Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[TPTB_need_war]

Miners create the blocks, so I'm not sure what decentralizing away from miners would even mean. If you mean that smaller miners are dependent on, or even supported by, 1MB blocks, I disagree. It may even be the opposite, smaller mining operations may have access to better bandwidth and speed vs remote industrial mining farms in rural china.

Economies of scale encourage, especially since the arrival of ASICs, the relative centralization of mining. This was not a surprise and was predicted from the very beginning. IMO maxblocksize has almost nothing to do with it.

You show that you don't have the slightest clue what Peter R's definition of decentralization really means. Distributed hashrate node != decentralized entity.

A large miner only needs a hash of the transactions in order to mine remotely, so it could delegate the censorship of transactions to some other entity (e.g. IBLT), thus effectively censorship of transactions is under control of an entity that is aggregating hashrate (nodes).

Whereas, a smaller independent miner that refuses to delegate and be permanently sited so that it can't be easily regulated by TPTB, will need to have enough ephemeral bandwidth to see every transaction across the P2P network. For example, I can still obtain an unregistered, wireless connection to the internet here in my location with a prepaid 3G USB dongle, but if I site any where but a few special locations then I will often see the bandwidth drop down to 28.8K baud.

I throw 'baud' in there to remind youngsters that maybe somebody in this world still uses an analog audible spectrum telephone (or HAM radio?) modem.

What a great point.

Yet another blunder on your part.

[1713890104]

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[TPTB_need_war]

And if ppl do move to blockstream "sponsored" chains I question the legal/political ramifications of blockchains that have a big corporate target to aim at for censorship, identity tracking ,etc.

I've been meaning to mention this scenario.

Big corporate consults with Blockstream to construct a proprietary corporate SC with a significant innovation that Bitcoin proper definitely would want to incorporate. Before any of this success is known to the market,  corporate forces Blockstream to sign a non-compete.

With Bitcoin Core still controlled by these devs, said innovation can't get back ported to Bitcoin Core because it continually gets blocked by non consensus. A hard fork introduced by anonymous dev can't get off the ground for the same reasons XT might not get off the ground.

What then?

Blockstream can't enforce a monopoly on SC experimentation. Once they put the federated servers on the live Core chain, then any one can create a SC, which is not a hard fork. BTC HODLers don't need to move en masse in order to make the SC viable, for as long as someone solves the resistance to 51% attack for lightly adopted SCs. I believe I may have that solution in hand; others may as well.

If Blockstream unnecessarily delays the switch over to live, then another group could possibly supercede them. They need to keep moving at maximum, safe speed.

Blockstream (i.e. the Core devs) are planning to unleash the freedom for anyone to innovate on BTC pegged value, which is precisely what you are clamoring for.

But its pretty disingenuous to deliberately hamstring Bitcoin thereby forcing users into their solution.

I suggested to them both in public and in private (with no confirmation from them) that they stop arguing in public so they don't get labeled as the boogeymen. Instead let Bitards break Bitcon and they should continue coding so we will all have a place to run to (hopefully before it is too late). They could use political proxies as Gavinmike are ostensibly relying on Cypherdorc. Btw, I have no affiliation in this debate. I am interested to test my logic here.

[TPTB_need_war]

^ Time to post this again: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/who-controls-bitcoin/

This would be the final arbiter.

But, like the fork in 2013, I think miners would solve it before trading on classic vs new began.

Yup. It's the silent ace up investors' sleeves that prevents any funny business by the miners, devs, or other stakeholders.

This is incomplete logic thus illogical.

The essay forgets:

1. A 51% attack can enforce a protocol, but not including minority blocks in the longest chain. I already obliterated rocks' argument upthread that anyone could prove this is happening and thus get the masses to act on it by pulling their mining nodes (the masses don't mine). There is no way to prove that a minority chain is the honest one when it comes to censoring transactions.

2. Mining income is not the only potential profit motive from some entity aggregating hashrate for the purposes of censoring transactions.

3. Asymmetries in the impacts on profitability of different classifications of miners due to protocol changes, potentially change the dynamics in ways that the author's simpleton analysis miss.

[tvbcof]

...
Blockstream can't enforce a monopoly on SC experimentation.  ...

I would be shocked if they did.  Beyond that, I would be surprised and disappointed if they did not fairly actively encourage and facilitate others to do so.  It strikes me as a strategic blunder to do otherwise.

[TPTB_need_war]

...
Blockstream can't enforce a monopoly on SC experimentation.  ...

I would be shocked if they did.  Beyond that, I would be surprised and disappointed if they did not fairly actively encourage and facilitate others to do so.  It strikes me as a strategic blunder to do otherwise.

