The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
tandfonline.com
tandfonline.com
[1] - https://lightning.network
[2] - https://blog.bitrefill.com/top-11-lightning-network-wallets-...
The argument that "only large entities will be able to keep up with that" doesn't really hold - thats the status quo already.
It's sound engineering. Like in other systems by composing layers you can achieve the advantages of each component while addressing their costs, without creating insurmountable complexity... "have your cake and eat it too".
Particularly, the central Bitcoin system is a global broadcast medium-- necessarily for its security. Global broadcast is inherently somewhat limited in its scalability (though less than some assume). Other layers effectively add "transaction switching" to Bitcoin, radically improving scalablity and performance with their own costs which are good trade-offs for their applications.
As far as the status quo of traditional finance... If you're happy with the status quo! Use it!
(I'm going to assume you don't mean the status quo of Bitcoin--because 28kb/sec isn't something only large entities can keep up with, it adds up over time-- but even cumulatively its managable)
You could recreate the status quo of centralized finance with Bitcoin, but it wouldn't be obviously better: at least systems like visa and paypal are purpose build to do what they do. Bitcoin takes on a lot of costs and tradeoffs to achieve decenteralization.
Bitcoin was created to be money that existed above and outside of the vulgarities of immediate human politics, just like how strong encryption made it effectively impossible for some sysadmin to just read your files based on some excuse.
I think having that option in the world is extraordinarily valuable.
But this is the logic of one of the main devs who championed the "fee market" idea of Bitcoin[0], that high fees are required for Bitcoin to function. And who in 2017 celebrated when fees were around $50.[1]
[1]: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/the-fee-market-myth-b9d189e45...
[0]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017...
Fees prevent spam
Even the Lightning Network whitepaper states it needs much larger blocks, and for it to work well you need to be able to settle quickly and cheaply on-chain, which is not the case with full blocks.
And this, you want to do after significant adoption?
So, you are basically going to tell the Starbuckses and other large corporations that have built a large infrastructure around onchain transactions that they need to stop that, wait a few years until 2nd layers are adopted, and then start using that?
The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one.
Contrary to the claims of the article the term "fee market" was introduced and promoted by Jeff Garzik-- rather than people opposing him as the article claims. (Fee market is kind of a bad term, the correct term would be blockspace market, but it actually made sense in the original usage which was about wallets paying 'fees at market rates').
> The answer is lies in the free market. Move transaction fees away from hardcoded limits, and towards something more dynamic, with economic feedback between merchants, users and miners. ... Also introduced is an anti-spam rule that avoids relaying transactions whose value is below that of the transaction fee required to send it. This rule self-adjusts over time, as the "tx fee required to send" changes over time. In a dynamic fee market, it might change a lot.
( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196138.msg2044717#ms... )
> 2010-11-19 20:55:42 <jgarzik> eventually we'll all be paying TX fees, sooner or later. and competition to get -some- fee (at lower prices) versus no fee kicks in.
> 2011-02-28 04:13:57 <jgarzik> amiller: it's inevitable that fees will be required. nobody should be assuming bitcoin transactions are / will always be free.
> 2011-03-01 20:32:21 <jgarzik> fees are inevitable
> 2011-03-10 22:14:34 <jgarzik> I think TX fees are a great feedback system; a healthy attribute of bitcoin.
> 2011-11-07 22:43:12 <gavinandresen> Lolcust: yes, but I worry because transaction fees are broken right now-- clients and miners really need more flexibility to let fees go where the market decides, instead of us guessing what the right fees are.
> 2012-10-11 17:01:27 <jgarzik> gmaxwell: I think storage and network will be cheap enough that any non-zero fees will be interesting to miners
> 2013-03-16 00:47:40 <gavinandresen> So: I have no idea what the right answer for fees is. We need to create a market between miners and users, and let the fees go where they belong.
> 2013-03-17 21:12:04 <jgarzik> TD: Satoshi obviously wanted fees to support the system long term. If there is no scarcity, there are no fees.
And people being willing to pay substantive fees to use Bitcoin is absolutely something to celebrate, Bitcoin's long term security is completely dependent on fee income. Getting a non-trivial part of the rewards from fees is a basic validation of the concept.
> 2013-03-17 21:12:44 <jgarzik> TD: The current situation, where block subsidy dominates other incentives, clouds thinking on block size
> 2013-08-12 17:59:33 <jgarzik> auctions make me want replace-by-fee :)
> 2014-05-12 15:13:22 <gavinandresen> hearn: fee cap, meaning what? Fees need to be a market, and rise or fall based on supply and demand for block space
> 2014-08-15 12:37:53 <jgarzik> Merge this useful change, and next will come the call to remove block size limit altogether, which will throw a nuclear bomb onto any nascent fee market.
> 2014-08-15 12:38:37 <jgarzik> All the VCs and execs want an infinite block size limit. It's a sad fixation.
That's rich coming from you. It's easy for anyone reading this to search for what nullc has said and done.
> The design of Bitcoin where security is supported by fees to get into blocks is established in the Bitcoin whitepaper and has been in the software since day one.
Many transactions paying low fees can support security just as well as few transactions paying high fees. I'd say even better as people will stop using Bitcoin or move to other cryptocurrencies when fees grow.
Saying that the "fee market" (or "blockspace market" if you want) is supported by the white paper extremely dishonest. The blocksize limit was only meant as a temporary spam protection, not to enforce higher fees. Zero fee transactions were on the other hand accepted from day one.
> One of these researchers, Jonathan Postel of the University of California’s Information Sciences Institute and an editor for the Request of[sic] Comments (RFCs) which is a document series capturing the development of the Internet.
> Postel has stated:
> “We are screwing up in our design of Internet protocols by violating the principle of layering”
> Basically, the monolithic design of TCP would soon become inflexible and unable to scale efficiently. Therefore TCP was split into two protocols, TCP & the Internet Protocol (IP).
https://www.colocationamerica.com/blog/history-of-ip-address...
The comparison with TCP and IP is limit in that TCP data all goes inside IP packets. With second layer transaction systems the relationship is different: the security and stability comes from the underlying blockchain. The higher part adds capacity.
Bitcoin forms a trustworthy robotic court system upon which the wheels of automated commerce can ride.
The Engineering discipline relies on empirical studies. With constantly full blocks, you have no way to measure transaction demand.
Fees are only a weak indicator of transaction demand because of substitute goods.
Flowee the Hub (Bitcoin Cash full node implementation) can sync the equivalent of 4GB blocks using just a cheap quad-core VPS.
But being able to barely keep up means that if you fall behind for even a moment (say, if your connection drops... or if miners get lucky and mine a bunch of extra blocks) then you will _never_ catch up. Operating anywhere near the limit of your processing rate is non-viable for that reason.
You need to be able to process many times the network's capacity so that you can catch up in a reasonable amount of time.
Secondly, Lightning isn’t “additional complexity” fir bitcoin— it’s taking complexity and putting it where it belongs— at the platform layer.
TCP/IP doesn’t get faster by making packets bigger. Same with bitcoin. And the application layer should be kept separate from the transport layer.
Tangent: I would not recommend running lightning on such hardware. State is local to the node, unlike with on-chain scaling. That implies you need server-grade (read: redundant) hardware.
Technically larger MTUs can increase performance somewhat by reducing per-packet overheads... but the effect marginal and not that enormous with good nics and drivers.
But still, probably not the best example. :)
Good thing for you it's in the interests of extremely rich and powerful people to see that your sabotage is well supported, and good thing for the rest of the world you have a containment chain where your stupidity is restricted from bleeding over to the rest of them, and every single other chain appears to be completely mercifully free of your idiotic philosophy.
If fees are a barrier to you, you can make your transfer of value using any other traded cryptocurrency (or lightning whatever it is).
Aim of bitcoin is not to be the fastest cryptocurrency but the most mined one (thus safest?).
Probably because that point has nothing to do with anything, as basically every single blockchain in existence has fees that go to miners. BTC isn't the slightest bit unique in that.
> Aim of bitcoin is not to be the fastest cryptocurrency but the most mined one (thus safest?).
Which once again has nothing to do with the artificial useless block limit. The cryptocurrency that is most mined is the one in which mining is most profitable, the US federal reserve could launch a competitor tomorrow with a goal directly opposed to every other cryptocurrency in existence and if they paid more per SHA256 hash rate unit they would become the most mined cryptocurrency.
As for block size, it's been ages since I looked into this stuff at all (and I've only ever watched out of the corner of my eye), but my impression is that the block size is currently limited for relatively arbitrary reasons. I don't think there is actually a lot of resistance to increasing the size sometime. It's just that the developers want to limit the size now to guide development in certain ways.
And really, as far as I'm concerned that's totally fair. If you don't like it, fork the coin. Or start a new one. Or stick with Bitcash. The developers are in control because that's the whole point -- to guide development in the way that they think will work best. Not everybody is going to agree. So what?
I think the only reason people get upset is because of the ludicrous amount of potential money on the line. And again: if you are controlling that ludicrous amount of potential money, you are able to vote with your feet -- to the extent that you can convince other people with ludicrous amounts of potential money to follow suit. If all that insane speculation and fraud were to vacate Bitcoin, the developers could happily code away and there would be nobody left to complain.
