Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[rpietila]

there is another radical view from Justus, see here:

remove the block max size limit completely (b/c it's an artificial scarcity), while at the same time introduce a
price discovery mechanism into full nodes p2p network to determine nodes services prices (e.g. validation, txs relay, ect etc)

I may be wrong on details, but this is afaik already used in Monero. And sounds like a good plan.

[1713906560]

1713906560

[1713906560]

1713906560

[sickpig]

Sorry to pose a stupid question: what are the reasons why the limit cannot be raised?

main reasons that opponents to the increase state are:
 
 - centralization
 
 - fees discovery price distortion

 - UTXOs size will increase significantly

 - Tor could not be used anymore

 - other things we don't know yet caused by rising block max size.

All valid reason to keep developing and not accept the 20MB block proposal as a final solution. To attempt solving those problems buy limiting block size is an expression of a lack of creativity

the one i keep hearing getting complained about more so now is the one Ice brought up earlier; UTXO.

i don't get that one.  the UTXO is stored on disk and has a 100MB cache stored in RAM that limits filling it up.  yes, the UTXO set is increasing apparently according to Statoshi, but if it only takes up 100MB, what's the big deal?

http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh

[cypherdoc]

Sorry to pose a stupid question: what are the reasons why the limit cannot be raised?

main reasons that opponents to the increase state are:
 
 - centralization
 
 - fees discovery price distortion

 - UTXOs size will increase significantly

 - Tor could not be used anymore

 - other things we don't know yet caused by rising block max size.

All valid reason to keep developing and not accept the 20MB block proposal as a final solution. To attempt solving those problems buy limiting block size is an expression of a lack of creativity

the one i keep hearing getting complained about more so now is the one Ice brought up earlier; UTXO.

i don't get that one.  the UTXO is stored on disk and has a 100MB cache stored in RAM that limits filling it up.  yes, the UTXO set is increasing apparently according to Statoshi, but if it only takes up 100MB, what's the big deal?

http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh

good re-read.  and i'm pretty sure he changed that write-up.  initially, he claimed the entire UTXO was held in RAM but down in the Reddit comments for the thread several ppl pointed out that it was held on disk with a 100MB high speed cache.  so, bottom line, it doesn't necessarily appear that this is a problem except for maybe miners.  given that tx growth won't immediately go to 20MB/block, i think it's safe to say this space problem should be worked out in time.

[molecular]

Pretty bold claims from Middleton, but I have tried it and it works, at least in a beta phase, not vapor phase or proof of concept phase, but beta phase.  You can trade all tickers that Cypherdoc mentions on here.  

I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?

Saying "it works" without understanding how it works is short-sighted.

Twice or thrice I tried to find technical documentation (wading through all the promotional crap) and was stifled, so I assumed it is centralized bullshit.

That's my assumption, too... until it's explained how it works and it works in a way I can trust (which I doubt, but I've been wrong before).

If it's Reggie typing in 50000 tickers every hour then there might be no "counterparty risk", but there's plenty of other risk.

EDIT: I PMed him, maybe he'll show up here and explain. If not, it hardens my assumption.

It works from an end-user standpoint, which is more than I've seen from any other project.  Tickers prices are fed through an oracle, which is centralized.  Also, the code is not open source... yet, which i cant blame them for not wanting all their work to just be copied into another system.  In a nutshell, it appears to be blockchain.info 2.0.  The blockchain.info model has proven to work thus far with zero trust issues, but we will just have to wait for more info to become available. 

Thanks for the info regarding the centralized oracle.

I don't understand your comparison to blockchain.info.

[molecular]

Pretty bold claims from Middleton, but I have tried it and it works, at least in a beta phase, not vapor phase or proof of concept phase, but beta phase.  You can trade all tickers that Cypherdoc mentions on here.  

I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?

Saying "it works" without understanding how it works is short-sighted.

Twice or thrice I tried to find technical documentation (wading through all the promotional crap) and was stifled, so I assumed it is centralized bullshit.

