Topic: Bitcoin 20MB Fork - page 122. (Read 154790 times)

I. "I agree a big discussion is necessary before changes are made, but we shouldn't act like a hard fork is somehow inherently an issue."

Part and parcel of the present dispute is to clearly make the point that Gavin Andresen does not have the authority to enact or create a hardfork of the Bitcoin network, nor any sort of significant clout, cachet, power to influence the matter etc.

This will be useful for the Bitcoin network first and foremost, because Gavin is, by and large, a mentally retarded doofus displaying a shocking amount of Dunning-Kruger syndrome in his assorted dabblings in economics and other hard fields.

This will secondarily but perhaps still notably be useful for Gavin himself. Finally liberated from all that influence he is incorrectly perceived to carry he will be free to live the rest of his life in the relative peace his brain was constructed to handle. To understand his situation, imagine a mentally retarded child living happily in the sands of New Mexico. A rich old man dies in New York, and on the strength of original research, it is considered that the mentally retarded child is the sole inheritor. News makes its way to the happy desert residence that same evening, by telegraph, but the poor monkey knows nothing of it outside of dim rumors. He is not collected enough to understand what "inheritance" rightly means or anything. He does have some sort of an idea as to "being rich" = "lots of icecream", but that's as far as it goes. All sorts of people, much better placed to understand what it all means, all try their hand at, you know, "being friendly". And "neighbourly". And only meaning the best and having the kid's interest at heart. His life, as you might well imagine, turns into the sort of nightmare only homo homini lupus can bring on its brother, and the child lives hell (parce-que l'enfer, c'est l'autres). Once the news makes it through that really, it was all a mistake, no such inheritance exists (as in fact it does not), the simpleton is free to return to his simple prior life, and be happy again.

Help Gavin be a happy idiot, stop trying to make him fulfill shoes too large for his little peabrain.

II. "If the community can't hardfork today we could stop using bitcoin now and look for the better suited alt coin. If bitcoin can't fork-update it has no value."

Obviously Bitcoin "has no value" to you. That is probably because you were expecting to defraud the faith others put in Bitcoin by inflating it. While it's true that welfare states finance themselves that way currently, and in the process create the unwelcome and unwarranted impression in the heads of the nobodies in the street that their voice matters to any degree or is important in any manner, Bitcoin does not work that way. Bitcoin does not work that way intentionally, specifically and by design. So... yeah, pack it and get lost.

"The community" of people that need things can not fork Bitcoin to provide for their needs at the expense of the actual community of people that create things and own things. Related to this, let us reiterate those ancient points about Bitcoin :


III. I don't understand why anybody would be against a larger block.

The popular name to this is "arguing to ignorance". You might also not understand why anyone would propose you wash, stop collecting broken car engines on plastic foil in front of your dilapidated motorhome or fucking your cousins. What you understand or don't understand is not a proper subject of discussion, and you aren't welcome to try and foist it on intelligent people who aren't your parents.

IV. Satoshi himself envisioned much larger blocks.

The discussion of what "Satoshi himself" did or didn't do, meant or didn't mean, so on and so forth is about as interesting and discussing the Mormon "bible".

This is called "arguing to authority", and it tries to give pecuniary value to that only truly worthless article of all times and places : the esteem of the mob. This may work well in electing United States presidents, ensuring that "while the voting public knows best what it wants, it deserves to get it long and hard". Bitcoin specifically and deliberately does not work in this way.

Bitcoin is not a reflection of your hopes and aspirations, but a check on them. Bitcoin isn't here to make it easier for you to do what you want to do ; Bitcoin is here to make it trivial for others to prevent you from doing what you want to do every time that's stupid. The sooner you comprehend this fundamental difference between Bitcoin and "technology" especially in the "revolutionary & innovative" subsense of that nonsense, the better, for you.

V. The fork is needed because otherwise some people won't be able to use Bitcoin.

Bitcoin isn't for everybody. Creating something useful that everyone can use is an exercise in trying to create something that's useful but worthless. Such a thing may exist, in the sense perpetuum mobile may exist. As far as the science of physics goes, they do not.

Should blocks ever become full, older coinbases will be prioritized over newer coinbases, and larger mining fees and transactions prioritized over smaller mining fees and smaller transactions. This means that someone who wishes to pay for very little with Bitcoin will be forced to use something else, so to speak is forced to "give his seat" to someone richer. This is exactly the point and the intent of Bitcoin : to force the poor to yield to the rich, unversally, as a matter of course.

You may not like this, but that is entirely an emotional problem of yours, which you're welcome to resolve any way you can : stop being poor, take a lot of pills, whatever. You may try to solve it by attempting to make it impossible for the rich to construct tools that they will then use to force you to yield to them, but this will necessarily not work : being rich means by definition they have more resources than you, and whatever you devise they can make a counter.

