Hello shills

[VeritasSapere]

So, ...zeitgeist? Gestalt? That ...Je ne sais quoi? You do understand what a definition is, correct? I'm sure you have some personal, perhaps poetic, perhaps spiritual/mystical understanding of "economic majority," but unless it could be defined in lowly, secular terms, we can't access it via our mundane earthbound logic.

The simplest and clearest definition I can give for the economic majority is that it is the people that give Bitcoin value who I would define as the economic majority. If I where to specify that even more then we can say it is the users, merchants,exchanges and businesses, this can be extended further to include all sorts of use cases and groups of people who overall give Bitcoin its value.

If you can't define it (as in "necessary and sufficient"), you can't possibly address the second part of my question -- explain to me the voting mechanism by which this "economic majority" makes its will known. So it has no place in this discussions about code, crypto and money.

That is my definition, it is true that this economic majority does not have a direct voting mechanism by which they can have their voice heard, according to my theory at least, it is the miners who actually have the vote, however due to the way that incentives work within Bitcoin, the miners are supposed to represent the interests of this economic majority, since it is in the miners self interests to follow the economic majority since this is where their industry derives its value from.

It may or may not be fundamentally flawed, but this notion of "economic majority" sure is. The true economic majority -- those with the greatest stake in BTC, those who actually hodl BTC -- have no voting mechanism beyond their feet, i.e. post-factum, sell if you don't like what happened to you; get out.

It is true that this "economic majority" do not have a direct voting mechanism, however I would consider the miners vote to be a vote for the economic majority in proxy, because of the way that the miners interests are aligned with those of the economic majority.

Miners act like representatives for this economic majority in proxy even though there is no direct voting mechanism for the economic majority themselves, voting these representives in place. Instead who ever has invested the most in securing the Bitcoin network gets to have a greater share of this vote on any decision, this helps to ensure that these game theory incentives remain strongest on the group that actually is the most invested in the value of Bitcoin.

That's like telling people they have a voice in their country's leaders by letting them GTFO if they don't like the government in power.

That is a pretty accurate analogy actually. However fortunately it is a lot easier getting out of Bitcoin and investing in the alternative cryptocurrencies or any other possible genesis forks in the future, then it would be having to leave your country of origins because you do not agree with its politics, this type of volunteerism is very important in my conception of the governance of Bitcoin.

This is the best theory of Bitcoin governance that I could come up with, I do question if this theory is flawed, then there might not be better or more satisfactory theories out there for the governance of Bitcoin. Since we do need a theory of Bitcoin governance, Bitcoin does require governance, some of the others models proposed by the small blockist I consider inadequate, from the tyranny of consensus to the "benign" dictatorship of Core.

It could well be that the governance of Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed and your criticisms do cut at the heart of these problems. We do need a theory of governance for Bitcoin to prove wrong in the first place even if we are just playing devils advocate, the conception that I have explained is at least more democratic and rooted in free market principles compared to the alternatives.

Considering what is happening with Bitcoin now I do question the validity of this theory on governance, and if this first real experiment in decentralized governance does fail, I would consider Bitcoin to be fundamentally flawed. I would also consider certain alternative cryptocurrencies which have more complex and better defined governance mechanisms to have most likely solved these problems within Bitcoin, these alternative cryptocurrency is where the future of the cryptocurrency revolution might then lie.

There is one more extension to this theory which you might not have considered yet, which is the possibilities of genesis forks. Essentially splitting Bitcoin into multiple separate currencies with the same distribution of Bitcoin might be what is necessary for this governance mechanism to actually function correctly, by giving the economic majority a more direct way to express their choice. You might have noticed but that is exactly what we are doing on this forum as well. In conclusion if this theory on the governance of Bitcoin is flawed then I would consider Bitcoin itself to be fundamentally flawed, unless you can think of another alternative theory for the governance of Bitcoin?

 

[VeritasSapere]

But @ current BTC price, much of that gear is just barely turning a profit, and, after the halvening.

I am a miner myself and it still profitable to mine with the current generation of hardware and it most likely still will be profitable after the halving for most of the miners with the latest generation of equipment. It is a common misconception for people to think that mining is unprofitable, putting myself in the shoes of the miners, I would say that is exactly what the miners want you to think.