That's my assumption, too... until it's explained how it works and it works in a way I can trust (which I doubt, but I've been wrong before).

If it's Reggie typing in 50000 tickers every hour then there might be no "counterparty risk", but there's plenty of other risk.

EDIT: I PMed him, maybe he'll show up here and explain. If not, it hardens my assumption.

See slide 14 here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UxB33wp1rCncBtPbuzQbkS1SZg_fjCTNMqu-wZGii-o/pub?start=true&loop=false&delayms=10000&slide=id.g7b8415063_38

Thanks for chipping in! Your other post ("centralized oracle") confirmed my suspicion. I don't share TPTB_need_war's view that that fact makes veritaseum centralized bullshit, though. I suspect it might be a great system. I love the fact that it lives on the bitcoin blockchain and has no other token. I also love that there's no counterparty risk and in addition I'm guessing it ties up some bitcoins in contracts and I do like that, too.

About the "other risk": where is the oracle on your server getting the tickers from? I guess that process should be made transparent at some point so we can at least know how it could be manipulated.

Certainly the incentive is high for some rogue employee somewhere to falsify some ticker feed you're pulling for just long enough for a large bet to be settled in his favor, no? Clearly there's noone capable/willing to fix something like that after the fact.

[Reggie Middleton]

Pretty bold claims from Middleton, but I have tried it and it works, at least in a beta phase, not vapor phase or proof of concept phase, but beta phase.  You can trade all tickers that Cypherdoc mentions on here.  

I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?

Saying "it works" without understanding how it works is short-sighted.

Twice or thrice I tried to find technical documentation (wading through all the promotional crap) and was stifled, so I assumed it is centralized bullshit.

That's my assumption, too... until it's explained how it works and it works in a way I can trust (which I doubt, but I've been wrong before).

If it's Reggie typing in 50000 tickers every hour then there might be no "counterparty risk", but there's plenty of other risk.

EDIT: I PMed him, maybe he'll show up here and explain. If not, it hardens my assumption.

See slide 14 here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UxB33wp1rCncBtPbuzQbkS1SZg_fjCTNMqu-wZGii-o/pub?start=true&loop=false&delayms=10000&slide=id.g7b8415063_38

Thanks for chipping in! Your other post ("centralized oracle") confirmed my suspicion. I don't share TPTB_need_war's view that that fact makes veritaseum centralized bullshit, though. I suspect it might be a great system. I love the fact that it lives on the bitcoin blockchain and has no other token. I also love that there's no counterparty risk and in addition I'm guessing it ties up some bitcoins in contracts and I do like that, too.

About the "other risk": where is the oracle on your server getting the tickers from? I guess that process should be made transparent at some point so we can at least know how it could be manipulated.

Certainly the incentive is high for some rogue employee somewhere to falsify some ticker feed you're pulling for just long enough for a large bet to be settled in his favor, no? Clearly there's noone capable/willing to fix something like that after the fact.

Only the data feed is centralized, everything else is fully distributed, which is better than centralized (reference the first link that I put up which explains this). A decentralized data feed just wouldn't work and it would be taking a step backwards from the current legacy system unless and until we have more activity than the centralized exchanges. Securities data fees are commodity items, and very easy to corroborate, very difficult to get away with in terms of fraud and/or manipulation.
As for someone in my camp manipulating a data feed, he/she would have a hard time doing so (we get them from 3rd parties) and even a harder time concealing it, and even a harder time than that getting away with it (each client plus the server has the ability to audit, although that is not implemented yet). You'd have to somehow change a data feed, hack into 3 disparate systems to inject that false data feed (whose real feed is freely availalble to all) and then hope nobody notices.
As it stands now, I believe our system is safer than the status quo by a long shot.

[dEBRUYNE]

there is another radical view from Justus, see here:

remove the block max size limit completely (b/c it's an artificial scarcity), while at the same time introduce a
price discovery mechanism into full nodes p2p network to determine nodes services prices (e.g. validation, txs relay, ect etc)

I may be wrong on details, but this is afaik already used in Monero. And sounds like a good plan.

