Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 90. (Read 378993 times)

It's funny you say that, because every time you talk about "free market" you come with things that have nothing to do with the concept. You also insist that it has something to do with ideology to see something as a "free market".


Bitcoin was designed so that its code-defined parameters couldn't be redefined by users ("bottom up") and this is a feature. Imagine if gold could be redefined by holders of gold merely by their agreement. It would be the anti-gold: gold works as a store of value because its properties cannot be changed in a feasible manner (and certainly you cannot alter the gold of others no matter how much support your "ideas" have).

Bitcoin's "physical properties" are its code. When, like in the case of the blocksize cap, there is a general agreement that one of these "physical properties" of Bitcoin should be changed, it's important to understand the contradiction this entails to something that is intended to be money/store of value to introduce changes to it. Bitcoin is in this sense in a strong contradiction of being both still experimental software that requires changes, and that ideally it would need zero changes so the "physical properties" analogy of "digital gold" stands on its own.

The problem here is not one of ideologies, as largely (except Mike Hearn and an increasing number of mainstreamers, who are socialists and statists) the ideologies of bitcoiners are strongly for free market capitalism.

It's a problem of vision / understanding. Either see Bitcoin as a payment channel tool or as a distributed database, not money and not commodity, in which case obviously introducing major changes and revisions is a "software" thing. For this school of thought, destroying the underlying assumption that the main properties of Bitcoin cannot be changed is not a big deal. This kills Bitcoin as a store of value. I'd argue that some even want this to happen. This is why I'm not that surprised when you say that if people want, let them introduce inflation in Bitcoin and stuff like that. Or when you interchangeably talk about forks of the chain and forks of the code.

The block size limit like any other parameters of Bitcoin were set by either Satoshi or the devs after him. This is "2" as you said above, and this is the way Bitcoin as we know it. The market balance mechanisms were also set up by developers. You blow up the stability of these mechanisms and you have made Bitcoin utterly pointless. The very system is made so that users running arbitrary protocols just doesn't work for them. What you suggest by "1" is political money and it will never work. Why don't you just try it separately and leave the Bitcoin network alone?

errr, i surely cant wait for you n00bs to fork off in january.

Exactly.

You cannot determine only those 2 viewpoints from what I said, Peter, because I subscribe to neither.

The nodes should determine what the value is, not the developers. But the software itself in the nodes should make the determination, not the node's human operators. I've been saying this all along; dynamic blocksize limit is the best solution to me. And that's not what you're saying at all, Peter.

It seems that there are two different ideologies in play:

1.  It should be easy for people to express their free choice regarding the block size limit because Bitcoin is ultimately a product of the market (bottom-up / emergent phenomenon).

2.  The block size limit should be set by a group of experts because people will make poor choices (top-down / policy tool).

I don't "think" this, it's an observable fact.

The bitcoin network gets attacked. It gets attacked by people like Coinwallet.eu, for instance, who broadcast hundreds of thousands of transactions to the network all at once, then pretending they are being helpful by means of providing the bitcoin network with an independent "stress test".

But of course, that's just the market expressing it's will, no? The anti-spam transaction measures that the Bitcoin dev team (XT has it's own "solution") have implemented for the 0.12 release in 2016 should just be abandoned in favour of letting bad actors dictate the price of transactions, yes?

You are saying that people should not have this freedom because you think they will abuse it?

When you allow people to have freedom, you also need to allow them to make bad choices. You cant have it both ways, it is the consequence of freedom. I personally think it is worth it, since it brings about more good then harm overall in the greater society and civilization over the long term.

I never defined the free market concisely myself on this thread, I gave different examples of how different ideologies define and understand the free market, my point being is that our subjective ideology actually influences and changes our definition and understanding of free markets. The question of whether USD is a free market or whether it exists within a free market, depends on who you ask. This is certainly a topic that people with wide ranging ideological backgrounds do disagree on.

It's true. The free-market can solve a vast majority of problems better than central planning can, and given a proper chance to prove it, likely all problems. But a free-market of software nodes making the decision is the ideal model for governing aspects like blocksize; letting node operators choose freely just invites people with bad incentives to abuse the freedom. People like Peter R try to gently imply they want the former, when in truth, they're proposing the latter.

The miners act as a proxy for the economic majority. The entire concept of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are based on the free market, no feature or parameter is excluded from this, I have already proven my point, agree to disagree I guess.

This has everything to do with ideologies, since when we apply different ideologies to this problem we get different answers. This has become a debate about the fundamental principles of Bitcoin, decentralization and financial freedom are ideological concepts after all.

Bitcoin is most definitely in the market and it does need to compete. It is being actively traded in several exchanges and it is used all around the world for many different things, including trade. Bitcoin is therefore on the market.

This seems to imply to me that you do not understand free markets, a free market is not comprised of a monolithic totalitarian consensus. It is instead made up from different people with different views operating in a free environment making free choices. Consensus in Bitcoin also does not mean that everyone has to agree with each other all the time, which would only be possible when you do have a centralized authority that everyone can agree with. Disagreements can be resolved through proof of work, this is the ingenious way that Bitcoin has solved this age old problem. I do not understand what problem you could possibly have with that, unless you think we should only have one option to choose from, which would be an accurate description of totalitarianism.

