Topic: Bitcoin becoming centrally planned: Communist - page 3. (Read 6167 times)

Lots of talks here about communism and centralization..
Everything you know about communism is from TV? History channel?
Bitcoin can be used in every system you can imagine because have nothing in common with it!

I dont understand how bitcoin have problems with centralization?

the casuals can fork of to their edgy little altcoin. We are going to set the rules in stone, then put on some segwit and we're done here.

Yes mining is somewhat centralized, but just wait and see until some day one of those altcoins like XT or Classic win due casuals and shills giving their support and they centralize the nodes too, then that will be actual game over.
But while Core devs are on charge supporting a pro privacy and pro decentralized node (small blocksize) agenda, we are safe. If Gavincoiners gain traction, it's time to sell.

You guys are saying as if it were a bad thing.

No, what I`m saying is that everyone looks for their own interests, thats just basic human nature.

And if 1 group of people have too much power over others (bitcoin miner vs bitcoin user) then they will impose their will on the others.

Thus even though 90% of bitcoin users want option A, if the miners see option B as more profitable for them, they will enforce option B, and the bitcoin users will just have to follow along like sheep.

That is easier said than done. With a fraction of the mining power, blocks would not be produced at the normal rate. They would be mined much slower. And coinbase transactions must have at least 100 confirmations before being spendable, so those trying to dump would need to wait some time before being able to taint their coins with newly generated ones. And most miners seem to not spend their newly mined coins soon after. Looking at the blockchain, most recent coinbase transactions are not being spent.

It is. Is there currently an imaginary problem that is being claimed? The current problem is this block size problem, and it most certainly is not being claimed by only the devs, it is being claimed by everyone else.

Another thing, would you rather wait for a problem to become an actual problem and start screwing with things or would you rather know that a problem that could cause future pains exists and then promptly fix that problem to preempt it? It causes less problems to fix an issue before it becomes a problem than it does to wait for it to become urgent before fixing it. Of course, the problem has to exist first (and be proven to exist), just that it isn't causing a lot of trouble at the current time.

But you just need XT nodes to reject those transactions by blend in some new core coins, and I'm sure you will find a way to do that when you have million dollars worth of coins to dump

I think a consensus is much easier to reach when everyone is experiencing the same problem in reality, not just some imaginary problem claimed by different devs

Right, so if people are coming for reasons 1 and 2, then they have a vested interest to keep Bitcoin that way. This means that if there are people who are turning Bitcoin onto a path that leads away from those two goals, those who are here for reasons 1 and 2 will be the people who are turning away from those guys and preventing that from happening. So if that group is the majority, then such nefarious schemes to sabotage Bitcoin are not likely to happen.

True, and it is also a major source of people's complaints. Of course what they don't realize is that Bitcoin transactions settle (become non-reversible) much faster than credit card payments.

No, you are incorrect here. Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin XT transactions will be exactly the same, and they will still be connected to each other unless a protocol level change such as changing the magic bytes happens. The only difference is the blockchain the node is using. That means that any transaction that spends pre-fork coins can and probably will be confirmed on both blockchains. And that will continue as long as none of the inputs in the transaction chain becomes tainted with any newly generated coins after the fork (which may be a little hard to do). So if a Bitcoin XT holder decides that he immediately wants to cashout his Core coins, then the transaction he sends to send his core coins to the exchange will also send his XT coins to the same address. That means he won't have access to any of his coins. To actually split it up so that there are actually two sets of coins to be spendable is a lot harder and a lot more hassle to do.

And the easiest way to avoid this is to fork with consensus.

Which is exactly what they have done.

ok, i have spent some time trying to theorize RealBitcoins idea..

the best thing i can come to..

bitcoin is a 'freedom government'

where these nodes are civil servants (american senators, uk MP's) and they are all distributed out in different area's of the lands, all with their own agenda and all supposedly performing a service or being honest for the benefit of the people.

yes they can meet up at the senate(irc://#bitcoin-dev) and discuss new rules, new rights, new ways to tax(fee) how to speed up the justice system.(block validation) but because there is no president/prime minister/overlord. its not centralised. its just organised distribution.

i think RealBitcoin is trying to say that although senators(nodes) live in different states, come from different backgrounds and have different motives for being senators(nodes). there is visible and recorded history that collusion happens in the real world governments. and the same could happen with bitcoin.

though colluding to screw up bitcoin is like the senate saying "lets screw the dollar", or parliament saying "lets screw up the pound" which ultimately would only hurt themselves aswell as others.

Large miners should lower their hashrates or stop mining for a month so that we can mine easily. Otherwise it's leading towards centralisation.