It's a bit different I think, quoting myself here so the experts can make a judgement.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

since noone mentioned it yet: https://twitter.com/MagicalTux/status/596622731711352832?s=09

Yes, an actually decent suggestion from Mark Frappacino.

This is already implemented in certain altcoins, for instance the CryptoNote family whereby Monero currently is the biggest (ignore Bytecoin, it had a 80% premine which actually is a danger to anonymity). I personally don't know the details of it, but this is what I could find:

I think Cryptonote (Monero) actually adjusts the miner's reward depending on the size of his block, and updates the block size limit like this:

(median of past n blocks, with constant lower-limit) * 2

if I'm reading this correctly:

https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/blob/c41d14b2aa3fc883d45299add1cbb8ebbe6c9ed8/src/cryptonote_core/blockchain.cpp#L2230-L2244

Thats correct, our block size is dynamically scaled by the size of the previous blocks with no hard limit for the block size. Its been this way since the launch in early 2014. There is also a dynamic coinbase penalty above a size threshold to prevent people from making too large of blocks, too quickly. Gmaxwell and some of the other bitcore developers argued against such a design, saying that it gave too much power to miners to decide the size of the blocks.

source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/35azxk/screw_the_hard_limit_lets_change_the_block_size/cr2phqd
note: Tacotime is one of the 7 core team members of Monero

[smooth]

to make a long story short: remove the block max size limit completely (b/c it's an artificial scarcity), while at the same time introduce a
price discovery mechanism into full nodes p2p network to determine nodes services prices (e.g. validation, txs relay, ect etc)

Price discovery as commonly described does not work for this because decentralization is a public good. Justus' idea is for clients to connect to multiple peers to express their desire for decentralization but is worthless for the same reason there are dozens of different brands of laundry detergent, breakfast cereal, even chocolate. in the supermarket but only a handful of manufacturers.

But to be realistic, none of the known solutions to this are incredibly good, and at least trying something is probably better than head-in-the-sand. That's what I have supported letting Monero's dynamic block size play out as an experiment, while recognizing problems with it too.

[sickpig]

there is another radical view from Justus, see here:

remove the block max size limit completely (b/c it's an artificial scarcity), while at the same time introduce a
price discovery mechanism into full nodes p2p network to determine nodes services prices (e.g. validation, txs relay, ect etc)

I may be wrong on details, but this is afaik already used in Monero. And sounds like a good plan.

It's a bit different I think, quoting myself here so the experts can make a judgement.

I'm far from been an expert, but AFAIU Justus's proposing to remove completely the max block size limit.

His reasoning is based on the fact that block space is a naturally scarce resource and that it should be better
"regulated" by the free market rather than by a "central" authority through the application of production quota.

With "block space price" he meant the cost of adding a tx to a block, that will be computed taking into account
all the needed resources to complete such a task, so: bandwith, storage, etc. etc. involved in being a relay node,
a miner (not hasher) or a full node, you name it.

He then continues arguing that at the moment the bitcoin p2p network lacks of the necessary
price discovery mechanism for such a scarce resource.

To solve the problem this is his proposed solution:

... we need a mechanism via which the nodes can pay each other.
This mechanism exists in Bitcoin now, and it’s called micropayment channels.
Any two nodes can connect and they have this mechanism via which, if they can
agree on who owes what to whom, they can construct a payment and they can
adjust that payment as rapidly as they need to and settle it infrequently on the
Bitcoin block chain.

This free competition in an open market introduced by this will avoid the aforementioned
centralization problem.

ps Justus, sorry for any misinterpretations.

[justusranvier]

The reason we have to worry about miners producing "too large" blocks is because they don't pay for all the P2P network resources they use (neither do end users).

All the arguments we have about resource consumption are derived from that primary design flaw.

If we fix it, then we won't have to argue any more.

