Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[justusranvier]

I hate the fact that politics must be played.  But after this debacle, sidechains had better be more awesome than the second coming of Satoshi if they want to make mods that are so much more complicated than changing a constant that there is simply no comparative basis.
My guess is that they want to delay blocksize so they can cram sidechain mods into the same fork as a negotiated compromise.  But this is turning into a huge mistake.  They are burning all the goodwill they had, and making us suspect them of not wanting what's best for bitcoin.  This reputation is going to badly affect their ability to get consensus in the future.

The opposition to Gavin's 2000% jump proposal comes unanimously from every active technical contributor to Bitcoin Core who has spoken up. This should suggest to you that your understanding of the comparative basis likely miscalibrated.  Though there is no comparative basis, 2WP sidechains are something that just requires non-broken smart contracts, it's not something that needs a hard-fork (and the centralized fedpeg sidechain stuff is indistinguishable, uncensorable, and unblockable: you can't prevent people from using it no matter how much you think you should be able to tell them that they can manage their funds).

Considering how often cypherdoc brags about his thread here being filled with economic wisdom, it's surprising to see views like "changing a constant simple and safe", after all 21 million bitcoins is merely a constant (and, pedantically, one the system didn't originally enforce....).  Try another strawman.
 

can you really not tell the difference between the money supply guarentee and a transaction rate limit?

[cypherdoc]

I hate the fact that politics must be played.  But after this debacle, sidechains had better be more awesome than the second coming of Satoshi if they want to make mods that are so much more complicated than changing a constant that there is simply no comparative basis.

My guess is that they want to delay blocksize so they can cram sidechain mods into the same fork as a negotiated compromise.  But this is turning into a huge mistake.  They are burning all the goodwill they had, and making us suspect them of not wanting what's best for bitcoin.  This reputation is going to badly affect their ability to get consensus in the future.

Greg is hugely disappointed that the Elements thread is off the first pg of Reddit.  and rightfully so, it's a bad sign that's theres not more interest.  apparently the initial software is very buggy; not unexpected.  it's early, i know.  but i totally agree they've burned almost all their goodwill by being so obstinate and unforgiving in this debate.  unfortunately in finances and investing, the best deals are made on golf courses btwn friends and ppl you can trust.  Greg et al may the best cryptographers in the world but if no one trust their motivations on simple issues like Core code, how can they be trusted in deeply complex issues like SC Elements?  and i'm not talking about the crypto, i'm talking about the economic assumptions behind it and the business models upon which they are laid out and introduced to the community.  i wouldn't want to be investing in BS at this pt.

[justusranvier]

I hate the fact that politics must be played.  But after this debacle, sidechains had better be more awesome than the second coming of Satoshi if they want to make mods that are so much more complicated than changing a constant that there is simply no comparative basis.

My guess is that they want to delay blocksize so they can cram sidechain mods into the same fork as a negotiated compromise.  But this is turning into a huge mistake.  They are burning all the goodwill they had, and making us suspect them of not wanting what's best for bitcoin.  This reputation is going to badly affect their ability to get consensus in the future.

Greg is hugely disappointed that the Elements thread is off the first pg of Reddit.  and rightfully so, it's a bad sign that's theres not more interest.  apparently the initial software is very buggy; not unexpected.  it's early, i know.  but i totally agree they've burned almost all their goodwill by being so obstinate and unforgiving in this debate.  unfortunately in finances and investing, the best deals are made on golf courses btwn friends and ppl you can trust.  Greg et al may the best cryptographers in the world but if no one trust their motivations on simple issues like Core code, how can they be trusted in deeply complex issues like SC Elements?  and i'm not talking about the crypto, i'm talking about the economic assumptions behind it and the business models upon which they are laid out and introduced to the community.  i wouldn't want to be investing in BS at this pt.

There really should be more interest in Confidential Values. That's a great technique.