Also, as mentioned before, it's a Mexican standoff where they hold all the cards: at worst, they lose just the (remaining) potential of their gear & whatever contractual obligations (lease, employees, power contracts, etc.) If Bitcoin survives with the SHA256, they could certainly profit handsomely by selling their hashpower to the "more rational investors" who've swooped in & acquired BTC "at prices that are now artificially cheap." Rinse and repeat.

I think you are underestimating what kind of a lasting investment mining is. It is actually the best way to align the interests of any particular group in Bitcoin, much better then holding Bitcoin, since Bitcoin can easily just be sold. The mining equipment is highly illiquid and highly dependent on the success of Bitcoin. The miners are essentially stuck with the equipment until they ROI in most cases, it is not easy to sell warehouses full of unprofitable ASICs while Bitcoin is losing its value, this is why Mining does form the strongest incentive possible in the governance of cryptocurrencies.

I mean, given a choice between whose shoes to step in, I'd go with the miners. They're a tight-knit bunch -- what, like 9 guys controlling 90% of hashpower?

This is another common misconception of mining, there are thousands of miners represented by 10-20 pools. You are mistaking these pools for actual individual miners which they are not. The miners can easily switch between pools allowing their vote to be heard. This is important, I have equated the pools with a type of representative democracy for the miners. There will always be 10-20 pools, this is not going to change, it is the nature of Bitcoin mining, what is more important is how distributed the mining power actually is.

They can reach a working agreement much faster & more efficiently than "the Bitcoin Community."Might even sign one of those IRL legally binding and/or enforceable (as in not non-violent hippie) contracts, too

I presume this is sarcasm, If this is how the governance of Bitcoin actually will start functioning however then I would consider the governance of Bitcoin to have failed, since the rules of Bitcoin should follow the will of the "Bitcoin Community" or what I like to define as the will of the "economic majority", not by some mining cartel like how you describe.

In regards to the alternative cryptocurrencies, if Bitcoin does prove itself to be fundamentally flawed then I would consider incentivized full nodes, self funding blockchains and more complex and well defined voting mechanism to be the solution to the problems that Bitcoin is experiencing now. It is highly unlikely that such radical changes can be implemented in Bitcoin itself. I have been looking very closely towards both Dash and Bitshares presently as alternative cryptocurrencies that have solved this potential problem within Bitcoin.

 

[freetrader]

I think the term "economic node" is a strange one (*). I much prefer the term "economic entity" as used in the paper here:

http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/8/1/7

Summarizing my view on what constitutes an economic entity in Bitcoin in a few words:

An entity that transacts with another entity via the network, in the process transferring actual value in exchange for goods or services.

Yes, to me this excludes holders. Holders often reason that they are economically contributing since "by holding, we are giving more value to the currency". I think that's unproven, and actually misleading. I firmly believe the more bitcoins are flowing around and put to real use transacting in the real world, the more value Bitcoin would have - much more than a nebulous cloud of imagining-themselves-to-be-rich holders could add.

Holders do one thing - they make it harder to get Bitcoin for people just entering (because they contribute to raising the price). Unfortunately, they do so without increasing the utility.

My understanding of "economic entity" also excludes someone sending coins from one account of theirs to another. If they pay mining fees to another entity, I'd consider it a minor economic contribution, if they don't, I wouldn't.

(*) The term "economic node" only makes sense to me if it refers to a node which can be associated with economic entities in some form, i.e. excluding any nodes that are just parasitic on the network and don't contribute to the economic activity taking place via the network.

 

[SysMan]

Brilliant question, we should ask this of @SysMan - do miners see it that way?

1st there are one big mistake in calcs Valuing Bitcoin marketcap as 7-8B$.
http://www.wefivekingsblog.blogspot.tw/
You should calcs also all investments in bitcoin infrastructure, all involved businesses, all users, computers, miners, long term technology investments ... this then create real cost of bitcoin.

Well, it is generally in their best interest to preserve the value of BTC. Even if they sell for fiat immediately, they still don't want to see all of their expensive hardware rendered worthless as a result of a Bitcoin price crash (or equivalently, as a result of the economic majority successfully changing the PoW via a hardfork).
https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-416#post-14316

100% correct.
2. Miners are not interested in ruining the bitcoin. they made long term investments with returns over 1+ year. They interested to develop, expand & wide spread bitcoin network as technology.
- even is someone will try to perform 51% doesn't allow you to extract 6B$ of market-caps in any way. first miner or miners who will start cheating and stealing found will risk immediately rise panic on bitcoin, price will be ruined and you will never extract even 2B$ even if you very fast and coordinated - you will not be able to sell stolen btc out (and even will will not be able to hide with money )

Is this why don't you fear the holders?

