Topic: [XMR] Monero Speculation - page 1636. (Read 3313576 times)

That's a feature, not a bug.  Bitcoin was designed to be not merely ultra-conservative but radically reactionary.

If a control variable in Satoshi's Bitcoin e-cash experiment could be changed with nothing more than social engineering (IE Reddit Army FUD) I would dump every one of mine for fiat.  And by fiat I mean silver, gold, and Monero.   

The heretical position is trying to pull off a contentious hard fork, in sheer defiance of the fact Bitcoin was build to withstand such attacks by giving every social/technological/economic advantage to its defenders and every disadvantage to its attackers.

That's why our favorite antifragile Honey Badger shrugged off XT's chain fork and Hearn's code fork in the same manner as a bag of sand doesn't react when pounded.

With no block reward and no blocksize limit, what's the advantage of including transactions that don't offer a transaction fee? What would happen if you just removed the blocksize limit. I want to see it tested. I don't think it'll be as bad as people think.

My bad, sorry, you did say "When the fees get high enough people start switching" which indicates the marginal cases being phased out.

I was distracted by your violent rhetoric about "hitting a brick wall" and Bitcoin Obituary-type "nobody really cares about Bitcoin any more" speculation.  Again you were right, as in the example of nobody caring about whale oil anymore because of superior substitutes.

Regardless, LN is not an off-chain solution.  Using LN is not like using a bank.  There are no TTPs.  I think of such trustless payment channels as Layer 0.9 (when they are settled they become part of Layer 1).  It's just a write cache; surely you know how those work.

To be honest, I find your reasoning by analogy (involving a lecture about the history of cybernetics, which I don't really need, having also been alive in the era of punch cards and educated in the intellectual progression from Babbage and Lovelace on through Shannon/Wiener/Turing/VonNeumann/Vannevar Bush and finally to Don Knuth, Bill Joy, and Francis Heylighen) to be the opposite of persuasive.

Even worse is your conflation of the hard work of doing the engineering with lazy analogies and argumentum ad Newegg ('zomg cheap storage').  I've terminated more than a few SCSI chains and read StorageReview, so don't try the 'get off my lawn' stuff with me!   

I've copied floppies; my first HD was 120MB (yes MB not GB).  My last one was 2TB.  But I still realize Moore's Law and its analogues are not really laws, just observations that will ultimately succumb to the law of diminishing returns because of physics (if not sooner because of politics).


Bitcoin is by design a settlement system, so Davout is exactly right.  There was never any real chance of everybody on Earth wantonly writing to the Holy Ledger all the time, for all eternity, every time a coffee or bus ticket is purchased.

They guy who played Riker to Satoshi's Picard told us that years ago:


The problem is you don't misunderstand how Lightning and sidechains work, thus making flawed conclusions based on false premises.  There are type mismatch errors in your mental code.  Hint: sidechains != alt chains.

I sincerely urge you to forget everything you think you know about LN/SC (especially the bits related to punch cards) and relearn the topics with fresh, unjaundiced eyes.  It took me a while to stop 'fighting features' and come around to the ideas, but I have and as a result of that deep due diligence am more optimistic about BTC's future than ever before.

It's great you're so enthused about Monero, but even our core devs don't share your 'Monero will replace Bitcoin, Because Blocksize' POV.

Please consider diversifying some of those CAD into a few BTC.  I hate seeing a fellow Mustang go long fiat!   

The issue is that competition among the miners will drive the price down to zero since there is no longer scarcity in the blocksize, This effectively eliminates the difficulty in POW since there is no economic incentive to mine. The small block crowd do make a valid point here.

Edit: With no blocksize limit and no emission it is to the advantage of a miner to include all transactions regardless of fee price.

The block reward subsidizes all transactions until it doesn't.

Then you pay to play. Maybe the miners include your transaction and maybe they don't. If they don't, then you offer a higher transaction fee. What's the issue?

Depending on how it is realized a Lightning network doesn't have to be like a conventional bank because your ability to get your money back (and the inability of the bank to use your money other than under your direction) is enforced by smart contracts. But that depends on a secure and high capacity main chain to execute the smart contracts


Agree and I haven't seen any proposals for how these are even going to be done well by altcoin standards. The proposals I've seen are merged mining and a closed group of block signers.

This runs into the opposite problem. Effectively infinite supply. The likely result is transaction fees would go down to zero. So now how do you secure the net work in the absence of an emission?

Edit: We see now see how intractable the blocksize in Bitcoin is. Both sides can make very valid points.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8810


The orthodox bitcoin stance is to eliminate the  block size limit altogether. But it seems that some people have decided to revise that. Making the block size bigger is now seen as the heretical position. Incredible.

