genjix: This thread, particularly the first post, is very valuable to have in the public eye right now with GHash.IO at strong as they are. It's a short-term fix, but keeping attention on P2Pool and similar things will help. In the medium term the blocksize thing will probably start heating up again before long, and we'll see the same old set of naive arguments to just raise or get rid of those limits without doing the hard work to address the fundamental design flaws in Bitcoin.(*) Either way the OP has a lovely case study of why we have to keep pushing to make Bitcoin more, not less, decentralized.
Cluttering up the thread with off-topic arguments doesn't help that cause, and perversely the way human psych works is such that engaging in arguments like the above with your opponents just validates their social status. Best to ignore them on a personal level, engage them on a technical level, and keep making awesome software. I didn't pull off
this by worrying about who was working for what police forces you know.
Is there a reason you suddenly dug up this thread from 2011, genjix?
How much money would you take from the dutch police to help them arrest a buyer of DMT from Silk Road, and so help clear up Bitcoin's image?
e.g. "Because it's relevant." would have sufficed and kept discussion on track. Make a separate post for the above instead if you want to bring it up.
tvbcof: People dislike Mike in
for being so prolific, precisely because he creates so much code and writing that's often kinda good, but misses the mark; somehow usually landing towards centralization and away from privacy; often only when examined closely. Some find it just annoying, others in this community see it as a deliberate and malicious attempt to shift the overton window of political acceptability. Either way, there are more interesting things to discuss.
mike: If the above sample of my PR consulting services has interested either you or a colleague, please be in touch and I'm sure we can negotiate an acceptable hourly rate. Referrals by request.
*) Back on topic: an interesting question to ask might be to what extent does the current division between "miners" and "users" make this freezing crap possible from a social point of view. I and others keep on kicking around crypto-currency designs that make per-transaction PoW possible, even to the point where everyone has an incentive to "do their fair share" of PoW mining through demurrage balanced exactly with mining reward. In short, if you do your fair share of the mining effort that is required to keep the system secure, the demurrage and mining rewards balance out with a net gain of zero. If you do more than your fair share, your coins grow, and if you do less, they shrink.
You can pair systems like that with other schemes that make pooled mining much less attractive, and I
think you can make PoW algorithms that are designed such that even a high-budget ASIC effort wouldn't have more than a single digit multiplier advantage over a standard computer in terms of electricity/return.
Socially, are people open to such systems if the result is a much more decentralized coin where it's totally infeasible for transactions to even be significantly slowed by miner regulation? Obviously you can just ignore the whole mining business and not do your fair share, but you'd essentially be paying, say, 1% of the value of your coins to the participants in the system who do that important work for you.