[cypherdoc]

I hate the fact that politics must be played.  But after this debacle, sidechains had better be more awesome than the second coming of Satoshi if they want to make mods that are so much more complicated than changing a constant that there is simply no comparative basis.
My guess is that they want to delay blocksize so they can cram sidechain mods into the same fork as a negotiated compromise.  But this is turning into a huge mistake.  They are burning all the goodwill they had, and making us suspect them of not wanting what's best for bitcoin.  This reputation is going to badly affect their ability to get consensus in the future.

The opposition to Gavin's 2000% jump proposal comes unanimously from every active technical contributor to Bitcoin Core who has spoken up. This should suggest to you that your understanding of the comparative basis likely miscalibrated.  Though there is no comparative basis, 2WP sidechains are something that just requires non-broken smart contracts, it's not something that needs a hard-fork (and the centralized fedpeg sidechain stuff is indistinguishable, uncensorable, and unblockable: you can't prevent people from using it no matter how much you think you should be able to tell them that they can manage their funds).

Considering how often cypherdoc brags about his thread here being filled with economic wisdom, it's surprising to see views like "changing a constant simple and safe", after all 21 million bitcoins is merely a constant (and, pedantically, one the system didn't originally enforce....).  Try another strawman.
 

it's certainly a lot simpler than anything you've proposed; oh wait, maybe not, that'd be nothing.

as for Adam's extension block, bless his heart, i know he's trying but at this pt it is just too complicated.  the other devs think so too.  i read the dev transcript. 

[gmaxwell]

it's certainly a lot simpler than anything you've proposed; oh wait, maybe not, that'd be nothing.

Yes, you cannot be simpler than changing a constant-- but as I pointed out, changing a constant is no measure of safety, correctness, or ethics. There are plenty of one character changes that would utterly destroy the system if adopted.

And contrary to your claim, I've proposed many things--- even going back some time. For example, adjusting the limit to respect the impact on UTXO so that the costs better match the actual costs; adjusting blocks based on the 33rd percentile of miner preferences (similar to Jeff's proposal of 25th percentile), and allowing miners to mine blocks over the limit quadratically with increased effective-difficulty-- so if the network is actually backlogged with fees miners can catch up without being completely unhinged.

And then there is all the separate fundamental scaling work which I originally proposed, like the whole notion of UTXOs as a separately tracked and commutable resource, fraud proofs, etc.

apparently the initial software is very buggy; not unexpected. 

Huh?  Dunno what you're talking about there!  The network has been running flawlessly.  While we're sure there are, no doubt, lots of issues-- as we optimized for adding interesting features instead of QA-- and you really really really shouldn't go create an altcoin out of it (because it will crash and burn and we will laugh)... it works quite well, and I'm not aware of any complaints to the contrary.    Are you unable to exit FUD-everything-gmaxwell-touches mode for even a moment?

There really should be more interest in Confidential Values. That's a great technique.

Thanks. There are a couple of other angles that I think more people will be excited about once they 'click' for them.

Tying the subjects together-- for a given state of technology and amount of extra capacity (be it bandwidth, cpu, etc.) that capacity can be spent in various ways, by taking on increased load, by improving fungibility or privacy, by increasing decentralization. I happen to think we need all of these things. But a simplified understanding that only looks at one dimension isn't going to come up with a good engineering conclusion.  And sure, more X sound great if you consider it in isolation, but perhaps not when you realize it means less Y and never gaining any Z.  One of the reasons I think it's important to be cautious here is so that we can have CT (or a superior successor technology) in the Bitcoin network and not just in a sidechain.

[cypherdoc]

it's certainly a lot simpler than anything you've proposed; oh wait, maybe not, that'd be nothing.

Yes, you cannot be simpler than changing a constant-- but as I pointed out, changing a constant is no measure of safety, correctness, or ethics. There are plenty of one character changes that would utterly destroy the system if adopted.

well, we'll never know unless we try.  Bitcoin needs growth and artificial restriction at 1MB does not match Satoshi's original vision.

And contrary to your claim, I've proposed many things--- even going back some time. For example, adjusting the limit to respect the impact on UTXO so that the costs better match the actual costs; adjusting blocks based on the 33rd percentile of miner preferences (similar to Jeff's proposal of 25th percentile), and allowing miners to mine blocks over the limit quadratically with increased effective-difficulty-- so if the network is actually backlogged with fees miners can catch up without being completely unhinged.