I assume Blockstream's income will come from consulting and or taking positions in SCs that generate dividends or such (they will sort of be in the driver's seat to copy experimentations into a sanctioned SC). Or perhaps a fee to federated servers.

I speculate TPTB wanted SCs as an alternative mechanism to create a bloatchain (which they can dump the masses on via their control of Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, Zuckerbook, etc) should they not be able to push it through Core. Thinking they could then deprecate Core by 51% attacking it after the mass move to the SC. I believe TPTB thinktanks miscalculated because they thought no one could solve the 51% attack vector. I think the gestation period since 2009 was to see if anyone could solve that 51% attack issue, before they decided to go all in with vulture capital (but they didn't factor in that I was late to the Bitcon scene ). Any way, that is wild speculation on my part.

[Erdogan]

Gold up

[TPTB_need_war]

Meanwhile... A money pit called Ethereum.

Interestingly I guess I stumbled onto the solution to Ethereum's key intractable, scaling problem, which is how to get consensus on a script without forcing every miner to verify the script.

[TPTB_need_war]

Gold up

Gold and BTC doing the summer bounce exactly as I told you all they would.

[Cconvert2G36]

A large miner only needs a hash of the transactions in order to mine remotely, so it could delegate the censorship of transactions to some other entity (e.g. IBLT), thus effectively censorship of transactions is under control of an entity that is aggregating hashrate (nodes).

You're describing a mining pool, and disparate miners connect via stratum to the pool, which administers the mining node. Nothing new here with larger maxblocksize.

Whereas, a smaller independent miner that refuses to delegate and be permanently sited so that it can't be easily regulated by TPTB, will need to have enough ephemeral bandwidth to see every transaction across the P2P network. For example, I can still obtain an unregistered, wireless connection to the internet here in my location with a prepaid 3G USB dongle, but if I site any where but a few special locations then I will often see the bandwidth drop down to 28.8K baud.

I throw 'baud' in there to remind youngsters that maybe somebody in this world still uses an analog audible spectrum telephone (or HAM radio?) modem.

Small time miners solo mining via 3G dongle, 28.8k baud modems, and HAM radios? Are you serious? Are you describing your, as yet unreleased, superproject? You're not describing post 2011 Bitcoin.

Hand waving about TPTB shutting down/censoring bitcoin on a global scale because of bigger blocks is hyperbolic.

[TPTB_need_war]

A large miner only needs a hash of the transactions in order to mine remotely, so it could delegate the censorship of transactions to some other entity (e.g. IBLT), thus effectively censorship of transactions is under control of an entity that is aggregating hashrate (nodes).

You're describing a mining pool, and disparate miners connect via stratum to the pool, which administers the mining node. Nothing new here with larger maxblocksize.

Nothing new by forcing more miners to pools with sufficient connectivity Nothing new by enabling those with more connectivity to harness higher revenue per block and to block propagation (orphan rate) attacks on the less well connected nodes  

Whereas, a smaller independent miner that refuses to delegate and be permanently sited so that it can't be easily regulated by TPTB, will need to have enough ephemeral bandwidth to see every transaction across the P2P network. For example, I can still obtain an unregistered, wireless connection to the internet here in my location with a prepaid 3G USB dongle, but if I site any where but a few special locations then I will often see the bandwidth drop down to 28.8K baud.

I throw 'baud' in there to remind youngsters that maybe somebody in this world still uses an analog audible spectrum telephone (or HAM radio?) modem.

Small time miners solo mining via 3G dongle, 28.8k baud modems, and HAM radios? Are you serious? Are you describing your, as yet unreleased, superproject? You're not describing post 2011 Bitcoin.

Hand waving about TPTB shutting down/censoring bitcoin on a global scale because of bigger blocks is hyperbolic.

Go ahead. I am quite happy if you centralize Bitcoin Core. PLEASE MAKE MY DAY (and fatten my wallet by a few $million at least).

[shmadz]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  

Are you doing ok cypher? You seem to be increasingly hyperbolic and desperate in your comments. This one in particular is exceedingly misleading and smells like a blatant attempt to use unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to make your case and influence others.

You do of course realize that if the price were to rise to 500 by next July their income will remain precisely the same as it is today?

Luckily, I'm sure the miners understand the economics of mining well enough that they will not be taking your misguided advice.

And if it doesn't rise, what's your  long term plan for miners to supplement the lost block reward income?  

If the price does not rise, there's no extra security needed to protect the system... Why pay more to defend a system that's not increasing in value? We see this market force in action right now as the low prices have caused the global hash rate to stagnate.

My long term plan is that users will be willing to pay increasing fees due to scarcity of embedding information in the most secure ledger on the planet. When you propose changes to a system that may have an effect on the security profile of such a system, you should expect serious opposition.

