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Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

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Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#211

Post by CryptoPunk »

nullc wrote: post #210
CryptoPunk wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you quote all of the instances where he endorsed large blocks? You're singling out one expression of mildly small-block sentiment and overlooking multiple expressions of strongly large-block sentiment by Satoshi.

There aren't any? He _implemented_ the block size limit, nothing forced him to. Had he wanted it to change automatically he could have coded it that way. Instead, he tended to describe the design as being mostly set in stone. When someone tried to remove the limit he urgently yelled at them to stop (and stated if it were ever needed it could be phased in). I'm sure that his, like everyone elses, understanding of the…

Here:

"At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node."

- November, 2008

Here:

"The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users."

-July, 2010

Here:

"It would be nice to keep the [block chain] files small as long as we can.

The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets.

But for now, while it’s still small, it’s nice to keep it small so new users can get going faster. When I eventually implement client-only mode, that won’t matter much anymore. (note to readers, "client-only mode" refers to SPV mode)"

- August, 2010

Here:

"The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling."

- in an email to Mike Hearn

Are you really unfamiliar with these, or think they're not worthy of your reader's attention?

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#212

Post by CryptoPunk »

nullc wrote: post #202
CryptoPunk wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners were solidly behind a hard fork. Every major stakeholder group, minus the Core development team, was solidly for it.

That is simply not true. You can even look to the public markets, there were futures on each of these fork attempts and they traded at a tiny fraction of the price of Bitcoin.

The majority of mining power signalled support for several attempts to do a hard fork to raise the block size limit:

https://twitter.com/btcinchina/status/804163370043588608

"3rd largest #bitcon #mining pool BW signal support for 8M blocksize, following the consensus from scaling conference."

And another initiative:

https://www.coindesk.com/btcchina-support-gives-bip-100-bitc...

"BTCChina Support Gives BIP 100 Bitcoin Hashrate Majority"

>>there were futures on each of these fork attempts and they traded at a tiny fraction of the price of Bitcoin.

The futures predicted the likelihood of the fork happening, not what percentage of miners supported them.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#213

Post by CryptoPunk »

mtrycz2 wrote: post #190
CryptoPunk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single modern consumer-grade PC can validate 100X larger blocks in real time. The average web page these days is over 1 MB. The idea that you need to limit every once-in-every-10-minute block to 1 or 1.6 MB is not, from everything I can see, close to approaching a sound balancing of competing priorities.

My RPi4 can handle 256MB blocks on BCH's scalenet, just fine. There never was a scaling issue.

Exactly. Even 100X larger blocks, meaning 100 MB blocks, would allow for very high levels of decentralization.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#214

Post by CryptoPunk »

nullc wrote: post #201
jart wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners can't change Bitcoin without the consent of full nodes, who run the core client. That's why SegWit2x didn't happen three years ago. All the miners supported it, because bigger blocks means bigger transaction fees. Full nodes and core devs didn't support it, because big blocks means you won't be able to run Bitcoin on PCs much longer and therefore centralized online service providers will control it.

FWIW bigger blocks actually mean much much smaller transaction fees, both in theory and practice. Though it's true some miners erroneously believed arguments otherwise. BCash, for example, some loopy "large block" clone of Bitcoin has only rarely had more than $1 in fees in blocks-- and not primarily because it has fewer transactions (though it does), but because there is no cause to pay more than negligible amounts…

>>FWIW bigger blocks actually mean much much smaller transaction fees, both in theory and practice.

Ethereum has larger transaction fees than Bitcoin right now, on a larger volume of transactions, so in practice, that is not true.

The addressable market will necessarily shrink with too small blocks.

Now of course when Bitcoin Cash launches, with most of the world unaware of it, it's not going to get as much as adoption, and by extension transaction fees, as Bitcoin, irrespective of its block size limit, so your comparison is inappropriate.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#215

Post by tromp »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #206
tromp wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkpointing very much runs counter to the decentralizing philosophy of bitcoin. Nodes should be able to fully verify the transaction history with reasonable resources.

In practice, checkpoint is not a big deal. For history older than X, where X is a sufficiently distant time in the past, there will always be widespread consensus on the hash of the true chain, and numerous reputable parties that the hash of the true chain can be obtained from. Some poison node attack where fraudulent websites provide a hash of a fake history will not be viable. Checkpointing is also currently being…

Bitcoin Core never did checkpointing in the sense of skipping prior history. They merely required a particular block at a particular height.

Not fully verifying history is a complete departure from how things are done in bitcoin full nodes.

And Bitcoin Core removed even those checkpoints [1].

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75733/why-does-b...

