gmax, the Bitcoin Bear:
The next element I would like to talk about is federated consensus. Bitcoin uses decentralized consensus, which is absolutely essential for holding Bitcoin's values and ethos in the wider world. It's what makes the system resistant to outside influence, political meddling and it's what makes it trustworthy. We're not even sure if it works in bitcoin, though. So it's hard to apply it to another network that is parallel to Bitcoin, but maybe the consnesus system of bitcoin doesn't work. What does decentralized consensus mean for a private network? It's not clear whether it's even possible to use decentralized consensus in a small low-value private network. Even if you were trying to use decentralized consensus in a small network, then how do you bootstrap it? .. because decentralized consensus is only secure if you have economic incentives in place. There are many other mechanisms for consensus that others have proposed. In the sidechains whitepaper, we formalized bitcoin consensus by calling it a dynamic membership multi-party signature (DMMS). The idea here is to say that the blocks are on the network are valid only if a threshold number of parties have signed it, and which group well it's dynamic. So what if you take that idea of DMMS and replace it with a static plain signature, and the result is a centralized system which is better than just trusting a single server. It's a system where you can have real-time auditing by most participants, and where dishonesty is machine detectable. Censorship is not machine-detectable in this system. You can build this with an arbitrary multisig policy, you could have a rule that says if an auditor or 5-of-8 sign on it, or 8-of-8 sign off on it. This approach does not require any human discretion, we could potentially implement it on tamper-resistant hardware to make it more secure, and some applications need trust. Trust is inherently a bit of centralization, but if you are trading around a digital proxy of gold, which requires someone to eventually redeem those tokens for gold, and if you have trust then why not make use of it. This has been mostly the work of Jorge Timon.
hmmm, i hope he doesn't view Bitcoin as simply a digital proxy for physical gold. i hope that here he is just referring to a specific SC implementation of bitcoins for physical gold. imo, Bitcoin is digital gold at it's most basic level. i sure hope gmax thinks the same way. the whole point of Bitcoin is to REPLACE physical gold, not eventually redeem those tokens for gold!
We get it. You don't like Blockstream. If they're for something, you're against it.
Sidechains are here now. As for GavinCoin, "not tonight dear."
btw, we already have seen the fallout from what happens when the core dev team is aligned under the umbrella of Blockstream --> paralysis of the block size increase proposal.
that's pretty clear from the timeline of things. it would have better if they'd at least been honest about it, something like, "we object to an increase beyond 1MB b/c we have what we think is a better proposal to scaling coming online in just a few weeks. when you see it, we think you'll agree that there is no need to adopt Gavin's proposal".
instead, they hid it, and even said conflicting things like "we even think blocks should be smaller than 1MB" and "SC's don't contribute to scaling". now they they are saying that "SC's can contribute to scaling indirectly by allowing testing".