And then there is all the separate fundamental scaling work which I originally proposed, like the whole notion of UTXOs as a separately tracked and commutable resource, fraud proofs, etc.

at this pt, you'd have to propose a concrete commitment plan and present it to Gavin to prove yourself.  no more talk.

apparently the initial software is very buggy; not unexpected.

Huh?  Dunno what you're talking about there!  The network has been running flawlessly.  While we're sure there are, no doubt, lots of issues-- as we optimized for adding interesting features instead of QA-- and you really really really shouldn't go create an altcoin out of it (because it will crash and burn and we will laugh)... it works quite well, and I'm not aware of any complaints to the contrary.    Are you unable to exit FUD-everything-gmaxwell-touches mode for even a moment?

i said it was expected.  you know there was thread on Reddit yesterday where some of the guys were talking about having problems.  it got shoved so far down that my just now search 3 full pages deep can't find it.  it's not a criticism, just interesting given your disappointment that the Elements announcement thread is now gone too.

There really should be more interest in Confidential Values. That's a great technique.

Thanks. There are a couple of other angles that I think more people will be excited about once they 'click' for them.

Tying the subjects together-- for a given state of technology and amount of extra capacity (be it bandwidth, cpu, etc.) that capacity can be spent in various ways, by taking on increased load, by improving fungibility or privacy, by increasing decentralization. I happen to think we need all of these things. But a simplified understanding that only looks at one dimension isn't going to come up with a good engineering conclusion.  And sure, more X sound great if you consider it in isolation, but perhaps not when you realize it means less Y and never gaining any Z.  One of the reasons I think it's important to be cautious here is so that we can have CT (or a superior successor technology) in the Bitcoin network and not just in a sidechain.

btw, i haven't heard your thoughts on Jeff's proposal.

[gmaxwell]

at this pt, you'd have to propose a concrete commitment plan and present it to Gavin to prove yourself.  no more talk.

LOL. Present it to Gavin?  You realize that Gavin hasn't actually tendered a specific proposal-- it's all talk and political maneuvering with the general public, right?  No BIP draft, no pull request, no development thread (except for the one created days after by opponents of his move in shock by the approach). As far as I can tell the whole situation was specifically constructed to be a big show and justify a "governance" crisis and land-grab (a belief also supported by the emails Mike was sending the gmx account a year ago). That noise about the XT hardfork?  No commits on the repository for months, and except for two patches even the months old stuff is just copying Bitcoin Core-- the work of all these other people who are so easily disrespected now. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Meanwhile, beyond making proposals, creating simulations, oh yea and developing bunch of highly useful new free software for Bitcoin, the rest of the people who actually do the work continuing to truck on.  In any case-- these things have been proposed in the usual forums. Gavin seems unwilling to consider anything other than a massive uncontrolled jump in blocksize as far as I can tell, fortunately Jeff isn't interested in the same kind of purely political end run.

And here again we find that you say something untrue (that I hadn't made proposals related to block size), it's corrected (no, in fact I've tried several specific proposals), then the bar moves.

[cypherdoc]

hadn't seen this simulation from the btcd folks before.  looks promising:

Conclusions

Aside from the obvious network and storage constraints of running a full Bitcoin node at large block sizes, it appears the Bitcoin network is capable of handling a substantially higher transaction volume than it does currently. The CPU time being dominated by ECDSA signature checks at high transaction rates suggests a clustered full node architecture could process credit-card-like transaction rates by using a load balancing / offload approach to ECDSA signature checking, e.g. a full node with a 10 machine cluster would top out at >2,000 tps.

The resources and know-how required to run a clustered node like this may impose a significant centralizing force on Bitcoin. Backpressure against the centralization of Bitcoin may well drive alternative solutions to having all transactions on-chain. Alternatively, it may end up that Bitcoin adoption grows slowly enough that the computing power of a single node grows quickly enough to avoid requiring a clustered full node architecture.