If you are more practically inclined, and having understood, accepted and come to terms with your fundamental human inferiority as it flows from your poverty, some solutions to your predicament of "I wish to buy myself a basket" have already been discussed :


Run along now, back to playing in the mud with the other naked kids in your village. Bitcoin's just not for your kind.

VI. This is a clerical issue, because block propagation and other considerations incentivize miners to keep blocks small anyway. The 1MB is just a hard limit getting in the way of things, the marketplace of miners should be allowed to fix block size as it seems appropriate.

While this argument has been disingenuously brought by Gavin himself, the fact is that the proposed inverted bloom filters upgrade would allow all blocks to propagate in constant time, regardless of their size. Just the sort of deceitful poison flowing out of USG through its few remaining (but apparently well entrenched) Bitcoin moles.

VII. The minersⁱ decide.

No, they do not. The miners make some minor decisions in Bitcoin, but major decisions such as block forks are not at their disposition alone, and this for excellent reasons you'll readily understand if you stop and think about it.

There are two specific methods to control miners on this matter, which will make the scamcoin Gavin is trying to replace everyone's Bitcoin with only replace some people's Bitcoin. The first and most obvious is that irrespective of what miners mine, each single full node will reject illegal blocks. This is a fact. If all the miners out there suddenly quit Bitcon and go mine Keiser's Aurora scamcoin instead, from the perspective of the Bitcoin network hash rate simply dropped and that's all. There's absolutely no difference between Keiser's scamcoin and Gavin's scam coin as far as the network is concerned : while one's a scammer that I humiliatingly defeated in the past whereas the other a scammer that I humiliatingly defeat in the future, this makes no difference for Bitcoin. As far as anyone will be able to perceive, miners simply left.

The second and perhaps not as obvious has nevertheless been discussed at length on multiple occasions on #bitcoin-assets. Consider this terse explanation from March. 2013.


The situation here is aggravated by the fact that the fork proposed is not simply nondeterministic behaviourⁱⁱ, and so the holdings on the two chains aren't notionally equivalent. Instead, all the holdings on the Bitcoin chain are accepted as valid on both Bitcoin and Gavincoin, but holdings on Gavincoin are rejected by Bitcoin. Consequently, everyone involved with the fork is writing options to everyone in Bitcoin, free of charge. That they have no ready way to finance these should be obvious, and consequently the grim prospects of the Gavin side of the fork should be just as obvious. At least, to people who understand economy to any degree.

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i. By which really what's usually contemplated is, "pool masters will hijack the miners pointing at their pools, because they really wish to end up like BTCGuild/ 50 BTC ; that <5% of an entity once around 48% is such a tempting market share."
ii. As Peter Todd aptly points out, the alleged hard fork in Bitcoin's past wasn't a hard fork, but simply nondeterministic behaviour, resulting in two chains which both and roughly to the same degree validated.

VIII. "By the time the hard fork rolls around, all miners (and wallets, and other bitcoin software) will have dormant code ready to switch over and start mining the new fork."

Not so. The various gunk added to Bitcoin (past 0.6 or so) is currently only supported by the scam foundation Vessenes created back when nobody was looking, and everyone's been abandoning ever sinceⁱ.

The actual Bitcoin Foundation is not supporting any of that.

Consider the rate at which the scam foundation has been propping up scams, and the rate at which they blow up. Where is BFL ? Where is MtGox ? Where's all them fearless captn's of industry of yore ?ⁱⁱ Perhaps much more importantly : who has been popping them ? Think long and hard about that before you jump to conclusions about "everyone" and "nobody" and so on. A year ago you thought "everybody" would be impressed by imaginary "brick and mortar stores". I wasn't. That aspect of you is now in jail on unrelated charges. Bear this in mind.ⁱⁱⁱ

The odds of the Vessenes scam foundation surviving until the end of the year are intricately linked to BitPay, their only remaining supporter with actual money^iv, remaining solvent. Which, in spite of "brick and mortar store"-isms and other avatars of the Redditarded discussion, does not really look all that likely. In any case it won't be around for the years being here contemplated, which explains why Gavin's in such a rush, and why all this has to be done "right now".

Why would you help a bunch of scammers ruin Bitcoin on their way out ? And why'd you imagine that if you do you'll be left hodling anything but dust ?

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, 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 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, 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 ?

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i. Considering Murck left as well, it's not at all clear who's even left whatsoever.
ii. Not to put too fine a point on it :

So Roger Ver is now a bum. Who could have foreseen!

iii. No, I'm not kidding. All these schmucks can go to jail on pretty much anyone's say-so. There's a good reason serious business isn't generally built on the backs of ex-cons, out on parole. Guess what the reason may be ? Could it have anything to do with them being unreliable ? Whether they wish to be or not ?
iv. Yes, this is important. Bitcoin is about money. Not about "ideas", not about "community", not about your delusions of grandeur, importance, influence and so on. Bitcoin.Is.About.Money.