I never have.


I have done the engineering. Please see this link. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/IBM_card_storage.NARA.jpg. This is a picture taken during my lifetime. Now try to run the current VISA network using punched cards and tabulating machines. Credit cards existed before this picture was taken.

If they are using LN or some other off chain solution there are using some kind of bank by another name.
If they are using a side chain they are using an alt-coin by another name

In both the above cases there remain the serious security issues that smooth has mentioned in a prior post, in particular how do you secure the Bitcoin main chain. So my solution was to move from Bitcoin to a combination of XMR and CAD. I have both the solutions above. The "sidechain" XMR and the "bank" CAD.

Of course if you want a higher TX priority you have to pay for it. In a normal market It also means that if people offer to pay more for TXs they get an increase in supply of TXs. It is here where Monero TXs behave as a normal market. If there is an increase in demand, leading to an increase price it results this in an increase is supply. With Bitcoin TXs no matter how much the demand and price increase there is no increase in supply, and therein lies the fatal flaw in the Bitcoin TX market and by extension in Bitcoin itself.

The whole point of Bitcoin was to replace the bank for certain transactions, not to create a "better" bank so davout is dead wrong here.

It's hard to argue that it wasn't created for that when satoshi wrote about things like how to do zeroconf for vending machines:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3819

Or micropayments becoming practical over time as storage and bandwidth costs fall:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7687

In the subsequent years, some may have realized that isn't the best way to approach things but learning is different from revisionism.

I'm glad to see you no longer pushing your fake 'all-or-nothing' version of the substitution effect.  That's progress I can work with.

There are too many 'non-marginal use cases for the average person' to list here, given


And that's not even accounting for the additional capacity enabled by SC+LN.

The second question is you feigning obtuseness and being snotty.  You can do better than that; you know damn well if you want higher tx priority you simply have to pay for it.  You also know RBF makes that arrangement flexible, adaptive, and dynamic.

It would be great if you could stop pretending Bitcoin's Layer 1 was created (and/or is able) to replace commercial banking, cash, plastic, and Starbucks gift cards while remaining diverse/diffuse/defensible/resilient.  Please do the engineering.

Just wait.

Edit: It is already having an impact most notably on price and venture capital investments. The current Bitcoin bear market has been longer than any previous one. Of course what could easily happen is there is little apparent impact because people simply stay away from Bitcoin. Also the fact that transactions are still going through with a small fee premium is what is giving people a false sense of security.

It would be nice if the blocksize were actually a problem. There's never been a time when paying 5 cents wouldn't get your transaction processed quickly. We're talking about a theoretical problem that's based on people using BTC for some non-marginal use. Realistically, that won't happen this year, and probably won't happen next year or the year after that.

More detailed -> https://forum.getmonero.org/1/news-announcements-and-editorials/2429/testnet-hard-fork-23rd-november-2015-block-624634?page=&noscroll=1#post-4450

The testnet fork that was scheduled for today seems to have gone fine.

At 3 tps it wouldn't be average people using it. With 10 billion people an average person could only make one transaction every 100 years. So that would have to be some sort of foundation for other systems (side chains, Lightning, etc.) that support higher volume.

BTW, Lightning doesn't work very well with small blocks, though maybe that can be fixed (in its present form, you need enough capacity to close many channels in a relatively short period of time). Sidechains probably don't either, although it seems at least possible that one or more side chains could become so popular that the main chain isn't used much by anyone except by miners (unlike Lightning you don't necessarily need main chain tx capacity for a side chain to operate). 100 million tx/year might be enough for that.

This still ignores the question of how the main chain is secure and remains decentralized, how sidechains are secured, and probably other unanswered questions with the approach.

With a 1 MB blocksize limit one has 3 tps (reasonable practical estimate) for the current Bitcoin network. This translates into approximately 95 million transactions per year.

So here are some questions:
What non marginal use cases do you expect the average person to be able to use Bitcoin for?
Do you expect on average those transactions to be mined within that average person's life expectancy? That of their children? That of their grand children? That of their great grand children?

Please do the math.

You are falsely conflating everyone switching ("nobody really cares about Bitcoin any more") with loss of marginal use cases (EG SatoshiDice and coffee).  That's not how the substitution effect works.  What actually happens those who gain the most value from Bitcoin stay and those who gain the least switch.  That is basic economics.

When oil prices rise, we demand/produce/consume (IE substitute) more coal, nat gas, and alt energy instead.  That doesn't mean nobody really cares about oil any more.

It means that Bitcoin ceases to be a peer to peer network and becomes a network for clearing transactions involving MSBs and banks. We already have fiat currencies for that.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm Worth reading in this context.