[cypherdoc]

ooh, looky here, Dow futures:

[shmadz]

Although I'm opposed to the current proposals for block size increase, I'm not opposed to the idea entirely, and I'm optimistic that a compromise can be reached.

Supply is halving every 4 years. And I think that doubling block size every 4 years is enough to compensate.

Thanks Odalv, this is perhaps the simplest and most reasonable proposal I've heard on the subject, though I disagree with the following:

And maybe it would be fine to double block size in the middle of halving period.

It may be only semantic, but I think the doubling of the block size should happen in tandem with the halving of the reward. It makes for a kind of trade off, trade half the disbursement awards for potentially double the transaction rewards.

The important thing here is that the much slower rate of increase should keep the security profile of the network intact, and increasing to 2mb in 2016 and 4mb in 2020 etc. should enforce an acceptable level of scarcity while allowing the network to grow.

[cypherdoc]

above chart 1min.  here's the daily Dow futures.  note the breakdown.  they were lying to you:

[cypherdoc]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  

Are you doing ok cypher? You seem to be increasingly hyperbolic and desperate in your comments. This one in particular is exceedingly misleading and smells like a blatant attempt to use unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to make your case and influence others.

You do of course realize that if the price were to rise to 500 by next July their income will remain precisely the same as it is today?

Luckily, I'm sure the miners understand the economics of mining well enough that they will not be taking your misguided advice.

And if it doesn't rise, what's your  long term plan for miners to supplement the lost block reward income?  

If the price does not rise, there's no extra security needed to protect the system... Why pay more to defend a system that's not increasing in value? We see this market force in action right now as the low prices have caused the global hash rate to stagnate.

My long term plan is that users will be willing to pay increasing fees due to scarcity of embedding information in the most secure ledger on the planet. When you propose changes to a system that may have an effect on the security profile of such a system, you should expect serious opposition.

a goal of increasing fees is a worthy goal.  but when you propose to maintain a 1MB choke that was always meant to be a DoS protection mechanism to be removed when Bitcoin is ready, then YOU should expect serious opposition.

[Cconvert2G36]

A large miner only needs a hash of the transactions in order to mine remotely, so it could delegate the censorship of transactions to some other entity (e.g. IBLT), thus effectively censorship of transactions is under control of an entity that is aggregating hashrate (nodes).

You're describing a mining pool, and disparate miners connect via stratum to the pool, which administers the mining node. Nothing new here with larger maxblocksize.

Nothing new by forcing more miners to pools with sufficient connectivity Nothing new by enabling those with more connectivity to harness higher revenue per block and to block propagation (orphan rate) attacks on the less well connected nodes  

This already happened, several years ago in fact. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.

The former already happening substantially negates your second point. Additionally, we are talking about graduated increases here, not 1 to 256MB overnight.

[shmadz]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  

Are you doing ok cypher? You seem to be increasingly hyperbolic and desperate in your comments. This one in particular is exceedingly misleading and smells like a blatant attempt to use unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to make your case and influence others.

You do of course realize that if the price were to rise to 500 by next July their income will remain precisely the same as it is today?

Luckily, I'm sure the miners understand the economics of mining well enough that they will not be taking your misguided advice.

And if it doesn't rise, what's your  long term plan for miners to supplement the lost block reward income?  

If the price does not rise, there's no extra security needed to protect the system... Why pay more to defend a system that's not increasing in value? We see this market force in action right now as the low prices have caused the global hash rate to stagnate.

My long term plan is that users will be willing to pay increasing fees due to scarcity of embedding information in the most secure ledger on the planet. When you propose changes to a system that may have an effect on the security profile of such a system, you should expect serious opposition.

a goal of increasing fees is a worthy goal.  but when you propose to maintain a 1MB choke that was always meant to be a DoS protection mechanism to be removed when Bitcoin is ready, then YOU should expect serious opposition.

Aha   thank you. Now I understand the vehemence and panic that I sense from most of the people that are trying to push for bigger blocks. The problem here is that you cannot force me to accept your fork; you can't force me to accept your blocks; you can't force me to accept your unspent transactions.   You. can't. force. me.   You must convince me, but since you lack sufficient logical argument to convince, you resort to coercion, or as in your original post that ruffled my feathers , down right threats.

As I posted earlier I am open to compromise or negotiation, and I think that eventually a rational solution will find consensus and bitcoin will move on. I just find the aggressive posturing and fear-mongering methods of many of the people pushing for bigger blocks to be tiresome, and frankly, childish.

