Topic: Vitalik Buterin's thoughts about Blocksize increase (Read 1457 times)

Being useful does not necessary give something value, there are lots of useful air around you but they worth nothing

Same, being valuable does not necessary mean useful, there are many financial instruments that do not have any practical use, their only use is to make the owner richer over time

How could bitcoin make its owner richer? Because it has constantly shrinking supply and the fiat money have constantly expanding supply, so it will always appreciate against fiat money long term wise (in fact it will appreciate against anything, because they all have constantly expanding supply), if it is being used as a currency

Why not xxxcoin? Because the deflative effect will be strongest when all of the people who understand the power of monetary deflation concentrate their effort and resource on a single most mature and popular cryptocurrency. Sure you can use a dozen of cryptocurrencies, but then the effect of monetary deflation will be magnitudes lower, thus any investment on other cryptocurrencies will have a high risk of ruin

Why people keep saying that? just download the C++ client and you have your wallet. Or use one of the new web ones.
They have a nice design and are secure.

Bitcoin was created as a "single PoW-secured transparent unified ledger runnable by users at home".
For as long as it's allowed to grow in order to keep filling its niche, while maintaining the definition above, it will be fine.

Well I guess some kind of compromise will have to be found then. No payment system or any financial tool is not perfect in today's world, so Bitcoin will not be either. Each system has its drawbacks and strong points.

Finding a balance between centralization on one and max size of the blocks on the other side is the only solution that comes to my mind.

What's the point of having a ULTRA secure useless thing? There is NONE.

Expect a good portion of the market to leave out if the value proposition is not keeping up. Myself included. Another system will prevail.  
Bitcoin's value is derived from its use cases and every speculator with half of a brain understand that.  There is no point of speculating on a coin that have no use case prospect unless you are shorting it to death.

As a bitcoin broker, my statistics showing that most of the people are attracted by bitcoin because it has strong anti-inflation tendency, not because of its payment function

Bitcoin does provide easy payment function, but for those people using web payment domestically and using credit card to do international shopping, bitcoin just bring more trouble than convenience (exchange at both ends and exchange rate risk). Bitcoin is just too late in the payment space. If bitcoin arrived before paypal, then it would have been used around the world by now. Unfortunately, today's payment market is almost fully occupied by credit cards. Being a little bit cheap is not enough convincing to persuade people to make the switch

Besides, there are thousands of alt-coins all providing similar payment function, but they all have little value, because value must be time tested. Once upon a time I even spent some time in litecoin mining and trading; just after one month of practice, I realized that it is a community full of scammers and speculators, almost no one is doing meaningful development. This is a good example of the importance of being time tested

Focusing on time tested anti-inflation property of bitcoin will make it into mainstream

Interesting point of view by Vitalik. During reading this, it came to my mind that he speaks about currencies that are better than Bitcoin, that are developed and being developed - doesn't he talk about Ethereum? I mean, he's saying that his horse is the best for the race in my opinion, which is to be expected since it's his horse.

Let's take a look.

He did a pretty fair distribution of the Ethereum, everybody got a chance to participate in the ICO. There will be a fair mining phase up to the 90-100 million coins, when the coin will turn to POS. With the POS, there is no expenditure of electricity and mining costs. Apparently the Nothing at Stake problem has been solved so no problems here. Ethereum is as safe as Bitcoin according to Vitalik. Much faster confirmations. Yes, Ethereum is mainly for smart contracts, but you can use it as a currency, why not? People were using salt as a currency, why not Ethereum?

Also Ethereum is cheap at the moment, so everybody that have missed a boat with Bitcoin, have another new chance.

So what am I missing? I am expecting replies to see where did I go wrong.

Thanks!

Why with 18+ millions achieved fro ico there is no a fu***** standard wallet for eth?
I'm really disappointed.

Strong words from Buterin. I guess the core devs are still full of doubts and hence, the lack of action on their behalf.
He says that bitcoin is popular because it was the first, but he is right when he implies that it's not the best. It doesn't have the best technology, only the userbase.
People need to decide soon or let Bitcoin die, simple as that.

ask Vitalik Buterin for some help in understanding the technicals.

I agree that the largest holders are probably not using it in both ways. What I'm saying is that additional people won't come to value bitcoin as a store of value if they don't value it (or other crypto) for other reasons first. Bitcoin has been around now long enough that most people with disposable or investable income have at least heard of it. So why aren't they investing? We can give reasons relating to media coverage and technical squabbles and so forth, but in the end it boils down to a lack of personal familiarity with bitcoin. It's too much of an abstraction.