This whole discussion is a confusion over voluntarism and the free-market.

By Veritas definition, the USD is a free market.

I'm sorry for entertaining this whole thing   muyuu is right, we ought to stop trying to stick the free-market label on everything

Try not being so lazy and quoting only the relevant parts.


No, I'm just informing you that blocksize cap currently is not a free choice for neither the individual user nor the individual miner nor basically anyone. You need a mining majority to subvert the cap. That makes it remarkably "non free". It is so by design. I believe there are a few lost souls trying to make a client without caps and the rest untouched. If this client had a mining majority, then the blocksize cap would be sort of a free market.


No, quite likely I'm more of an anarchist than you are. This has nothing to do with ideologies. Ideologies don't necessarily make you blind to evident realities. What you are saying is just nonsense and honestly I have no idea what your ideology is, and I don't care.

Free markets have objective properties. Wishing that something should be a free market doesn't make it so.


Erm what? If you mean that there is a market of coins then possibly so, although not necessarily very efficient, functioning or free (alt-coins). Bitcoin itself as a protocol is not in any sort of markets, although maybe you can make a very wild analogy to see parallel Universes as markets or something esoteric like that. But in practical terms, you are not making sense. If this were a free market then why are you opposing its will surely devs are part of this market too then, and they have decided strongly as a majority against your beloved BIP101 and also XT, so it doesn't go into Core. You guys run XT, everybody happy. Free market right? except obviously it isn't. 

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Got to go now.

You are trying to imply that I contradicted myself, I did not. I know that I have the free choice, so therefore I do. Even people that have been convinced that they do not have this choice still technically and factually do have this free choice, however this does not change that if the economic majority does become totalitarian in its thinking it could still subvert the principles we hold dear, just like it often does in state democracies.

I suppose I am able to recognise that people have different ideologies then myself and I can respect that, I do not just describe ideologies I disagree with as "delusional". Marx for instance contributed much to our knowledge of economics today yet I do not agree with everything he says. I am definitely not a Marxist, however I can respect people who are different to myself, tolerance after all is an important foundation for having a peaceful society.

The entire Bitcoin protocol is part of the free market, everyone could decide to stop using it tomorrow, or the whole world could adopt it instead. You stating that some aspects of Bitcoin are not free and are not under the effects of the free market is therefore wrong. People do have the choice, everyone here has independently chosen to use Bitcoin for themselves and they can in the same sense choose to stop using it tomorrow.

Anyone can freely choose to run an alternative implementation as well which can propose to change any parameter of the Bitcoin protocol. Whether the economic majority sides with the change is a different matter, which is why so far at least the theory is that the block reward will not be increased, at least not without causing a chain fork. This is the game theory, psychology and economic theory that Bitcoin relies on for arguably its most important value proposition. I think that the Bitcoin protocol will continue to succeed in aligning peoples incentives in this way, time will tell whether I am correct and whether this grand experiment we call Bitcoin will continue to prove its premise.

Except it's obviously not a free choice. But you keep on telling yourself that as you cannot choose. 


That's not having a political slant, that's being delusional. Not everything is a free market, and by imagining things that are not free market as they were, you just live an illusion and fail to achieve any actual goals in the real world neither individual nor collective.


Of course there are free markets, but blocksize cap is not one, neither is the fee currently (sorry Peter) nor the total number of coins to be minted, to cite some examples. Whether some of that would be better as a free market is debatable, the reality is they are not as of today and they are unlikely to ever be.

It is a market because it represents a free choice between currencies/financial policies/cryptocurrencies. It is a free market because the choice is free and not under the pressure of any regulation by a government or other entity forcing us to conform, therefore it is a free market.

I can fill you in why, it is because libertarians and anarchists are on the extreme right of the spectrum in terms of economics, they believe that the free market can provide the best solutions to the problems we face when compared to government or other forms of centralized control, anarchism can even be described as an extreme form of capitalism. This is why people with this ideological slant do tend to compare everything with the market which is because many of them believe that the ideal way to organize society is through a free market, and there are a lot of libertarians and anarchists in the Bitcoin community. lol

Not all markets are free, though some Marxists might argue that there is no such thing as a free market.

I agree. I'm mostly playing along with their rhetoric

Agreed, but it goes both way 

Furthermore the culture of its participants is also important in the sense that they understand that they have a choice, if people become convinced because of overly dogmatic thinking or appeals to authority and become totalitarian in their thinking then the network can be subverted in this way, though in a way it is not subverted, since it is just reflecting the will of its participants, it certainly would seem that way from our perspective. In such a hypothetical future we would most likely find refuge in an alternative cryptocurrency, or possibly a chain fork of Bitcoin. This is why spreading and understanding the Bitcoin philosophy is important if we want those values to be reflected in the larger society and therefore reflected in our blockchains.

If you mean "what people run and agree to be Bitcoin", then obviously neither is it a proper market nor is it free. Pretty obviously really.

I don't understand this obsession with seeing everything as a market, and every market as free just because you wish it to be. This is simply delusional, which is probably why you guys are missing what's going on and "surprisingly" for you lot, 0 out of the last 1000 blocks are BIP101.

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