The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money • Hacker News Board

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#71

Post by cryptowizard » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

ericflo wrote: post #63

wayoutthere wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why decentralized currency is no better than regular currency. Bitcoin is centralized in the hands of a few shady, anonymous exchange owners funding the development. At least in a capitalist democracy we get to elect the criminals who rob us blind.

You can always fork. People forget this when talking about blockchains, but it is one of the fundamental innovations of the model.

"...replicating a structure (through organizational or version forking) does not completely address the hierarchy of the structure itself. While it certainly gives others a voice and accounts for fragmentation in the community, power is not flattened among all participants. Quite clearly, senatorial governance is not a direct democracy but a representative one where certain actors (Lead Developers, mining pool operators, software companies) are raised into positions of power by grouping individuals (programmers, miners, users) through their obligatory passage points. This is not necessarily a negative revelation for algorithmic decentralization via (proof-of-work) blockchains but it is important not to assume all stakeholders of their protocols are made equal. The cost of collective action is hierarchy" (481)

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#72

Post by aazaa » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:30 AM UTC

The article is behind a paywall, but it's essentially a revisionist account of the block size debate of 2017.

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.

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#73

Post by lappa » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:30 AM UTC

wbazant wrote: post #70

Exchanges trade both in Bitcoin and BitcoinCash, and I've just learned from the paper that they form a tree with a common origin. Does it mean that if I owned Bitcoin before the Bitcoin-BitcoinCash split, I can now spend it on both chains?

Yes, they share a blockchain history until a certain point. If your Bitcoins were sent in a transaction belonging to a block prior to the split, you own both BCash and Bitcoin.

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#74

Post by pshc » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:31 AM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #43

johndevor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning network solves this as do many other things (liquid sidechains)

Lightning Network is not peer to peer which is what most of us signed up for with bitcoin. I don’t want centralized middlemen and their channels, might as well use a bank at that point. Lightning Network isn’t simple and elegant, it is a convoluted mess. The peer to peer foundation of bitcoin is literally in the title of the white paper from Satoshi. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System https://bitcoin.org/…

In what sense is Lightning not peer-to-peer? It seems permssionless in that any two people can agree to open a channel.

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#75

Post by bathtub365 » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:39 AM UTC

staplers wrote: post #56

matheusmoreira wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For comparison, Visa claims it can handle more than 65 thousand transaction messages per second: 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…

The creator actually suggested that it could scale fine if they increased the block size and mentioned future miner farms in 2010. 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.

Do you have any evidence of this kind of collusion?

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#76

Post by awt » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:42 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #35

awt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holders of Bitcoin also have a say in what forks are viable.

Holders of bitcoin are the only people who don't have a say. Buyers, miners and developers decide what is and is not viable (in roughly that order). Holders have a say only as much as they are still buyers.

How do you sell a fork if you aren’t holding it first?

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#77

Post by square_usual » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:44 AM UTC

wbazant wrote: post #70

Exchanges trade both in Bitcoin and BitcoinCash, and I've just learned from the paper that they form a tree with a common origin. Does it mean that if I owned Bitcoin before the Bitcoin-BitcoinCash split, I can now spend it on both chains?

Yes. See: https://money.cnn.com/2017/08/01/technology/business/bitcoin...

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#78

Post by sunshinerag » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #36

I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.

Lightning protocol addresses that. You can make millions of transactions per second [1]. Quite a lot of crypto sites are already supporting it and wallet support is increasing too [2].

[1] - https://lightning.network

[2] - https://blog.bitrefill.com/top-11-lightning-network-wallets-...

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#79

Post by lawn » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

lappa wrote: post #73

wbazant wrote: post #70

Exchanges trade both in Bitcoin and BitcoinCash, and I've just learned from the paper that they form a tree with a common origin. Does it mean that if I owned Bitcoin before the Bitcoin-BitcoinCash split, I can now spend it on both chains?

Yes, they share a blockchain history until a certain point. If your Bitcoins were sent in a transaction belonging to a block prior to the split, you own both BCash and Bitcoin.

Why do people call it BCash?

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...

Re: The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

#80

Post by EGreg » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #23

EGreg wrote: post #15

Well, 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.

Funny that you say that.

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!