Can bitcoin maintain value or grow in value if the user base remains limited, comparable to or only modestly larger than today? Maybe, in the absence of competition and with sufficiently strong intensity of interest among the user base. But there is quite a lot of potential competition waiting in the wings from altcoins, that alone puts bitcoin (along with each of the alts) in a succeed-or-die situation. So holding at 1 MB blocks is risky - it only works if doing nothing (on this point) is really the best option. Given how much has changed with bitcoin use and scale since 1 MB blocks were implemented, I'm skeptical this will remain the case much longer.

And since most of the community has voiced a preference for larger block sizes, it is hard to believe that a decision to maintain the status quo would result in a retention of strong interest/support from the bitcoin community. Some would gravitate to alts, giving the best of them additional support, others would leave crypto. I don't see anyone going into bitcoin or increasing their stakes because of a decision to hold at 1 MB.

Re: ivory tower thinking -- cool story. The converse of that ad hominem: your opposition is based on the populist pleb argument: "Nothing can go wrong, full steam ahead, opposition is nothing more than ideology, exponential adoption, $100k bitcoins, rabble rabble."

That issues of scaling are taken so lightly is worrisome. I can entertain the argument that conditions now are testable for a 2MB limit regime. 32MB and beyond (or even 8MB) is exactly what I'm talking about -- if certain groups are so focused on a drastic (and particularly an exponential) increase, we will remain at an impasse. You nor anyone else can guarantee network security under those conditions, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.

That people have such tunnel vision that the essential definition of scaling = increasing block size limit is part of the problem. Imagine that: a spam attack of dust transactions comes along, and everyone has their panties in a wad because they are terrified that there isn't enough room on the blockchain for the spam?

Do you possess any technical credentials that can support this statement or should we just trust your gut?

its ivory tower thinking plain and simple.

in reality the system would be no less robust & secure should the the limit be bumped to 2MB or even 8MB, MAYBE at 32MB your arguments would START to make SOME sense beyond ideological interest.

No, it's called a meritocracy.

Of course it doesn't work like democracy hence why you are so butthurt because you'd like to be able to pretend that everyone has equal weight in these decisions. Matter of fact is they don't.

I don't see how that is true. In fact I'm quite certain a majority of the biggest bitcoin owners have never really bothered using it as transactional currency aside from for some niche use case or outright curiosity.

Don't forget that we are not targetting the "average person". They are not the ones that will bring value to Bitcoin.

The digital gold function, as a store of wealth, is the primary natural function of Bitcoin. It is the first step toward any considerable rise in its currency application.

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/the-two-ideologies-in-bitcoin/

this is a perfect example of ivory tower thinking.

in reality the system would be no less robust & secure should the the limit be bumped to 2MB or even 8MB, MAYBE at 32MB your arguments would START to make SOME sense beyond ideological interest.

I guess I take the opposite approach. If the devs were to implement something so reckless as BIP101 (as an example), my confidence in bitcoin would be crushed and I would largely exit my investment position. At least, I would never transact on the XT chain -- outside of double spending -- should a valid chain coexist with it.

Many don't realize it, but the robust, secure system that we have now, the consensus on the protocol that exists now -- these are the priorities. When it comes to "the dev team mak[ing] smart decisions," I hope that whatever populist arguments and arbitrary timelines that segments of the community produce are tertiary to those concerns. Conceding to those largely arbitrary and tertiary concerns would indicate to me that the development process is broken.

This is the perfect answer for the creator of ethereum.
He didn't put himself at either side, he just made it look like he is independent, and
he thinks his model of ethereum could be aplied on bitcoin!
It's good! Because I made it! Also he makes us believe bitcoin has undoubtedly unsolvable critical flaws.
But don't worry! This is why I made ethereum!
It's doesn't carry these flaws, plus it has much more potential!

Obviously sarcastic, don't listen to the enemies.

You make a valid point that a large number of users can still adopt bitcoin IF the transaction velocity of the money supply remains low enough. But this doesn't address my point that gold has a high value in part because everyone values it. To get to that point I think the average person needs to have some kind of tangible contact with bitcoin, obtaining and using it at least occasionally. And that would mean that mainstreaming of bitcoin as a payment processing system has to come first. The digital gold function (with the implication of high value) would derive from that success, IMHO.