Topic: Is it good or bad that Core development is virtually controlled by one company? - page 2. (Read 8220 times)

It's not that bad. If they make some stupid update, people could just choose to use an older version and the new dumb update would be useless. (Unless lots of people still use it though)

What are you insinuating? Don't be shy.

That last statement.

This question has already been answered. The protocol cannot assign value to these tokens. Just like with Gold, Commodities, Fiat... value is assigned by human agents or AI in the future. This means that 1 person can fork off of the network, have almost no hashing power and his/her coins can be extremely valuable as long as they and another believe it is real money and has value.

This is very basic economics that applies to any assets, that seems to escape you.


At the time when Satoshi wrote that, CPU power was synonymous with Full nodes.  This distinction has changed over the years. Now there are differences in the vote and influences of a full node and mining full node.


I agree , and all/most of core agrees with you here, that is why we are pushing for changes to increase capacity with Segwit.


I count 8.89% of all nodes now... where are you getting your data?

So, unstable people are threatening to dump their coins and/or spam the mempool to get their way... therefore, we should do exactly what they want...

How about... no.

Estimates have Classic at 16% of full nodes. This is madness. What will happen to Blockstream's alliances/sidechains under Classic? Any change in business strategy? Are we all doomed?

In other words, they can dump their BTC. That's fine, and for that, non-mining nodes are neither necessary nor instrumental.
I'm not interested in some feelsy newagey humanist take of Bitcoin network. At this point, all I'm interested in how the Bitcoin protocol can differentiate between "real" (money-backed) and "unreal" (unbacked by anything other than crunch power) non-mining nodes.
The answer is "IT FUCKING CAN NOT."

Allow me this argumentum ad verecundiam:
"... They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism." --S.N.

P.S. I also don't care if you "care about the security of the network and spend time and effort to protect it from malicious actors."
I care about kittens, which is equally relevant to this topic, which is to say not at all.

Some of us actually care about the security of the network and spend time and effort to protect it from malicious actors. Part of this process is understanding the attack vectors , and educating others the risks so we can collectively make the right decisions so threats aren't realized. MP and other fringe lunatic 1MB forever disciples can indeed carry out this attack and are no friends to me or most/all developers in Core. In fact he has threatened to murder some prominent developers.

If you consider my politics to classify me as unstable , than so be it. I call them principles, you consider them unstable ... but perhaps you would be better off considering them "insane convictions" or "convictions you disagree with" instead because these principles are quite stable and consistent . I'll respect your thoughts and try to offer you some consolidation that we truly do want to increase capacity and are working hard to do so safely.


You are fixated on the code acting as a form of AI that solely does the voting. The network consists of nodes with human agents behind them that "vote" with the BTC in their wallet. Actual human being interacting with the code is part of the network!

I think a lot of you are unstable. But threats are always a clever means of promoting your ideas.

Quite compelling when everything else fails.

BAH! But the network doesn't know if there's a wallet behind a node or not. There is no way for the network to know if there's 1000BTC or 0BTC behind a node. NONE. If one of your "real" nodes attempts to relay a block to one of my "fake" nodes, it gets ignored & B&. "My" node will pass on the blocks from "my" miners just fine, because they comply with "my," "fake" node's ruleset.
There is no value judgement here. Your nodes don't propagate "my" blocks, "my" nodes don't propagate yours.
You keep saying that, but it keeps making no sense. Via what mechanism? How?
Don't care, irrelevant. Stay on topic. We're still trying to determine how the network decides which nodes have money/"humans" behind them and which do not.
Please explain the mechanism.
ty

I do not know if it is good or bad that it is controlled by one company. But I think that being controlled by more than one company does not guarantee it will go good either.

Every individual Full Node wallet is a distinct node that can independently verify every transaction going back to the genesis block. They aren't dependent upon those 100 full nodes spun up on amazon ec2.* If one of those amazon ec2 nodes attempts to relay a block that doesn't conform to their full nodes consensus rule it will simply be ignored. The reason why a single full node with bitcoin is worth something is because there is an economic actor behind that full node who has agency and decides those coins have value. The only reason anything has value whether gold, fiat or bitcoin deals with that economic agent who places value upon their asset and can make choices or vote with that value.

Thus 100 full nodes spun up by one person with no btc associated with any of them has the exact same vote* and 1 node with no btc and even less of a vote than 1 node with btc. In fact those 100 nodes impose a very slight security risk as they are being hosted within a central company and misleading our ecosystem into believing that the node count is more decentralized than it actually is. If any of those full nodes changed consensus and other non -full node SPV clients trusted them that would also be another attack vector.  


* There is a low probability attack if those full nodes provided an alternative history during the bootstrap process(first time the blockchain is downloaded, that a new full node can coincidentally and unluckily peer from only those 100 nodes which could maliciously provide an alternative history as well. This means that there is a different and distinct form of a vote that is the exception that breaks the rule. 100 nodes have more of a vote than 1 node with regards to influencing new nodes bootstrapping to the main chain. Therefore not only is there a complex interwoven power dynamic between multiple groups within bitcoin there are distinct forms of "voting" at play here.

Very well said and something I completely agree with.

I'm not talking about ideology, I'm asking about the mechanics, the actual methodology.

I don't see how "100 nodes spun up on amazon ec2 is less of a vote than one bitcoin core node with BTC in the wallet."
Please explain.

P.S. I'm trying hard to overlook your bitchy insinuations re. trolling & shilling. Try to avoid such infantile faggotry in the future.

I don't advocate for this action or repeat these facts to fear monger, but they are important considerations one must consider when
deciding upon what level of consensus one must agree to before activating a fork. It is no surprise that many of the Chinese miners are advocating 90% -95% threshold and a much larger window.


The code determines what fits consensus or not. Human beings with Nodes full of BTC that now represent 2 different coins can transfer that BTC from their non-mining node to an exchange or another human which places downward pressure upon one of the coins price.



It all depends upon perspective. From their Eyes the big block coin that uses democratic form of governance where a majority can impose changes upon a minority would be the alt where their coin that uses anarchistic forms of consensus would be the true bitcoin. In their eyes the change in political consensus is much larger of a change than the change in the mining algo.

.@gmaxwell: could you actually answer my questions instead of waxing philosophical re. "pre-cypherpunk organizational modalities"?
ty

FWIW, full nodes have rejected the most-pow chain on several occasions in the past. E.g. in 2010 there was an incident where software errors caused miners to mine a block that minted a billion bitcoins out of thin air. That fork grew to about 75 blocks. There was another incident in 2013 which made it to about 35 blocks.  More recently, at the enforcement of strict-der, nodes started enforcing the new soft-fork rule with 95% hashpower support, and miners not in conformance with the rule (then a hardfork) managed to produce a chain of blocks 5 longer.

By block count, litecoin's chain has more 'work' than Bitcoin, and yet bitcoin nodes don't follow it.

I think that many people, versed in pre-cypherpunk organizational modalities constantly seek to attribute control to some authority in any system. When they look at Bitcoin they see mining and say "ah, here is the parties that are in charge" (or, alternatively and less  often, some software developers).  They're wrong about that: no one is simply "in charge", and that is a big part of the point and value. It also makes some people uncomfortable, because what they want is the old way of doing things with singular authorities which can be influenced in traditional ways... rather than the personal autonomy of cryptographic proof that backs Bitcoin.

Way to take my comments out of context. Pay attention to the nuanced distinctions I am making. There are different forms of votes being expressed. Non - mining Economic actors/nodes can quickly cripple the miners if they so decided to.