Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 675. (Read 2032265 times)

How do you make a price discovery mechanism?

I'm surprised and disappointed that so many techno-commies are involved with Bitcoin, to the point at which they can see problems that are an obvious result of a a lack of a price discovery mechanism and conclude that Bitcoin needs more central planning rather than more price discovery.

Extraordinarily well stated! (So I cannot bring myself to edit it down for size.)

I'm surprised and disappointed that so many people on this thread (not to mention Gavin) are telling we who value decentralization to stick it up our asses.  Especially when there is a great way to scale AND achieve highly desirable but mutually conflicting developments without giving the decentralization away.  That would be sidechains of course.

I think people forget that the P2P network is just as much a part of Bitcoin's protection mechanism as block mining is, if not the most important part. And the P2P network remains quite decentralized (I currently have 2 nodes running, one at home and one in AWS and neither mine for blocks)

The blockchain created by miners functions as the network wide official historical record. It enables newly joined nodes to compute the current ledger state to join the network, and prevents a poorly connected network from having separate node groups diverge.

But it is nodes on the P2P network who: Validate transactions, Transmit transactions across the network (and to miners), Block double spend attempts (the network quickly agrees on the "first" spend), Validate mined blocks and Monitor/track re-orgs.

We could have a single miner left, but the P2P network would still function as a mechanism to keep that miner honest. As long as that miner included all valid transactions from the network's memory pool and did not issue block re-orgs then Bitcoin is OK. If that miner tried to a) reject certain transactions (never include certain trans in blocks), b) issue double spends (insert trans into a block that conflicted with the P2P's selection), or c) re-write history (by re-organizing farther than 1 block back), then any of this would be very visible to the P2P network and the network could collectively decide on a more honest blockchain mechanism.

Mining can become more centralized because their actions are very visible and more importantly validated by decentralized peers, which any of us can participate in. That is the meaning when we say Bitcoin is decentralized, it is that we all can participate in the network's validation, mining is one aspect of that validation but not the only aspect.

As a thought experiment try comparing Bitcoin with only a few miners plus the P2P network, to either the FED or the London bullion depository. Even in that scenario Bitcoin is infinitely more visable and verifiable than either FED dollars or gold bar existence/ownership.

Fair point.  Even though when I first compiled the code it had mining software, I'll not argue from that perspective.  Probably at a bare minimum everyone would have anticipated some specialization on the mining end of things.

I'll also argue against my thesis in that it would have been a no-brainer to reward the transfer network and verifies (full nodes) if it were considered a desirable thing to have well represented in the network.

Maybe you are right and the whole thing was a pump-n-dump.  If so, I'm glad I dumped some already because there is every possibility that many people will be enthusiastic enough about a 'real' Bitcoin to get one going once the original has proven to be a hoax from the get-go.

Well, then we have to get pedantic. Bitcoin was *never* peer-to-peer. A miner technically always sits in the middle, even if the hashing/nodes were perfectly uniformly distributed.



Heh. I almost ended my post with: "But you'll not want for capital."

chartbuddy will outpost you all.

Maybe you remember the dusty old term 'peer-2-peer'?

I got my share of abuse for proposing that it should be deprecated as a sales pitch before it became a total joke since that is the way things are heading.


Whatever.  I'll be more wealthy more quickly at least, and that will make the disappointment more palatable.

That's not true. Bitcoin is correctly marketed as "decentralized". It's not marketed as "every single human in the world gets an equal say forever no matter what". Various aspects of bitcoin can (and probably will) consolidate significantly and yet remain far more decentralized and far better than alternatives. And that's what matters; remaining on a different level than the legacy financial system.



I somehow think you're always going to feel that way. In 2019, when things have consolidated further (yet still kept the essence of the system), and usage is an order of magnitude or two higher, you're still going to be feeling that tension because the industrialization/commercialization will be driving your idealism mad.

Be that as it may, it is diametrically opposite of what was pumped out for newbie consumption when they were trying to rope people in.

I myself always knew that it was a distinct possibility given the technical issues but figured I had a notable possibility of making a dime even if Bitcoin did go down the shit-hole.

I also figured that Bitcoin had the potential to become something worthwhile if clever people could rescue it in time.  Again, that is why I'm so excited about sidechains.

In 2011 I would not have guessed that in 2015 the future of Bitcoin would still hang in the balance described above.  I would have expected it to have gone one way or the other by this time.  I did not anticipate that off-chain transaction systems (sucky non-sound-money ones such as the exchanges and coinbases though they may be) would give Bitcoin a chance to make it this far and still have hope.  I guess I don't predict everything correctly.

That other guy posting in this thread?

Part of my research btwn Jan 2011 and April 2011 before I made my first investment was talking to key people one of which was theymos. He's been around at least as long as anyone else and one of the things I clearly remember him saying was that he could see significant consolidation to large server farms  as tx volumes rose. And that he didn't think it was a problem either.

Somewhat. What he calls group signatures are what Cryptonote calls ring signatures. But to make it work for a cryptocurrency requires the significant additional step of making them double spending proof (to extend his analogy, we can't general, even acting anonymously, giving such an order more than once).

Go read through his posts. He was a pragmatist. I really don't think he considered a significant degree of consolidation to be a systemic problem. He may not of considered it ideal, but he probably (correctly, in my opinion) considered it both inevitable and non-fatal.

Hearn pointed that out too.  For a while I was pretty demoralized by this, but now I think that perhaps he was actually playing the burgeoning community along realizing that very few of them really had the vision and technical prowess to see beyond very far into the future.  We may never know.

For my part I find it hard to believe that Satoshi could have (and would have) achieved what he did just to make a PayPal-II, and I am certain that he would have seen that this is exactly what it would become under a scenario as he described.  I also very much doubt that he blew it on his infrastructure capacity estimates as badly as he did (though in fairness, if he really did welcome the centralization of which he speaks it is true now 5 years later that corporate entities have plenty of capacity to run very high transaction rates...as it was when he (supposedly) wrote that.)

Nope. He made lots of changes and didn't comment on them.



https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/no-true-scotsman

Satoshi didn't seem to consider it a problem for bitcoin to centralize significantly:




There's also the metzdowd quote along those lines from Nov 2008.

Ya, well, MysteryMiner said he's Iranian and hates colored people (except he was more explicit.)  Right here on TrollTalk!


It sure doesn't take much to make you certain of something.

You don't seem to give Satoshi himself much credit.  He surely would have recognized the significance of slipping in the 1MB block size and commented on the commit if he felt like discussing it.  I'd say he likely had something deeper in mind.  But unlike our friends above, I don't pretend that my mind reading abilities are strong enough to overcome the space-time continuum.

Also, can someone who knows CryptoNote tell me if Satoshi basically had the seeds of it here?

Thought you might discount such clear evidence.

Theymos had this interpretation:


Caveden said this:


(my bold emphasis in both quotes)

It's a sure bet that these guys are smart enough to know what Satoshi was thinking.