Also centralized: one global ledger with one global consensus mechanism.
Switch to Holochain.
The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
21–30 of 344 posts
Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
#22I mean, literally anyone can fork the codebase, or run alternative node software.. since I'm not going to pay 44USD to read the paper, I'm not sure what his point is.
Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
#23Well, all projects can be changed by humans. 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…
Considering the other comment here about Holochain I feel like this whole comment was just meant to be an incognito way to shill Holochain.
Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
#24Note to commenters: In this context "Bitcoin production" is not mining; they're talking about the development of the protocol being centralized.
The two are not unrelated. If a protocol change creates a forked chain then acceptance of that protocol change is determined by mining the forked chain.
Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
#25The proof of work isn't actual work.
Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
#26There is both an overt development bureaucracy of Bitcoin and a shadow group. The overt effort is managed by MIT https://dci.mit.edu/ MIT developers have merge access to the Bitcoin official repo, which is truly the real power.
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.
Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
#27Note to commenters: In this context "Bitcoin production" is not mining; they're talking about the development of the protocol being centralized.
In the same vein: Could we perhaps have the titled changed to something more descriptive? "The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money" better describes that this is about the governing process of the protocol development rather than mining.
The mining is also pretty centralised these days:
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.
Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enlighten the graduates. How is BTC centralized. I'm waiting.
Bitcoin decision making is channeled down a funnel: Core Developers make suggestions and the Lead Developer (and those given commit access) sign off on those decisions. Those decisions are then voted for by miners who are (relatively) centralised in that roughly 5 mining pool companies control the vast majority of hashing power used to vote on those decisions. Meanwhile large wallet/exchange companies who control vas…
Holders of Bitcoin also have a say in what forks are viable.
Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
#29Note to commenters: In this context "Bitcoin production" is not mining; they're talking about the development of the protocol being centralized.
The two are not unrelated. If a protocol change creates a forked chain then acceptance of that protocol change is determined by mining the forked chain.
I do not think that is true. The winning chain will be the one where most people accept the coins from. Miner will only follow.
Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
#30Well, all projects can be changed by humans. 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…
Considering the other comment here about Holochain I feel like this whole comment was just meant to be an incognito way to shill Holochain.
Quite possibly, but they are also quite correct - you cannot scale a full mesh network to anything remotely resembling the capacity required, it has to be some kind of sharded, p2p topology.
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.