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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

#211
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you explain what's wrong with it?

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly, because building LN on the 1MB base layer is like building a pyramid upside down, it's unstable and creates more problems than it was meant to solve. Lightning was supposed to make tx fees low right? Well it technically has, but it also introduced the following problems that Bitcoin never had: - LN requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. This never existed on Bitcoin. -…

> LN requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. This never existed on Bitcoin. Correct, but this is clearly stated in its whitepaper and is one of the tradeoffs to get massively more txs and privacy. > If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I ca…

> And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem

Because LN is seeing barely any usage at all. The routing problem will bite as soon as it tries to scale.

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

#213
post #38

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.

I didn't know it was that bad. That couldn't scale to a small city =/

Don't listen to him. The whining about small blocks is just a narrative BCH folks want to push. Yes, it's true that currently bitcoin blockchain processes about 7 transanctions per second. But mempool is almost empty, 1sat/byte transactions go into next block - there really isn't any pressure to make blocks bigger right now. No emergency. And making blocks bigger comes with a big risk of spammers, so if we have other alternatives, we should take them. By the time people need much more than 7 transactions per second lightning will be fully usable, so there really isn't any problem.

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

#214

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.

If you read the bitcoin core release notes going back at least the past 5 years, and look at the road map, every release and every planned addition has improved scalability— many of them very significant improvements. The “bitcoin doesn’t scale” trope is a claim made by people who tried to take over bitcoin (Eg Roger Ver, Craig Wright, the S2X cabal) generally with their own personal benefit as the motive. Unfortunat…

It is a claim also made by anyone who understands bitcoin. It just doesn't scale. This is a fact, no matter whether scammers also agree.

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

#215
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're missing the keyword 'network'. If you're routing a payment across the lightning network, then it is technically not peer to peer. You send a payment to the next hop in the route, then they send a payment to the following hop, and so on. As you said, any two parties are able to open (and close) a channel. However, these actions require an on chain transaction, and your funds are locked until you close the chann…

Torrents also go through network, but we call them peer-to-peer. I think you don't understand what peer-to-peer means. It means you don't need central authority, a central node that would handle the connections, match them together. And that is true for Lightning, torrents, and all other things we call peer-to-peer.

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

#216
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me get this clear: You want to WAIT until it's evident that we can't scale anymore, and then add 2nd layers? And this, you want to do after significant adoption? So, you are basically going to tell the Starbuckses and other large corporations that have built a large infrastructure around onchain transactions that they need to stop that, wait a few years until 2nd layers are adopted, and then start using that?

I think you should re-read what I wrote: > Both should of course be done simultaneously, and never focus on one to the exclusion of the other. I have no issues with developing 2nd layers, but ignoring on-chain scaling and not even looking at what can be achieved is beyond stupid. In fact we know that moderate blocksize increases are safe (we can increase it many times before block propagation time becomes an issue fo…

Are knobs for scaling the primary network already well understood? They are limited. Block size and block frequency. So shouldn’t we delay irreversible changes to primary layer until we understand the additional capacity and knobs of second layer solution?

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

#217
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TCP/IP doesn’t get faster by making packets bigger. Technically larger MTUs can increase performance somewhat by reducing per-packet overheads... but the effect marginal and not that enormous with good nics and drivers. But still, probably not the best example. :)

Right, because no nic vendor was ever retarded enough to purposely cripple their product by restricting throughput to thousandths of actual potential theoretical physical capacity at the driver level like you and your toxic coterie did. In fact nobody has ever been this stupid in the entire industry period that I can think of except that coterie. Good thing for you it's in the interests of extremely rich and powerful…

I don't get your argument. Block size is limited so fees can go up to pay the miners so they have incentive to mine.

If fees are a barrier to you, you can make your transfer of value using any other traded cryptocurrency (or lightning whatever it is).

Aim of bitcoin is not to be the fastest cryptocurrency but the most mined one (thus safest?).

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

#218
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry Greg, we will get to you in due time. It's always interesting how you love to cherry pick and take things out of context. Then this was always your motive. The reference you like to quote about my wanting to limit the size of the blockchain is of course completely out of context. The creation of overlay networks allows bitcoin to act as a single reference source while also having different quorum systems…

I can't tell if it's the actual scammer or a parody of the scammer. I know! you could post a digital signature to autenticate yourself. Oh wait!

[flagged]

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Lightning requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. Lightning was not ready when Bitcoin capacity was crippled by the aforementioned tiny cabal of developers in favor of Lightning. Lightning remains unready, forever 18 months away from the promised usable technology.

Lightning also requires funds recipients to monitor their channels continuously, to make sure they're not closed early with obsolete balances. At least you can pay someone to do that for you.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but be aware, bcash is plagued with scammers, so as a precaution you should move your coins on bitcoin to another wallet before attempting to use a bcash wallet which could steal your bitcoin private keys.

My understanding is that "bcash" is used as a slanderous term between the two camps struggling for power. This comment seems to be attempting to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. As far as I am aware there is no evidence that shows Bitcoin Cash clients are attempting to "steal your bitcoin private keys".

when the fork happened there were indeed scam sites that asked you to "paste your private key to see if you have BCH"

There were also replay attacks possible, so that if you paid some BCH to someone they could replay the transaction to get the corresponding BTC as well

Neither of these are a concern anymore AFAIK (the first one never really was, never give away your private key)

And yes, "bcash" has a negative connotation.

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