Reward - halving.

3. Halving will not increase bitcoin price immediately. it will be slow price rise up in months... this will push-our from the competition some miners of less efficient mining DC, but also slowly.

Main price defining - by bitcoin based business economy, mining is just small part aprox. 1/10, its small part of price. But small miners (with small hashing power) & miners with short term profit - right now pressing btc price down (btc->usd mass regular & sales), decreasing real worth of it down.
This will sector will be impacted by halving in near 3-7 months only.

4rd. Mining is not centralized even now. its just combined for survivals on 10-15 pools, this is just logical. but there are at least of 500-600.000 owners of 40-50% power. only Genesis mining has 250.000 customers. and they are not the biggest one, there also hashflare/hashnest/coud minig/nicehash & etc.
only Bitfury sold & providing hashing power as hashing sub-contracts on big volumes aprox. 10% of network hashing power is contracts owned by huge amount of ppls.
but even this will be changed soon. I think mining will be changed in nearest year for next age generation, making more distributed mining platforms and mining power ownership. even pools will be changed soon my IMHO, for one big transparent & shared pool to avoid orphans and any centralized manipulations(but not this year, may be 2-3).

 

[67 speedqueen]

The simplest and clearest definition I can give for the economic majority is that it is the people that give Bitcoin value who I would define as the economic majority. If I where to specify that even more then we can say it is the users, merchants,exchanges and businesses, this can be extended further to include all sorts of use cases and groups of people who overall give Bitcoin its value. ...

In that case, you can get rid of the "majority" part, because what you've defined is not a majority but a totality.
No wonder I was confused -- by [Bitcoin] "economic majority," you mean "economy."
From "it is the people that give Bitcoin value," we can also extrapolate that it is not the bitcoin hodlers, but rather the fiat hodlers who are Bitcoin's "economic majority" -- they are the only ones who literately give Bitcoin value (set its price) when they *buy it.*

... due to the way that incentives work within Bitcoin, the miners are supposed to represent the interests of this economic majority, since it is in the miners self interests to follow the economic majority since this is where their industry derives its value from.

But that's my point. While miners self interests are supposed to be aligned with the interest of the hodlers, that stopped being the case once the "one CPU = one vote" model got broken.
[doublepost=1459164406,1459163519][/doublepost]

1st there are one big mistake in calcs Valuing Bitcoin marketcap as 7-8B$.
http://www.wefivekingsblog.blogspot.tw/
You should calcs also all investments in bitcoin infrastructure, all involved businesses, all users, computers, miners, long term technology investments ... this then create real cost of bitcoin. ...

You should only do that if you have no idea of what "market cap" is.
"Market capitalization (market cap) is the total market value of the shares outstanding of a publicly traded company; it is equal to the share price times the number of shares outstanding."-- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

While applying terms like "market cap" to Bitcoin is already a dubious practice, what you are asking us to do is add everything that lends Bitcoin value ...to Bitcoin value.
So, for Apple, that would be "AAPL market cap is not just AAPL market cap [total market value of the shares outstanding], AAPL also owns factories and IP and brand recognition and stuff, so AAPL market cap is actually twice as high as AAPL market cap. Owait..."
___________________________________________________________________________________
See why it's super useful to actually define our terms before getting into a spitting match discussing a topic? Most of the time there's no need for neologisms. Coining new jargon from familiar-sounding, intuitive-if-you-don't-question-them phrases is an old trick, used for just that -- they're intuitively acceptable and familiar-sounding, so you don't spend any time questioning them

 

[VeritasSapere]

Even pools will be changed soon my IMHO, for one big transparent & shared pool to avoid orphans and any centralized manipulations(but not this year, may be 2-3).

Having one big pool sounds like the very definition of centralization, 10-20 pools is a much better model for decentralization if we consider public pools to be like a form of representative democracy for the miners.

Maybe you could expand a bit on what you mean by having one pool, since by itself under the current architecture it would mean that Bitcoin would literally have a single point of failure within a single full node. The very opposite of decentralization.

 

[VeritasSapere]

In that case, you can get rid of the "majority" part, because what you've defined is not a majority but a totality.