Do note that btcsim does nothing to address the current issues with block propagation time and block size. These are serious issues that are already being addressed by Gavin and the other Core developers.

https://blog.conformal.com/btcsim-simulating-the-rise-of-bitcoin/

maybe offchain for profit companies are pursuing the wrong strategy by limiting block sizes on MC if they truly want to push tx's to their products? 

the important part of their conclusion is that they acknowledge that organic growth of tx volume doesn't necessarily immediately ramp to the block limit; it is in fact controlled by market forces and adoption by users.  even if tx volume did ramp to the max i actually wouldn't be afraid of a scenario like this.  that's b/c i'd bet dollars to donuts that exchange price would ramp with it thus allowing me personally to have some extra fun running a "supernode".

[cypherdoc]

at this pt, you'd have to propose a concrete commitment plan and present it to Gavin to prove yourself.  no more talk.

LOL. Present it to Gavin?  You realize that Gavin hasn't actually tendered a specific proposal-- it's all talk and political maneuvering with the general public, right?  No BIP draft, no pull request, no development thread (except for the one created days after by opponents of his move in shock by the approach). As far as I can tell the whole situation was specifically constructed to be a big show and justify a "governance" crisis and land-grab (a belief also supported by the emails Mike was sending the gmx account a year ago). That noise about the XT hardfork?  No commits on the repository for months, and except for two patches even the months old stuff is just copying Bitcoin Core-- the work of all these other people who are so easily disrespected now. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Meanwhile, beyond making proposals, creating simulations, oh yea and developing bunch of highly useful new free software for Bitcoin, the rest of the people who actually do the work continuing to truck on.  In any case-- these things have been proposed in the usual forums. Gavin seems unwilling to consider anything other than a massive uncontrolled jump in blocksize as far as I can tell, fortunately Jeff isn't interested in the same kind of purely political end run.

And here again we find that you say something untrue (that I hadn't made proposals related to block size), it's corrected (no, in fact I've tried several specific proposals), then the bar moves.

so it sounds to me that you aren't willing to even talk to Gavin on this issue, is that right?

Greg, would you want to be lead core dev?

[gmaxwell]

so it sounds to me that you aren't willing to even talk to Gavin on this issue, is that right?

In public, sure and I have.

It's just that I think there is unlikely to be an agreement there. As far as I can tell Gavin and Mike have a vision of a future where Bitcoin is "decenterlized" in the way the existing central banking system is-- rather than being secured by a decenteralized proof of work consensus (or similar) where the rules dominate the system instead of politics; or at a lest that its okay to become that way now and then maybe worry about it later if we don't like it.  It's not a view I share, and with such different objectives its difficult to agree on the the foundations needed for agreement when a true trade-off must be made.  Mike thinks that transactions should be completely free forever and that the system has failed if they're not.. well you can see the perspective differences outlined here, probably better than I am going to explain it right now: https://medium.com/@allenpiscitello/what-is-bitcoin-s-value-proposition-b7309be442e3

Greg, would you want to be lead core dev?

No, among other reasons, it would be foolish as a US person..., and incidentally, I think the lead on Bitcoin Core-- Wladimir--  has done and continues to do an absolutely tremendous job. Though I suspect you read too much into lead-- it doesn't mean leader except in a person who helps people organize efforts sense. In Bitcoin another term for the world "leader" in the traditional top down governance sense, is "single point of failure"-- the part you compromise to undermine the whole thing. By Bitcoin's design and nature it can't have one of those, for better or worse.

the important part of their conclusion is that they acknowledge that organic growth of tx volume doesn't necessarily immediately ramp to the block limit; it is in fact controlled by market forces and adoption by users.  even if tx volume did ramp to the max i actually wouldn't be afraid of a scenario like this.  that's b/c i'd bet dollars to donuts that exchange price would ramp with it thus allowing me personally to have some extra fun running a "supernode".

