of my time, I shall leave you to make false assumptions at the glory of your dying PoW tech.
 

Thanks.  Your leaving will likely be very helpful, especially since your points (to the extent that you have any) are hardly even logically or factually coherent in their actual attempts to deal with actual contributions that bitcoin makes that largely, but not exclusively, achieved because it has POW.. and would not amount to anything if it were a lame-ass and largely scam motivated and vulnerable POS system that you suggest as being preferable..

Yes.. that is about 110 to 120 years into the future.  Sure, we need to plan ahead, but I doubt that your assertion that no solution has been found is even accurate.  It's not like a solution has to be found for every single hair brained theory when we do not even know if the facts are going to evolve into that direction... Makes no sense to have a solution ready for every single possible problem that could happen.  In other words, there seems to be sufficient and adequate evidence that whatever is happening in bitcoinlandia at this time, is a sufficient and adequate balance of what is perfect (or good enough. .or whatever other qualifier that might fit here) for now and sufficiently and adequately balanced for a variety (if not an overwhelming majority of likely and unlikely scenarios) of future scenarios.

I think this is also important, the people that will need to solve this arent alive yet. And we cant know what their world will look like.  Its all just speculation. I think Bitcoin will give them best possible basis to find a sound solution to this, for the reality they will be living in. We cant design a system for a world that doesnt exist yet, so we gotta make sure Bitcoin fits the needs of our reality first, to even survive this long. Its like someone in the 1900s trying to plan how we should live now. But thats what shitcoiners dont get. Systems are also about the people using them, its not about fancy founders with 10.000 prices and fancy features. A system needs to serve its users first, once it stops doing this it will just get abandoned or circumvented. It doesnt matter if a network has 10 trillion tps or 5.000% yield, if i cant even run a full node myself and a small group of people has control.

I don't disagree with any of the points that you are making, tadamichi.. yet.. of course, we are learning about bitcoin as we go - with 13.5 years of a track record of its actual going live, but then based on various resolutions of issues that had not been put together in the way that bitcoin achieved... but the bitcoin system that is in place seems to have a certain amount of difficult to change (some refer to as ossified) features..

But then when it comes to something like whether bitcoin needs to scale better or whether bitcoin might need to improve on some of the incentives in order to maintain security or maintain other possible practicalities, then the level of then adoption, how bitcoin is then being used and whatever other evolving issues might then be presented would have to be taken into account rather than what had seemed to have been stwenhao dumbass presentation regarding fixing future problems that we are not sure will or will not exist... or whether they will need to be resolved or whether there might be some easy then solution or some more complicated possible need that would exist at that future date.

Of course, stwenhao is smarter than everyone else, and he can see where this bitcoin's incentives to secure the base layer matter is going, so he would like to warn us about fixes that we need to make now.

[stwenhao]

Why would the chain stop without a hard fork?

Because it is vulnerable to the year 2038 problem, and also to the year 2106 problem, if 2038 will not stop it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5365359.msg58166985#msg58166985

And why should the bitcoin community do useless hard forks for no reason?

There is a reason: four bytes may be not enough to measure time accurately. But even if it is, then taking modulo 2^32 will be also a hard fork. And if you don't want to solve that problem in the hard fork way, then the soft fork way may be too crazy to reach consensus.

I don’t get the point, it’s already possible to run pruned nodes so no need to castrate the whole chain.

It's about the initial chain download. It should be faster. A lot faster. For now, it can take many days, and that should be improved somehow.

But what point would deleting the chain serve and how would it work in practice?

The point is to make the chain smaller. And the way is to do deep chain reorganization, that will reach consensus, because the new chain could contain the hash of the old chain. When it comes to removing data, chain reorganization is the only operation that can be used to make it.

No one will agree to this, if you don’t believe me, try it and see how many nodes would follow.

In Segwit, people agreed to put signatures in a separate space called "witness". Why do you think they won't agree to put the whole chain in a separate space (called "archive"?).

Of course, stwenhao is smarter than everyone else

We all know that I am not "smarter" in any way. There are only ideas, people can always reject them. I think reaching consensus is always needed, but for some things mentioned here, I think it could be possible to do so. Bitcoin users are different, not all of them are happy about Proof of Work. Another story is that implementing some of my ideas may sound crazy, but it may turn out to be better than creating another altcoin.

[tadamichi]

Because it is vulnerable to the year 2038 problem, and also to the year 2106 problem, if 2038 will not stop it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5365359.msg58166985#msg58166985

Ok now i got it, thanks. I didnt even know the problem existed until now.
I just checked out the GitHub and i think they’re trying out solutions for this already.

I also read that this apperntly will get fixed by itself over time. Like basicly its not a big issue anymore. Just a recompile over time.
If you write C++ code using chrono::system_clock or chrono::steady_clock now and update ESP-IDF once the 2038 problem is solved, the code should keep working after 2038 with just a recompile against the newer libc & libstdc++.

But in the theoretical case a hard fork would be necessary for this, i cant imagine people in the year 2038 would be refusing to fork, if their wealth was on the line. But i also think it’s important to try to solve this earlier.

It's about the initial chain download. It should be faster. A lot faster. For now, it can take many days, and that should be improved somehow.

