Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[justusranvier]

I'd imagine that there are quite a few litecoin bagholders there who would be happy to see bitcoin hobbled by limited transaction capacity.

This is a really informative thread,  particularly page 17: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=144895.335

Really the entire thread is worth reading, so you don't miss quotes like this:

RE: lots of code to write if you can't keep up with transaction volume:  sure.  So?

Transaction volume itself leads to centralization too, simply by ensuring that only a miner able to keep up with the large volume of low-fee transactions can make a profit.

I really don't understand this logic.

Yes, it is a fact of life that if you have a system where people are competing, the people who are less efficient will be driven out of business. So there will be fewer people in that business.

You seem to be saying that we should subsidize inefficient miners by limiting the block size, therefore driving up fees and making users pay for their inefficiency.

All in the name of vague worries about "too much centralization."

[1713580296]

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[1713580296]

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[1713580296]

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[smooth]

even smooth, who offers up decent stuff, was confusing me a while back before i found out he was a Monero core dev.  i couldn't figure out why when i got skeptical about altcoins he'd always quickly negate anything i had to say on that.  also when we got to talking about the 49%-51% attacks against Bitcoin he was posting highly frequently against Bitcoin.  that's ok, he's smart and is entitled to his opinion.  but it was never clear until someone mentioned his Monero connection what was happening.

You're confusing cause and effect here. I'm involved with Monero specifically because I don't buy the Bitcoin maximalism argument, and Monero has technology that is actually interesting and actually adds something meaningful (unlikely dumb clones like Litecoin). At least, I don't buy the Bitcoin maximalism argument yet (at some point if Bitcoin continues to grow, perhaps after another 10x-100x, it will likely be correct). I consider Bitcoin to be a tiny pimple on the scale of global currencies and finances, so if anything the network effect is working very much against it, not for it. Cryptocurrencies have to succeed on the basis of compelling advantages that overcome a network effect, and if Bitcoin can do that, others can too. I see Bitcoin's lead now as being about as relevant as Novell's with Netware:

By 1990, Novell had an almost monopolistic position in NOS for any business requiring a network.

Or perhaps in line with platforms that once had a hugely dominant market share and weren't even replaced, directly, by anything (example: Palm Pilot).

But even that isn't right, because Bitcoin does't currently have a hugely dominant market share anywhere, outside of a few enthusiasts. (Don't misinterpret this as "Buy Monero instead" -- obviously Monero has even less of any kind of share.)

However, I'm also realistic that Bitcoin is a lot larger that any of others and my assets are allocated accordingly. I'm one of those guys you were just talking about who is (approximately) 90% in Bitcoin, 10% in Monero. And beyond that also 90% in non-crypto assets, which if you do the math makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets. If you want to call me a Monero shill based on that, go right ahead, but you are fooling yourself, and probably using that as an excuse to avoid objectively considering the points I raise.

BTW, I also agree with a lot of your points about sidechains and other bitcoin development issues. I don't fully support the 20 MB idea because I think 20x is just too much too fast, but if it was intended as a negotiating tactic to get something more modest through, then well done Gavin.

[TPTB_need_war]

Edit: I wrote the following before reading smooth's latest post above. He and I were apparently writing at the same time. Interesting to see how well I guessed his stance.

this whole debate is consistent with my long held belief that all innovation should occur on the mainchain.  if Bitcoin fails to do that as an open source project similar to linux, which was supposedly the great promise it made imo, then the whole concept of cryptocurrencies has failed and we'll just go back to fiat for the next hundred years.

Such underlined overly generalized grandiose black&white perspectives can usually be assumed to be false by applying Occam's Razor without any further analysis.

You've assumed:

1. Bitcoin won't end up monopolized by the State (which is I assume what you mean by your and most everyone's imprecise use of the term 'fiat').