As Jeff pointed out in his writeup, blocks have long been '100% full' relative to to whatever limit is being applied. If there is excess space, there is someone somewhere who will try to use it to store their data... be it some outlawed pornography they want to try to make censorship resistant or just 0 BTC  payments to advertise to people. A single while loop is an effectively infinite capacity demand, and a price of zero thats what we would have.  There have been a half dozen attempted companies trying to do "data archival in the blockchain", yadda yadda-- turns out globally replicated storage that other people pay for is pretty attractive!.   Though the traditional hard limit isn't necessary to block out crap like the unsolicited commercial advertising, but I'm personally very uncomfortable with putting ourselves in the position where the health of the network depends on miners censoring transactions-- I much prefer the politically neutral economics of competing for the available resources with fees.

[Adrian-x]

I hate the fact that politics must be played.  But after this debacle, sidechains had better be more awesome than the second coming of Satoshi if they want to make mods that are so much more complicated than changing a constant that there is simply no comparative basis.
My guess is that they want to delay blocksize so they can cram sidechain mods into the same fork as a negotiated compromise.  But this is turning into a huge mistake.  They are burning all the goodwill they had, and making us suspect them of not wanting what's best for bitcoin.  This reputation is going to badly affect their ability to get consensus in the future.

The opposition to Gavin's 2000% jump proposal comes unanimously from every active technical contributor to Bitcoin Core who has spoken up. This should suggest to you that your understanding of the comparative basis likely miscalibrated.  Though there is no comparative basis, 2WP sidechains are something that just requires non-broken smart contracts, it's not something that needs a hard-fork (and the centralized fedpeg sidechain stuff is indistinguishable, uncensorable, and unblockable: you can't prevent people from using it no matter how much you think you should be able to tell them that they can manage their funds).

Considering how often cypherdoc brags about his thread here being filled with economic wisdom, it's surprising to see views like "changing a constant simple and safe", after all 21 million bitcoins is merely a constant (and, pedantically, one the system didn't originally enforce....).  Try another strawman.
 

MV = PT

A hard cap on the supply "M" was always the intent.
During my time spent immersed in Bitcoin never was the intent to limit Velocity or Transactions too be enforced by the Bitcoin protocol.

The idea of limiting Velocity or Transactions is a radical one, M is intentionally limited in the Bitcoin experiment, not V or T. Thinking it's OK to move Bitcoins V or T to a shidechain that is managed by the same incentives scheme that preserves the Bitcoin protocol is as radical as increasing "M" in the Bitcoin experiment.  

and to think there is no difference between "2WP sidechains are something that just requires non-broken smart contracts" in effect Sidechain Elements, a fantastic achievement by the way, and doing the same thing without a trust or a distributed server enforced by Bitcoin protocol to manipulate V or T  off the Bitcoin blockchain is an expression of macro economic ignorance.  

[kazuki49]

As Jeff pointed out in his writeup, blocks have long been '100% full' relative to to whatever limit is being applied. If there is excess space, there is someone somewhere who will try to use it to store their data... be it some outlawed pornography they want to try to make censorship resistant or just 0 BTC  payments to advertise to people. A single while loop is an effectively infinite capacity demand, and a price of zero thats what we would have.  There have been a half dozen attempted companies trying to do "data archival in the blockchain", yadda yadda-- turns out globally replicated storage that other people pay for is pretty attractive!.   Though the traditional hard limit isn't necessary to block out crap like the unsolicited commercial advertising, but I'm personally very uncomfortable with putting ourselves in the position where the health of the network depends on miners censoring transactions-- I much prefer the politically neutral economics of competing for the available resources with fees.

all valid concerns and points, too bad all the pro-forkers see is unwarranted noise between them and mass adoption™, people pushing for hard-forks right now look very retarded and desperate, look at the derpness:



coffee-heads are going to destroy Bitcoin and I'll love to watch the show.

now contrast with some wisdom:

[cypherdoc]

If there is excess space, there is someone somewhere who will try to use it to store their data... be it some outlawed pornography they want to try to make censorship resistant or just 0 BTC  payments to advertise to people. A single while loop is an effectively infinite capacity demand, and a price of zero thats what we would have.

aren't these non std tx's?