It is good to be clear what we mean when we use these words. When I use the term "majority" I am using it in the same way that we might use the term when we would say: "Democracy is supposed to reflect the will of the majority".

In this example however it would not be true to say that democracy reflects the will of the totality, since that would not be true. The will of the totality I would more closely relate to what I refer to as the "tyranny of consensus". It is not the case that everyone agrees, that is mostly impossible in the governance of large groups of people, what is important is whether most people agree.

In Bitcoin at least during a hard fork the people can choose not to follow the majority and split of as a minority, this fundamentally solves the problem of tyranny of the majority which I have always found to be one of the more profound innovations of Bitcoin.

No wonder I was confused -- by [Bitcoin] "economic majority," you mean "economy"

Agreed, I could also say that Bitcoin reflects the will of the collective economy, that puts us on the same page in regards to this definition, though I do think "economic majority" is a better term because it is more specific in regards to this "majority".

From "it is the people that give Bitcoin value," we can also extrapolate that it is not the bitcoin hodlers, but rather the fiat hodlers who are Bitcoin's "economic majority" -- they are the only ones who literately give Bitcoin value (set its price) when they *buy it.*

This is definitely in part true, that the economic majority in part represents the purchasing power of the world. Which is exactly the fiat value which might not flow into Bitcoin but alternative cryptocurrencies if Bitcoin continues to refuse to scale directly.

Here the understanding needs to become more nuanced, since present holders also have a different type of influence over the price by being able to sell. While there are multiple competing cryptocurrencies and fiat solutions, competing over peoples attention. While Bitcoin internally even has a more complex balance of power within, companies with different interests, webs of influence and splintering communities, the same old human stories. If you where to map out the actual balance of power that represent the "economic majority" it would become far more complex, but overall I do think the principle holds true that it is the people that give Bitcoin value.

It has never been one person one vote, that is not what "one CPU = one vote" represents. It is specifically the people that have invested the most into securing Bitcoin, exactly because that is what aligns their incentives the most compared to anything else overall.

Satoshi even predicted the move into datacentres and industrial sized operations. On the plus side I would hope this would also lead to better more informed miners and professional miners, this has its positive aspects as well. Therefore the greater economic power you posses the greater potential vote you can have within Bitcoin, in this way it shares some aspects of plutocracy, critics of democracy might be able to even appreciate how Bitcoin might be a superior form of democracy for that reason.

But that's my point. While miners self interests are supposed to be aligned with the interest of the hodlers, that stopped being the case once the "one CPU = one vote" model got broken.

Satoshi did predict the development of ASIC's contrary to what some people believe. I also do not see how the "one CPU = one vote" ever got broken. How is running thousand CPU's in a giant server farm any different to running a thousand ASIC's in regards to this principle, the economics and governance in this regard are the same.

See why it's super useful to actually define our terms before getting into a spitting match discussing a topic? Most of the time there's no need for neologisms. Coining new jargon from familiar-sounding, intuitive-if-you-don't-question-them phrases is an old trick, used for just that -- they're intuitively acceptable and familiar-sounding, so you don't spend any time questioning them.

I applaud your deeper investigations of the underlying semantics. I have come to realize that disagreements often stem from misunderstandings attributed to different understandings of the meaning of the words themselves.

 

[freetrader]

3. Halving will not increase bitcoin price immediately. it will be slow price rise up in months... this will push-our from the competition some miners of less efficient mining DC, but also slowly.

I think most people on here would expect that the halving has already been priced in by the well-planning miners in advance, and not that there will be a sudden price explosion.

The fact that it's only the second halving, and happening in a very different Bitcoin economy than the first, suggests that we may not fully understand all the coming economic effects perfectly yet.
However, history seems to be on the side of your prediction:

Historically, halving of miner’s reward has had no substantial effect on the price of Bitcoin. On November 28, 2012, the first time the miners’ reward was halved, there was no visible impact on the value of Bitcoin, which was worth around USD $13.40 per bitcoin.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/will-the-upcoming-mining-reward-halving-impact-bitcoin-s-price-1455126224

What this all ignores is 2 things:

1. the ongoing struggle over the vision of Bitcoin, i.e. on-chain vs off-chain scaling, or to put it another way, electronic cash available to all versus a settlement network fintech backbone. That debate can give rise to events such as forking etc. which could have a dramatic effect on the perception of Bitcoin by the larger world market. It would be wise not to forget that, or to inform those in the mining community who may not even understand this possibility.
2. the much stronger position of alternative cryptocurrencies waiting in the wings for "Bitcoin to make a mistake". In 2012, correct me if I'm wrong, there was no Ethereum, there was no Dash, there weren't crypto exchanges which can let value flow easily between *many* alternatives. Miners who believe that Bitcoin's dominance can be taken for granted while they lean back and don't care about the evolution of the system software are ignorant, and should be told to get with the times.

