Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 232. (Read 2032248 times)

theymos is a strange character that has control of all our media outlets; BCT, Reddit, & apparently Bitcoin.org.

i admired him greatly back in the day b/c he helped me understand Bitcoin thru several pm's and a couple of Skype audio conversations. ...

i've been very disappointed ever since in his allowing forum moderators to essentially run wild around here deleting posts they don't like.  and then with the forum donations for a new site.  i'm certainly not alone.

...
and now this.  i really think it's a power play by the devs to keep control.  marcus said it flat out.  they want control.

I wish Bitcoin used almost no bandwidth as well... but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

This is getting bizarre…that post has a strange feel, with hints of desperation, like someone is grasping at authority that's slipping through their fingers.  This type of behaviour will only serve to disenfranchise them further, as power migrates to MIT, CoinCenter, and hopefully several new initiatives at university research labs.  

I think I've heard all the arguments, but I still cannot understand the opposition to increasing the blocksize.

the drama continues on:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/pull/894

there's that name Saivann again.  he was involved in the original PressCenter.org debate.

... But your situation is not typical, and you can always purchase a virtual machine for very little if you really wanted a node.

Remember this quote by Adam when the time comes that they make their proposal to change the Bitcoin protocol to enable LN and SCs.

The bar to add LN and SC enabling protocol changes is wide-scale consensus. If a small number of participants disagree, it doesn't happen by their own logic. Additionally these protocol changes significantly change what Bitcoin fundamentally is much more than a simple 20MB blocksize c

Nobody can claim the specific piece of paper money from you, solely on the basis that it was the very same piece of paper money that was stolen.

They (and others) can still make all sorts of other claims, for money or otherwise, like if you had reasonable cause to believe the paper money was proceeds from criminal activity, and accepted it anyway (see Shrem). The act of spending such knowingly dirty money to make it fungible, is called money laundering, I thought...

Great article explaining some profound details about ownership:

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-ownership-impact-fungibility/

When you aquire a stolen article from a thief, you might be responsible, and have to give the article back to the rightful owner.

Not so with money, when you sell a can of beer to a known thief, nobody can claim the money from you. The reasoning behind it is to secure the fungibility of the money. When you receive money in a transaction, you should not worry about the source of that money. Exactly what we need for bitcoin, for the same reason.

Come to think of it, this is not so with the banks, they worry a lot where the money comes from, and I  have to declare by which acceptable means I have come to own them. Are deposit money not fungible? Strange world, indeed.

The last time I ran bitcoind in support mode (allowing incoming 8333) was on a soekris router which is comparable to an RPI.  That was many years ago, and while it worked, it was very close to not 'working fine'.  Granted, leveldb and some other optimizations have happened since then which helped but things were pushing the envelope, and that is ignoring considerations such at UTXO size and network capacity.  Since I won't allow UPnP on my network and won't run bitcoind on an important machine, I need a sacrifice machine to run it.  I'm currently stuck on satellite here at home which pretty much precludes supporting the network even at the 1MB setting due to total data constraints.  To run bitcoind I have to arrange a remote system that I can trust and that is something of a challenge for a suspicious and careful person.  I'm not about to sacrifice the time and money in support of Bitcoin when the likes of Andresen and Hearn are hanging around trying to kill it.

To understand my thoughts you need to understand that I consider joe-sixpack users to be a liability on all fronts.  'Outrunning regulation' is laughable to me, and idiots do more harm than good when they try to run critical systems.  Multibitch users are not helpful to the network and, as I say, not helpful in the 'critical mass' equation since Bitcoin with it's batch-mode native function is simply not competitive as an exchange currency and never will be a big factor there.  IOW, the kinds of percentages we need for anything remotely resembling 'critical mass' are completely pie-in-the-sky.  Even if Bitcoin worked worth a shit here, a lot of people love big brother and would hate Bitcoin for that reason anyway.  All Bitcoin traction does is to attract attack from TPTB by virtue of it's positive attributes such as lack of counter-party risk.

Time and time again we see idiots losing their money to criminals and hucksters.  Being a Bitcoin enthusiast has been like watching a fight between a skilled boxer and a punching bag and I don't see that changing as long as idiots are using Bitcoin in it's native form.