Let's face it. If we believe that there are billions of dollars tied up in BTC, the owners of that coin could easily afford to hire programmers to fork the protocol. They don't do it because the politics of doing so is essentially impossible. Most people want to stick with the dev group. Again, I'm left with saying, so what?
The same problem also limits block size, since large blocks take longer to propagate.
But that's why Ethereum went with GHOST, which was originally proposed for Bitcoin. Instead of choosing the block with the most hashpower behind it, you choose the block with the most hashpower in the entire tree after it, so that forks contribute to a block's security. The original paper calculated that this allowed both faster blocks and higher throughput, and it's the reason Ethereum has 15-second blocks.
Here are a couple papers:
https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/38121/why-did-e...
...which says Ethereum actually uses a version of the "Inclusive Protocol," which according to its paper has similar advantages:
https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~yoni_sompo/pubs/15/inclusive_ful...
I am pretty sure that isn't true. I'm looking at the code, and the only thing I see included for 'uncles' is the header. This has the beneficial property that higher orphan rates increase difficulty which should lower orphan rates.
OTOH, it doesn't appear that including other people's orphans is incentive compatible without the rest of ghost (because it lowers your own future income).
"a version of" -- there is no close in cryptography. :) Security analysis usually do not apply well to approximations.
Edit: See also this answer, https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/41647
Lightning was not ready when Bitcoin capacity was crippled by the aforementioned tiny cabal of developers in favor of Lightning.
Lightning remains unready, forever 18 months away from the promised usable technology.
There's a myriad of reasons people don't buy things with third-party checks.
This is provably false. Lightning is huge and growing:
* more than $6 billion USD in liquidity
* nearly 11,000 nodes
* tens of thousands of transactions daily
* a growing ecosystem (https://www.lopp.net/lightning-information.html)
You can see the real-time stats at https://1ml.com/
There is only $6 million in capacity, not $6 billion.
Daily transactions are more likely in the few hundreds per day, not tens of thousands. Although this can't be determined with accuracy.
Plus the design itself is flawed. You have to be online to receive money. No cold storage. Routing at scale isn't solved.
Lightning was supposed to make tx fees low right? Well it technically has, but it also introduced the following problems that Bitcoin never had:
- LN requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. This never existed on Bitcoin.
- If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I can have an empty address on Bitcoin and receive any amount of money without any limits.
- In Lightning when making a transactions you must always reserve the current Bitcoin onchain miner fee, so that if either channel party wants to close the channel it'll get accepted and mined by a Bitcoin miner. Well when Bitcoin fees hit $3 a few months ago, 60% of the Lightning network capacity was locked up in miner fees lol... defeating the purpose of microtransactions and the LN network
- In Bitcoin my coins can only be stolen if I leak my private key. Well for LN your money can be stolen simply by not being online to monitor your money. In addition to stealing your LN private keys, a bad user can attempt to steal your funds when you're offline. Which is why LN requires a 3rd party service called Watchtowers to watch over your funds. Way more complicated than Bitcoin
- The unsolvable routing problem. A good chunk of LN transactions will fail simply because the routing is weighted and chanes constantly. Compare that to Bitcoin's gossip network which doesn't require any weighted routing. FYI weighted routing is currently a mathematically unsolved problem.
- LN is centralizing around LNbig.com At one point LNBig.com had over 70% of the entire LN network capacity. LN will continue to centralize around these big hubs, because they can offer cheap connections and low fees than a regular peer can. Welcome to Bank of America LN Hub TM.
- With Bitcoin I can keep my money in a cold wallet. With LN it's either a hot wallet or cold wallet and I must close all my channels and pay the Bitcoin onchain fee just to close it. You're literally choosing betwen low fees OR security with Lightning, where as with Bitcoin you have both.
- Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publically stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin and show many problems that will simply never be solved. Like the race condition when a big hub closes and hundreds of users all attempt to race to transmit their transaction to miners.
- In the Lightning whitepaper, LN requires AT LEAST 133MB+ blocks for global adoption for LN to work without congestion... And Blockstream blocked a minor 2MB increase. So good luck.
So congrats to Lightning, for "solving" 1 problem and creating 12 new ones.
There's many more, but these are the ones easily digestable by users without going into the deeper technical problems with LN. There's a reason Lightning is always 18 months away from completion....for 5.5 years now. While Bitcoin Cash just works.
https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/sf-bitcoin-meetup/2015-02...
Correct, but this is clearly stated in its whitepaper and is one of the tradeoffs to get massively more txs and privacy.
> If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I can have an empty address on Bitcoin and receive any amount of money without any limits.
Correct, but you can also move those funds to other channels you have already opened. Also, loop-in and loop-out are coming. Also, receiving multiple bitcoin transactions on a single UTXO is a privacy hit for all involved.
> In Lightning when making a transactions you must always reserve the current Bitcoin onchain miner fee, so that if either channel party wants to close the channel it'll get accepted and mined by a Bitcoin miner. (...)
You need to if you don't plan to aggregate your settlement and opening txs, or aggregate those transactions with others. All if that tech is still coming.
> In Bitcoin my coins can only be stolen if I leak my private key. Well for LN your money can be stolen simply by not being online to monitor your money. (...)
This is your first statement rewritten. I will not address it again.
> The unsolvable routing problem. (...)
And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem, and further improvements like AMP will further reduce the number of failed fees. Another option is to make an on-chain transaction.
> LN is centralizing around LNbig.com (...)
Like bitcoin was centralizing around Satoshi's mining farm in the first year of Bitcoin? LN is at infancy stage, and has a hard cap on what amount of BTC you can open a channel with.
> With Bitcoin I can keep my money in a cold wallet. With LN it's either a hot wallet or cold wallet and I must close all my channels and pay the Bitcoin onchain fee just to close it. You're literally choosing betwen low fees OR security with Lightning, where as with Bitcoin you have both.
Besides the fact that bitcoin will still be there, all of these points are explained as part of the network. I don't understand why you are harping about these sorts of issues when the whitepaper or easily found literature about LN clearly state these issues. Also; don't forget that LN doesn't have to be the only second layer on Bitcoin. I can imagine banks building a second layer walled garden with the feature of settling onchain. Heck, this could be made in less than a year, and would basically give every user in the world the option to buy bitcoin. They would however need to have the right volume of BTC available, so it would be utterly devastating to those vested in fiat (which is why they aren't doing it yet).
> Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publicly stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin and show many problems that will simply never be solved.
Drya is, to my knowledge still very positive on LN, don't know about Poon though.
> In the Lightning whitepaper, LN requires AT LEAST 133MB+ blocks for global adoption for LN to work without congestion (...)
With the then current code, and the then current block size. Block size has increased with Segwit. Taproot will further increase capacity. Channel factories are a thing thought of after publishing the white paper, etc.
> While Bitcoin Cash just works.
Bitcoin Cash works. I agree. It's miners will keep raising the block size and spammers will keep filling those blocks to make the ghost towm seem inhabited. Then, users will slowly stop their BCH full nodes because it becomes a bother to keep them online. After that, it will centralize to a small set of players that will be able to change the consensus rules to their wish. Is that the decentralized peer-to-peer money you wanted? This attack vector is a considerably more important threat than reduced adoption will ever be.
Oh that's funny. While you're right that payments failing for not finding a route is a big problem, it's not even the real problem with routing.
The problem is for LN to function at scale, it have to centralize around a few big hubs. Because otherwise routing is impossible, and transactions will fail.
Decentralized routing is an intractable problem, and LN have to choose between centralization and scaling.
Because LN is seeing barely any usage at all. The routing problem will bite as soon as it tries to scale.
Definitely not true.
As I previously mentioned in this thread, lightning has over $6 billion USD in liquidity, nearly 11,000 nodes and tens of thousands of transactions every day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21980404
The problem with lightning privacy is that to get good privacy you need more than about 2 hops. The problem is that every hop locks up money equal to the amount transferred: increasing the cost of the transaction.
The study also finds that the LN is currently subsidized, and based on the capital costs alone, fees should be comparable to on-chain (BTC) transactions. BCH transactions are currently subsidized as well, but not to the same extent (I estimate 3cents/kB would pay for processing and storage).
https://blog.dshr.org/2020/01/bitcoins-lightning-network.htm...
Why do you assume BTC/LN will improve scalability properties but not BCH? On-chain capacity can be optimized over time without increasing the average cost for running a node.
And, that is before all the issues. Oh well... When Lightning comes to an end later this year, you will have a new boondoggle thing I guess?
Everyone was holding their breath for your prior fraudulent manipulation ( https://i.redd.it/lktxhvvvmny31.jpg, https://i.redd.it/02oagc805u441.png ) has long since died from asphyxiation. I think you might need a new approach.
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...
> Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second.
The small scale of bitcoin increases the cost of transactions, making it less useful as a currency and more useful as an investiment. Perhaps it was made this way by design.
However, it would make sense that exchanges and credit-card-like institutions would want to keep bitcoin unscalable for the foreseeable future and stall scalable development.
> Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices.
( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289... )
Hal Finney, one of the main developers of PGP and Bitcoin's first user wrote in 2010:
> I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash. Most Bitcoin transactions will occur between banks, to settle net transfers. Bitcoin transactions by private individuals will be as rare as... well, as Bitcoin based purchases are today.
( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342... )
That sort of view was well known and understood by others in early 2011 when (now former) Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen had recently started he wrote of the future:
> I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks (I have no idea what their transaction clearing/processing networks look like or how they work).
( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3118.msg44789#msg447... )
Or, look at other discussions early in Bitcoin's life-- and instead of quoting myself from back then, I'll show that these views were broadly understood:
> 2010-12-09 02:14:28 <gavinandresen> jgarzik: that seems like a bad idea; I have a niggling feeling in the back of my head that the optimal bitcoin-like system would have even smaller blocks/transactions than current bitcoin....
( https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2010-12-09.html#... )
> 2011-07-15 03:32:13 <moa7> actually the more it shakes out the more bitcoin is looking like a settlement clearing system like interbank market e.g.
> 2011-07-15 03:41:46 <jgarzik> moa7: RE "settlement clearing system" <<-- EXACTLY
> 2011-07-15 03:42:22 <jgarzik> moa7: it is presumed by many that a future bitcoin (if successful) will involve a secondary layer that can handle higher volumes, microtransactions, etc.
( https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2011-07-15.html#... )
2012-04-13 17:56:22 <jgarzik> IMO I think the current bitcoin's endgame is as a not-high-volume settlement network.
( https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2012-04-13.html#... )
Or,
> 2012-09-09 20:00:32 <jgarzik> gmaxwell: I am against changing block size, FWIW. I think the market will properly intervene, bitcoin will reach a steady state where all blocks are 1MB, and the best bidding gets block placement. SatoshiDICE and other data apps automatically solve themselves, once 1MB is normal.
> 2012-09-09 20:00:48 <jgarzik> I think I will be overruled, but that is my position.
> 2012-09-09 20:03:24 <jgarzik> bitcoin exists _because_ of certain constrained limits. money creation is one of them. block space is another.
> 2012-09-09 20:03:35 <jgarzik> that is a fundamental constraint; messing with it massively changes the economics
( https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2012-09-09.html#... )
There are plenty of tough trade-offs in Bitcoin and reasonable people can have no end of a disagreement about them. But these discussions, mostly from before any credit card company ever heard of Bitcoin-- show that a nuanced understanding existed all along.
Disagree if you like, but the conspiracy theories are an insult to everyone's intelligence borne out of a malicious and dishonest rewriting of Bitcoin's history pushed on by court decreed fraudsters like Craig Wright. You have plenty of alternatives-- if they're better then they should stand on their own without the abuse and deceptive FUD.
He was talking about people like you. He didn't advocate for a centrally planned block limit. Stop trying to twist his words.
Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik are well known big blockers so stop trying to imply otherwise. At least here I won't get censored by theymos like on r\bitcoin and bitcointalk.
I don't know about 'centerally planned' but he hardcoded a limit into the consensus rules.
> Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik are well known big blockers so stop trying to imply otherwise.
That's the point. And I a pointing out that they said all these things in 2010-2014-- as you can see some of the quotes (esp from Jeff) are quite emphatic. I could quote a lot more.
The narrative a lot of people are transmitting about Bitcoin is untrue, and by showing the diversity of these views going WAY back from people who later tried to push through changes I think makes that point pretty well.
Not, nodes set rules, they enforce them.
This was always intended as a temporary measure and it was understood by the community at large that the limit would be removed as soon as it started hindering adoption. As an example, see this reddit thread of mine 86% upvoted: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/35hpkt/please_remi...
As history will remember, what happened then is that you decided you had missed out on the boat and you started raising money for your stupid little layer 2 solution while censoring everyone suggesting it had to coexist with a bigger block size.
I'm not going to mince words, you are the reason Bitcoin is a speculative scam instead of a real payments revolution as it was intended to be. It had one chance and thanks to you and your cronies the only people benefiting from it are the ones liquidating noobs on bitmex.
But if they didn't-- which would be sad-- your logic doesn't follow: Is the USD not cash because paypal exists and is widely used?
Venmo is venmo. Venmo adoption Bitcoin as a currency on their platform would not turn Bitcoin into venmo. It would just create another option for using Bitcoin-- one with it's own positive and negative trade-offs.
There is a balance. The system is not very valuable at the extremes of resource usage or limited capacity, like many other systems.
It would be very easy to argue that it would not be if the present mechanics of the cash system were restricted to a maximum global throughput of 3 transactions a second. But no other monetary system would actually pursue such an asinine goal on purpose except as a means of sabotage.
Which explains you.
The reference you like to quote about my wanting to limit the size of the blockchain is of course completely out of context. The creation of overlay networks allows bitcoin to act as a single reference source while also having different quorum systems that act independently. You will note that I did not say I would get increasingly piratical regarding the block size. Rather, I note in December 2010 just before I left the public development of bitcoin fact that users of bitcoin were getting rather tyrannical. I do understand that you failed to complete your education, but to help increase your erudition, this is a reference to others seeking to objectively restrict something that should not be restricted in the way that you're proposing.
Eric Vorhees, Garzik and others like you wanted a system that could not be controlled. Unfortunately for you, you chose a project, bitcoin, that is highly resistant as it scales to your type of shenanigans.
Yes, I do understand that having a system outside of government control helps with your side projects such as selling malware, ransomware and other projects that have are generally tainted feel. However, you will find that bitcoin isn't good for this.
I do wonder if you pointed out to anyone that the entire purpose of having a Merkel tree is scaling. In fact, if you take the basic structure of bitcoin and limited to 1 MB blocks, the entire need for a Merkel tree is obfuscated. Where you have limited numbers of transactions, a simple index would do. But then, you are not seeking to educate people about bitcoin are you...
Unfortunately for you, lots of things have been happening in the background. You never understood a single percent of what bitcoin was about. I don't blame you for this, I don't think you're smart enough to understand why I created bitcoin or even the origins of any of the parts or components. You're a great troll. You're also a useful idiot. In separating out the fools you have allowed me to finally manage to take bitcoin to where it needed to be. It was never EGold or any of the other anarchist systems that you wished to create.
Did you forget that I said the protocol was set in stone? No, I don't think you did. But then, you have a habit of taking things out of context, twisting them, outright lying. The problem you seem to not understand is that you haven't stopped anything. The time you figure it out I will have a patent on everything needed to scale blockchains. Then again, you will bitch and complain and say it's not fair. But a public yet but we have it a target of 1,000 patents (in total) this month and the pipeline will take me to 2,500 papers this year.
It is a real shame, well not really, that you're going to have to watch is all you have tried to corrupt falls apart around you this year. Have a nice life Greg, I wonder what rock you're going to crawl under next time ?
In two easy steps:
$ ./bitcoin-cli signmessage 1GMaxweLLbo8mdXvnnC19Wt2wigiYUKgEB "Digital signatures are to scammers as garlic is to vampires. I am hn user nullc, but you are not Bitcoin's creator."
$ ./bitcoin-cli verifymessage 1GMaxweLLbo8mdXvnnC19Wt2wigiYUKgEB "HJ0VgbIY9BAud6MiZ4Qh0KSwhmA7gwkFm07tjPJeHsYNcj5oIAVlVR2JnKTF7EjqTWEaD9QbAPzk8QII8QJxW4s=" "Digital signatures are to scammers as garlic is to vampires. I am hn user nullc, but you are not Bitcoin's creator."
true
---
Yes, I know you love to run around going “Craig’s not Satoshi, don't listen to him”. However, all of that is irrelevant. The simple fact of the matter is that I've taken the original protocol that I designed and implemented it and it scales and it works. Not the way that people like James A. Donald desired (and yes, he is a child pornography and paedophile and that is part of why he wanted an anonymous coin, something I didn't realise in 2008). Rather, it is a micropayments system that changes the entire nature of the Internet. It allows companies like Google and Facebook, or rather the ones that will replace them to create systems that earn through micropayments and at the same time allow individuals to earn the money to pay for this. It's not the concept that people in the cryptocurrency space think about, but then the people in the cryptocurrency space are rarely those who will take this forward.
Don't worry, you can still play. I do know how to fix lightning; I have patents on it. Likewise, I have patents that would fix Ethereum but then I don't need to, bitcoin doesn't need Ethereum.
It surprises me how little people bother to learn. The entire cryptocurrency space is premised on ideas that have gone before. The only true innovation that I added to bitcoin was an economic system that linked to a traceable pseudonymous series of transactions. Proof of work-based Cryptocurrencies existed 20 years ago. Distributed Cryptocurrencies existed 20 years ago. The entire technical and corporate space 20 years ago was larger than the entire bitcoin space and in fact cryptocurrency space at the peak a couple years ago. But then, few bother to actually do the research. Few and then fewer even bother to understand that the concept of a blockchain, of hashing a block of information into next block was not new. It was published 25 years ago.
Yet none of you seem to have bothered to take the time to read the source documents. I shouldn't be surprised at this sort of attitude, I sought in students all the time. People are becoming lazy, not all of us but many.
It's interesting in a way that people believe that bitcoin acts outside of government and law. In the Whitepaper I stated that bitcoin nodes, miners enforce the rules. I didn't say that they create the rules. I said that the rules were set in stone. The incentive system allows miners to act in a manner that keeps them honest. You see, in law, the definitions of used in the Whitepaper have meaning. In particular, the term attacker has meaning.
