Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 191. (Read 2032248 times)

Following MP's advice and never changing the protocol (thereby avoiding what he calls creating an altcoin) is an objective definition of doing nothing. It is not the only one, and it might be one that leads to Bitcoin's failure (if the original protocol was not sufficiently well designed to succeed) but at least it is objective.

Obfuscation is an effective form of propaganda.

Edit:


Saw this after posting. Any way it was relevant to this thread because the disbelief in "conspiracy theories" is claimed as some objective argument against those of us who believe such an elite vulture capital has a takeover plan for Bitcoin.


Right, I (as AnonyMint) was there at the start. But it went on and on an on, so I departed.

It's a question of perspective. There is no correct answer to what "doing nothing" really means, but it's being used as an argumentative tactic among the block-increase skeptics. I'm simply pointing out that neither side has a clear-cut, definitive claim that they are the ones proposing "doing nothing" or "maintaining the status quo" or "taking the conservative position."

Side chains are absolutely essential if you want BTC to evolve and fulfill such a goal.

Without side chains, you can assuredly kiss that hope goodbye, because for example we can see now that Bitcoin as currently designed is not decentralized because it requires all this politics on the issue of scaling.

I would totally use XT as a sidechain, and may even support it from an infrastructure perspective though most likely the google-type entities will subsidize my use and very possibly will give me 'cash back.'  As long as XT is open source that I can compile myself and verify the 2wp implementation, I've got no problems doing so.

I would even use XT if/when it sprouts blacklisting since that will probably be a requirement in my jurisdiction and vendors will not realistically be able to use an 'unsafe' currency solution.  When I want to buy trinkets from TigerDirect I don't really give a shit about these things.

Your question presumes omniscience thus it is not falsifiable. Junk science.

For example, it may be the case that the vulture capital is waiting for the exponential block size scaling before they unload the masses into Bitcoin via Paypal, Coinbase, Circle, Facebook, 21 Inc, etc.. With the intent of forcing out ephemeral miners and achieving distributed centralization and KYC regulation every where.

Actually that outcome is the one I think is nearly assured no matter which direction we go, because one could speculate that they've also invested in pegged side chains as an alternative where those entities can push the masses into a side chain which extracts the BTC value out of Core, and then they cut loose the hashrate on Core (and any other merged mind side chains) and send it off into nowhere, nowhere land.

Then again, I am onto their plans and working on the antidote.

Maybe it would be fine if 8 GB block-size supporters spin-of their own XT-coin sidechain.  :-) (My advice is to use 2wp so you can go back later.)

If so, then people can all take a chill pill and stop with the scaremongering on both sides. We're probably a lot closer to consensus than we think if the FUD is all cleared away.

I expect we are far from 1MB being stifling, as long as the fee market works properly, and conversely I also suspect that the cap isn't really needed at all. But for the sake of conservatism and consensus, we should just keep moving up the cap modestly so that it stays similar to its usual position well above where it would be actually functioning as much of a cap. If problems arise on either the "fees too high" or "blocks too big" (or "spammers just use up all the extra space") side, we can make the necessary adjustments by either increasing the cap or getting the fee market working better. If we get both problems, we'll actually be in a double pinch and have to innovate our way out, but I don't think we're anywhere close to that even being a possibility yet.

The debate now, assuming the FUD is wiped away, seems to come down to, "Is it better to hit too-high fees first, or too-big blocks first?" I can see the argument from an optimization perspective that too-high fees is smoother and results in more economization and innovation, but on the other hand if it starts to hinder adoption that would be self-defeating and could even reduce decentralization because people who otherwise would have adopted and run full nodes will turn away.

I think from looking at how everyone is acting and reacting in this debate that it is clear people's opinions (even of most devs) will generally move away from any pain that develops, so I see no danger of Bitcoin being "stuck" or stonewalled into a position that is painful for anyone, at least until we get to the "double pinch" scenario above, where both full blocks and high fees are a problem, but again that should be way far in the future, where we really can likely rely on things like Lightning Network and whatever other alien tech exists then.

TL;DR: Not worried.

The fundemental error here is failing to recognize the voluntary nature of currency adoption.

Gavin proposed a change to Bitcoin that users are free to accept or decline.

That some developers interpreted this as a threat and turned it into a battle only shows the weakness of their position.

The proper response would have been to convince people to not choose the change by explaning why they would be better of by doing so.

Instead, they acted with outrage over the idea that somebody proposed something without their permission and was doing a better job of convincing people that they'd benefit from his proposal instead of theirs.