  There have been a half dozen attempted companies trying to do "data archival in the blockchain", yadda yadda-- turns out globally replicated storage that other people pay for is pretty attractive!.   Though the traditional hard limit isn't necessary to block out crap like the unsolicited commercial advertising, but I'm personally very uncomfortable with putting ourselves in the position where the health of the network depends on miners censoring transactions-- I much prefer the politically neutral economics of competing for the available resources with fees.

i disagree with this.  in a perfect world, the miners and users should be negotiating fees btwn them with you as core dev leaving any fee manipulating mechanisms (speed limits) out of the protocol.  that is what Jeff brought up in his BIP and represents insight you should consider.

[cypherdoc]

I am a Monero Pimp & I love Bitcoin conflict

meanwhile:

[thezerg]

I hate the fact that politics must be played.  But after this debacle, sidechains had better be more awesome than the second coming of Satoshi if they want to make mods that are so much more complicated than changing a constant that there is simply no comparative basis.
My guess is that they want to delay blocksize so they can cram sidechain mods into the same fork as a negotiated compromise.  But this is turning into a huge mistake.  They are burning all the goodwill they had, and making us suspect them of not wanting what's best for bitcoin.  This reputation is going to badly affect their ability to get consensus in the future.

The opposition to Gavin's 2000% jump proposal comes unanimously from every active technical contributor to Bitcoin Core who has spoken up. This should suggest to you that your understanding of the comparative basis likely miscalibrated.  Though there is no comparative basis, 2WP sidechains are something that just requires non-broken smart contracts, it's not something that needs a hard-fork (and the centralized fedpeg sidechain stuff is indistinguishable, uncensorable, and unblockable: you can't prevent people from using it no matter how much you think you should be able to tell them that they can manage their funds).

Considering how often cypherdoc brags about his thread here being filled with economic wisdom, it's surprising to see views like "changing a constant simple and safe", after all 21 million bitcoins is merely a constant (and, pedantically, one the system didn't originally enforce....).  Try another strawman.
 

I'm tired of your pedantic FUD.  The system originally had a 30+MB implicit limit which was then reduced.  AFAIK the fact that the system didn't enforce the 21million was a bug.  The intention was always sound money. 

Seriously, look at ANY Bitcoin pitch.  Every single one explicitly predicts features that require more transactions than can fit in 1MB.  The promise was NEVER "someday, you'll never use bitcoins but your bank will".  At the same time from the very beginning Satoshi even said that as the network grows, the full nodes would become more centralized.  But he understood that that does not matter because membership is STILL permissionless.  Yes, it might require more money to buy a bigger computer and network but anyone can still join.  Just like it requires more money to mine today.

You have a problem with 20MB, fine.  So propose 8, 4 or something that is not just "wait and see".  However, I never saw a post from you guys about how you tried it with 20MB and it didn't work. But I saw a careful analysis by Gavin showing how it DID work. 

And scalability is harming the network RIGHT NOW, because developers aren't going to base all their work on something that won't work (or won't work without who-knows-how-high fees).

As Cypherdoc will attest, I was Blockstream and sidechain's biggest supporter on this topic.  But now I say he was right.  I no longer trust that you guys aren't trying to steal all Bitcoin's value into a sidechain.

[gmaxwell]

If you're going to argue that the "original" has some kind of terribly weight to it, then you need to come to grips with all the other ways it was originally broken.  The limitation to 1MB was intentional, not a bug.  Nor was the additional temporary soft limits below 1MB.   No one in the technical community is arguing that it should by 1MB forever, other than a panic end run around the process, breaking up consensus, and a huge leap thats completely out of proportion with safe operation or current demand just doesn't make sense.

Every single one explicitly predicts features that require more transactions than can fit in 1MB.  The promise was NEVER "someday, you'll never use bitcoins but your bank will".

Good thing then that there is no one in the technical sphere saying that.