[iCEBREAKER]

rising BTC price in the present is ultimately supported by people who DO care and DO research and BUY COINS when the price is NOT rising.

....

Bitcoin's "intrinsic value" is its future promise of certain functionality -- functionality that is described in every intro to bitcoin and VC pitch in existence.  This functionality -- hell even the simplest BTC P2P transfer -- does not work with 1MB blocks once the network transactions exceed its capacity consistently.  Even lightning network people calculated that overlay networks DO NOT WORK with 1MB blocks.

This ship is going to hit an iceberg, stop dead in its tracks and start leaking water as soon as the 1MB limit is hit consistently.  But  you are right the cat is out of the bag. For the technology.  The US government, in partnership with major banks, are going to be right there ready to deploy an "decentralized" solution but actually only banks can run full nodes (permission-required decentralized).  And it will trade USD.  And only banks and the govt can issue the "coinbase" txn or see the full blockchain, or allow the creation of new addresses (accounts).

Bitcoin's functional advantage will disappear and it will be reduced exactly to digital gold.  Except there's no reason to hold it vs gold or any other altcoin because you can't fucking transfer it anyway.

The problem with Bitcoin is that so many people didn't get on the train.  So now they hope it will fail so they can board a new train -- Monero, Etherium, whatever.  And they go onto these forums concern trolling as if they are actually Bitcoin proponents.  But suck it up. There is no other train available to you -- the next train will have exclusive membership and will actually be a rocketship (think Apple ipay) deployed simultaneously onto millions of POS, default installation in your phone, automatically connected with checking accounts for several major banks etc.

I've been solving blocks on the BTC train longer than you, and (like gmaxwell, tacotime, etc) am perfectly capable of simultaneously riding the XMR train as well.  We old-timers recognize a great train when we see one.  Too bad you missed the first half of the BTC movie and thus cannot tell the difference between a golden donkey and a thoroughbred unicorn.

BTC's "intrinsic value" is the fact is fulfills Aristotle's criteria for good money better than anything else (except Monero).

The BTC price is rising in terms of the last 5/4/3 years.  Zero to $250, by way of $1200.  Excellent performance by any definition.

The price rises when more people act on the optimistic zoomed out view than a cherry-picked local retrace.

The smart money already knows all about the hard UXTO limit, and is therefor investing in systems built on the core blockchain which offload tx pressure to sidechains and other off-main-chain whatnot.

The UXTO constraint may never be solved in an acceptable (sub)linear way, or the solution(s) could for political reasons never be implemented in BTC.

As for the Gresham's Law.

Yes, I do want people to HLOD their BTC.  Hoarding helps the price in terms of fiat trash rise, and invigorates the beneficial feedback loops driving adoption which ultimately result in a race condition that breaks petrodollar hegemony.  It's the Cartmanland principle: if people can't have Bitcoin they will want it more than ever.

This ship is going to hit an iceberg, stop dead in its tracks and start leaking water as soon as the 1MB limit is hit consistently.

Bro, do you even Nassim Taleb? 

If you did, you'd already know antifragile systems require adversity to grow stronger (BTW, BTC is not analogous to The Titanic).

If we coddle BTC and indulge it with lavish 20mb blocks to protect Gavin's delicate little feelings, it starts becoming a fat lazy Dodo Bird.  Like a child's immune system, BTC must encounter antigens to learn about its environment and prevent auto-immune diseases.

I'm getting really sick and tired of you faint-hearted hand-wringing Doubting Thomas, Panicky Penelope, and Nervous Nellie types.   

You will be punished by Lord Satoshi for your disturbing lack of faith!