2. Bitcoin is the only way to scale to masses (i.e. to compete with the fiats).

3. That the "whole purpose" of crypto-currency is to scale to the masses.

I have explained in detail in this thread that Bitcoin can not scale to the masses without violating assumption #1. And I have argued that for those of us who want to protect ourselves from #1, we need to violate assumption #3 and create an anonymous coin that does scale decentralized for the "rest of us" to use. In other to achieve that goal, we need to identity a niche market for crypto-currency that is large enough to achieve monetary scale but doesn't depend on the diligence of the preoccupied masses.

I have also explained in detail in this thread that the #2 assumption only applies if someone doesn't invent a design for crypto-currency that doesn't violate the End-to-end Principle and Principle of Least Power.

i've always said i'd welcome more privacy in Bitcoin and it's possible Monero does that.  i know there was a big technical issue months back but can't remember what it was.  maybe someone could clarify.  but that's beside the point.  it is NOT innovating on top of Bitcoin which i quite frankly see as a problem for it.  it is not leveraging upon the huge network effect already achieved by Bitcoin.  does that necessarily mean it will fail?  no.  but i think we get one chance with this b/c the implications are so huge.  if Bitcoin fails, they all fail.  if it's not improved upon or upgraded, it will fail.  if we all don't stick together as a group, it will fail.  if that means the economic majority has to fork off and shed the likes of the Blockstream cabal, we have a chance.  the more i think about it, the better i like the idea of getting rid of gmax and luke.  i think they're toxic.  yeah, gmax is a brilliant cryptographer but he can't be trusted with the keys or to run a company.  he's a KNOWN Bitcoin bear and posts an XMR donation address.  that's his prerogative but i think a core dev should be all out pushing and working on Bitcoin like Gavin does to advance the project forward.  shedding those guys would be a good thing.

It is implausible to put Monero's autonomous End-to-end Principle respecting anonymity onto the Bitcoin block chain. It would be a hard fork against numerous vested interests.

It is technically impossible to achieve that End-to-end Principle respecting anonymity off-chain.

Your conceptualization of a world of "all or nothing" flies in the face of the reason the internet scales, which is the autonomy and freedom of choice and freedom to have many different choices that is embodied in the End-to-end Principle.

There isn't one flavor of Unix nor Linux. And there isn't one operating system on the internet. The internet doesn't care which operating system the END user chooses.

Cypherdoc your simpleton myopia is going to be paradigm shifted and you'll be standing there dazed and confused and wondering what happened.

this hasn't even been the greatest Bear, imo, which was from 32 to 1.98 in 2011.

$1000 to < $50 will make it so. (I didn't place 100% odds on that potential outcome)

i've always said that the majority of ppl investing in cryptocurrencies will lose money.

SOBO (statement of the blatantly obvious)

Bitcoin is like threading a needle; it needs to stay private enough to prevent all out war with TPTB.  so far so good.

You meant stay non-private enough.

This death by a 1000 papercuts future is acceptable to most people and one of the reasons Bitcoin must be accepted as reality.

even smooth, who offers up decent stuff, was confusing me a while back before i found out he was a Monero core dev.  i couldn't figure out why when i got skeptical about altcoins he'd always quickly negate anything i had to say on that.  also when we got to talking about the 49%-51% attacks against Bitcoin he was posting highly frequently against Bitcoin.  that's ok, he's smart and is entitled to his opinion.  but it was never clear until someone mentioned his Monero connection what was happening.  i like to focus on what ppl's motivations are, that should be clear.  i won't let that cloud my judgment however.

I believe smooth would like to see maximum experimentation because he recognizes the potential for the death by 1000 papercuts future and in general I think he is interested in crypto-currency but isn't convinced we've hit on the best design yet. He may have a profit motive too in Monero, but I am not knowledgeable about to what degree that motivates him.

My motivation is clear. I think Bitcoin is the death by 1000 papercuts NWO future. I accept it as reality and for the network effects it brings to crypto-currency, yet I would rather die trying than accept that 1000 papercuts NWO future. And I am certain Bitcoin does not have the scaling attributes of the internet. It violates the fundamental End-to-end principle for scaling.

