IX. "Hard fork block size politics: do we want decentralized digital gold, or just another Visa? We want both. And there's no reason we can't have both."
Actually, there's a damned good reason "we" can't have both : one of them is nonsense. To grok this, tell me, whom do you know in Mali ?
No, not Bali, that island where preppy sluts go for spring break. Mali, the funny-shaped, landlocked West African nation.
Nobody ? Never even heard of anyone from there, never ate in a Mali restaurant, never bought a Mali anything over the mail, as far as you're concerned Mali could just as well not exist at all ? Well, bless you, the sentiment's exactly mutual! As far as they're concerned, the entire population of Mali couldn't give less of a fuck, and you might as well not exist.
Yet your proposal here is that we take everything of everyone : each pair of underwear, each box of notebooks left over from highschool, each car and set of car keys, each coffee mug, each old printer cartridge, each and every single item of everyone, worldwide, and dump them all into a huge warehouse in San Francisco. And then, you say, you'll give everyone receipts to keep track of their stuff. Obviously the receipts will be rather lengthy and complicated an affair, but all the inconvenience, confusion and sheer effort is worth it, you say. Because why ? "Because there's no reason we can't have both". Orly.
I get it, you're a centralist at heart
I am anything but. On the contrary, I think it's great that Bitcoin is as decentralized as it is. Believe me, I don't want to see Bitcoin centralized. But to the extent that technical, or even political, reality necessitates some degree of voluntary centralization, people should have that option as well. You shouldn't be allowed to hobble usage or force reliance on risky off-chain services in the name of decentralization any more than you should
be forced to store transactions that don't interest you. It works both ways.
, you want this globalisation thing where everyone's stuff is locked up in Fort Knox so the misfortunate indigents of Mali get to curse the day your pasty ass showed up forcing "democracy" on them.
I'm not a fan of democracy. Perhaps Gavin is. And perhaps you have a point there. It's unfortunate that a valid criticism of Gavin's proposal has been drowned out by a lot of misdirected bloviating.
I don't particularly like this outlook, but who am I to tell you how to live your life.
Nevertheless, there's a damned good reason why you can't have both at my expense. You can't ask demand me and my friends and my business partners run complicated, expensive and ultimately pointless computer systems that are required to distinguish our transactions from Mali bound transactions, avoid double spends and all of that simply because you want the world to be a centrally-planned, single-core thing because you're too intellectually lazy and too mentally simple to accomodate the actual variety of the world in your barren skull. I get it, it'd be much simpler for you to think of "everything in Bitcoin".
This simplicity for you has actual costs in the world. If large classes of transactions among which there is no possible cross-ambiguity remain limited to their own context, there's less hassle for everyone involved. Imagine the common occurence of someone sitting in your seat on the airplane. Fortunately, the tickets carry a seat number, which can be compared, and there you go. Imagine instead the Gavinairport where Gavintickets require everyone in the whole airport get out of their planes, single file to the tickets checking office, and have their tickets checked. Every single time someone sits in someone else's seat. And what'd the TSA say to this ? I can almost see them, "there's no reason we can't have it". Of course there isn't, if nobody gives a shit about people or their legitimate interests.
There's no benefit to making everything wait on everything else if large swaths can be readily isolated that'd absolutely never meet. If my blockchain doesn't have to wait for Mali blocks to propagate, and if it doesn't have to to check against Mali doublespends of transactions nobody in Mali could ever be conceivably involved in under any circumstances, then my blockchain is easier to run, to maintain, to debug and so it can provide for the citizens of Mali exactly the only thing they actually want me to provide : a backup value.
They don't perceivably want nor do they conceivably need main chain transactions for every single quarter of cent / West African CFA franc transaction they undertake. What they clearly need and possibly even want is the ability to turn a pile of however many of these they've saved into a few Satoshi. So they can save that
Seven billion people accessing their savings
twice a year requires a blocksize of 130 megabytes.
, so they can buy Trilema credits, so they can do the few and precious things where they actually interact with the world at large. There's absolutely no need to make every single move they take dependent on the actions of far removed parties that couldn't care less about their interests, needs or proclivities.
Yeah, yeah, you're thinking "but Bitcoin is decentralized". Sure, it's a decentralized implementation. But it is an implementation of a centralized concept. Bitcoin is universal money, and that's quite by definition central. Even if implemented in a decentralized manner, as all usable money always has to be implemented, it nevertheless is a centralized thing, by the very nature of what money has to be in order to be money. Now why marry to this an obligation that's burdensome on everyone and not really useful to anyone ?
It's important to realize that Bitcoin is not, and really cannot be, simply a replacement for gold. Gold is more decentralized. It is arguably a more efficient store of value. If Bitcoin is only as usable as gold, it will have failed to realize its potential, in my opinion.
And that was my point. Bitcoin can be an extremely flexible system, because it is built on sound ideas and moral principles. There are very few actual technical limitations, only limits to our imagination.
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