Bitcoin is an economic system. Miners always end in data centres. It doesn't matter how you change the proof of work protocol. If an ASIC device was never created, it would still be more efficient for miners to end running many many computers in a data centre. In scale there is efficiency. The problem is that you guys think you can beat me. You don't even realise you've already lost. Then, commenting on information that I know when you don't and some of you will say this informational asymmetry is an unfair advantage. I'm sorry if you're a snowflake and I don't care.
This collectivist, socialist mindset that has infiltrated what people call libertarian thought is rather despicable. You seem to actually believe, surprising as that seems that you have a right and that I have an obligation to give you information. That when I'm not seeking anything from you, what am not asking you to help, where in fact I don't actually care two damns about your existence that I should do something to obtain your gratification or even some respect from you. I'm sorry, I don't care about the respect that some people seem to garnish and gather from social media sites to their pseudonymous identities. It is funny to watch however.
Enjoy. 2020 is going to be an interesting year and some of you are going to find out how interesting very shortly.
that you want to use the _Dread Pirate Roberts_ defense - I was only just handed these keys... But that will never be. It does not matter at all what you say. You shall learn just how far gone you are this year and just how many people see you as the fool.
Enjoy failure... It has been your life and it shall remain so.
- DrCraigWright
You suffer from the misapprehension that your opinion matters. I'm sorry it doesn't. HN does little for the real-world contrary to what many in Silicon Valley culture seem to think.
A large reason for the creation of bitcoin stems from the promise of micropayments. Therefore Google and Facebook collapsed into the shit show that they are, they couldn't solve it. Your belief is not needed nor warranted. I'm not seeking money or investment from you and nor do I really care about you or even know you. We have companies coming to use my technology, and I'm not talking about ICO pumpers or other scammers seeking to replicate the frauds of the 90s. I'm also not talking about the bucket shops that pose as pink sheet scam markets under a new name.
We have companies such as Nike now getting into blockchain. Basically, the idea being to save data. Interestingly, the focused concept in the Nike patent is covered by my 2016 filings placing me two years ahead of them. Which is fine, they now have a choice. They can use BSV freely or they can pay my company royalties.
So why is it you think that I need to convince you?
Why do you think that it matters that I have you believe me or come on board as my disciple?
I hate to tell you that you're a little bit deluded if you believe that. You see, people will build on my platform whether you like me or not. I have a technical solution that works, I have solutions that scale, and mostly I've had the time to patent every aspect of how bitcoin works. You see, while other people have been trying to understand my protocol, I found that the best way of stopping people hijacking it further was to start building what some people call a patent fortress. You can't scale without SPV. Unfortunately, people didn't understand what it was. So much of bitcoin was not understood even though was common.
It is interesting how people think that I invented the concept of blockchain. It was published in the mid-90s. However, it was a set theoretic mathematical construct and not as simple as it was resented in the paper.
And whether you like the fact that I created bitcoin are not or whether you believe me is irrelevant. You see, when I file a patent it is independently verified and passed and granted without reference to who I may have been and what I've done in the past. I know that's a difficult concept to some of you, but every time I create something it is tested based on the merits of what I've created that time and not the laurels that I wear.
You seem to think that I'm creating another shit coin. No, I'm just freeing up bitcoin do what was meant to do. The way designed it. Not so that you can speculate, so that businesses will be able to use low fee transactions that are fast and cheap. See, in the next five years we will have transactions that process for under 1/10000 of a cent. And yes that is the correct number of zeros. It's not about a political circle jerk that comes from this fallacy of code is law (which was discredited in 2001 by Prof Timothy Wu). It is about the technology. In this is the point, while you guys circle jerk talking about how you're going to change the world with anonymous money that helps drug dealers and terrorists...
We are building something that will actually help the world.
And no, your liking me, your wanting to be aligned with me, your care as to what I'm doing matters to less extent than you could imagine.
I know! you could post a digital signature to autenticate yourself.
Oh wait!
Digital Currency Group, which has investment in a lot of Bitcoin companies has a controlling interest from MasterCard.
That alone does not prove anything, but Bitcoin (BTC) failed to scale. When fees hit $50/transaction, with weeks long confirmation times, most companies backed by DGC failed to switch to the upgraded version of Bitcoin (BCH). This was despite BCH being a drop-in replacement, while Segregated Witness (the BTC upgrade) was not.
Part of the reason nobody switched to BCH was a major marketing push to strip Bitcoin Cash of the name "Bitcoin", and to frame it as a "scam" with "air-dropped tokens" you can "claim". (It was just a direct blockchain copy at fork time).
The truth is that BCH forked from BTC after 4 years of obstructionism. We forked just in time: because the huge transaction backlog on BTC happened within months of the fork. The result was an entirely predictable result of failing to scale.
Citation needed.
> When fees hit $50/transaction, with weeks long confirmation times, most companies backed by DGC failed to switch to the upgraded version of Bitcoin (BCH). This was despite BCH being a drop-in replacement, while Segregated Witness (the BTC upgrade) was not.
The upgraded version of Bitcoin is the version that holds consensus among its users. Bitcoin Cash never held that position, and probably never will. Calling it "Bitcoin (BCH)" shows your bias.
> Part of the reason nobody switched to BCH was a major marketing push to strip Bitcoin Cash of the name "Bitcoin", and to frame it as a "scam" with "air-dropped tokens" you can "claim". (It was just a direct blockchain copy at fork time).
If I were to run a direct blockchain copy of Bitcoin and change some arbitrary rule (such as making the difficulty readjust every 2000 blocks), that does not a bitcoin make. I would be running a dead chain nobody uses. If I were to argue the change and everyone follows my chain and runs my code, only then would it be Bitcoin, since it carries consensus.
> The truth is that BCH forked from BTC
Correct. You forked off, and aren't bitcoin. The 2017Q4 spike in transaction fees was probably due to a number of separate issues and misconfigurations, such as wallet fee estimation being mostly broken, users feeling FOMO and wanting in at any price, and transactions not optimally filling the space alotted to them (which SegWit partially fixed, as designed).
https://www.removeddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/...
The only thing holding up BTC price is Tether, it will fail and Ethereum and BCH will lead the space. The rest is pretty much bullshit because Ethereum and BCH together can almost do anything.
- A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction.
- Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactions with how nation-states settle their central-bank ledgers with gold. Gold is the best comparison to Bitcoin because trading in hard gold is "final". Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash. As do bank transfers. All of these bubble down into interbank transfers that eventually settle on the base layer of central banks. So compared to shipping and securing gold, Bitcoin is quite cheap!
* Pasted and modified from an earlier comment I made on HN.
That's, like, just your opinion. For a lot of people it competes just fine.
> Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash
How so? As far as settlement is concerned, a cash transaction is pretty much exactly like a bitcoin transaction (and quite unlike a credit card transaction).
Until it doesn't. A payment network is graded on how it handles disputes, not regular transactions. Bitcoin can't do refunds or chargebacks, making it rife for fraud.
Sure, you can implement escrow, but then it's no longer competitive like GP said.
In Bitcoin the block size limit was eliminated and replaced with a block weight limit which better reflects the long term operating costs for node. The raw 'size' of transactions inherently is becoming less meaningful in the long term with things like transaction compression and compact encodings.
The weight limit doesn't map perfectly to any size limit because its limiting different things, this evening most blocks have been about 1.3 MB.
If you were traveling at 120 MPH and then accelerated to 156 MPH you would not say that this was a small difference without consequences.
It mattered significantly, in several respects. E.g. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
Increasing supply above demand radically drops fee rates. That is the logical, predicted, and observed behavior-- both in Bitcoin and in other similar systems.
Why not?
Because these credit card companies have thousands of _their_ machines, in _their_ locations, running _their_ software, to meet _their_ standards.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin is run god knows where, for god knows who (as rightfully intended of course), on god knows what software.
Sadly speed is just naturally part of the tradeoff in this scenario.
It's not true for Bitcoin Cash which plays by the "if your node is not making you money why are you running it"
When we upgrade every 6 months or useless nodes just get stuck on the old chain forever and that's it.
Last upgrade there was one miner who upgraded one block to late and lost about 1000 USD. That miner will be the first to run the new software in may.
We had a hacker who got a smart card to get Bitcoin cash to work like a credit card without needing to be online.
Bitcoin cash tx are instant and take on average about 2 seconds to spread to about 1999 out of 2000 mempools.
They settle on the chain on average 10 minutes.
Credit card tx also take a couple of seconds but much longer to settle.
Right now BCH can not yet scale like Visa but we already have the capacity to compete with paypall.
Satoshi's design works at scale but only when you don't delete point 6 from the whitepaper which is "Simple Payment Verification"
Core tries to make you belief the whitepaper was written without points 6 and 7.
7 is how to make the blockchain smaller by pruning it using merkle trees.
Nobody does that yet because storing 200 GB for 10 years is super cheap.
But 6 and 7 are ESSENTIAL in the design to scale.
Core completely ignores them or says: Well SPV is not 100% secure there for it's insecure and should not be used.
Gmax does this with everything, he flips it to extremes.