Usually large mining pools have close relationship to exchanges, since they have plenty of liquidity to provide, so I guess they are more or less aligned. Average user however do not really have a choice in where bitcoin is going. So I think the concern of "the group of 12" manipulating bitcoin is real

Users are attracted by bitcoin's several properties:
1. Honest money creation and limited money supply, so its value will always go up long term against fiat money
2. Secure and censorship resistant, a safe medium for storage and transfer of value
3. Fast world wide transaction

When they face a change enforced by miners and exchanges, they have to decide the priority and evaluate what kind of feature they can sacrifice without totally giving up on bitcoin

Statistics showing that majority of people come to bitcoin because of 1 and 2. So any change impacting these property will heavily affect user adoption and drive new users away. 3 are less important. Why no one is too worried about 50% attack? Because 50% attack only affect the payment function of the system, coins in cold storage are not affected. Even chinese government took over all the chinese mining pools, they can't rob other people's coin

Currently there is a trend of advertising bitcoin as a fast and cheap payment method. However, if the new users you gained are just interested in fast and cheap transaction, then you will not have customer loyalty. Once more and more free and instant payment services appear, these customer will easily move away. Besides, this advertisement trend feels like finding innocent new users and dump the coins to them, this is not going to last long  and hurt public image of bitcoin


After the fork the blocks on XT network will not be known to core network, vice versa, just like litecoin network is not aware of any bitcoin transactions since you are running different software

You brought a very interesting point: If XT somehow can destroy the corresponding coin when a pre-fork coin is spent on core chain, then we can eliminate this kind of dangerous attack. But nothing can enforce XT to do this, I guess that is not in the interest of XT, since they might want to destroy the competitor chain to make sure their success

If only the exchanges changed to use XT (or whatever other client that implements a fork), then they would be losing business because few other users are also using XT so they don't make any money. If the users and exchanges were switched to XT and pushing for a for, then the miners would follow because that is where the money is. If miners and exchanges switch but users don't, then those miners and exchanges are incentivised to switch back because there is no money to be made if no one else is using that fork. In all of those cases, it is not possible for one group to coerce everyone else to switch, there has to be two out of three to do so otherwise there is no incentive for the other groups to switch.

Also, in your example, with such a fork, there is nothing that distinguishes a Core transaction from an XT transaction, so those XT holders who are sending core coins to that exchange are also sending their XT coins to that exchange. What you described is simply not possible.

We already know that a fork without consensus is suicidal, it is suicidal for both sides. That is why we always wait for the supermajority before enforcing any sort of fork, hard or soft.

I'm afraid that thousands of users do not have this degree of freedom. What you said is true at the early stage of bitcoin when bitcoin was still in design phase and worth only a little. At this stage, everyone have invested so much money, effort and time into this ecosystem, thus their economy interest will limit their choice

Imagine that majority of exchanges have upgraded to XT and one exchange left running core, and a fork happened. Then core exchange will immediately be flooded by millions of pre-fork coins sell order coming from XT coins holder. The value of core coin will crash to 0 right away. And then there is no meaning in mining this coin, all hash power will leave

This means, if any fork happens without reaching major consensus, it is suicide economically. It does not matter how great your view is for the future or how good your design can scale, nothing matters when the market cap of that coin is 0

People have no choice because they don't want to lose money. Only new users won't lose money because of the change to a new fork, all the existing users (especially full nodes) will refuse a fork without major consensus, due to the potential loss it can incur as described above


So, if no major consensus can be reached upon block size limit, bitcoin will stay at its current form until one day a major consensus is forming. This could be that thousands of transactions queuing up in the mempool and many users start to experience significant delay of confirmation. Currently all these negative things are not happening, that's the reason people are not eager to up the limit.

And by keeping the blocksize at 1MB, eventually a fee market will form. And it is interesting to see if this market can solve some of the capacity problem. So instead of trying to avoid such a fee event, seeing how this fee market will develop is more interesting, because no one knows how people will adapt to this kind of new situation

Alright then, your argument about division is not valid because again I`m not saying blindly follow anybody, I said 3 times that only united in spirit, but each with it's own ideas to compete, so the problem with gavin and the solution to it was necessary to happen, yes many people saw it through.

I like the picture of the services, yes it gives me hope about bitcoins future , thanks

Okay, you're right. However , it was exactly what I wanted , the total decentralization.
I believe I'll have to accept friendly centralization.

Thank you again for your patience

When I spoke of exponential increase in rate hash, i don't  suspect of attack , but that has  big betting in Bitcoin.
I didn't believe in Increase hash rate now, because we are Close to see the reduced Reward to 12.5 BTC.

I think I'm calmer now

Why do you say I am delighted? Stop putting words in my mouth. I see that there is centralization, there inherently is. There absolutely is no way to have complete and absolute decentralization. But it isn't on the scale or level which you claim it is.

I want to Be Wrong, I want to be Convinced Of this, but I fear What are YOU IN too delighted with the Bitcoin to See THIS centralization is Forming.

Yes they would have been heard. The thousands of miners who mine at those 3 pools who are against XT (or any other proposed fork) switch to other pools who does not support the fork. Those 3 pools no longer have a majority.

The thousands of users (including the miners) who don't support the fork stop using those 4 exchanges and use other less popular but just as good exchanges.

The thousands of users who use those 5 developer's client switch to another client.

With all of the options out there, people aren't being forced to use anything, and if they don't like it, then they don't have to use those products or services which use rules they don't like. This is consensus.