This guarantees that it is a dead-end (just as Facebook is a dead-end). But dead-ends can cause a lot of pain for a while.

The salient quote is:

Bitcoin can never scale as the internet did because it violates the two key scaling principles of the internet, End-to-end and Principle of Least Power. They might be able to scale it as they did Facebook to most people on earth, but it will never scale to most economic activity on earth (and note the distinction). The only way they win with Bitcoin (i.e. for it to encompass most economic activity) is by oppressing the economic freedom that will drive most of the future economic activity.

[Odalv]

...
However, I'm also realistic that Bitcoin is a lot larger that any of others and my assets are allocated accordingly. I'm one of those guys you were just talking about who is (approximately) 90% in Bitcoin, 10% in Monero. And beyond that also 90% in non-crypto assets, which if you do the math makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets. If you want to call me a Monero shill based on that, go right ahead, but you are fooling yourself, and probably using that as an excuse to avoid objectively considering the points I raise.
...

Smart boy snake called RPietila used XMR to take your money (just 1% but it is enough for him)

[smooth]

...
However, I'm also realistic that Bitcoin is a lot larger that any of others and my assets are allocated accordingly. I'm one of those guys you were just talking about who is (approximately) 90% in Bitcoin, 10% in Monero. And beyond that also 90% in non-crypto assets, which if you do the math makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets. If you want to call me a Monero shill based on that, go right ahead, but you are fooling yourself, and probably using that as an excuse to avoid objectively considering the points I raise.
...

Smart boy snake called RPietila used XMR to take your money (just 1% but it is enough for him)

I mined ~100% of the Monero I have, and then some.

[Odalv]

...
However, I'm also realistic that Bitcoin is a lot larger that any of others and my assets are allocated accordingly. I'm one of those guys you were just talking about who is (approximately) 90% in Bitcoin, 10% in Monero. And beyond that also 90% in non-crypto assets, which if you do the math makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets. If you want to call me a Monero shill based on that, go right ahead, but you are fooling yourself, and probably using that as an excuse to avoid objectively considering the points I raise.
...

Smart boy snake called RPietila used XMR to take your money (just 1% but it is enough for him)

I mined ~100% of the Monero I have, and then some.

:-)  ok, then you are serving him for free

[cypherdoc]

...
However, I'm also realistic that Bitcoin is a lot larger that any of others and my assets are allocated accordingly. I'm one of those guys you were just talking about who is (approximately) 90% in Bitcoin, 10% in Monero. And beyond that also 90% in non-crypto assets, which if you do the math makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets. If you want to call me a Monero shill based on that, go right ahead, but you are fooling yourself, and probably using that as an excuse to avoid objectively considering the points I raise.
...

Smart boy snake called RPietila used XMR to take your money (just 1% but it is enough for him)

I mined ~100% of the Monero I have, and then some.

btw, when gmax claims he has vested interest in Bitcoin, this is how i believe he would have gotten his BTC.  from free mining equipment donated to him for R&D.  i've seen him lobby for it pretty shamelessly.  i'll bet not a cent out of his pocket.

[TPTB_need_war]

even smooth, who offers up decent stuff, was confusing me a while back before i found out he was a Monero core dev.  i couldn't figure out why when i got skeptical about altcoins he'd always quickly negate anything i had to say on that.  also when we got to talking about the 49%-51% attacks against Bitcoin he was posting highly frequently against Bitcoin.  that's ok, he's smart and is entitled to his opinion.  but it was never clear until someone mentioned his Monero connection what was happening.