I thought about this too and that it can be a problem in the future. I just think it’s more sound that Bitcoin grows gradually with the technology around it, to make sure it’s security is top notch. Extreme measures like this could go against the principle of what made Bitcoin what it is in the first place. And then again for many technical problems there could be non technical solutions, in case technology doesn’t catch up, like for example services that sync the chain locally(which already exist now). To me it’s just more likely that technology will actually catch up and the whole world won’t adopt bitcoin tomorrow, so we still have time.

[pooya87]

In Segwit, people agreed to put signatures in a separate space called "witness". Why do you think they won't agree to put the whole chain in a separate space (called "archive"?).

Witness is not separate at all. It is an inseparable part of the transaction like any other parts (version, locktime, input count,etc.). Any full node sees this part and fully verifies it (any node that doesn't see or verify it is no longer a full node).
What you are suggesting is eliminating the history meaning the full nodes can no longer verify "everything".

[death_wish]

In Segwit, people agreed to put signatures in a separate space called "witness". Why do you think they won't agree to put the whole chain in a separate space (called "archive"?).

Witness is not separate at all. It is an inseparable part of the transaction like any other parts (version, locktime, input count,etc.). Any full node sees this part and fully verifies it (any node that doesn't see or verify it is no longer a full node).
What you are suggesting is eliminating the history meaning the full nodes can no longer verify "everything".

Thanks (and I can’t believe can totally believe that we are still correcting these misconceptions almost five years after activation).

However, a node that doesn’t see these data is still a full node.  It won’t be able to validate Segwit rules; and as a practical matter, it has quite limited functionality as most people move to Segwit.  The concept of a softfork is to make consensus validation rules more restrictive; the outdated node will apply laxer rules which are a strict subset of the current rules.

Nonetheless, the old node still has the same security for its own non-Segwit funds as it always did.  Consensus validation of pre-Segwit transactions works just the same as before; and a pre-Segwit full node can still follow the correct chaintip, without the SPV/light-wallet vulnerability of being misled onto a malicious minority fork.

The import of this backwards compatibility is driven home by experience with blockchains where a centralized dev team can effectually force upgrades; there are even some chains where you can lose your money if you fail to upgrade timely.  In Bitcoin, your money is safe even if you don’t upgrade to the latest Core; and the Bitcoin Core developers deliberately make sure that they do not have the power to coerce nodes to upgrade.

There are not a few technical howlers in this thread.  Another one, just for instance:

to build centralized systems upon a decentralized system, but not the other way around

It depends what do you mean by "centralized" and "decentralized". I can imagine a scenario, where all coins would flow inside the Lightning Network, then all on-chain transaction fees could be gone, and then guess, what will happen next: you will have a system that will run out of coins. Miners will mine all 21 million coins in circulation, and what then? No new coins, so the basic block reward would be zero. And then imagine that all coins could be locked in some LN channels, and stay there. If so, then miners will stop mining (because of no incentive), and then the whole chain will stop, because the whole life will be present entirely in some lower layers.

Lightning Network is entirely dependent on the blockchain.  If miners stop mining, then Lightning loses its security.  The whole concept of Lighting is to maintain, in effect, private local ledgers that can be enforced by recourse to the global ledger (blockchain) in case of attempted theft.

By dead simple logic, it is also obvious that if Lighting or a Lightning-style network could function without the blockchain, then we would shut down the blockchain right now.  Why would anyone pay the costs of mining, if a Lightning-style network could function without it?  Although I myself have some criticisms of Lightning, the benefit of running L2 without L1 would so drastically outweigh the downsides that it’s a clear win—unless it wouldn’t work it all, which it wouldn’t.

(Nit, but a telling one:  The blockchain is the lower layer; Lightning is the upper layer.)

On these and other points:  Please stop speculating wildly on Bitcoin’s future without adequate technical knowledge.  Regardless of your intentions, all it achieves is to sow misinformation, rumours, and FUD.


With my apologies, I am still behind on replies to some others who addressed me above.  I’ll be back...

[pooya87]

However, a node that doesn’t see these data is still a full node.

A full node is a software that performs full verification on everything, if it skips any part of the verification then it no longer can be considered a "full node".
Old nodes that do not receive the witness are no longer performing full verification hence they are not full nodes anymore.

and a pre-Segwit full node can still follow the correct chaintip, without the SPV/light-wallet vulnerability of being misled onto a malicious minority fork.

If PoW were the only metric then SPV clients can also not be tricked into following a "minority fork" with less work since they are capable of validating (and some of them like Electrum already validate) proof of work and follow the chain with the most work.

Keep in mind that when it comes to "longest chain" it is only an argument when everything else is correct. Miners alone don't control bitcoin, both miners and nodes do.
For example if all miners decided to produce 10MB blocks that would make that chain the chain with the most work but it still wouldn't be considered "bitcoin chain" because it breaks consensus rules. That's the same with SegWit, if all the miners decided to spend a SegWit P2WPKH output without providing any signature, all full nodes would reject that chain regardless of how long that is but the old nodes would accept it which is another proof that they no longer full nodes.

P.S. that doesn't make old nodes useless though. In other words you are right that they still provide a lot of functionality and security, they are just no longer full verification nodes.