You have a problem with 20MB, fine.  So propose 8, 4 or something that is not just "wait and see".  However, I never saw a post from you guys about how you tried it with 20MB and it didn't work. But I saw a careful analysis by Gavin showing how it DID work.

Many things have been proposed, moreover, when we tried it and it didn't work we went about _fixing_ the problems in the system. (Heck, good luck getting an older version of Bitcoin core synced with the chain with the _current_ sizes!). Do you read Bitcoin Development? do you read the commit and pull request feed? Do you read the bitcoin-dev channel logs? If not why would you have expected to see these things?  The only reason to take technical work out of the ordinary open to everyone technical channels is political gamesmanship. I for one prefer to avoid making it look like Bitcoin is blowing up (in spite of whatever concerns I will gladly bring to people's attention in the appropriate forums).

The constant attacks on sidechains/blockstream are because you think you can manipulate people with pat answers-- but the claims are bogus and easily established as such; the opposition to the 2000% jump in the Bitcoin development community universal it's Gavin thats the odd man out, yes indeed, that includes all the tech people at my company too-- but it's easy to show our views on the subject existed long before the company.  Worse, it's illogical, huge blocks and the ability to willy nilly change Bitcoin would make sidechains a lot easier to deploy.  In terms of interests, I'd be all for it, if I were not concerned about it being an existential threat to Bitcoin as a practical, decentralized system.

And scalability is harming the network RIGHT NOW, because developers aren't going to base all their work on something that won't work (or won't work without who-knows-how-high fees).

I like your euphemistic "developers" where are these mystery people? What are the project's you're talking about? As far as not knowing what the fees will be in the future-- thats fundamental, less than a half dozen miners could decide tonight that all future txn will need 1 BTC fees.

meanwhile:

Yea, well, got a chart of Bitcoin since Monday?  Ahem.

[cypherdoc]

guys, i think it's pretty clear that Greg isn't even going to consider Jeff's proposal as viable, unless you'd like to say otherwise Greg.  your non-response to my query says so not to mention your rhetoric.

thus, we all have to make our own plans whether or not to support XT.  i know i will be.

edit:  oh btw, since Sidechains Whitepaper release in October?  $380 to where we are today. Ahem.

[gmaxwell]

guys, i think it's pretty clear that Greg isn't even going to consider Jeff's proposal as viable, unless you'd like to say otherwise Greg.  your non-response to my query says so not to mention your rhetoric.

I did respond to your query! Jeff's proposal is a bit underdefined right now, but to the extent that it isn't it's a good step forward. (Have you read it? It makes many of the points I've been making that you so vigorously have disagreed with...)

[cypherdoc]

guys, i think it's pretty clear that Greg isn't even going to consider Jeff's proposal as viable, unless you'd like to say otherwise Greg.  your non-response to my query says so not to mention your rhetoric.

I did respond to your query! Jeff's proposal is a bit underdefined right now, but to the extent that it isn't it's a good step forward. (Have you read it? It makes many of the points I've been making that you so vigorously have disagreed with...)

i've read the salient parts of it and i don't agree with all of his assumptions.  such as the part about large blocks causing centralization.  i think the dynamic is inc blocks-->inc users-->inc merchants-->inc full nodes-->inc value-->inc price.  the reason full node #'s should actually inc, not dec, is the growth dynamic that will encourage more merchants to fund their own nodes for security reasons and that they can write them off thru the business.  it's ok to push most full nodes up one level to merchants and/or supernodes.  users in foreign countries or behind Tor don't need to run full nodes.  the value of the network will grow with the square of the user numbers.  in fact, centralization is exacerbated with 1MB blocks.  that's so clearly obvious as tx's are pushed off network onto centralized services like CB.  plus, the small niche community of user geeks is a much easier target for law enforcement.  diffusing Bitcoin and the user base out into developing countries is also where Bitcoin stands the greatest chance to really take hold and entrench itself.  i guarantee you a little African kid is more likely to say FU to his gvt than you would be to the USG from the use of Bitcoin.  

[PenguinFire]

It is crazy this thread is still going.     I remember posting in it like a month ago.