Main price defining - by bitcoin based business economy, mining is just small part aprox. 1/10, its small part of price. But small miners (with small hashing power) & miners with short term profit - right now pressing btc price down (btc->usd mass regular & sales), decreasing real worth of it down.

This will sector will be impacted by halving in near 3-7 months only.

I can follow your argument about downward price pressure through small miners and short-sightedness. But I think downward price pressure - at least as much as it reduces volatility - is good because it plays a part to attract new business into the Bitcoin economy, which in the end will pay the miner's operations. Currently through the price, in the longer term future through fees.

4rd. Mining is not centralized even now. its just combined for survivals on 10-15 pools, this is just logical. but there are at least of 500-600.000 owners of 40-50% power. only Genesis mining has 250.000 customers. and they are not the biggest one, there also hashflare/hashnest/coud minig/nicehash & etc.
only Bitfury sold & providing hashing power as hashing sub-contracts on big volumes aprox. 10% of network hashing power is contracts owned by huge amount of ppls.
but even this will be changed soon. I think mining will be changed in nearest year for next age generation, making more distributed mining platforms and mining power ownership. even pools will be changed soon my IMHO, for one big transparent & shared pool to avoid orphans and any centralized manipulations(but not this year, may be 2-3).

Thank you for the numbers. I can't argue with the 40-50% of power being in the hands of many individual owners, as I have no way to independently verify this. Do you have some sources for this number?

It seems much larger than I expected. We all saw the Hong Kong Scaling Conference video with yourself and the Chinese miners who together represent what - 80% of mining power?
Was the chairperson of that debate wrong to characterize the situation in those terms?
I didn't really hear any of the present miners speak up to object to this.

That video shocked the world, and - rightly or wrongly - gives the impression that mining is very much centralized right now. Until your statement above, I had not even heard anyone else argue otherwise.

So I think we should get to the bottom of this, so that nobody is under incorrect impressions.

I am encouraged by what I take as your prognosis that mining power ownership will become further distributed. That's good to hear, but I hope you (and your company), and Genesis, are not the only ones working towards that cause.

 

[VeritasSapere]

@freetrader When the chairperson of that debate characterized the situation in those terms, I did think it was wrong and misleading. Most of the hashing power is still represented by public pools that have many different people contributing to their hashrate. The people there represented the heads of the different pools and a few private miners, like Bitfury and KNC whom are still the exception in terms of running their own pools.

The miners can easily switch between pools if they wanted to, this is in part why I compare the public pools to a form of representative democracy for the miners.

I would go even further to say that there are thousands of different miners all around the world, I would consider @SysMan estimate to even be conservative. Slush alone has twelve thousand different accounts mining towards the pool.

I also think that mining will become more decentralized, and it has been becoming more distributed over the last year. I expect that trend to continue, though the balance is delicate with the problem of centralization of manufacturing, if Bitfury started selling chips to the public again it would help to alleviate this problem some more.

 

[albin]

orthogonal

You can't use that word anymore, Maxwell already used up all the "orthogonal"s.

 

[freetrader]

@albin: Impossible. Maxwell is a member of the infinite orthogonal group:

Oh wait, not sure if that means he used up all the orthogonals, or if there's always an orthogonal left.

 

[johnyj]

I think hodlers are a check and balance that can help to maintain Bitcoin's value precisely when there are difficult choices to make and Bitcoin has to fork to let the market decide.

In this situation, hodlers play a very important role, as they will try to maximize the safety of their holdings by choosing one fork over others. In this way, they work to maintain the value of the currency - but perhaps most visibly in key moments.