You're confusing cause and effect here. I'm involved with Monero specifically because I don't buy the Bitcoin maximalism argument, and Monero has technology that is actually interesting and actually adds something meaningful (unlikely dumb clones like Litecoin). At least, I don't buy the Bitcoin maximalism argument yet (at some point if Bitcoin continues to grow, perhaps after another 10x-100x, it will likely be correct). I consider Bitcoin to be a tiny pimple on the scale of global currencies and finances, so if anything the network effect is working very much against it, not for it. Cryptocurrencies have to succeed on the basis of compelling advantages that overcome a network effect, and if Bitcoin can do that, others can too. I see Bitcoin's lead now as being about as relevant as Novell's with Netware:

By 1990, Novell had an almost monopolistic position in NOS for any business requiring a network.

Or perhaps in line with platforms that once had a hugely dominant market share and weren't even replaced, directly, by anything (example: Palm Pilot).

But even that isn't right, because Bitcoin does't currently have a hugely dominant market share anywhere, outside of a few enthusiasts. (Don't misinterpret this as "Buy Monero instead" -- obviously Monero has even less of any kind of share.)

Bitcoin can't scale to future economic activity. It is impossible. It doesn't have the correct scaling attributes.

The existing financial systems can't scale either. The dying Industrial Age monetary and financial system is dying and "they" (society as a marriage of interests in collectivism) intend to apply expropriation and capital controls to any growth in the economy activity which can't be contained within this dying system which includes the End-to-end violating design of Bitcoin.



So I interpret your astute comment to mean that the actual network effects are out there in the Ends of the network and Bitcoin (in its current form) doesn't have a chance in hell of capturing them. I doubt you meant it that way though, but I am encouraging you to see my perspective. I suspect you favor complexity class arguments because they are more fundamental and compelling.

[Biodom]

even smooth, who offers up decent stuff, was confusing me a while back before i found out he was a Monero core dev.  i couldn't figure out why when i got skeptical about altcoins he'd always quickly negate anything i had to say on that.  also when we got to talking about the 49%-51% attacks against Bitcoin he was posting highly frequently against Bitcoin.  that's ok, he's smart and is entitled to his opinion.  but it was never clear until someone mentioned his Monero connection what was happening.

You're confusing cause and effect here. I'm involved with Monero specifically because I don't buy the Bitcoin maximalism argument, and Monero has technology that is actually interesting and actually adds something meaningful (unlikely dumb clones like Litecoin). At least, I don't buy the Bitcoin maximalism argument yet (at some point if Bitcoin continues to grow, perhaps after another 10x-100x, it will likely be correct). I consider Bitcoin to be a tiny pimple on the scale of global currencies and finances, so if anything the network effect is working very much against it, not for it. Cryptocurrencies have to succeed on the basis of compelling advantages that overcome a network effect, and if Bitcoin can do that, others can too. I see Bitcoin's lead now as being about as relevant as Novell's with Netware:

By 1990, Novell had an almost monopolistic position in NOS for any business requiring a network.

Or perhaps in line with platforms that once had a hugely dominant market share and weren't even replaced, directly, by anything (example: Palm Pilot).

But even that isn't right, because Bitcoin does't currently have a hugely dominant market share anywhere, outside of a few enthusiasts. (Don't misinterpret this as "Buy Monero instead" -- obviously Monero has even less of any kind of share.)

However, I'm also realistic that Bitcoin is a lot larger that any of others and my assets are allocated accordingly. I'm one of those guys you were just talking about who is (approximately) 90% in Bitcoin, 10% in Monero. And beyond that also 90% in non-crypto assets, which if you do the math makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets. If you want to call me a Monero shill based on that, go right ahead, but you are fooling yourself, and probably using that as an excuse to avoid objectively considering the points I raise.

BTW, I also agree with a lot of your points about sidechains and other bitcoin development issues. I don't fully support the 20 MB idea because I think 20x is just too much too fast, but if it was intended as a negotiating tactic to get something more modest through, then well done Gavin.