(Force_choke.gif)

[iCEBREAKER]

Sorry to pose a stupid question: what are the reasons why the limit cannot be raised?

main reasons that opponents to the increase state are:
 
 - centralization (BTC network becomes less diverse, diffuse, defensible, and/or resilient; big miners can fuck over small ones by gaming blocksize)
 
 - fees discovery price distortion (free rider problem is compounded, ecosystem adapts to artificially low fees, parasitic systems are subsidized)

 - UTXOs size will increase significantly (full nodes will begin to assplode at random)

 - Tor and slow connections like Lukejr's 5mb DSL could not be used anymore ("TOR" is shorthand for all hardened networks, especially super-bloaty steganographic types)

 - other things we don't know yet caused by rising block max size. (Mircea will deploy his 'GavinCoin Short' financial weapon of mass destruction, with utterly unpredictable consequences)

Expanded that for you.

For details see: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=941331.0 and the recent reddit threads where Gavin the Pointy-Haired Boss gets reamed by his Dilbert codemonkey (gmaxwell) and Wally engineer (pwuille).

TL;DR:

"Gavin is the only committer who supports [20MB blks] at this time. The rest have significant concerns" -gmaxwell

[tvbcof]

...
The UXTO constraint may never be solved in an acceptable (sub)linear way, or the solution(s) could for political reasons never be implemented in BTC.
...

Almost certainly 'never' by any realistic definition of various things.

UTXO is the core of the information of who has what.  Coinage in circulation solves the problem in several ways, the most important being loss of information (which is why TPTB would like to and likely will at some point do away with it.)  Coinage is segmented into equal units which can scale due to the aformentioned loss of high resolution info.  UTXO is a minor optimization in the segmentation, but that optimization  vanishes with popularity.  Right now it is early and there are plenty of keys which control the equivalent of trillion-dollar bills.  That would vanish if the rather absurd dream of universal usage came into existence.  It would be relatively easy for Google-scale entities do the bookkeeping on individual satoshis in near real-time and relatively impossible for others to do so.

Solving 'the UTXO problem' would require what is by most definitions 'magic'.  Perhaps some future quantum-effect storage, communications, and processing schemes could 'solve' the problem but I'm not expecting to pick up such technology at Fry's by the next holiday season (Moore's law notwithstanding.)

[Adrian-x]

The reason we have to worry about miners producing "too large" blocks is because they don't pay for all the P2P network resources they use (neither do end users).

All the arguments we have about resource consumption are derived from that primary design flaw.

If we fix it, then we won't have to argue any more.

So why can't the protocol be tweaked to allow smaller blocks to propagate through the network of nodes faster than larger blocks. This is a market incentive for miners to regulate themselves. If it isn't working more like may not work, why not fix it.

This is how I always understood it to work, small blocks and maximum fees those who are not efficient will find themselves with a higher number of orphans, and those accepting fees too high will be circumvented, undercut by those doing high volume.

None of this comes into play for the next 6-10 years but I can't see how this market mechanism fails.

[iCEBREAKER]

you can't call me a noob.  and you probably came after me.

what you're missing is that Bitcoin is money born from the internet, by the internet, and for the internet.  it works on the same principles; it can route around damage.  and a key tenet of it's ability to do that is that it is located widely in different jurisdictions round the globe.  even if the US shutdown the internet, it would survive worldwide and the US would be back groveling in a few days wanting to get back on.  especially after pressure from the financial institutions.  

Bitcoin needs to have the same architecture and be spread worldwide to all corners of the Earth for maximum self preservation.  it can't do that if we hamstring it where it is now with just 1MB.  any idiot can see that.  

you want it to be a SOV.  it has the potential to do that.  but it won't happen if you force all tx's offchain to centralized entities, SC's included, that can shut anyone's acct down.  this requires increasing the block size.  all the core devs "say" they want that but they've been dragging their feet for 3y.

as for digital gold, it won't happen if only 0.001% of the global population ever hears about it, let alone uses it.  an African kid will never accept Bitcoin as digital gold as he can't touch it, feel it, carry it in his pocket, weigh it, or wear it.  thus, he will need to be able to transact with it and be able to analyze that it does in fact not increase in supply.  we know that he will have the tools to do this as fiber optic lines are being laid across Africa as we speak.  $10 Android phones are now available and soon 21 and phone makers look prepared to practically give away mining phones to grab market share.  but they have to be able to transact with Bitcoin in a reliable, cheap manner.  only then will they appreciate Bitcoin as a gold substitute.