Meanwhile right now on LN there is couple of hundred thousand dollars that is very easy to steal from non technical people.
1) you find people that want to open a channel with you. These people go online to post their ip addresses and open ports on /r/bitcoin. These posts are encouraged on /r/bitcoin.
2) You open a channel with them for like 100 USD in BTC.
3) You push the balance to their side of the channel by using a swap side that accepts both LN and other coins.
4) You sell this 100 USD for another coin.
5) You publish an old state.
6) You do this to nodes you monitor using nmap to see if they go offline on a regular basis for longer then nlocktime.
7) You can't lose money on this, only win with people that should not be running LN but are.
There is like 6 million USD locked up in LN and about 10% is for grabs.
8) The victims have nowhere to go because if they post about it on their channels they get called stupid and banned and their post deleted.
9) People are already doing this but the victims are still not speaking out. They just belief it was their own fault and move on. Meanwhile the watchtower software is not there yet and if a node does not go offline for nlocktime you can easily DDOS that node for 144 blocks and you doubled your money.
- Bitcoin doesn't have chargebacks
- Bitcoin's base protocol transaction throughput is low
- There is a fixed cost per transaction (credit cards have low marginal costs for the credit card processor, and variable, percentage-based fees)
You could build that feature on top of bitcoin, but it isn't a feature that should be built into bitcoin transactions. See the lightning network
The “bitcoin doesn’t scale” trope is a claim made by people who tried to take over bitcoin (Eg Roger Ver, Craig Wright, the S2X cabal) generally with their own personal benefit as the motive.
Unfortunately, even here in HN, most commenters gave t been reading the release notes.
But you should. Core is very accessible, and the release notes of bitcoin are the developer equivalent of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders.
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
As you said, any two parties are able to open (and close) a channel. However, these actions require an on chain transaction, and your funds are locked until you close the channel. Unless you're going to be exchanging many transactions in a short period of time with your peer, you would be better off creating transactions directly on chain.
I won't get into this here, but the lightning 'network' has its own set of scaling problems, which imo are much worse than that of the bitcoin network itself.
It's not technically a payment at that point, since the payments is atomic end to end. But yes, you send a message your peer, which sends it to another peer, which sends it to another peer...
like any other P2P network.
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1]
Furthermore, the previous title was "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" [2]. So reading "Peer-to-Peer" as "Person-to-Person" would mean that the title hasn't changed in meaning, it just became a bit more catchy.
Also, when analysing the incentives of participants in the bitcoin network, it turns out that network nodes do not actually form the ideal-typical p2p mesh network (where all nodes are equally distributed and connect to a few other nodes) but a more densely connected network where connectivity to mining nodes is strongly incentivised. This topic has been researched and discussed by Dr. Wright (See [3] for more information).
[1] https://bitco.in/bitcoin.pdf
[2] https://nakamotostudies.org/literature/ecash/
[3] https://nchain.com/en/blog/bitcoin-network-topology-small-wo...
Wrights comments on topology are technobabble and largely meaningless, so it's difficult to say something about them... however, to the extent that we can assign any meaning at all to them don't you notice that saying your transactions need to go through particular nodes sounds an awful lot like the property you're using to argue that lightning is not peer to peer?
Banks throwing away checks is not a problem. Bouncing checks are a fraud problem, which is why most everyone have moved on from using checks is many situations.
Lightning's solution is to just 'watch' everyone you do transactions with, which is a lazy, non-viable solution analagous to continuously watching an anonymous stranger's bank account when they write you a check.
It takes something that is, in human terms, relatively simple and makes it so convoluted that it's hard to even follow.
I read the Lightning paper and found it simple enough to understand (conceptually at least) how the channels are opened, updated, closed, and penalized. Of course the actual implementation is a more complicated and nuanced than what the paper covers.
The same volume without lightning would require blocks that were terabytes, which is obviously unworkable at the current state of technology.
Because lightning is actually relatively scalable it doesn't broadcast every action to everyone.
https://blog.dshr.org/2020/01/bitcoins-lightning-network.htm...
This is how the design of lightning network incentivises mega hubs that know most people. So if facebook made a big hub with all its users it would work smoothly.
Also: You can not receive payments if the computer/wallet that hosts your lightning node is not online. Not super smooth.
The system has routing, and it turns out that it doesn't take much for the probability of a graph to be connected with low average diameter. See: The six degrees of kevin bacon.
If lightning doesn't work for a particular payment, you can simply make a payment without using it, potentially by splicing out funds from one of your channels.
Yes, Lightning has trade-offs. You have to be online (though there is ongoing research into changing that), and some moderately complex software had to be written to create it.
But in return you get get massive efficiency increases and instant irreversible payments.
For the transactions that it's intended, I think for these are pretty good trade-offs... though if you don't like them you're free to not use it.
No true: due to limited block space on the base-layer.
I am not convinced you get any efficiency increase with the LN: just more difficult capacity planning because everything is suddenly so hard to measure.
Sending a payment, whether on the first or second layer, will take a certain amount of: bandwidth, processing and storage.
Even if fewer nodes are involved with each transaction, the LN seems to rely on a lot of message passing; beyond what a simple broadcast on the base layer requires.
Even is we assume the processing and storage requirements are equal: it will be more expensive on the LN. On the base layer, your data is protected from Byzantine faults by having each node verify the transactions as they come in. With the LN, state is local to each node. That implies you need redundant hardware to protect against Byzantine faults. I have been migrating my machines to ECC RAM and redundant storage: it is not cheap. What I save on hardware costs by buying old servers I pay in extra power use.
The above paragraph did not even mention the capital requirements of maintaining a Lightning node.
Today sending a transaction communicates 10 messages for each of ~100k nodes in the network. Once its confirmed, that transaction will additionally be sent once to every new host to join the network, forever.
Lightning sends a couple of messages back and forth among the nodes directly involved in the transaction... maybe 4. (The average shortest path length is about 2.8 currently).
So the marginal communication cost for a transaction is literally hundreds of thousands times lower-- even ignoring the cost to future nodes joining the network-- and this advantage grows as the number of nodes increases.
Among the "Bitcoins", only Bitcoin Cash is keeping that dream alive.
I’ve never understood this argument.
But that simply isn't how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin developers have no such authority. People with no special power beside respect and goodwill, write software on their own as they're free to do just are you're free to do. Other people voluntarily chose to run it. If people don't run it, it's completely inert. They cannot force anyone to run it. Subject to the limitations of public review, they cannot make hidden changes. The software has no automatic updates, and the developers have a long history of being extremely vigorously opposed to automatic updates.
Because whatever effect the software has on the network could only be slowly realized as it's deployed (short of something like a crash bug or an RCE or similar) there is ample time for the public to review a new version -- even if they chose to ignore the open development process -- and sound the alarm against running it if they judge it to be adverse.
If you don't like software put out by one developer, you can run software from another. You could create your own (or pay someone to do it) from scratch. You could run an old version. You could take a version you don't like and make modifications until you do...
Moreover, the biggest community of developers in Bitcoin makes their software all free software, develops it on public lists/websites/irc channels, and has taken considerable efforts to maintain compatibility with other software specific to maximize your ability to choose to not run it without feeling too much conflict or hesitation-- You can happily go take Bitcoin 0.8 from 2013 or and years old copy of knots or a number of other forks or alternative implements... start it up and it will sync and come to consensus with the network. (I wouldn't necessarily recommend running something that old exposed to the internet-- due to vulnerabilities-- but you could and it would work fine.)
I would say your freedom is like your freedom with free software, but it isn't quite: If almost everyone else chooses to run something incompatible you can still keep running your original, but you might find yourself on a separate currency from everyone else. Since money gains it's value from network effects you might fine that less than ideal. But that's the limit, and it's also why the Bitcoin community is cautious with incompatible changes-- essentially never having intentionally made one. Faults in version prior to 0.8 make them self-incompatible, unfortunately. If you want to run a version prior to 0.8 and come to consensus with the network today you'd have to patch a database handling bug in it.
I think this is better. It's certainly very different properties than a trusted third party, and even if you're not sure it's clearly better-- perhaps you can agree that diversity and choice is useful and that you're better off for having the opportunity to use it should the need arise.
No... we're not.
There are bitcoin nodes which didn't follow the 1MB block size and "segwit" or "dsv" nonsense .... they just use the protocol rules from the original bitcoin.
To say bitcoin scales just great is an understatement. It scales so well it will consume _everything_
Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison. Censorship-resistance and on-chain scaling are both good things, but one picks a priority.
You or someone else can always go BCH if you like big blocks and the BTC devs are not going to stop you.
Only if they get extremely big, and the clients cannot handle them.
> to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks.
These people should use light wallets or SPV wallets, which is what we already use on mobile phones.
> Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison.
Only Siths deal with absolutes. This is a false choice.
Small blocks, and large fees, also have a centralizing effect on the network as small miners gets priced out as the transaction fees removes a larger fraction of their income.
And miner decentralization is the most important type of centralization there is, because that's what provides censorship resistance and network security.
Years ago BTC once managed 550 000 transactions in a 24 he period
Now at best just over 400 000
So in reality it's more like 5 TPS
All that doesn't matter as P2P Electronic Cash is doing well on BCH.
