Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Justus Ranvier]

I have no idea.

 

[Peter R]

@Justus Ranvier

And the next post by "FreeMoney" brings up @theZerg's acceptance depth idea that we've implemented in Bitcoin Unlimited.

BTW, I really like the idea in the post by Gavin above MPOE-PR's of measuring the block size limit in units of time rather than units of bytes.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

@Peter R We've been trapped in "Groundhog Day" since 2012.

 

[Norway]

@Justus Ranvier
Could you please repeat that?

 

[albin]

Maybe the world really did end in 2012 and we're stuck in some bizarre illusion!

 

[Justus Ranvier]

@Norway

[doublepost=1454285370,1454284733][/doublepost]

given the rising level of dissatisfaction with core dev?

If you recall, there never was much satisfaction there:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152027.msg1617246#msg1617246

Yes, they are. This is what being a developer means in this context: that you are a servant. A slave, if you prefer that terminology. One who obeys. An inferior. A steward. Nobody, politically speaking. I'm running out of alternative ways to put this, but I would hope you get the idea.

If someone is interested in becoming politically relevant, being part of the dev team is not only a waste of his time, it's a waste of everyone's time. That a number of the more socially inept kids are doing this (Amir Scarface Taaki, who has meanwhile thankfully been ejected, Weirdo Luke, Gregory Pointless Maxwell and on and on) doesn't make it workable. It just doesn't work.

If someone is interested in becoming rich, being part of the dev team is not only a waste of his time, but a waste of everyone's time. It's just not how it works. Being part of the dev team is being part of the slaves, the servants, the stewards, the however you'd call them. This abject social position does not entitle them to immunity for their fuck-ups in any case. You may dislike that, and that's fine, but your likes and dislikes have no power to change this world.

 

[Erdogan]

@awemany

Yes, Gmax has certainly made important contributions to Bitcoin. I think the tension with him now is the conflict of interest with respect to Blockstream, coupled with his view on Nakamoto consensus. His camp thinks that there are two different forms of consensus, while I believe most in the big-block camp think that ultimately only Nakamoto consensus matters.

"I think what would be great would be some kind of bounty system where one is able to say 'I'll work on it' and lock the bounty for a while. I'd also like to personally get more involved with Bitcoin low-level development."

Yes!! Imagine if we could setup perhaps three "Funding Councils" that would act similarly to Canada's National Research Council (NRC) or the USA's National Science Foundation (NSF) [I'm sure similar councils exists all over the world]. Development teams or researchers could submit project proposals to the Bitcoin funding councils; some competitive process would be used to allocate the funds. Individuals and teams that made progress that the community was pleased with would be more likely to receive continued support.

A fully decentralized, curruption free bounty for large blocks, the Badass Big Block Bounty (BBBB):

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4282pr/badass_big_block_bountythe_great_blocksize_war_of/

 

[throwaway]

There should also be bounties for every block mined on top of the first Big Block, up to certain depth (6 or so, I guess).

 

[Erdogan]

72 Classic nodes.

@throwaway: That would cost you more

The first large block, orphaned or not, will change everything. It will clear out the discussion. No more need for reddit or bitco.in !

 

[solex]

Looks like most Classic nodes are XT and BU users switching over. BU reached 150 nodes on the 28th, but down to 103 now. Oh well, it's a long road..

 

[JVWVU]

First you have to break the Core than you can look at BU. We finally unionized.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

This post really is worth a second look:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=208200.msg2182597#msg2182597

My general preference is to error towards being more decentralized. There are three reasons for this

Today, "decentralization" is apparently an essential core value of Bitcoin.

Just a few short years ago, however, it was merely Gregory Maxwell's personal preference which he felt the need to justify, apparently because it wasn't obviously a core value back then.

(1) We can build a multitude of systems of different kinds— decentralized and centralized ones— on top of a strongly decenteralized system but we can't really build something more decentralized on top of something which is less decentralized. The core of Bitcoin sets the maximum amount of decentralization possible in our ecosystem.

What does this actually mean? I'm pretty sure Bitcoin itself is built on top of a fairly centralized last mile ISP network combined with some not-particular-decentralized interconnections, so

Since Bitcoin (apparently) exists as a more-decentralized network built on top of a less-decentralized lower level network, this statement doesn't appear to be true in general.

This argument is still cited today.

(2) Decentralization is what makes what we're doing unique and valuable compared to the alternatives. If decentralization is not very important to you... you'd likely already be much happier with the USD and paypal.

Well, other than the monetary properties of a limited currency supply.

Maybe he and his friends don't value hard money economics, but it's premature to say the least to say this his case is proven in terms of larger Bitcoin adoption.