This is not a sustainable position for them. Money is only as valuable as there are other people willing to accept it, and nobody is in a position to force anybody to accept Bitcoin.

People who act on the expectation that their opinions are right by default because they were there first and so aren't subject to continual validation in the marketplace of ideas are going to end up losing everything.

I suppose by that argument the Russian revolution (to use one of countless examples)  was, by definition, not a 'hostile' fork since it was democratic.

In any conflict, once the first shot is fired all involved parties are are appropriately labeled 'belligerents'.  As to who 'started it', that is left to the history books and these are, as they say, 'written by the victors.'

if 75% of the network wants to go with large blocks and 25% want to force smaller blocks, which fork is the hostile one?

No. No hostile forks.

Just for reference, those of us who's interests include the global climate change issue/scam (if they have a range of interests at all) have a lot of fun on another epic thread here:  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/reddits-science-forum-banned-climate-deniers-374873  All are welcome and a lot of scammer minions have fallen.  Most of the time it only takes a few days.

The full block 'problem' was overplayed for propaganda reasons.  It's the same principle as making loud noises to get a herd of animals to do what you want them to do.

Someone made some graph with his guess at simplistic future predictions which did not (because they can not) make any allowance for future developments.  His genius was to put pretty colors on it which were even more arbitrary.  Since people like shiny and colorful things (a throw-back to our simian ancestry where identifying ripe fruit was important) it was a wildly successful bit of propaganda with many observers.  That does not make it particularly meaningful in reality though.

In point of fact there is a large mostly synthetic utilization of transaction availability even at the 1MB derived rate.  This from people who would not be there if it were not for the fact that BTC transactions are subsidized to the level of being nearly free.  Sloughing off these freeloaders will not threaten the system at all and may be helpful.  This would buy us at least a lot of time.  If/When an actual problem with capacity occurs everyone that I know of (except perhaps MP) is perfectly amenable to increasing capacity through simplistic block size increase methods.  In that case, unlike today, it will be much more easy to gain the 'consensus' that Bitcoin needs.

yes the key thing to understand is that he's not trying to hit a bullseye here.  It is not necessary.  He is just trying to define an extreme condition to let coders allocate memory, size embedded hardware, etc based on these maximums.  Individual miners are welcome to mine smaller blocks.

Let's assume a spam attacking misbehaving miner ala the large miner, large block attack against small miners that was initially a huge FUD advanced by Wiulle and others that you don't hear anything about anymore. Simple defense, just mine a 0 TX header only block during the time of your large block processing. This is the practical defense that Wang Chun told us they do and that we've witnessed they do during stress tests. And this defense can be done  irrespective of whether as a miner you are connected to Corallo's relay network or not which those Fudsters love to go on about.

Point being miners can and should be encouraged to track TX's and fees and construct blocks appropriately based on their own internal metrics and profitability. Core devs can't possibly do this.

Yes, you could accuse Gavin of trying to be a one man predictor for network growth at this point but his proposal is based on sound growth projections with the larger point being that he is trying to automate out as much human intervention, voting manipulation  and need for future forks as much as  possible.

A single person picking a number out of their head is voting, because all the person can do is make a suggestion. Every suggestion is voted on, by investors.

Superimposing a second voting mechanism, and more complexity with it, seems redundant. That is, unless you think "hard forks are dangerous." I say, get comfortable with the fork, make it so that it is easy to do with predictable results, and then use it whenever necessary. Whatever its dangers may be, the dynamics of that voting mechanism are far superior.

yes the voting has issues.  

The biggest issue is the role the block size cap should have in the network.  

Satoshi, Gavin, et al. see it as a "sanity check".  In software this is essentially an exceptional condition -- a value that the system should *never* exceed.  In this perspective, miners can individually produce smaller blocks (regardless of pending txn count) so why create a mechanism that essentially forces a cartel (collective behavior)?  The only reason would be to maximize miner profitability by manipulating the supply curve.  Closely tracking evolving network and disk capacity is not necessary for a "sanity check" because most miners will simply start mining smaller blocks (than the limit) if network and disk stop following moore's law.

Others want the max block size to be an entity that can be used to actively manage the network.  Presumably if miners are noticing a lot of "spam", but a "misbehaving" miner is mining it, they could vote to reduce block capacity to eliminate this spam.  Also, voting lets the limit more closely track the evolution of network and disk capacity.

I think you're just starting to understand Bitcoin. No need to fork to SC's?

Is it meant to be humorous that voting is described as arbitrary when compared to a single person picking a number out of his head?