Following which scare tactics ensued which broke the block size increase agreements of 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit, that Bitcoin wouldn't survive a hardfork upgrade even though it had upgraded several times in the past.
The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access when he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi and testing large block clients on the side. On-going abusive attacks when discussing about pros/cons of small blocks in r/Bitcoin and DDoS on large block nodes since Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin ABC..
The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have been there for a long time indeed, and we've come a long way with optimizing transactions and still keeping fees low while accessing the ledger via Bitcoin Cash VS forcing transactions to layer 2 side-chains via Bitcoin Core.
It's important to tell the whole story here. Gavin stepped back as lead maintainer and appointed Wladimir. No one else.
Maintainership is the sole reason to have commit acccess. All changes to the software are made as pull requests. And commit access is only needed to merge these pull requests. Nobody commits directly on master without going through a pull request, not even maintainers.
Being the maintainer of an open source project is hard work and can be quite thankless at times. The role is one of a glorified janitor while still requiring the highest both technical and people skills.
It is not surprising people only do this for a few years, and as far as I can tell Gavin did a great job. I don't think that is in dispute. But he should not have commit access when he is no longer maintaining the software.
(It may also be of interest that Gavin stepped back from maintaining the software in order to focus on his role as "chief scientist" for something called the "Bitcoin Foundation". This foundation was comprised of a number of noteworthy people whose names keeps appearing and re-appearing in MLM schemes, "hacked" exchanges, and/or premined coins. Gavin may be the sole exception.)
Bitcoin Cash on the other hand has been gaining merchant acceptance and I've enjoyed using BCH same like I did enjoy using BTC since 2012. The honeybadger of P2P electronic cash is truly unstoppable.
Adam, the only person who's name is mentioned in the body of the bitcoin whitepaper, was happily using Bitcoin long before creating a company to support it. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225463.msg2371674#ms... though Adam has never been actively involved with the bitcoin software project itself-- beyond some mailing list discussions and such.
Aside, the numbers on the website you linked are randomly generated nonsense. Embarrassingly for its author, their made up numbers which are trying to claim to be astronomical fail to make their point because they're not that high when compared to other highly paying tech companies ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ne7ccUdOWewD4rFDQjjnQEJDgs... ).
That whole allegation is odd. Blockstream has (had?) a program where a significant part of employee pay was in the form of pre-purchased Bitcoin which vested over time. This was intended to create a significant incentive for employees to see bitcoin's value grow-- specifically to address concerns that somehow Blockstream could create incentives against that when it employed a couple long time contributors. ... it turns out that buying Bitcoin at $450/each was a really good deal, and it panned out well for employees. It worked exactly as advertised, and some anonymous troll is spinning it as some kind of fraud?! Weird.
> 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit,
Not going along with a proposal you think is bad is not an "attack"-- it's the actualization of your own personal freedom.
> The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access
Gavin's commit access was removed by Wladimir, -- not one of the people associated with Adam or our company. When it was removed it had been completely unused for a year and barely used for several years. Its ultimate removal was triggered by Gavin loudly endorsing an obvious scammer as being Satoshi which was especially concerning given his comments about "handing the repository over" to 'Satoshi'.
https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-movi...
Good security practices should have had the access dropped long before then, and he'd been asked by Wladimir to resign them but kept responding that he'd sleep on it. Wladimir had wanted to avoid the drama of revoking them, but once Gavin was loudly endorsing a scammer the threat of poorly maintained access seemed a lot more serious.
> he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi
Wladimir (and the other people you are insulting) were also there back when Satoshi was still active. Even back in 2011 Wladimir was the most active contributor, with two commits for every one by Gavin (348:152). In 2010, Satoshi made 215 commits and Gavin made 35.
Leading in a open source collaboration is a complicated question. Gavin was an extremely valued contributor, including valued for his public speaking at a time when many of us were keeping a low profile because we were really concerned that our involvement in Bitcoin might result in legal prosecution. That, however, doesn't mean he was leading in strong sense like you'd apply to the leader of a business. If you look at actual decision making in the project it, once Satoshi was gone it was always an extensive collaboration.
This fact is why e.g. some people have falsely accused me of controlling it when I didn't have any particular authority at all, just a history of reasonable insight and persuasive arguments.
> and DDoS
Bitcoin nodes got DOS attacked with some regularity in the past by people trying to interfere with block propagation to cause competing blocks to get orphaned (and still do, though less often now-- because we implemented countermeasures to make those attacks much less effective). There is no evidence that anyone saw any DOS attacks other than those. None of the people I know would have bothered not expected a DOS attack to do anything: the system is designed to be designed to resist DOS attacks.
The falsity of those "nodes" was also demonstrated by their near overnight disappearance once the pumping of competing altcoins stopped...
> we've come a long way with optimizing transactions
I don't believe that bitcoin abc has deployed any scalablity improvement not previously existing in Bitcoin. The primary one in it over the original p2p protocol, compact blocks, was designed by myself...
His public comments would say otherwise and many doubt that his company is supporting Bitcoin vs handicapping it for private interests.
> Gavin loudly endorsing an obvious scammer
Classic nullc way of putting it.. Gavin simply said that CSW was able to sign a message from one of the keys he had interacted with Satoshi's account. The signing itself has be debunked many a times, Gavin did not endorse CSW as Satoshi himself, like giving bitcoin repo access to CSW..
The entire drama created a path for new folks like Adam who showed up in 2013(from your bitcointalk article) to see opportunity to gain control of the core client.
Bitcoin Cash handles this by making sure to have multiple implementations.
CompatBlocks is just one of the developments that BCH has completed and released https://cash.coin.dance/development#completed
Overall, only time will tell how the Bitcoin story will play out. For a fact though, we have 2 chains developed centrally planned (BTC & BSV) while BCH keeps the checks & balances of power with distributed teams.
If you are feeling like going on a debunking spree, I'd like to see you refute the sources here https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/ekykl9/bitcoin_cash_th...
Sorry, I did not say or mean to take any credit, all I'm pointing out is that BCH was able to get that tech out in prod.
> BCH's constant hardforks have killed many of those multiple implementations. "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bcoin" to name some of those. Ironically the old BitcoinXT from back when it was Bitcoin software ... happily still works on Bitcoin. So you have it backwards: it's bitcoin that preserves people's freedom to use different implementations.
This is flat out wrong, the BCH developers meet monthly to review roadmap and sync up on development in a decentralized fashion. The clients that were not maintained were deprecated as expected, nothing out of the ordinary here. The Bitcoin XT client was compatible with BCH chain when Core activated the SegWit.
The bi-annual BCH client upgrade actually helps keeping users empowered as to which ruleset they accept, a choice which is not available for Bitcoin Core users as they are held hostage to the code that governs their money.
Letting volume be the main driver for payments to the network instead of fees (as it is today) scales much better. By that, I am stating that the hostage situation (as you describe it) has been introduced commit per commit.
Well, in the end, its a battle of opinion because smaller blocks give other features to the chain, so it will be interesting to follow how the dynamics between volume, miners, businesses and users unfolds when the original protocol is reintroduced on the BSV chain the 4th of February.
It's true that Satoshi added the 1MB limit after the first release, but at that time and before then blocks were _implicitly_ limited to somewhat a bit over ~500KB-ish due to issues in the database layer.
This is the reason that you cannot sync a pre-0.8 node all the way to the tip today without modifying it. 0.8 fixed the database problem and made actual 1MB blocks a possibility and the larger blocks triggered pre-0.8 nodes to randomly split off the network.
- Abandoning instant payment by introducing replace-by-fee where you can "undo" a transaction not in a block yet.
- The limitation of what can be done with the scripting language by disabling OP codes needed for (even basic) math operations.
- Forcing transactions to be formatted after specific templates limiting how transactions are used.
Bonus story: As I understand it, Vitalik tried to build on bitcoin but the limitations in the script languarge and transaction format made a globally distributed computer impossible so he went off and created Etherium.
Unconfirmed transactions are inherently at risk for being replaced, which is why confirmation exists in the first place.
When transactions are explicitly market non-final the software makes replacing easier instead of having to broadcast to the entire network yourself. Replacement for non-final transactions was a feature in the very first version of the software but it was disabled because it was vulnerable to a DOS attack (replacing a transaction over and over again in a tight loop). When a fix was found for the vulnerablity the feature was restored.
This is no way inhibits "instant payment"-- if you don't want to honor _non-final_ transactions until they're confirmed or replaced with a final version, just don't! (However, actual testing shows that doublespends of unconfirmed transactions are highly successful even without making them replaceable.)
Regardless, this wasn't a "stripping"-- it was _original functionality_ which was restored.
Aside, I see you are promoting Craig Wright's scammy BSV coin in other posts. I assume you are aware that the "Genesis hardfork" which they are about to release activates replacement in BSV too? https://github.com/bitcoin-sv/bitcoin-sv/blob/dev-Genesis-be...
> The limitation of what can be done with the scripting language by disabling OP codes needed for (even basic) math operations.
Vulnerable opcodes were disabled-- by Satoshi back in 2010. There has not been a single opcode disabled in bitcoin by anyone except Satoshi.