I don't think most of the hodlers are technically capable of making their choice, and when they don't need to make a choice, they will avoid it at all costs, e.g. keep the status quo. The recent hash rate vote at slush indicated that majority of users are totally undecided because they can't even form an opinion on this matter, leaving decision making power to pool owners. And that's only miners, those who are not miners are even less clear about the current situation

So, the propaganda of Blockstream is very effective: They use the brand name "bitcoin core" to appear legit, then selling distorted views everywhere combined with lots of technical barrier, I have seen again and again in large corporation this kind of strategy works in gaining support

And this is the natural result of any system that have human participants involved, even bitcoin is designed to be truly decentralized, eventually someone who is good at setting up such propaganda will take over since the majority of the participants are IT illiterate and are easily affected by media manipulation

IMO it is an advertisement strategy. A good rival solution should also be called "bitcoin core" (it is not a trademark in open source software) and advocate 2MB increase as a clear benefit over existing core. You can call them bitcoin core unlimited, core classic, core 2, core segwit etc...

 

[freetrader]

A good rival solution should also be called "bitcoin core" (it is not a trademark in open source software) and advocate 2MB increase as a clear benefit over existing core. You can call them bitcoin core unlimited, core classic, core 2, core segwit etc...

You make good points about lethargy of hodlers and small miners. But I think an increasing number will wake up if the volatility of the price increases, which it will if Blockstream/Core keeps driving the project in the direction of a settlement network / banks and out of the hands of ordinary people.

About the name "Bitcoin Core" - I don't think any competing development teams should touch it with a ten foot pole.

1. "Core" is a completely wrong connotation for a supposedly decentralized, no-single-points-of-failure system.
2. At this point the legacy of Bitcoin Core speaks for itself. No need for any good samaritans trying to clean it up as long as Core project members don't do it themselves. Let them come up with "Core 2.0" or "Core Reformed" or whatever.
3. Prominent Blockstream/Core members have publicly stated that they would consider legal action against competing implementations. Running into such a trap is unnecessary and only a valid course of action for people/organizations who have too much money to spend on lawyers.

For the last point, this is pretty much well-known public record, so I am too lazy to dig out references.

 

[67 speedqueen]

It is good to be clear what we mean when we use these words. When I use the term "majority" I am using it in the same way that we might use the term when we would say: "Democracy is supposed to reflect the will of the majority".

In this example however it would not be true to say that democracy reflects the will of the totality, since that would not be true. The will of the totality I would more closely relate to what I refer to as the "tyranny of consensus". It is not the case that everyone agrees, that is mostly impossible in the governance of large groups of people, what is important is whether most people agree.

But we're not getting any closer to a workable definition.

Democracy is predicated on a fair voting mechanism, and "majority" is clearly defined as "more than half of the participants." Not people, because non-citizens/slaves/women/children/illiterates/mentally unfit etc., etc. don't always count, but for each instance_of_democracy, member_of_democracy is, and must be, clearly defined.
Because otherwise the whole thing becomes pointless -- if we don't know who can vote, we can't unequivocally state if the voting process is fair, or even what "majority" means.

Without defining member_of_democracy, shit like "If 90% of /r/Bitcoin users find these policies to be intolerable, then I want these 90% of /r/Bitcoin users to leave. Both /r/Bitcoin and these people will be happier for it" becomes a sound example of democracy in action, since those who don't agree with Thermos aren't true Bitcoiners [member_of_democracy] & thus don't deserve a vote.

Before we can address if miners truly represent "economic majority," we must know what "economic majority" means.
Before we can work with terms like "majority," we must understand what it is we're measuring, so we can say with certainty "this is more than half of "economy," thus is "economic majority." A good go/no go test would be trying to create a unit for our "economic majority" calculus. For democracy, for instance, it's "citizen," for gasoline -- "gallon," etc., etc. That instantly makes the term "majority" meaningful -- if I stole 976 gallons of gasoline, and left 673 gallons behind, i stole a better part, more than 50%, the majority of gasoline.

P.S. Let's try to hammer out a working definition (if it's fun for you), and not veer off on a bunch of tangents.

 

[freetrader]

@67 speedqueen :

Without getting too specific about what is being voted on, I could see something like this happening in future with "Bitcoin democracy"":

• full node wallet users vote in their transactions (some kind of signaling as was touched on at the Roundtable). Exchanges would have to provide voting options for their users' transactions.
  
• miners can vote on stuff using the coinbase. This obviously requires protocol extension and is not available right now.
  