X. A Princeton graduate who resides in Amherst, Massachusetts and has lived his entire life firmly attached to the govenrment tit is going to "save Africa" from imaginary problems it doesn't actually have by inflating the Bitcoin blockchain to the point nobody but his USG owners can maintain a full record. This is good for Bitcoin.

You are an idiot. Go the fuck away.

XI. Raising the limit doesn't force the blocks to be filled. It just gives miners the option to make bigger blocks should market conditions make it to their advantage to do so.

This is not how economics work. Quoting Buffettⁱ :


So, no : infinite blocks to not give "the miners" any sort of option, because "the miners" as a collective noun do not exist. There exist individual miners exclusively, and the incentives of individuals are, should the Gavin scam actually be implemented, firmly oriented towards destroying the commons that is Bitcoin.

There's no way out of this problem, and simple ignorance of economy or game theory is not a solution.

XII. The current 1Mb limit is arbitrary. We want to change it. Please ignore the fact that the discussion is about whether to change or not to change, and please ignore that the onus is on whoever proposes change to justify it. Instead, buy into our pretense that the discussion is about "which arbitrary value". Because we're idiots, and so should be you!

Go away.

XIII. Bitcoin has worked fine so far, and is sending the world's elite running for cover - from political to financial to media elites. Clearly this means more of the same won't work in the future, and it must be changed to more closely conform to what these elites like to see, which only coincidentally happens to strictly resemble each and every other previous challenge to their authority, which only coincidentally hapepend to all failed. Because we're idiots, and so should be you! For equality.

Go away.

XIV. We all agree.

Good for you, too bad you're irrelevant. Bitcoin is about money and about power, not about opinion and social media. You can agree until you are blue in the face, that's not what makes a difference. Your public humiliation on this score - in case your shepherd be dumb enough to actually take the field and be humiliatedⁱⁱ - should be instructive for you.

Take notice on the why and the how you don't matter, understand why "MP doesn't cater to my idiocy which makes me want to support anything else" doesn't actually do anything, break through the shell of your own idiocy and start actually developing as a human being already. Going by your infantile behaviour this is clearly the first time you had the chance, but going by the messy state of the world around you it might actually be your last, too. Try and make the best of the very little you have at your disposal.

That'd be it. This third installment actually covers the entirety of the "arguments" brought by the idiots (and assorted incentivised shills / "political activists") pushing this particular attack on Bitcoin. Ridiculous how little they have, considering how much they cost their government, their parents and the Earth generally. But such is life.

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i. Really, you should do a lot more reading of MPOE-PR - she is pretty much the only avenue for a tardstalk user to actually relate to Bitcoin. Everyone else there is just hallucinating nonsense.
ii. Seems improbable, if nothing else on the strength of the recent very embarassed Fed release - apparently once MP destroyed their shill in Bitcoin they're not even willing to name Bitcoin at all anymore, it has to be "Digital Value Transfer Vehicles" now. Nothing quite like wounded narcissism in bureaucrats, eh ?

I don't really keep up with development too well, are things like additional message and protocol fields being discussed, whatever kind of things that would make it easier to use Bitcoin's security in parallel systems and possibly need a hard fork? Just thinking something that important should cover anything we can see possible potential in from here.

I agree, seems presumptuous if not reckless to take on the whole world only with bitcoin.

Thanks for quoting that!  Wladimir's quietness in the public muck is as pronounced as his activity in the codebase.  I never knew where he stood on this stuff.  My natural guess would be that anyone who is bright enough to be such a prolific code contributor would immediately understand certain things like this, but...Gavin...

As someone who has worked on and designed data management systems, Wladimir's statement is so common sense to me that it shouldn't even need to be stated.  I am aghast that there is so much dispute about it.  A very strong hypothesis is that many people who have some technical skills are busying themselves with solutions which will be viable only by at least a scaling induced semi-failure of Bitcoin...and those who's technical and analytical skills are weak or non-existent are just expressing their inborn goober-ishness.

Sidechains not only soundly addresses the issue, but the two-way peg completely demolishes any economic concerns as well.

kind of a noobish question but why not sort of raise the number of blocks instead of increasing their size?

ah sure, but doesnt 'more nodes and/or miners' also implies 'more information'?

Because of the 10 minute limit: blocks mut be generated approximately every 10 minutes. If you want more information, you need bigger blocks.

kind of a noobish question but why not sort of raise the number of blocks instead of increasing their size?

could we not have block size increase by some function of storage cost v size going down. Thus bootstraping into a quasi moores law approach, which would mean we would hit say 20 MB or larger but with no increasing cost to the user base.

This would seem to please all parties and provide a road map of when fork would take place. Indeed this would be less like a fork, more like a feature of BTC much like the predetermined coin supply.

I dont see the rush here tho, price is crashing, adoption is slowing, regulation is stamping..



from the locked thread: 20MB * 6 (per hour) * 24 * 365 = 1051 GB per year

I believe it is extremely important to maintain the fundamental properties that Satoshi laid out -- because the system he described is the system that all of us who own bitcoin bought in to.