More recent softforks such as BIP141 have made it easy to reenable (fixed versions of) and add new opcodes. But there has been only moderate interest in reenabling any of the disabled opcodes, particularly since on altcoins and test networks (like elements) where they're enabled they've gone unused.
More interest right now is going into bip-taproot, since its structure enables users to use fancy scripts in an extremely efficient and private way-- allowing them to invoke the script only in exceptional cases.
> Forcing transactions to be formatted after specific templates limiting how transactions are used.
That was also done by Satoshi for attack mitigation reasons, but it hasn't been the case for several years now.
> Bonus story: As I understand it, Vitalik tried to build on bitcoin but the limitations in the script languarge and transaction format made a globally distributed computer impossible so he went off and created Etherium.
That is an outright lie. Vitalik never made any made any contact to the bitcoin developers or community related to this. Had any such effort been made it would be easy to point to public evidence of it. It simply doesn't exist.
Moreover, "build(ing ethereum) on bitcoin" would have made it impossible to "premine" 72 million coins (2/3rds of the current ethereum supply) and pocket tens of millions of dollars, as he's done. The folks that he collaborated with to create ethereum had done several prior altcoin pump and dumps and went on to do several others after ethereum.
It's unsurprising that he didn't seek out collaboration with Bitcoin however: He was well known as a scammer in the Bitcoin community at that point because shortly before starting etherum he had been making a nuisance of himself soliciting investments for a "quantum miner" scam. https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/vitaliks-quantum-quest-9e...
Edit: I was just pointed to these chat logs where Ethereum was first suggested-- they strongly refute your claim, https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1214250162069164032/ph... https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1214250162069164032/ph...
Well not just 'not any evidence' -- he claimed to provide a cornucopia of "evidence" all of which turned out to be easily proven to be forgeries. Things like editing his old blog posts to insert mentions of bitcoin (archive.org shows they were added years later), or claimed "digital signatures" by satoshi which were just literally copies out of the blockchain, or trickeries of unsound cryptography ( https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81115/if-someone... ).
Unfortunately, the media loves a headline, and all too often doesn't care much about the facts. And cryptocurrency appeals to a diverse collection of people including many that are highly exploitable by Wright's bombastic approach, including a number of business leaders.
Wright has a long personal history of fraud with numerous judgments in courts and administrative bodies against him. His Bitcoin related fraud appears to have begun with an R&D tax rebate scam where he claimed millions then attempted tens of millions in tax credits which he couldn't have possibly earned without spending hundreds of millions of dollars. To justify that he had hundreds of millions to spend, he claimed to be Bitcoin's creator.
From there it appears to have evolved into an advanced fee fraud plus scammy cryptocurreny pump. Essentially he's been claiming that he owns a million bitcoin but it's locked in a trust and asking for investments that he'll repay or getting people to buy his crypocurrency which he assures them will go up in value when he 'dumps' his Bitcoin and uses the income to buy up BSV.
Annoyingly, to pull of this scam he's and his representatives engaged in a massive campaign of harassment and fudding towards people involved in Bitcoin, particular developers and former developers like myself... lying about the history of Bitcoin, our activities in Bitcoin, etc. He even falsely accuses me of funding ISIS and other such nonsense (e.g. https://twitter.com/AldersonBSV/status/1199160142048063488 ). ... and generally just making a mess and turning a previously fun domain to work on into a frightening morass of attacks and threats from conspiracy filled crazy people or people pretending to be ones.
By attacking the credibility of the people most able to call out his deceit he isolates his marks from the very people who would protect them. Walking over all this has clearly had a protective effect, but it doesn't save everyone.
This liberates me from having to focus on who initiated the project - because it is meant to be frozen whoever initiated it can not change the setup at will.
To me it's not important who made visa or who runs it. I use it anyway because it got utility letting me pay at the bakery on a tiny island on the other side of the world.
I don't care about who made the HTTP protocol. I use it every day without knowing.
Utility is the real value of a technology.
There is more to BSV than a single person.
You wanted large blocks? We'll give you large blocks!
It makes a number of errors, most notably, calling the hashing power spent on securing the network "donations" (quotation marks sic).
Bitcoin has one job: securing the network of transactions.
Bitcoin is a mechanism to aggregate hashing power in order to make it possible to semi-objectively measure the risk of a block being reverted, in fact, this is the only formula in bitcoin's white-paper.
The paper examines a system of economic incentives, and somehow dismiss its key activity as an altruistic "donation". The article goes downhill from this statement onwards, and I couldn't feel like it makes a huge (yet ineffective) effort of deconstructing Bitcoin's governance model.
Some quotes that reinforce the superficial understanding of the Author:
> There are times, however, when two miners can find the correct nonce for a new block within a few seconds of each other and both broadcast their valid block of transactions (nigh on) simultaneously to the network. This causes a split, or fork, where miners go ‘rushing off’ to mine on top of two competing blocks. Because this form of divergence is endemic to the blockchain’s mechanics it is referred to here as a systematic fork; the discrepancy should be quickly resolved by network mechanisms (this happens, on average, two or three times a week). Systematic forks are temporary glitches...
These forks are essential to maintaining decentralization as a mechanism to make the network secure: trust the info, not the people that delivered the data, trust the signing mechanism (hash power spent), not the people running the machines.
> Furthermore, the political strategy of a user activated soft fork still requires code developers to create a client that reflects the political will of the market and thus demands the obligatory passage point of a Lead Developer found in version control systems.
Not true -- the UASF measures were not merged into the Bitcoin Core branch. Some code was merged to protect users from potentially problematic interactions with Bitcoin Cash fork.
Modeling Bitcoin's governance system is a daunting task. The author essentially confuses the power developers have with regards to miners: developers know there are things that would never fly with miners, and miners are way more powerful than what is described in the paper.
Bitcoin Core protocol kept the Bitcoin branding and continues censorship.
Bitcoin Cash protocol is being actively developed and has a scaling roadmap https://www.bitcoincash.org/roadmap.html
Bitcoin SV was another centralized attack(from nChain+CSW) on BCH.
While both BTC & BSV are centrally developed and managed, BCH has decentralized development with multiple implementations. Bitcoin has a long journey ahead, we are still handing out large miner rewards, we can check back in 3 more halvings by 2028 and see how things unfold.
Quakers, despite being religiously-motivated to pursue non-hierarchical expression[2], necessarily adopt organizational structure: committees, clerks of committees, group decision-making about who will take certain roles, i.e. "meetings for worship with attention to business." There is some natural and arguably necessary inclination toward roles and authority for the sake of organizational clarity and efficiency.
What it does not have is empowered leaders with explicit authority, rather positions are cast as being in service of one another, in organizing groups of effort rather than controlling the outcome of the group, and thus tend toward eliciting the active participation of all. Care and attention are taken to minimize the gravitation toward arbitrary and unaccountable authority.
Bitcoin takes a similar approach - necessary roles expressed in service of one another / the general effort, with attention toward guarding against arbitrary or negative expression.
The other side of this relates to thought leadership - in some sense speakers naturally have authority via the Pareto Principle's natural tendency to distribute virtues unequally. However, by embracing a consensus-oriented development practice, the general perspectives are a check against individual mistakes or abuses by those empowered by position or circumstance.
I think maintaining the balance between the gravity of centralization vs the beauty and safety of decentralization requires a continuous effort. Thankfully, it is not solely up to the developers to ensure this - developers, node operators, and miners can each and all be active by refusing to upgrade or otherwise by forking the codebase. I would say that's the key ultimate check against the centralization, that every individual has the ability to vote with their node / personal activity. I'll be curious to hear if the article addressed any of that.
[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=Empact
We also try to keep scammers out our community and I think we are doing a fairly good job, better than most crypto communities.
There were also replay attacks possible, so that if you paid some BCH to someone they could replay the transaction to get the corresponding BTC as well
Neither of these are a concern anymore AFAIK (the first one never really was, never give away your private key)
And yes, "bcash" has a negative connotation.
The MIT license gives the right to rename.
Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
End license text.
Dark forces captured BTC to stop it from becoming a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. BCH is keeping that dream alive and the dark forces opposed to financial freedom have been attacking BCH since before it existed.
I am sure there are BTC and BCH wallets that can steal your private keys. Don't use a wallet from an unreliable source for any crypto.
Come on.
I don't think those kinds of comments are warranted here. I don't see any increase in the number of green usernames in this thread compared to any other post. What kind of evidence do you have to support these claims?
$ egrep 'class="hnuser"><font color="#3c963c">' 21978475 | wc -l
35
21977147 (top thread right now):
$ egrep 'class="hnuser"><font color="#3c963c">' 21977147 | wc -l
0
21974514 (second from top):
$ egrep 'class="hnuser"><font color="#3c963c">' 21974514 | wc -l
1
21974117 (third from top):
$ egrep 'class="hnuser"><font color="#3c963c">' 21974117 | wc -l
1
These threads have similar numbers of comments to this one.
21971545 (Next one down with a lot of comments, 2.5x this one):
$ egrep 'class="hnuser"><font color="#3c963c">' 21971545 | wc -l
1
Plus, there is a thread on reddit directing: https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/el5qqf/bitcoin_core_hav... But hey, maybe I'm paranoid.
