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

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

#111
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is an additional layer of complexity an improvement? Why not make bitcoin blocks 10x larger and 10x more frequent? The argument that "only large entities will be able to keep up with that" doesn't really hold - thats the status quo already.

That’s not the status quo at all. You can buy a raspberry pi 4, a 1TB SSD, and have a perfectly functional bitcoin node, and lightning node and BTCPAY server all in one for close to $200. 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…

On-chain scaling does not prevent that. In fact, it reduces complexity by removing the Lighting requirement.

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.

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

#112

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.

Never forget: The original protocol did not have the restrictions you are feeling. 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…

For readers, BSV is an Bitcoin clone created and promoted by Craig Wright. An austrialian man who fraudulently and without any evidence claims to be Bitcoin's creator and that BSV is his (Satoshi's) Vision (thus the name).

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.

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

#113
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In one of his last messages in 2010 before going publically inactive, Bitcoin's creator wrote: > 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 ultim…

The counter argument to this is that the white paper refers to Bitcoin as “a peer to peer electronic cash system.” If high fees force users to centralized, custodial second layers, then it ceases to operate as peer to peer cash. It becomes Venmo.

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

#114
post #4

Earlier 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…

This is not an accurate model of how bitcoin works. :(

Not at all.

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

#115
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the Wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network ) it highlights it quite well under "commitment transactions." It takes something that is, in human terms, relatively simple and makes it so convoluted that it's hard to even follow.

Wikipedia is often notoriously convoluted for technical topics though. 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.

Since you read the Lighting whitepaper, you know that an uncongested base-layer is assumed. The paper suggests something like 133MB blocks at scale.

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

#116
I see this thread is full of false claims about how BTC-Bitcoin is still a real Bitcoin and will be able to scale to fulfill it's original intended use case (peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people). I explain in this opinion piece how such dishonesty is used to fool people into continuing to support the captured, centralized and intentionally broken Bitcoin (BTC).

https://read.cash/@Big-Bubbler/the-troll-army-still-cant-sto...

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

#117
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never forget: The original protocol did not have the restrictions you are feeling. 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…

For readers, BSV is an Bitcoin clone created and promoted by Craig Wright. An austrialian man who fraudulently and without any evidence claims to be Bitcoin's creator and that BSV is his (Satoshi's) Vision (thus the name). 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 me…

Also, BSV seems to be a parody of Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

You wanted large blocks? We'll give you large blocks!

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

#118
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions Why not?

Compared to credit cards: - 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)

There is an uncorrelated cost for every transaction, it's not exactly fixed.

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

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clarifications (this comment perpetuates some common misconceptions): - 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 transactio…

> Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions Why not?

Credit card transactions are not immutable. This is a feature

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

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