Sidechains breaks the single-point-of-failure problem which vexes a 'one-size-fits-all' solution and pushes the critical infrastructure support role to people who can handle it.  It also pushes the benefits of a counter-party-risk free solution down to the masses.  Nobody can stop the masses from giving their money to shysters but it's very possible to arrange for the sidechain operates themselves to have a tough time robbing their users (unlike general alts.)

Am I an 'elitist'?  Fuck ya.  At the end of the day, though, my goal is to have everyone who wants to be able to enjoy the benefits of distributed crypto-currencies.  I just don't want to see Bitcoin ruined in the process of trying to achieve this...but am prepared to deal with this eventuality if that's the way the cookie is to crumble.

You could say that miners are the vendors of block space, and the users demand it and signals it by their actual fees. An interesting point in the document, in fact creating a market where not only the fees, but also the block size is dynamic. As we close in on the physical limits of the system, many years from now, the block size increments will have to stop, and fees will limit the demand. Sounds ok to me.

Remember this quote by Adam when the time comes that they make their proposal to change the Bitcoin protocol to enable LN and SCs.

The bar to add LN and SC enabling protocol changes is wide-scale consensus. If a small number of participants disagree, it doesn't happen by their own logic. Additionally these protocol changes significantly change what Bitcoin fundamentally is much more than a simple 20MB blocksize change.

Something tells me though that their tune will be different then.

Edit: I think this comment by Mike sums up the need here.

Mike is pointing out that Bitcoin is the entire ecosystem, not just the development board. In fact if you totaled the amount of work and effort put in to build Bitcoin I think it would work out to be less than 1% bitcoin devs and >99% everyone else. There has been a tremendous amount of effort put in to build Bitcoin that goes far beyond and outside of the bitcoin core. But the devs are ignoring that and acting as if Bitcoin is their project and they own it and have put the most amount of work behind it. I think this is telling, and demonstrates the need for systems controlled by users.

is voting confined to miners?

Miners vote by encoding ‘BV’+BlockSizeRequestValue into coinbase scriptSig, e.g.
“/BV8000000/” to vote for 8M. Votes are evaluated by dropping bottom 20% and top
20%, and then the most common floor (minimum) is chosen.

Quite lengthy reply from Adam:

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34208939/

worth reding, though.

Governance

The rest of the developers are wise to realise that they do not want
exclusive control, to avoid governance centralising into the hands of
one person, and this is why they have shared it with a consensus
process over the last 4 years.  No offence but I dont think you
personally are thinking far enough ahead to think you want personal
control of this industry.  Maybe some factions dont trust your
motives, or they dont mind, but feel more assured if a dozen other
people are closely reviewing and have collective review authority.

I know you want scale bitcoin, as I said everyone here does. I think
what you're experiencing is that you've had more luck explaining your
pragmatic unilateral plan to non-technical people without peer review,
and so not experienced the kind of huge pushback you are getting from
the technical community.  The whole of bitcoin is immensely
complicated such that it takes an uber-geek CS genius years to
catchup, this is not a slight of any of the business people who are
working hard to deploy Bitcoin into the world, its just complicated
and therefore not easy to understand the game-theory, security,
governance and distributed system thinking.  I have a comp sci PhD in
distributed systems, implemented p2p network systems and have 2
decades of applied crypto experience with a major interest in
electronic cash crypto protocols, and it took me a several years to
catchup and even I have a few hazy spots on low-level details, and I
addictively into read everything I could find.  Realistically all of
us are still learning, as bitcoin combines so many fields that it
opens new possibilities.

As I said you can not scale a O(n^2) broadcast network by changing
constants, you need algorithmic improvements.

Quite lengthy reply from Adam:

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34208939/

worth reding, though.

As you can probably tell I think a unilateral fork without wide-scale consensus from the technical and business communities is a deeply inadvisable.

If Bitcoin runs out of capacity *it will break and many of our users will leave*. That is not an acceptable outcome for myself or the many other wallet, service and merchant developers who have worked for years to build an ecosystem around this protocol.

still posturing bullish.  apparently there is a bot chewing thru 2BTC buys every 30 sec?

If Bitcoin become becomes dependent on SCs that manage risk for people to protect them from their own mistakes, then we are back into FRN land, where we are all protected and coddled for the minor fee of being slowly boiled alive in the FEDs inflationary pot.