Seems this thread is bizarro land. I guess you're going to just ignore the abusive conspiracy theory in the post that I was responding to and instead wag your finger at me for turning it around with a pretty obvious observation?
Also I don't know if it's HN formatting but the commands you posted don't work. I think you're trying to point out there are N number of new users in this thread?
Do I have to verify with 1Niak6WPi1NDYquYGBc6TYVerheyEGeXM7 or is my very fimilair style good enough for you?
Come on indeed.
They perceive BCH to be a threat to their pocketbook and they should. If BCH succeeds at building p2p electronic cash, there will be no need for BTC to exist.
Because it's part of a social engineering campaign to discredit Bitcoin Cash and to prevent people from learning about the idiocy of what Bitcoin is doing.
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bit...
Around fork time, there was a coordinated push, including websites, subreddits, youtube videos (title of video by jimmy Song interviewing Roger Ver was first known use), and the censored 'bitcoin' forums all calling the fork 'bcash'. One week later, Samson Mow even did a guest column for Forbes magazine[a] mentioning the term. Adam Back later Chastised Cobra for not calling it bcash.
The goal appeared to be two-fold:
1. Strip Bitcoin Cash of the name 2. Frame it as a scam, especially if we take back the name.
a. https://fortune.com/2017/08/07/bitcoin-cash-bch-hard-fork-bl...
"The newly created Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a rushed spinoff of Bitcoin (BTC), a clonecoin of which there have been many in Bitcoin’s past. Because the name is confusing, many have taken to calling it “Bcash” to avoid buyer confusion."
https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-profes...
If that is really their position, it's absurd and untenable... so I'm sure we'll see further clarifications in the future. Like how are you supposed to deal with forks that you do not know about or perhaps could not possibly have had any way of knowing about?
You can avoid uncertainty, however, by selling right away.
The shadow is who influences these people, and why. It really isn't conspiratorial - it's the long tail of influencers, media, meet-up groups, conventions, exchanges, and people who have a stake in Bitcoin.
Anytime there is a major disagreement, there is a fork. This is how numerous forks were created, the biggest of which are Bitcoin Cash, which later itself forked into Bitcoin Cash SV. A fork is just a group of developers who disagree with the official Bitcoin bureaucracy at MIT. If these dissenters have enough support then the new coin has value.
Bitcoin is old and stable, and through its age and stability it has gained trust. Major changes to Bitcoin simply won't happen anymore. The Lightning Network required very minor changes to the core protocol, and using Bitcoin's constrained tooling developers have (heroically!) engineered a scaling mechanism. It is not yet perfect nor easy to use, but over time the client services around it will improve.
The extreme wariness of core Bitcoin developers ensures that trust is maintained in the protocol. A major disaster in Bitcoin would be very bad for the whole industry.
If you don't like Bitcoin, just create your own coin, or fork from Bitcoin! Such is how so many new coins are made.
I don't think meetups/conventions have much role in Bitcoin development either. I stopped going to them entirely because every event is reliably taken over by ICO/altcoin pumpers-- groups who stand to gain a lot by expanding their audience and are willing to pay to send representatives to events.
If there are tons of people looking to make transactions, fees go up or down based on people's willingness to pay to be included in the next block.
It also doesn't really increase the blocksize, but move some data outside of the blocksize calculation to make room for more transactions. The important difference is that Segwit is opt-in and depend on usage for it's effect, while a blocksize increase would immediately increase transaction throughput to its full capacity.
Nitpick here, but what will happen is that the cost of mining blocks will outweigh the revenue of selling its fees. This means that miners will at some point decide to stop mining bitcoin. If this happens abruptly, that would cripple the network for a while, since the difficulty adjustment function would not be able to adjust the difficulty in time. If the move is not sudden, but a progression over months/years/decades, that wouldn't cripple bitcoin.
If miners stop mining bitcoin, that doesn't immediately make bitcoin less secure. The hardware might be used to mine other chains, or could just be binned. If a single entity wanted to perform a 51% attack, she/he would need to buy up a lot of discarded hardware without notice.
A reduction of global hash power isn't a security issue per se; it is a multi-variable problem.
Over time, most bitcoiners foresee the transaction volume and demand rising, such that miner fees will compensate for the reduction in block subsidy.
So once we get to the end of new supply around 2140, the system will sustain from ongoing transaction fees.
Dan Held and I explore this in this interview if you're interested: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/81/
1: Create a globally-sanctioned Internet Currency
2: Allow people to convert any currency to IC
3: Make internet access free for and available to everyone worldwide
4: Charge IC for access to websites and services like Facebook, Amazon, Steam etc.
This account seems pretty biased to me. For example, it not only gives short shrift to the user activated soft fork (USAF), but gets the basic facts wrong (page 15):
> User activated soft forks require a large amount of coordination, particularly from industry. ...
This is absurd. UASF was supported by far fewer companies than those supporting Segwit2x.
A UASF is a declaration that nodes controlled by a group of users will reject generated blocks failing to conform to certain specifications. In the case of the 2017 incident, the specification was that the block must signal support for segwit, thus ensuring its activation.
> ... The cohesive demand for a node-initiated upgrade of network rules gathers momentum around Bitcoin meet-up groups, forums, blog posts, social networks, conferences and company board rooms. With regard to SegWit, this momentum led to the ‘New York Agreement’ in 2017.
The New York Agreement led to the ill-fated and incompetently executed Segwit2x proposal, not the UASF. The author could have discussed that initiative in detail but didn't. In short, the (single) developer was incompetent and the update didn't even activate properly.
https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/
And the Chinese company that produces the most asic miners (Bitmain)... also runs a mining pool. Gambling. In a Casino. Shocking.
The paper seems to focus more about the political/organisational problem, which to me seem more inherent and harder to solve.
At least in a capitalist democracy we get to elect the criminals who rob us blind.
Whereas, you do not have much of an option except to accept your national currency.
I get it, I have to work to make money while others mine virtual coins. It's a great deal for them is it not? It's just a power grab. I'm sure the people who use to have the exclusive right to print the money are very upset. Centralization of mining and decision making is just another power grab.
I get it, I should shut up and get back to work.
How is BTC centralized.
I'm waiting.
Not at all.
I talk some about why people who write Bitcoin software don't control anything this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978934
If buyers were happy with bitcoin-but-a-different-brand then there isn't much existing bitcoin holders can do to hold their market together. There is an unlimited supply of numbers out there, the constraint is numbers that are backed by whatever silly number of hashes per second the Bitcoin network is up to. The holders don't have any particular influence over that constraint.
"The overall political framework for altering the Bitcoin code is described as senatorial governance: a (de)centralized model of bureaucratic parties who compete to change the monetary policy (codified rules) of the protocol. This model shows how Bitcoin is not an autonomous system but is assembled and maintained via human discretion."
i still think the nano (formerly raiblocks) approach is cool - it scales by running parallel blockchains - each wallet is its own chain. tx's between chains are voted on weighted by % stake - dpos without lockups or slashing. this way its not a competition for space in a single ledger, its competition for voting bandwidth on the worst marginal node. a better tradeoff imho. downsides: the ledger also grows larger quicker than btc (because theres no 7tps limit so you can spam it)
no voting rewards or inflation - theres no on chain incentives for voting at all, but exchanges/pos need to run full nodes to validate ledger anyway and voting is trivial bandwidth. its elegant and the security model works but its hard to tell people about without coming across as a fanatic.
[1] https://nano-faucet.org/stats/
[2] https://nanocean.org/ (Click on Live Stream)
Switch to Holochain.
https://read.cash/@Big-Bubbler/the-troll-army-still-cant-sto...
However, the problem with Bitcoin is that it's built on a monolithic blockchain, so it's actually got a bottleneck. The miner is the bottleneck. Every transaction in the world must be sent to every potential miner, making it even more inefficient.
In most other distributed systems, when you increase the number of computers, the amount of transactions the system can handle increases. Not so with these monolithic blockchains.
Ethereum has the same problem. Vitalik even admitted it this year: https://community.intercoin.org/t/vitalik-scalability-is-a-b...
We need systems that are sharded from day 1, such as MaidSAFE and Holochain. "Embarrassingly Parallel" systems!
I have absolutely nothing to do with Holochain. I attended one Holochain meetup. Since you thought that, I should say my own project is called Intercoin.org ... I linked to a page that lets you discover a lot more.
Why don’t you say this is a way to shill MaidSAFE?
I guess my shilling was too subtle for you to even notice. And that’s fine.
You know what really bothers me about HN lately... I have written tons of helpful information on all these topics at our domain BUT I AM AFRAID TO LINK TO IT in a comment because it will be heavily downvoted (-3 for now) and called a shill.
You can literally devote YEARS of hard work and bugfixing, open source the code base as I did with https://qbix.com/platform and describe exactly what the problems are and how this solves them and you can take the code and use it...
But the comment is instantly downvoted and You’re called out for shilling. Shilling what, a free and open source project? Why even bother to link to solutions anymore. May as well just stop at a few helpful but vague suggestions. I have started doing that.
In this case I thought it would be good form to mention some competing projects to illustrate a major new generation solving sharding. Turns out that’s even worse. Apparently I’m shilling our competitors now!
At which point, and the irony here is quite profound I agree, you are starting to look at something that looks a lot like the existing banking system.