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#216

Post by [deleted] »

alexmingoia wrote: post #86
gorgoiler wrote: post #38

I don’t understand Bitcoin. If I make bread and you grow potatoes, we can barter, but it’s much easier to use some intermediary to track the value that we exchanged. The intermediary facilitates this with tokens (coins, notes, cards.) Bitcoin seems perverse. It puts all the value in the tokens themselves and at the same time I can’t even use it to buy bread or potatoes. About the only thing I hear that you can buy wi…

People use Bitcoin to protect their wealth from inflation/debasement. It’s easier to own and protect than gold and real estate, easier to transact, etc. Whether it’s widely used as a currency is irrelevant to whether it can be.

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#217

Post by not_kurt_godel »

ilammy wrote: post #139
saberience wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold has a value because it can also be used for legitimate industrial applications, plus it has the other physical qualities of being attractive to look at and doesn't corrode (i.e. useful for making jewellery). So yes, while it does have value because people believes it has value. Even if no person wanted gold for its "imagined" value, it would still have value because it's used by many actual companies in actual p…

Bitcoin can be used for making transactions on the Bitcoin network, and to store information permanently on the Bitcoin blockchain. Here are examples of applications. Industrial applications of gold as imaginary as those applications of Bitcoin are. You can use other metals as conductors, and the whole notion of a specific arrangement of molecules being called “an appliance” or “a jewellery piece” is just human imagi…

> the whole notion of a specific arrangement of molecules being called “an appliance” or “a jewellery piece” is just human imagination.

Yes indeed! And you know what they say about too much imagination - VERY dangerous. In light of this, I am making a special one-time offer to you to improve your safety by sending me specific arrangements of molecules you may have that take the form of gold or US "dollars". Act now before it expires!

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#218

Post by CryptoPunk »

tromp wrote: post #215
CryptoPunk wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, checkpoint is not a big deal. For history older than X, where X is a sufficiently distant time in the past, there will always be widespread consensus on the hash of the true chain, and numerous reputable parties that the hash of the true chain can be obtained from. Some poison node attack where fraudulent websites provide a hash of a fake history will not be viable. Checkpointing is also currently being…

Bitcoin Core never did checkpointing in the sense of skipping prior history. They merely required a particular block at a particular height. Not fully verifying history is a complete departure from how things are done in bitcoin full nodes. And Bitcoin Core removed even those checkpoints [1]. [1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75733/why-does-b...

Bitcoin Core removed that form of checkpointing, and added in another.

Currently it has checkpointing in the form of assumevalid, which by default causes a full node to skip validation of transaction older than the checkpoint when synchronizing. [1]

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/88652/does-assum...

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#219

Post by tromp »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #218
tromp wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin Core never did checkpointing in the sense of skipping prior history. They merely required a particular block at a particular height. Not fully verifying history is a complete departure from how things are done in bitcoin full nodes. And Bitcoin Core removed even those checkpoints [1]. [1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75733/why-does-b...

Bitcoin Core removed that form of checkpointing, and added in another. Currently it has checkpointing in the form of assumevalid, which by default causes a full node to skip validation of transaction older than the checkpoint when synchronizing. [1] [1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/88652/does-assum...

Well, that is depressing to learn. So by default, a bitcoin full node DOESN't fully validate transaction history. If it finds a particular block at a particular height (that a group of developers have signed off on), then all signature validations in prior blocks are assumed to be successful. The reasoning is that you have to trust those developers anyway not to sign off on malicious source code.

Re: Bitcoin Core Lead Maintainer Steps Back, Encourages Decentralization

#220

Post by moralsupply »

runeks wrote: post #75

I think the people who are critical of the wastefulness of Bitcoin fail to factor in the usefulness of a store of value. Whether you like it or not, human beings find a need to store value. In countries without a proper store of value -- due to e.g. government intervention -- they start hoarding commodities (e.g. wheat, cotton) or productive assets like cars. So the question becomes whether having something like Bitc…

Fiat currencies proof-of-work is taxation, inflation and interest rate control. That accounts for 1/2 of your productivity, just so that governments can have a monopoly on their currencies.

Not to say that managing fiat money is tremendously wasteful. Credit cards alone take 3% of every transaction on fees that barely make sense. Banks charge ridiculous taxes on pretty much everything they do, and don't even guarantee your money can be withdrawn.

Gold and silver on a per unit-of-value basis require more energy to mine than Bitcoin.

When you compound all of that, you'll realize that Bitcoin energy expenditures are overall not so much of a big deal.

But if they are a big deal for you, at least be consistent and go after gold and silver mining, to start with, and do fight against governments' monopolies on currencies, as those are a lot less "green" and more widespread than Bitcoin.

Additionally, you can come up with new blockchain technologies that don't require PoW, and/or support the existing ones that don't require PoW by parking your money on them. You can also short Bitcoin in a futures market in order to protest against it.

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