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

Wrights comments on topology are technobabble and largely meaningless, so it's difficult to say something about them... however, to the extent that we can assign any meaning at all to them don't you notice that saying your transactions need to go through particular nodes sounds an awful lot like the property you're using to argue that lightning is not peer to peer?

Wrong, this assumes it is the only way to make each block more valuable, it is not only not the only way, it is the most stupid way imaginable; an artificial production quota completely unhinged from underlying physical reality.

> Size of mining reward and transaction fees per given amount of kb of transactions is vital thing for miners.

Transaction fees per given data volume is less important than net profit on actual services provided, a chain that has a thousand times the capacity and a hundred times lower costs is still ten times more profitable than the competition.

> Increasing block size would be same as decreasing payout (of tx fees) for each block.

Just as stupid as saying that increasing seats on a train decreases the ticket revenue on that train. Completely false.

> Since transaction fees will eventually become the only reward for the miners tampering with their value would be just as frightening as tampering with the block reward

Tampering with the value of transaction fees is exactly what setting an unjustified artificial production quota does. And yes, this is "frightening" to a certain extent, but if you're still around on BTC by now, nothing is going to frighten you into abandoning it because it's absolutely valueless and idiotically stupid at this point in time, propped up only by the self-admitted unbacked charade that is transparent USDT manipulations.

> It would affect miners. And miners are ultimately who decide with their legs on what version of crypto to secure.

And as a miner, we will mine whatever pays the highest immediate return on invested power, no matter how ridiculously stupid that thing appears to be to us, it still makes sense to do that and immediately sell it and pocket the difference between the nearest sensible competitor to that for those who actually accrue proper genuine working cryptocurrencies with utility or whatever other legitimate financial instrument you care to mention that isn't transparently sabotaged and utterly broken.

> Sure, but if you are not federal reserve and can't invest billions of your own money in your crypto then what bitcoin does is exactly how you get to be the most mined crypto.

On the contrary; if you are the federal reserve, or that clique of financial manipulators (see AXA investment in Blockstream), and you're desperate to protect your collapsing imaginary financial system from genuine auditable competition, taking control of BTC and ploughing money into an avenue anybody with an ounce of sense could tell immediately was a dead end just from the specifications of the chain is how you get to be the most mined crypto whilst maintaining plausible deniability that you're meddling in the process at all.

I talk some about why people who write Bitcoin software don't control anything this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978934

The system has routing, and it turns out that it doesn't take much for the probability of a graph to be connected with low average diameter. See: The six degrees of kevin bacon.

If lightning doesn't work for a particular payment, you can simply make a payment without using it, potentially by splicing out funds from one of your channels.

Yes, Lightning has trade-offs. You have to be online (though there is ongoing research into changing that), and some moderately complex software had to be written to create it.

But in return you get get massive efficiency increases and instant irreversible payments.

For the transactions that it's intended, I think for these are pretty good trade-offs... though if you don't like them you're free to not use it.

I don't think meetups/conventions have much role in Bitcoin development either. I stopped going to them entirely because every event is reliably taken over by ICO/altcoin pumpers-- groups who stand to gain a lot by expanding their audience and are willing to pay to send representatives to events.