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Please note Satoshi chose to include in the blockchain a newspaper quote from an article about bailouts for TBTF banks, instead of one from an article about excessive bank, ATM, or credit card fees.
Bitcoin is revolution and financial freedom, not a nifty gadget to put in retail points of sale. If a guy in Venezuala (or Florida) can't be his own private bank by running a full node over TOR on a slow 5mb DSL line, this experiment has failed.
Satoshi did not create Bitcoin because he was mad about the 50 cent credit/debit surcharge on his iced Americano, and you can't kill/obsolete the BIS with some stupid VC micropayment daydream internet-of-bullshit Visa-wannabe transaction network.
And there is this:
The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.
If we subsidize blockchain bloat, we'll get more of it.
That most precious resource should be optimized, not diluted.
The sooner you Monopolist Maximalists get over the fact that GavinCoin doesn't have the required 80% consensus, the better.
The max doesn't have to stay 1mb forever, but now is not the time to potentially undermine the diffuse/defensible/resilient nature that provides BTC's antifragilty.
I agree with everything you wrote above, except 1) Gavincoin has 80% of the mining consensus (which is centralized already), you freedom figthers lost and you will soon be forced to admit it, 2) Micropayments are undesired if done by Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, etc, but there is a way to do this without centralization and SOBO you will not get enough network effects from just making a decentralized store-of-value that can't be spent nor converted to anything any where
. (SOBO = statement of the blatantly obvious)
We are headed into a global contagion where physical black markets will not exist. You will not be able to trade crypto-currency for legal tender nor for gold. The only economy left standing (other than the NWO monetary reset) will be the anonymous micropayments economy of the fledgling Knowledge Age.
Running a full client is ALREADY too resource-intensive for average Joe. The blockchain.info model is better suited for average Joe. That model has proven to solve the problem of trust in an environment where trust has been violated a majority of the time. Average Joe will be his own bank with a simple web interface where he has full control over his keys.
excuse my ignorance, but why is average joe (or average jose in argentina) "required" to run a full node.
why cant they run an spv client? Are spv clients like multibit unsafe (or not safe enough?) once sync'd to the rest of the nodes. satoshi believed that the vast majority would use spv clients. was this an unwise decision to make?
If mining isn't decentralized, then you've lost control over Bitcoin to the financial elite.
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Blockchain size is not the main issue with micropayments (no amount of pruning is scalable if the unpruned chain isn't scalable, i.e. scalability is a different complexity class from bounded compression). Rather as I discussed with thezerg upthread, at some scale micropayments force centralization of full nodes due to processing and bandwidth requirements. I argued that renting a hosting server is not decentralization, because the authorities can regulate the ISPs. Anonymity derives from mixing targeted activity (monopolization of mining by the cartel that runs our world) with untargeted activity (users surfing the net from a home ISP connection).
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The 20 MB blocks will drive more centralization of mining.
And you can't fork away from that...
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Until we make crypto-currency technically impossible to monopolize, then we've given them no choice but to do what they do best.
Bitcoin's design can't resist monopolization. Impossible. Do I need to repeat all the detailed reasons again?
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You can't fork away from the masses whom are owned by these mainstream elite who are now taking over Bitcoin. No one will follow you. Money requires some critical mass.
If you are going to fork, you must do it now and build some critical mass (even if smaller than Bitcoin's mass).
Which is precisely what I am intending to do very soon, i.e. fork those of us who are aware into a design that technically can resist all forms of attack on the decentralization and permission-less attributes.
Until you have that, you are just blowing hot air here.
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Very simple. They have monopolized the mining (ASICs concentrated into farms, 21 Inc, pools hidden behind Sybil attack) and the userbase (Coinbase, Paypal, Circle, Bitpay, etc). Checkmate.
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P.S. Bitcoin will succeed in being widely adoped, because the elite want it to succeed. But they will be in control of Bitcoin. The decentralized, permission-less quality of Bitcoin will be a propaganda lie only, not reality.
). Without that cooperation, it never happened.