[TPTB_need_war]

A large miner only needs a hash of the transactions in order to mine remotely, so it could delegate the censorship of transactions to some other entity (e.g. IBLT), thus effectively censorship of transactions is under control of an entity that is aggregating hashrate (nodes).

You're describing a mining pool, and disparate miners connect via stratum to the pool, which administers the mining node. Nothing new here with larger maxblocksize.

Nothing new by forcing more miners to pools with sufficient connectivity Nothing new by enabling those with more connectivity to harness higher revenue per block and to block propagation (orphan rate) attacks on the less well connected nodes  

This already happened, several years ago in fact. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.

The former already happening substantially negates your second point. Additionally, we are talking about graduated increases here, not 1 to 256MB overnight.

No it doesn't negate the second point unless you think winner-take-all (or at least greater centralization) of the pools is a desired next step.

Also the former did not already happen for those with sufficient hashrate (or perhaps hardware NAV economics) such that mining on a pool has undesirable tradeoffs, such as paying fees (or perhaps anonymity timing correlation attacks on onion routing to the known termination node the pool). I don't claim to be omniscient on all the reasons why nodes don't all mine on pools. Also keep in mind P2Pool which has some of the economic benefits of a pool yet requires miners to have the bandwidth to handle the block size.

[cypherdoc]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  

Are you doing ok cypher? You seem to be increasingly hyperbolic and desperate in your comments. This one in particular is exceedingly misleading and smells like a blatant attempt to use unfounded fear, uncertainty, and doubt to make your case and influence others.

You do of course realize that if the price were to rise to 500 by next July their income will remain precisely the same as it is today?

Luckily, I'm sure the miners understand the economics of mining well enough that they will not be taking your misguided advice.

And if it doesn't rise, what's your  long term plan for miners to supplement the lost block reward income?  

If the price does not rise, there's no extra security needed to protect the system... Why pay more to defend a system that's not increasing in value? We see this market force in action right now as the low prices have caused the global hash rate to stagnate.

My long term plan is that users will be willing to pay increasing fees due to scarcity of embedding information in the most secure ledger on the planet. When you propose changes to a system that may have an effect on the security profile of such a system, you should expect serious opposition.

a goal of increasing fees is a worthy goal.  but when you propose to maintain a 1MB choke that was always meant to be a DoS protection mechanism to be removed when Bitcoin is ready, then YOU should expect serious opposition.

Aha   thank you. Now I understand the vehemence and panic that I sense from most of the people that are trying to push for bigger blocks. The problem here is that you cannot force me to accept your fork; you can't force me to accept your blocks; you can't force me to accept your unspent transactions.   You. can't. force. me.   You must convince me, but since you lack sufficient logical argument to convince, you resort to coercion, or as in your original post that ruffled my feathers , down right threats.

As I posted earlier I am open to compromise or negotiation, and I think that eventually a rational solution will find consensus and bitcoin will move on. I just find the aggressive posturing and fear-mongering methods of many of the people pushing for bigger blocks to be tiresome, and frankly, childish.

sorry you weren't able to discern that i merely parroted your very words back at you.  so any "aggression" you attempt to smear me with, simply look back in the mirror.

[thezerg]

Once upon a time when gold was used as currency, silver was also used because you couldn't reasonably mint coin small enough to pay for things like a meal (I heard that this is also why the "bar tab" was invented -- when even silver became too valuable).

With Bitcoin, it seems like 1 Satoshi is small enough to ensure that a "silver to bitcoin's gold" does not happen.  However, I think that this is untrue; 1 Satoshi is analogous to 1 atom of gold.  The actual minimum bitcoin transfer can be estimated by the point where is becomes inconvenient or expensive to make the transfer.  This varies by the individual but I feel it would be a transaction fee of somewhere between 1 and 10 percent.

So the Satoshi is not the smallest effective Bitcoin unit.  The smallest practical bitcoin unit is something between 10 and 100 times the transaction fee.

I think that the result of an unscaled bitcoin blockchain is that small-payment niche will open up, allowing a scalable altcoin blockchain to gain market share (lightning network, centralized solutions, and sidechains may block this niche, to an unknown extent -- but note they didn't for gold).  This cryptocurrency will begin as the "silver to bitcoin's gold", and a clever implementation might ride Bitcoin's coat-tails to adoption.  If Bitcoin becomes extremely successful this new cryptocurrency will overtake it in daily use just like silver overtook gold.  But what advantages will Bitcoin have over this new currency?  Gold's advantage was essentially its greater value to volume (and weight) ratio.  But (as with any crypto-currency), you'll be able to carry and transact large quantities of this new cryptocurrency just as easily as small.  So Bitcoin will have no advantage.  The new cryptocurrency will ultimately dominate transactions and market cap.

What do you think about this reasoning?