90s Extropian/cyberpunk here.  I didn't miss money being born from the internet in the form of Bitcoin, I've was waiting and hoping for that to happen my entire early adult life.

Bitcoin has already "spread worldwide to all corners of the Earth."  Its_happening.gif was 2011.  We are now in the future we dreamed of.  

GavinCoin threatens to scour Bitcoin from those far flung corners, such as Lukejr's neighborhood in Florida where only 5mb DSL exits.

GavinCoin will also exile Bitcoin from TOR, etc, which are also critical far flung corners for users, full nodes, and miners to occupy for the sake of the system's self-preservation.

You keep selling this fear of 1mb Bitcoin dying alone and unloved except by her (cryptonerd) cats.  But all the non-Gavin core devs and I will not buy it.

We all agree the size should be raised "eventually" as Satoshi foretold.

But now (or Soon) is not the right time.  We need studies, simulations, and (most importantly) actual empirical feedback from persistent full blocks to best determine how and when to proceed with altering the 1mb parameter.

This nonsense of plucking magic numbers from the (Pointy-headed) CEO of Bitcoin's ass is not acceptable.

You, Hearn, and Gavin have succeeded in panicking the Redditards into a frenzy of "ZOMG BITCOIN IS GOING TO DIEEEE!!1!!  SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!!!1!!  QUICK DO IT NOW!!1!" hysteria.

That's why we've been advised by the incomparably redoubtable Nick Szabo to CALM. THE. FUCK. DOWN. AND. THINK. INSTEAD. OF. DRAMA. QUEENING:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/356twp/nick_szabo_zooko_pwuille_gavinandresen_infinity/

[TPTB_need_war]

I had severe gastronomicalgastrointestinal issues manifesting towards end of 2011.

This must have been particularly hard for you to swallow.

[TPTB_need_war]

I believe the block size limit issue is getting critical.  You guys should check out Reggie Middleton's Veritaseum.  Quoting:

I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?

Our server acts as an Oracle feeding commodity ticker data (think Reuters, Google, Bloomberg) into the wallets to adjudicate P&L.

There is research available on how to create a more decentralized, consensus driven oracle. Apologies I will not google now for a citation.

Edit: perhaps it was on Ethereum's blog that I saw some mention of research.

[HeliKopterBen]

Pretty bold claims from Middleton, but I have tried it and it works, at least in a beta phase, not vapor phase or proof of concept phase, but beta phase.  You can trade all tickers that Cypherdoc mentions on here.  

I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?

Saying "it works" without understanding how it works is short-sighted.

Twice or thrice I tried to find technical documentation (wading through all the promotional crap) and was stifled, so I assumed it is centralized bullshit.

That's my assumption, too... until it's explained how it works and it works in a way I can trust (which I doubt, but I've been wrong before).

If it's Reggie typing in 50000 tickers every hour then there might be no "counterparty risk", but there's plenty of other risk.

EDIT: I PMed him, maybe he'll show up here and explain. If not, it hardens my assumption.

It works from an end-user standpoint, which is more than I've seen from any other project.  Tickers prices are fed through an oracle, which is centralized.  Also, the code is not open source... yet, which i cant blame them for not wanting all their work to just be copied into another system.  In a nutshell, it appears to be blockchain.info 2.0.  The blockchain.info model has proven to work thus far with zero trust issues, but we will just have to wait for more info to become available. 

Thanks for the info regarding the centralized oracle.

I don't understand your comparison to blockchain.info.

I compare it to blockchain.info in that users retain control of their keys while using the service but without running a full node themselves - it is much more convenient and less resource-intensive.  Of course it's not a Web client but they may have plans for that.

@Reggie Middleton
Do you have plans to develop a hosted Web interface for your product?