Very interesting notes.
1. I totally agree that dominant market share by bitcoin is currently misleading and Palm Pilot and Novell are great examples. I had Palm Pilot (and it is still there somewhere). At first it was exciting, but then it turned out not to be that useful (as Newton before it). As time passed, i used it less and less, until i just put it in a drawer. I also remember that it IPOed at hundreds and for a brief moment had market cap at around 100 bil or so.
2. I also have ~10% of my capital in crypto, but i was initially aiming at 20%. The difference is due to stock market outperformance and BTC decline.
I also bought some monero (maybe 1% of btc). Maybe I should increase my monero allocation a bit, but monero so far underperformed bitcoin, although it seems to be in a uptrend. However, with $9 mil theoretical market cap it is just too small right now and probably is just a dev coin for now.
3. My fears re bitcoin could be formulated very simply: it is possible (at this moment) that it will simply wither away not unlike the palm pilot and there is NO way to jump ship from bitcoin into a winning crypto (because it might not even born yet).
4. I have difficulty understanding a decentralization claim for bitcoin since apparently there is one person or a very small group (six people) that are anointed to make the most important changes.

[TPTB_need_war]

This morning I conceived how I can pay my gratitude to Monero while providing an anonymity function that I must have. And I mean by driving the price in an upward spiral. If my plans come to fruition.

(yeah I know it sounds like bullshit)

And yes this is a subtle hint to buy some Monero, and I have no vested interest. I own 0 XMR.

[smooth]

...
However, I'm also realistic that Bitcoin is a lot larger that any of others and my assets are allocated accordingly. I'm one of those guys you were just talking about who is (approximately) 90% in Bitcoin, 10% in Monero. And beyond that also 90% in non-crypto assets, which if you do the math makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets. If you want to call me a Monero shill based on that, go right ahead, but you are fooling yourself, and probably using that as an excuse to avoid objectively considering the points I raise.
...

Smart boy snake called RPietila used XMR to take your money (just 1% but it is enough for him)

I mined ~100% of the Monero I have, and then some.

:-)  ok, then you are serving him for free

I'm pretty sure my return on investment from Monero will always exceed his, but no I'm not particularly profit motivated by it, to answer another question from the thread. It's just interesting technology. If useful ideas from Monero end up being incorporated into Bitcoin (such as the dynamic block sizes), and then Monero withers away financially, i consider that a complete success. If you look at 1000 crypto coins after Bitcoin you will only find a few that actually do anything interesting at all, or even try to. Monero is one of them.

[Odalv]

...
However, I'm also realistic that Bitcoin is a lot larger that any of others and my assets are allocated accordingly. I'm one of those guys you were just talking about who is (approximately) 90% in Bitcoin, 10% in Monero. And beyond that also 90% in non-crypto assets, which if you do the math makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets. If you want to call me a Monero shill based on that, go right ahead, but you are fooling yourself, and probably using that as an excuse to avoid objectively considering the points I raise.
...

Smart boy snake called RPietila used XMR to take your money (just 1% but it is enough for him)

I mined ~100% of the Monero I have, and then some.

btw, when gmax claims he has vested interest in Bitcoin, this is how i believe he would have gotten his BTC.  from free mining equipment donated to him for R&D.  i've seen him lobby for it pretty shamelessly.  i'll bet not a cent out of his pocket.

gmax is brilliant and educated mind.  ...

[TPTB_need_war]

there's a fundamental disconnect with developing new altcoins that Bitcoiners should be able to migrate to or exchange for.  it's called instability or even inflation.

this ties in with Bitcoin's promise of being open source and being programmable money.  if Monero or any other coin is proven to be successful to the point of forcing all Bitcoiner's to switch, then i think crypto money as a concept fails.  why?  it's b/c that process causes so many ppl to lose money in aggregate from the migration process.

You failed to incorporate the fact that larger markets can be obtained with new capabilities.

WYSIWYG (Windows, MacOS, etc) subsumed MSDOS and I went from selling 30,000 copies of physically distributed software in 1980s to distributing a million copies of CoolPage over the internet at the turn of the century.

