Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 153. (Read 378996 times)

He would have to convince people to do a hardfork and change Bitcoin in order to achieve such a goal. This danger I think will always exist, I have a background in political philosophy so I am well aware how people can be lead astray. Bitcoin is democratic in some aspects of its governance on the protocol level. A more enlightened culture would help to counter such threats. I was about to say that this is not a problem that Bitcoin solves but in a way it does because of the ability to hard fork and split, at least the problem of the tyranny of the majority is solved. Even if the majority does not choose freedom, we still can, even if it means we will not be on the longest chain. The volunteerism of cryptocurrency is beautiful.

I also think that fees may be good to be dynamically appreciated because of demand in the block for transactions, rather than increase the block size to try to ease the fees. If we do so then I can imagine how a corrupt politician will lobby for decreasing fees breaking the natural demand/supply equilibrium of fees paid to miners when subsidy is complete and miners live off of the fees alone, causing havok in network security and perhaps an attack. His main motive will be to attract votes from telling unsuspecting voters that he will decrease the cost of doing business by increasing block size and decreasing fees as a result, thus allowing the poor to transact on the blockchain blah blah blah. However once its done once, it will be used as a tool to change again because the corrupt will refer to the time when it changed saying, they got it wrong that time we have to change it again.

There is a confusion in the terms here, it is important to make the distinction between the pools and the miners. It might be better to adopt a new terminology of hashers and miners if people disagree with this distinction. The miners do not talk to each other via headers to decrease latency, the pools do instead. So there is a difference between mining centralization and pool centralization, it would be a mistake to equate these two issues. Even though there are not more then twenty pools today, there are far more individual miners that are responsible for and have control over the hashing power.

My point is that miners do not run full nodes, the pools do instead, this is why increasing the block size would not lead to increased mining centralization. It would also not effect centralization of pools since it is the miners who decide where and how the hashing power is distributed. The danger of centralization of mining does exist today and it is a threat that should be taken seriously, consider becoming a miner yourself to help keep mining decentralized. Mining centralization today however is due to centralization of manufacturing and economies of scale among other factors. Increasing the blocksize however does not effect mining centralization for the reasons I have explained here.

Everybody out there is laughing about the 'spherical blockchain' ideas of Peter R.

Which is no surprise.

So when two miners coordinate to talk to each other via headers because the latency to propagate the block (bigger block) is too high is that not what we call centralization? Regardless of what type of node miners are running.

Read their arguments for yourself and make up your own mind, there is a lot of disinformation and ad hominem on these forums. This is an article written by Mike Hearn explaining why he thinks we should increase the blocksize:

https://medium.com/faith-and-future/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d647312d22c1

Bitcoin XT

An immediate switch to 8 MB and doubling every two year until 32GB blocks.

I know that part its obvious... so what are their arguments for?

The miners incentives are already aligned properly, which I am not suggesting we change. I have proven the theories that I have presented here, just saying that I have not, does not make the opposite true.

In response to the incident of Antpool SPV mining and causing a fork a few months back, since then Antpool has lost a lot of its mining power which proves my point exactly, such a pool is incentivized to attract more miners by acting responsibly and when they act irresponsibly they lose support, proving the points that I have been making. I very much doubt that Antpool would make such a mistake again since they lost a lot of money because of the reward and reputation that was lost, if miners understand one thing it is profit. You also claim that the solo miners are an integral part of Bitcoin. This is simply just not true, solo mining is no longer feasible. Unless you think that an industrial mining operation costing at least more then ten million dollars is a solo miner and good for decentralization, since that would be the only way to feasibly solo mine today because of variance.

I agree with you that mining centralization is difficult to prevent, because of centralization of manufacture and economies of scale among other reasons, to a certain extend I have accepted this reality however. I still do not think that increasing the blocksize would increase mining centralization since miners do not run full nodes.

In my position for instance I just point my hashing power towards a pool of my choice that I think reflects my beliefs well and acts responsible, increasing the block size does not effect my mining operation whatsoever and the majority of the hashing power is under the control of people that are in a similar position to myself.

Increasing the blocksize does introduce centralization pressures but not in regards to mining. Keeping the blocksize at one megabyte also introduces centralization in the form of an increased reliance on third parties. So for me considering this balancing act, increasing the blocksize is the most decentralized option with everything considered.

My point still stands: larger blocks increase mining centralization pressures. Truth is, even with a single miner you can trust that it will do what's best for Bitcoin. But it doesn't have to. It's all based on incentives. Mining centralization is hard to prevent, as the past tells us, and even harder to undo. You likely won't notice until the bad happens.

You don't understand Bitcoin.

It is not about trusting miners but aligning their incentives properly, which you suggest to change. The onus of proof is on you to support your position with factual demonstration that the balance of power is not at risk. You have so far tragically failed at doing so.

If we cannot trust that the majority of the mining power will do what is best for Bitcoin then Bitcoin has already fundamentally failed which I do not think is presently the case. In order to orphan all non-abiding blocks a single entity would need to be able exert control over more then fifty one percent of the mining power, if this happens Bitcoin has already been undermined anyway. I do not think it will be possible to enforce such policy across every jurisdiction in the world, this is however more of a question for geopolitics.

Eric Lombrozo pulls no punches
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg02503.html

It's all well planned of course; Peter can make a censorship victim claim if they ban him too, or they can continue to tolerate his sophistry. Banning is better IMO, people will be interested in the reason why he was banned, and so it generates an opportunity to fill in the details for themselves. Win-win, really.

I have been trying to avoid ad hominems, but XTers on the mailing list today look like a pure sect. Why are devs wasting time with them...
Peter R's invented gridlock https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg02501.html

Can't agree more with BtcDrak - this is toxic.

You can't possibly have missed all this lulz ?  

Gavin has been compromised by Mike Hearn and his merry band of socialist shills who are attempting to press urgency under the pretense that the cap is stalling Bitcoin MAINSTREAM adoption.

Thanks just got into the debate and wanted to see if I fully understood what the problem was about... so why can Gaven not see this? I mean it took me like an hour to get the facts down and realize its a bad idea right now? whats his view?

You did not prove that, and I explained why it does. Hint: cenralization pressures change this dynamic.
Don't be so naive. You don't know if they are doing good, in fact, most Chinese large farms connected to AntPool, F2Pool and others might be controlled by a single company. What you see is a nice graph on bc.i, nothing more.
No amount of miners' faith can circumvent government regulation. That's a fundamental problem to Bitcoin that bothers me most.
Circumvented easily -- just orphan all non-abiding blocks.
There are countries that love to project their power onto others around the world (FATCA and so on), and countries that might be willing to do the same (China, ..). What happens you can't predict, but I cant discount any possibility.

That's the whole point of the debate. The uneven propagation is influencing orphan races outcomes. While this can be at least partially mitigated by relay networks, the worst-case scenarios is still the same.

Yep, you're sensing it right, I have come to the same conclusions only maybe from a different perspective.
We will get to the block-size increase decision eventually as the Time Goes By.