[TPTB_need_war]

Bitcoin is not just for the rich, even when transaction capacity is severely limited. We will have off chain service companies to handle that. Here is how it could work:  A base equity capital. Let's say around 100 bitcoin to cover assets under management 1000 bitcoin. The board and the CEO is made responsible with all their assets (that has been the case in earlier times). Time deposits, let's say in general 3 years. You can pay immediately by transferring your deposits, but you can not immediately withdraw your bitcoins. Loans made to others also timed, say the same, 3 years. The institution keeps a sizeable reserve, let's say 30 %. This will probably be prudent, the market will decide. Due to fractional reserve banking, the money volume should therefore increase by about 3333 (the current system with zero reserve sometimes, would not be possible). There will be no deposit insurance and no bailouts. Sometimes such a bank will fail to pay back, with customers loosing money, and the market will have to keep the industry in check.

I believe the death of the Industrial Age and the birth of the Knowledge Age will kill usury without causing a Middle Ages (Dark Age). I have covered the reasoning extensively in the One-world reserve currency and the Economic Devastation threads (as AnonyMint and various other pseudonyms).

IMO, you are describing a high fixed capital investment Industrial Age economy that is dying into a NWO outcome.

Many of us are tired of that shit of trusting people. We want a meritocracy where to earn one must “Show me the code, talk is cheap” (Linus Torvalds).

In other words, we want 100% transparency on the merits of value and exchange (this is orthogonal to anonymity, which is more about escaping politics, slavery, and the refusal to forgive and forget irrelevant factors[1]). We are tired of that Old World morass, power vacuum, slavery bullshit. Tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. Tired. Of. That. Shit.

Such businesses can produce added value: Interest, loyalty function, price, speed, guarantees, insurance, cool factor, advertisements and so on. They are necessary as long as the blockchain can not serve all transactions. There is no point in working against the appearance of these services, they will exist if they are profitable, and they will expand the bitcoin volume in existence with debt.

The crucial difference is no government sponsored deposit insurance and bailouts. Therefore, it is not the same as the banking fraud going on now.

It corrupts people because it is a power vacuum (no matter how localized at the genesis) and even in cases of upstanding intentions[2] because people get themselves into promises they can't keep, then are forced to corrupt themselves (e.g. making deals with politicians and cartels, etc).

[1]

CoinCube I pretty well fucked myself in that errant discretion area long ago, e.g. picture my resume "1994 - 2015 resided most of the time in Mindanao". So I had no choice but to exit the system and work for a system where the pedantic, irrelevant past can't matter. I assert that having a good record in the dying NWO system is of diminishing utility. Hope you cash in your NWO chips with good timing. A system which can't forgive the irrelevant is obviously bankrupted.

[2]

Randy Travis - Good Intentions If it's Reggie typing in 50000 tickers every hour ... there's plenty of other risk. <joke>Even if discounting the Jack Daniels attack.</joke>

[solex]

But now (or Soon) is not the right time.  We need studies, simulations, and (most importantly) actual empirical feedback from persistent full blocks to best determine how and when to proceed with altering the 1mb parameter.

Wrong. We already know it will be a clusterfuck.

I venture my opinion from 30 years experience in IT, when it appears that you have zilch and should just speak to what you know about (Monero? Hashfast?)

http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh

good re-read.  and i'm pretty sure he changed that write-up.  initially, he claimed the entire UTXO was held in RAM but down in the Reddit comments for the thread several ppl pointed out that it was held on disk with a 100MB high speed cache.  so, bottom line, it doesn't necessarily appear that this is a problem except for maybe miners.  given that tx growth won't immediately go to 20MB/block, i think it's safe to say this space problem should be worked out in time.

I really think there is a fast and simple constraint on UTXO bloat which can be done:
Allowing the existing free transaction space to be used for tx which reduce UTXOs (i.e. negative delta) instead of being based upon the number of days destroyed, which was to encourage old coins being spent, something less important.