Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Cconvert2G36]

^ 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.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

^ 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.

[Carlton Banks]

Again, I'm for an increase to the limit, and I think miners acting rationally would be too. They would do it because of their own self interest though, not because a poll of reddit users wanted them to.

Are you sure miners acting rationally wouldn't consider the block limit as 1 dimension of the potential way to increase transaction capacity? The real question isn't "how/when/to what do we increase the block size", it's "how do we increase transaction capacity in a way that maintains a healthy market for hashes". Anything that centralises towards the miners, or amongst the miners, is bad for the eco system as a whole. BIP 101 would create a trend toward both.

[Cconvert2G36]

Again, I'm for an increase to the limit, and I think miners acting rationally would be too. They would do it because of their own self interest though, not because a poll of reddit users wanted them to.

Are you sure miners acting rationally wouldn't consider the block limit as 1 dimension of the potential way to increase transaction capacity? The real question isn't "how/when/to what do we increase the block size", it's "how do we increase transaction capacity in a way that maintains a healthy market for hashes". Anything that centralises towards the miners, or amongst the miners, is bad for the eco system as a whole. BIP 101 would create a trend toward both.

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.

[cypherdoc]

Again, I'm for an increase to the limit, and I think miners acting rationally would be too. They would do it because of their own self interest though, not because a poll of reddit users wanted them to.

Are you sure miners acting rationally wouldn't consider the block limit as 1 dimension of the potential way to increase transaction capacity? The real question isn't "how/when/to what do we increase the block size", it's "how do we increase transaction capacity in a way that maintains a healthy market for hashes". Anything that centralises towards the miners, or amongst the miners, is bad for the eco system as a whole. BIP 101 would create a trend toward both.

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.

What a great point.

The 5 largest miners in the world already told us they're trapped behinf the GFC with inferior connectivity speeds. And yes, we have to assume the relay network is factored into that statement.

It may turn out that a small miner could do the large block better connectivity attack Wiulle was going on about on reddit because of a direct connection to the relay network that causes the Chinese miners to choke.

[cypherdoc]

I don't see you as an enemy. I just acknowledged that it is great you want an increase.

I simply asked you why we should ignore, right now, a vast majority of the community who wants to see an increase built in now so that we can be ready come January?

I refuse to argue on behalf of a point I didn't make.  

Although, now that you mention it... what if a vast majority of the community (ill defined), wanted to increase the block reward? If the "community" = mining nodes and full nodes, this is exactly how changes happen. A majority of hashing power and servicing nodes become a dominant fork, and the losers either join them or have an altcoin with an impossible difficulty.  

The mining incentive structure is built in, and not terribly reliant on the general user community's opinion. Larger blocks servicing increased tx volume and their accompanying fees is good for miners (to the point of being limited by hardware and bandwidth capacity). Altering the block reward, would probably nuke the coin's value, so there is a sort of MAD incentive against it.

Again, I'm for an increase to the limit, and I think miners acting rationally would be too. They would do it because of their own self interest though, not because a poll of reddit users wanted them to.

This argument has  come up many times in the last week especially since Matonis brought it up despite him not understanding what's going on.

It won't ever happen because the idea has never even come up and  not been contested or challenged. Reason being, everyone is here in the first place, whether they know it or not,  because the supply is fixed and no one wants to change it, let alone a majority.

[Carlton Banks]

Again, I'm for an increase to the limit, and I think miners acting rationally would be too. They would do it because of their own self interest though, not because a poll of reddit users wanted them to.

Are you sure miners acting rationally wouldn't consider the block limit as 1 dimension of the potential way to increase transaction capacity? The real question isn't "how/when/to what do we increase the block size", it's "how do we increase transaction capacity in a way that maintains a healthy market for hashes". Anything that centralises towards the miners, or amongst the miners, is bad for the eco system as a whole. BIP 101 would create a trend toward both.

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.

Sorry, no, I didn't mean any of that. By "centralising towards miners" I mean miners being the majority/only nodes (which we already have to an extent), and by "centralising amongst miners", I mean large miners consolidating market share (which we also already have to a.... well you've already acknowledged it). BIP 101 accelerates both trends.

[Odalv]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  you must supplement that income by onboarding as many tx paying fees into the main Bitcoin blockchain if you want to survive long term.  offboarding those tx paying fees into centralized services like Coinbase or Bitpay will not help you.  what this means is that you indirectly need to grow the userbase that generates these tx paying fees.

you have no choice but to increase block size limits, and soon, otherwise unconfirmed tx's and unaffordable tx fees will drive new and even existing users away and you will forever be dependent on a small community of geeks and developers for business profits.  not a sustainable situation.

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

[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.  you must supplement that income by onboarding as many tx paying fees into the main Bitcoin blockchain if you want to survive long term.  offboarding those tx paying fees into centralized services like Coinbase or Bitpay will not help you.  what this means is that you indirectly need to grow the userbase that generates these tx paying fees.

you have no choice but to increase block size limits, and soon, otherwise unconfirmed tx's and unaffordable tx fees will drive new and even existing users away and you will forever be dependent on a small community of geeks and developers for business profits.  not a sustainable situation.

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

Sounds symmetric.

[Odalv]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  you must supplement that income by onboarding as many tx paying fees into the main Bitcoin blockchain if you want to survive long term.  offboarding those tx paying fees into centralized services like Coinbase or Bitpay will not help you.  what this means is that you indirectly need to grow the userbase that generates these tx paying fees.

you have no choice but to increase block size limits, and soon, otherwise unconfirmed tx's and unaffordable tx fees will drive new and even existing users away and you will forever be dependent on a small community of geeks and developers for business profits.  not a sustainable situation.

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

Sounds symmetric.

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

 2012 halving supply
 2014 doubling block size
 2016 halving supply
 2018 doubling block size
... and  so on :-)

[hdbuck]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  you must supplement that income by onboarding as many tx paying fees into the main Bitcoin blockchain if you want to survive long term.  offboarding those tx paying fees into centralized services like Coinbase or Bitpay will not help you.  what this means is that you indirectly need to grow the userbase that generates these tx paying fees.

you have no choice but to increase block size limits, and soon, otherwise unconfirmed tx's and unaffordable tx fees will drive new and even existing users away and you will forever be dependent on a small community of geeks and developers for business profits.  not a sustainable situation.

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

Sounds symmetric.

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

 2012 halving supply
 2014 doubling block size
 2016 halving supply
 2018 doubling block size
... and  so on :-)

...raising 21M bitcoin limit..

[Odalv]

To any mining pool operators out there reading,

next year July your mining pool income will be cut in half by the block halving.  you must supplement that income by onboarding as many tx paying fees into the main Bitcoin blockchain if you want to survive long term.  offboarding those tx paying fees into centralized services like Coinbase or Bitpay will not help you.  what this means is that you indirectly need to grow the userbase that generates these tx paying fees.

you have no choice but to increase block size limits, and soon, otherwise unconfirmed tx's and unaffordable tx fees will drive new and even existing users away and you will forever be dependent on a small community of geeks and developers for business profits.  not a sustainable situation.

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

Sounds symmetric.

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

 2012 halving supply
 2014 doubling block size
 2016 halving supply
 2018 doubling block size
... and  so on :-)

...raising 21M bitcoin limit..

...and removing SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 from protocol...

[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.

[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.