Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 231. (Read 2032248 times)

He is still pissed off because I don't buy into his "we are going back to cavemen" theory of economics.

That was a no brainer.. Jpm basically left the game and moved onto something else.. What that is who knows.

Meanwhile in other news:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/bank-of-china-becomes-first-chinese-bank-to-help-set-gold-price-1434453559

Great, now China is set to get in on the Gold price fixing (fraud).  Is this good news?

No. A clever writer with charisma (cypherdoc) and hence some more clever thinkers in this thread. A few stalkers are realising it but can't lure them into their own threads. That is the reason why they are here and not elsewhere.

TRUE. One huge egotrip in this thread. It should be locked and forgotten about.
But BTC is dropping and gold will climb, so at the very least it should have it's title changed.

Has it ever been any different?

What you have to remember about this thread is that if all the egos were laid end to end....


...no-one would be in the least bit surprised.

What a shame! The feet of the prophets are to be kissed!

I told you all upthread there would likely be a bounce this June in both gold and BTC but the final lows are still coming.

I continue (via Armstrong) to predict every price move. Yet I (and he) get no acknowledgement.

This does appear to be a power struggle between the Bitcoin Foundation and the "core developers".

It appears that the Foundation side has decided that the "core developers" are dispensable and that they are gaining too much leverage which is dangerous given their business conflict-of-interest with Blockstream.

All of this is indicative of the fact that Bitcoin is not yet on auto-pilot and is not decentralized. It is rather a power struggle of vested interests.

It doesn't matter which direction this power play goes because the writing in already on the wall as to the overall outcome of Bitcoin core sinking into a morass and either a subsumption or orthogonal alternative via pegged side chains will eventually emerge.

This is why I have suggested to Gregory that they just give up the control and march on. Their tech can't be controlled by Bitcoin core, so they should just ignore this power struggle and focus on where their inherit power is implicit.

Any way, none of it matters to my work (not even the timing of the viability of pegged side chains). I can carry on where my power is implicit.

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Astute separation-of-concerns.

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Scary only if you want anyone in the world to be able to directly participate in mining consensus.

If you don't care about some centralization due to the regulatory oversight (an example of an out-of-band incentive that obviates the assumption of a Nash equilibrium) that can placed on those who can meet much higher minimum resource requirements, then sure go on your merry way. Regulatory capture is incestuous.

But don't even begin to dream about on-the-block-chain micropayments with any semblance of decentralization.

Maybe not that bad, and if general technology companies are considered separate from Bitcoin-focused businesses, then perhaps another 155 could be added for them, as per the MSCI World Index (IT).
https://www.msci.com/resources/factsheets/index_fact_sheet/msci-world-information-technology-index-usd-net.pdf

It is easy to imagine that even non-Bitcoin tech companies would want to run at least one node to have a hook into a real-world blockchain instance..

All of these groups I identified would also be fairly insensitive to the cost of running a node.

- the academics will apply for grants to operate their nodes so they can perform research

- the businesses and miners will run nodes as a cost of doing business

- the governments will run nodes for law enforcement, surveillance, and other purposes.

- the power users will run nodes because they want to.

Would it really be so bad if the far future looked like this?  

I agree.  

I've been thinking a lot about full node count lately, and I could also imagine a future where node count continues to decline but network decentralization actually improves.  

Let's imagine a distant future where:

  - Every major research university operates 1 full node on average (there's 108 in the US, 15 in Canada, and let's assume 150 elsewhere). That makes about 280 nodes.  

  - Every major bitcoin company in this "bitcoin future" and every mining pool operates a full node.  Assume another 280 nodes.  

  - Various branches of governments in most countries run a few nodes.  Assume 190 countries x 2 nodes = 380 nodes.

  - And a bunch of wealthy bitcoiners operate their own nodes.  Assume another 300 or so.
 
This gives a total of only ~1,240 nodes, but I think such a configuration would be more decentralized than the current state of the network.  

I'm not suggesting that this will actually happen, just pointing out that the network doesn't necessarily need hundreds of thousands of nodes.  

Thanks Peter, this helps.
We can also think of it as O(2n) because of the re-broadcasting, which IBLT would do a lot to mitigate, especially as the re-broadcast is the time critical component, and the capacity of the network in a true O(n) state is already more like 300 tps than 3 tps.

I don't think the full node count would scale as far as 12m in the growth example above, but payment channels for node services would at least reverse the decline even when it becomes necessary to support that loading.


Absolutely!

Its hard to scare people when you talk about O(n) costs per node.

The way I see it, if m nodes need to be made aware of n transactions, then the network overhead for bandwidth is O(nm).  

If we assume that the number of nodes is linearly proportional to the number of transactions, then m = kn and the network overhead is O(n²).  But as you mentioned, m is probably not this significant.  In fact, for the last several years m has gone down as n has gone up, so the network overhead empirically is more like O(n^0.7) (i.e., better than linear).  

Interesting question: right now the Bitcoin network processes about 1 transaction per second while the Visa network processes about 2000.  Right now there are about 6,000 full nodes. If Bitcoin grew to reach Visa's level of transactions per second (2000X growth), would we expect the number of full nodes to grow from 6,000 to 12,000,000?

The other thing I don't understand is why people focus on the network overhead rather than the overhead to run a single node.  As far as I can see, this should always be roughly O(n).  

reddit post

(my emphasis)

Greg is giving me serious cognitive dissonance with these posts.
He is very concerned about the trend to centralization and yet can countenance a quick fork if necessary.

The most harmless hard fork is one which is prepared so far in advance that all software instances are upgraded before it takes effect. Something which was almost achievable if it had been scheduled in early 2013 with the target date about 2 years ahead. That is what Bitcoin needed.

Today, the time for this luxury is gone and about 6000 nodes exist (which accept connections). The worst scenario after a quick fork is 3000 left on each side, with the best scenario somewhere between 3000 and 6000 on the majority side, say 4500 nodes upgrading. The remainder either switching off or flailing away on a chain with a ridiculous difficulty. What a hammer-blow towards the furnace of centralization!

In my opinion, the odds of a dire situation after the 1MB is hit, needing a quick fork, is about 99%. This not an unreasonable interpretation of the separate findings of David Hudson and Statoshi. Even if Greg thinks the odds of needing a fast fork is more like 10% or 20% (otherwise why describe it in the manner above) then this is surely an unacceptable risk.

Meanwhile, Adam has just given us a Hallelujah moment:

Progress at last, buying time to smoothly scale the MC, as well as buying time for SC and LN. FFS! How can this be contentious to SC and LN supporters?

Lastly.
Perhaps Peter R can put this one to bed:

Adam claims that the network overhead in scaling Bitcoin is O(n^2), where n=transactions
Mike counters that it is O(nm), where m=nodes

The latter makes more sense to me, and further, that m is not as significant as it appears because it is highly parallelized.

Why do people keep saying they are leaving this thread then always come right back? Maybe I can help:

marcus, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Ok, the derpiness is plumbing new depths of sadness, i think it might be time to check out of the gold collapse and I have some other projects I'd like to work on ... so long and thanx for all the fish sn

bitcoin will scale eventually, patience grasshoppers.

Glad I am not the only one!

You'd think this level of hand-wringing about a hard fork would be reserved for changing the 21 million bitcoin limit or something. In 10 years I think this discussion about whether to have 1 MB blocks or 20 MB blocks will sound really strange in our TB-flash-drive streaming-hd-virtual-reality world.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1227012

That post also serves as proof that I wasn't singling out Blockstream when I asked them the same question about potential conflicts of interest.