• pools can vote using their own options which can range from imposing their will to proportional representation of their subscribers or anything in between (as is the case now)
  
• relay nodes - don't see a good way for them to vote on general issues, but as relates to protocol/development, they vote by running the software or settings that express their convictions
  
• hodlers vote using their private keys - signing their intentions either individually or jointly to combine their powers. They can also vote by forking the software and doing fork arbitrage, but they need support and investment from the rest of the community to write software / run their fork / make it tradeable etc.

 

[johnyj]

You make good points about lethargy of hodlers and small miners. But I think an increasing number will wake up if the volatility of the price increases, which it will if Blockstream/Core keeps driving the project in the direction of a settlement network / banks and out of the hands of ordinary people.

About the name "Bitcoin Core" - I don't think any competing development teams should touch it with a ten foot pole.

1. "Core" is a completely wrong connotation for a supposedly decentralized, no-single-points-of-failure system.
2. At this point the legacy of Bitcoin Core speaks for itself. No need for any good samaritans trying to clean it up as long as Core project members don't do it themselves. Let them come up with "Core 2.0" or "Core Reformed" or whatever.
3. Prominent Blockstream/Core members have publicly stated that they would consider legal action against competing implementations. Running into such a trap is unnecessary and only a valid course of action for people/organizations who have too much money to spend on lawyers.

For the last point, this is pretty much well-known public record, so I am too lazy to dig out references.

If you think majority of the users would understand your point 1 and 2, you already are a victim of blockstream propaganda, because they know who can understand these points are minority. The majority thinks core is what has been working and it will work forever, like windows

Legal action is a joke, who are they going to sue if it there are hundreds of implementations created by anonymous accounts all called bitcoin core? In fact, hackers has already used this strategy to steal lots of bitcoins and who are they going to sue? And I don't think they have any right to sue since it is an open source project, they just shout nonsense

 

[67 speedqueen]

@67 speedqueen :

Without getting too specific about what is being voted on, I could see something like this happening in future with "Bitcoin democracy"":

• full node wallet users vote in their transactions (some kind of signaling as was touched on at the Roundtable). Exchanges would have to provide voting options for their users' transactions.
  
• miners can vote on stuff using the coinbase. This obviously requires protocol extension and is not available right now.
  
• pools can vote using their own options which can range from imposing their will to proportional representation of their subscribers or anything in between (as is the case now)
  
• relay nodes - don't see a good way for them to vote on general issues, but as relates to protocol/development, they vote by running the software or settings that express their convictions
  
• hodlers vote using their private keys - signing their intentions either individually or jointly to combine their powers. They can also vote by forking the software and doing fork arbitrage, but they need support and investment from the rest of the community to write software / run their fork / make it tradeable etc.

Obvious hurdles:
1. Who decides what could/could not be voted on? If I want to vote for "all ur coinz belong to me [vector to full full proposition]," will everyone need to consider it & vote on it? With millions of users, this is important.
2. Who enforces the outcome? If my proposal wins, who makes you send me your coins?

Meatspace law has been in development for millennia; it [roughly] hashed out these problems over time, because is able to adapt by remaining in constant flux -- the very *opposite of set-in-stone, algorithmically-controlled clockwork* that bitcoiners takes such pride in.

 

[Aquent]

Can everyone please stop posting on this thread. I mean the title is "Hello Shills". Created by a person whose image suggests he was the ddoser of classic's node as well as F2Pool which suggests that the ddoser was not in any way just a professionally paid guy, but an ideologically motivated person, and we all can tell the likely candidate. In any event the poster has not replied sine his original first post.

Therefore, I suggest that any nice discussion that may be had be transported to a new thread with a less inflammatory title and not started by a criminal ddoser.

Thanks

 

[VeritasSapere]

I still want to reply to @67 speedqueen, continue the discussion on the concept of the "economic majority" though I suppose we could do that on a different thread.

I suspect that this thread has been created as a direct response to my commentating on Bitcointalk. Since I was inviting people to come into this forum since I wanted to focus less on Bitcointalk, it being a more toxic environment. Soon after I said this this thread appeared on the forum, started by @watashi-kokoto who was also in the Bitcointalk thread when I extended the invitation.

I figured maybe some of the small blockist would feel more comfortable and at home in this thread, even though we have somewhat ironicly been having some very high level and civil discussions in here.

 

[67 speedqueen]

Does it matter who started the thread? Someone on bitcointalk used a similar argument against this forum ("why would you use a forum run by Cypherdoc, a known scammer/shill").