How do we really know that decentralization is more important than hard money? Just because he says so?

Again. this argument is still cited today.

(3) Regardless of the block size we need to have robust alternatives for transacting in BTC in order to improve privacy, instant confirmation, lower costs for low value transactions, permit very tiny femtopayments, and to (optionally!) better support reversible transactions. ... and once we do the global blockchain throughput rate is less of an issue: Instead of a limit of how many transactions can be done it becomes a factor that controls how costly the alternatives are allowed to be at worst, and a factor in how often people need to depend on external (usually less secure) systems.

This is basically every project Blockstream is working on today.

Off chain transactions, reversible transactions, private improvements. Nothing intrinsically wrong with these things, but...

...and also because I think it's easier to fix if you've gone too small and need to increase it, vs gone too large and shut out the general public from the validation process and handed it over to large entities.

Problem with this is that Gregory Maxwell has no clue whether or not the market wants more throughput first, or more privacy and reversible transactions first.

Guess wrong, and people stop using Bitcoin and start using other alternatives. We can only tolerate so much of that before there is no more Bitcoin adoption.

All that said, I do cringe just a little at the over-simplification of the video... and worry a bit that in a couple years it will be clear that 2mb or 10mb or whatever is totally safe relative to all concerns— perhaps even mobile devices with tor could be full nodes with 10mb blocks on the internet of 2023, and by then there may be plenty of transaction volume to keep fees high enough to support security— and maybe some people will be dogmatically promoting a 1MB limit because they walked away from the video thinking that 1MB is a magic number rather than today's conservative trade-off. 200,000 - 500,000 transactions per day is a good start, indeed, but I'd certainly like to see Bitcoin doing more in the future.

No comment necessary.

But I suppose the community can work on educating people about that them with concrete demonstrations. Thing like bg002h's suggestion of a maxed out testnet would be interesting in establishing exactly what the scaling limits of current technology are.

This was done, and the results were ignored:

https://blog.conformal.com/btcsim-simulating-the-rise-of-bitcoin/

http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2015/01/twenty-megabytes-testing-results.html

 

[Justus Ranvier]

2012-08-25: The paralysis which stopped the hard fork planning had not yet set in. Civil, productive discussion was still happening:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=103172.0

This thread takes place just under six months before this one:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140233.0

 

[Peter R]

@Justus Ranvier

Those are interesting threads too. It appears that by January of 2013, Maxwell was using the same narrative as he uses today--but even Theymos wasn't on board at that point.

In the same thread, I found another great quote by "caveden." It's like he designed Bitcoin Unlimited and the idea of emergent consensus two and a half years before we started seriously working on the idea in the original GCBU thread:

 

[Justus Ranvier]

There is a wealth of forgotten history in the Bitcointalk forum.

Because Bitcoin has grown so much in the last four years, almost nobody remembers these arguments have all happened before, usually many times over.

 

[cypherdoc]

this is rich:

and maybe some people will be dogmatically promoting a 1MB limit because they walked away from the video thinking that 1MB is a magic number rather than today's conservative trade-off.

[doublepost=1454298559][/doublepost]

There is a wealth of forgotten history in the Bitcointalk forum.

Because Bitcoin has grown so much in the last four years, almost nobody remembers these arguments have all happened before, usually many times over.

your memory of these thread gems is incredible. keep it up.
[doublepost=1454298647][/doublepost][doublepost=1454299231,1454298455][/doublepost]no matter what Greg says against >1MB blocks, he is willing to accept 4MB under SWSF:

 

[solex]

The fundamental breakdown in Maxwell's thinking stems from this:

Without a sharp constraint on the maximum blocksize there is currently _no_ rational reason to believe that Bitcoin would be secure at all once the subsidy goes down.

As has been pointed out numerous times since, when the subsidy "goes down" is a problem for 20+ years in the future. The immediate concern is Bitcoin remaining the world's No.1 crypto for its first 20 years. Maxwell is so worried about the remote future that by crippling the current block-size he actually makes the remote future an irrelevance to Bitcoin.

 

[cypherdoc]

it's a good thing doctors are precise. i'd hate for someone to go blind or something for chrissakes.

 

[albin]

Maxwell's justification for SFSW blocksize is abandoning improving p2p relay in favor of the centralized fast relay network? This is not good.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Something that's good to not overlook:


When Satoshi added MAX_BLOCK_SIZE in 2010, not only was the 1 MB limit far higher than actual transaction demand, it was also a value higher than the network was physically capable of reaching.

For years, perfectly legal blocks were capable of breaking the network.

How did we avoid disaster? The miners simply did not produce them. They limited the sizes of the blocks they made to avoid breaking the network in order to make sure the coins they were mining stayed valuable.