Larger markets means a larger size of the global wealth pie for crypto.

Bitcoin can't scale to even a minute fraction of the economic activity coming the Knowledge Age. Thus you are highly limiting your slice of future global wealth with your stance.

Bitcoin has given a promise and it needs to deliver on that.  that is what i will support.  innovation and growth to all corners of the Earth for maximum decentralization.

Impossible with Bitcoin. Impossible. Apparently you don't understand well why I can state "impossible" with certainty?

Did you understand that one of the assumptions in Metcalf or Reed's scaling laws is that the Ends of the network must be able to freely interact with each other.

You are all excited about scaling to Visa scale, and I am all excited about scaling to millions of micropayments per second. It isn't just transaction volume rate limits that are the problem with Bitcoin, but also the fact that the Ends are not autonomous thus morass will constrain.

[TPTB_need_war]

How do you create a network topology that is decentralized at any scale?

With a design that enables the ends of the network to be autonomous (e.g. the internet), i.e. the End-to-End principle. Ideally the power (autonomy) of the ends over the center (or the group) should get stronger the more it is Sybil attacked (i.e. the attack doesn't exist).

Abstractly not erroneously redefining decentralization to be centralization-by-free-will-but-no-other-choice (aka "one for all, and all for one" collectivism) as Bitcoin did:

Marching in lockstep doesn't mean centralized (of course; that's the whole idea of Bitcoin in a way).

So no universal agreement on the state of the ledger? There must be some way of settling up over time. But I guess you just mean the protocol doesn't have to be shared, in some sense. This may be outside my technical knowledge. Not being a coder at all, I admit I haven't thought a great deal about how Bitcoin runs under the hood until recently. Your hints are getting somewhat tantalizing, but without seeing the whole thing we of course can't know if there's some obvious error if you're recreating Hashcash or Ripple/Stellar (can you? if it's that important you may as well open it to peer review; with a lot of it precoded you could still easily be first out of the gate).

There must be universal agreement on the state of the ledger and it must insure ordering. But there are aspects of Bitcoin's design which are unnecessary for those narrow requirements and this excess power (violation of Principle of Least Power) at the center constrains the Ends of the network more than necessary (violation of the End-to-end Principle).

When an altcoin is launched that is a form of peer review. It is possible that a qualified developer will join with me and be able to peer review my design. If someone of smooth's caliber wanted to join and take over the public face, I would grateful. That might relieve much of the vexing thought process I am going through about whether and how to proceed.

[cypherdoc]

walls are finally starting to posture bullish.  it's b/c the Dow is starting to roll:

[TPTB_need_war]

makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets

Some of have publicly commented that you ended up coding less for Monero than they had hoped.

If I said that hypothetically if I was a dev on a coin and my holding in the coin was only 1% of my assets then I wouldn't have much incentive to work on it full-time (forum posting not included as work); would this strike you or anyone else as being unethical or in any other way incorrect or inappropriate?

I am getting at whether a dev having a large stake in a coin is detrimental or positive?

I understand Cypherdoc criticizes Gregory's stake in Bitcoin because Greg is on the other side of the block size increase debate. And he seems to be jealous that Greg was gifted some hardware in exchange for (and/or to aid) his development work.

Seems to me that there will always be jealously, but Satoshi seems to mostly get a free ride. Is it because he is anonymous, gone, or because he caused a star to appear in the eyes of the Bitcoin supporters?

[cypherdoc]

Looks like Gavin's plan to get the miners to join his coup d'état is not going so great, lol

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114481/chinese-exchanges-reject-gavin-andresens-20-mb-block-size-increase

LOL, this quote just cut the legs out from Blockstream's main objection to raising the block limit; that being the large block attack  on small miners supposedly facilitated by "superior"  bandwidth connections. Well, the largest miners in the world are telling us they have "inferior"  connections! Lol! What a bunch of amateurs.

“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

i just have to repeat this quote and add another from the article to discredit the anti-Gavin's #1 objection to increasing the blocksize; the large miner large block attack:

"Similarly, Wang argued:
“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

this was from BTCChina's director of engineering Mikael Wang, the #3 in size mining pool in the world.  his statement is inclusive of the Discus Fish and AntPool, the #1 & #2 pools in size in the world as they are also in China.

so who has more credibility in this matter?  the pools themselves, who have the hard data?  or the armchair apparatchiks being the likes of Greg Maxwell, LukeJr, pwiullie, Corallo, and Peter Todd?  the answer is simple:  the armchair experts are wrong.

[TPTB_need_war]

What I said is it is possible to layer similar schemes on top of Bitcoin. For an example just look at the reusable payment codes justusranvier posted here a bit ago. That alone gets you a long way towards the anonymity of Monero, and more and more methods will continue to be developed on top of Bitcoin over time, achieving whatever level of anonymity desired.

None of those off-chain schemes can provide autonomous mixing, thus they can never scale per the End-to-end Principle. Smooth and I already rebutted JustUs upthread.

And no there won't be any discovery to make it possible to do autonomous off-chain mixing on Bitcoin. I thought about this for months. And I am confident smooth thought about this deeply. He and I discussed and debated these issues in great detail last year.

DarkCoin proposed (implemented?) a prequeue of mixes to try to make it behave more autonomously. But this is an "obfuscation by centralization", which is also what the masternodes of DRK did to solve the jamming problem of CoinJoin thus trading off anonymity which is unmasked by the masternode.

[hdbuck]

Looks like Gavin's plan to get the miners to join his coup d'état is not going so great, lol

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114481/chinese-exchanges-reject-gavin-andresens-20-mb-block-size-increase

LOL, this quote just cut the legs out from Blockstream's main objection to raising the block limit; that being the large block attack  on small miners supposedly facilitated by "superior"  bandwidth connections. Well, the largest miners in the world are telling us they have "inferior"  connections! Lol! What a bunch of amateurs.

“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

i just have to repeat this quote and add another from the article to discredit the anti-Gavin's #1 objection to increasing the blocksize; the large miner large block attack:

"Similarly, Wang argued:
“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

this was from BTCChina's director of engineering Mikael Wang, the #3 in size mining pool in the world.  his statement is inclusive of the Discus Fish and AntPool, the #1 & #2 pools in size in the world as they are also in China.

so who has more credibility in this matter?  the pools themselves, who have the hard data?  or the armchair apparatchiks being the likes of Greg Maxwell, LukeJr, pwiullie, Corallo, and Peter Todd?  the answer is simple:  the armchair experts are wrong.

Armchairs might be wrong. But toilet USGavin is being flushed away by chineese pandas. China 1 usg 0

[cypherdoc]

I understand Cypherdoc criticizes Gregory's stake in Bitcoin because Greg is on the other side of the block size increase debate. And he seems to be jealous that Greg was gifted some hardware in exchange for (and/or to aid) his development work.

Seems to me that there will always be jealously, but Satoshi seems to mostly get a free ride. Is it because he is anonymous, gone, or because he caused a star to appear in the eyes of the Bitcoin supporters?

don't be an idiot about what you don't know.  my criticism of gmax goes back years from simply observing his bearishness and misunderstandings around mining centralization.  it then escalated several notches from the Press Center debate from what i found to be highly authoritarian behavior.  he also has chased me off the dev IRC channels in the past which by itself wasn't a big deal but contributed to my thinking of him as a self important apparatchik presiding over Bitcoin.  then also, i've observed his shameless dealings in the mining hardware section where he lobbies for free hardware.  oh and then the SC's financial conflict with Blockstream.  he keeps adding to the list rather quickly though now with this anti Gavin debate wherein it's becoming all too clear to the community that he is a problem.