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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

#201

Post by etherael »

nullc wrote: post #106
cyphertruck wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 people to see that your sabotage is well supported, and good thing for the rest of the world you have a containment chain where your stupidity is restricted from bleeding over to the rest of them, and every single other chain appears to be completely mercifully free of your idiotic philosophy.

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

#202

Post by shilch »

nullc wrote: post #185
breavyn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You send a payment to the next hop in the route, then they send a payment to the following hop, and so on. It's not technically a payment at that point, since the payments is atomic end to end. But yes, you send a message your peer, which sends it to another peer, which sends it to another peer... like any other P2P network.

I don't think that "Peer-to-Peer" in the whitepaper's title ("Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System") refers to the network structure being p2p - and that's probably also not what most people mean when they talk about bitcoin being peer-to-peer. The very first sentence makes it pretty clear that peer-to-peer means person-to-person without any intermediary:

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1]

Furthermore, the previous title was "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" [2]. So reading "Peer-to-Peer" as "Person-to-Person" would mean that the title hasn't changed in meaning, it just became a bit more catchy.

Also, when analysing the incentives of participants in the bitcoin network, it turns out that network nodes do not actually form the ideal-typical p2p mesh network (where all nodes are equally distributed and connect to a few other nodes) but a more densely connected network where connectivity to mining nodes is strongly incentivised. This topic has been researched and discussed by Dr. Wright (See [3] for more information).

[1] https://bitco.in/bitcoin.pdf

[2] https://nakamotostudies.org/literature/ecash/

[3] https://nchain.com/en/blog/bitcoin-network-topology-small-wo...

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

#203

Post by etherael »

nullc wrote: post #124
teh_infallible wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin has decentralized non-custodial second layers. But if they didn't-- which would be sad-- your logic doesn't follow: Is the USD not cash because paypal exists and is widely used? Venmo is venmo. Venmo adoption Bitcoin as a currency on their platform would not turn Bitcoin into venmo. It would just create another option for using Bitcoin-- one with it's own positive and negative trade-offs. There is a balance.…

> Is the USD not cash because paypal exists and is widely used?

It would be very easy to argue that it would not be if the present mechanics of the cash system were restricted to a maximum global throughput of 3 transactions a second. But no other monetary system would actually pursue such an asinine goal on purpose except as a means of sabotage.

Which explains you.

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

#204

Post by pfraze »

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.

I'll vouch that EGreg isn't part of Holochain. I'm not either but it's one of the projects that I find most interesting in the distributed/decentralized computing space.

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

#205

Post by mpapec »

mdevere wrote: post #165
DrCraigWright wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh. I have technology. I have patents and more. You suffer from the misapprehension that your opinion matters. I'm sorry it doesn't. HN does little for the real-world contrary to what many in Silicon Valley culture seem to think. A large reason for the creation of bitcoin stems from the promise of micropayments. Therefore Google and Facebook collapsed into the shit show that they are, they couldn't solve it. Your bel…

How can you be the real Satoshi when _I_ am the real Satoshi? This guy is a fraud, don't listen to him!

Please show working implementation of SPV for starters.

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

#206

Post by statoshi »

mikekchar wrote: post #183
ac29 wrote: 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.

I can answer part of that question. You can't make it much more frequent because the amount of time for the difficulty has to be balanced against propagation time for blocks or else you will have lots of forks. Probably you can make it work, but there are a fair number of assumptions in the Bitcoin protocol about this and it would probably be better to start a new coin if you want to do that. The 10 minute update was…

Indeed; the market has clearly chosen to prefer optimizing for low cost of full system validation (running a full node) over lost cost of transacting (cheap block space.)

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

#207

Post by etherael »

nullc wrote: post #139
BigBubbler wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "bcash" term is used to attack BCH. It makes many of the attackers (that are everywhere on social media) pretty easy to recognize. Dishonesty and personal attacks are their "bread and butter". They attack BCH because it is the only Bitcoin still working to allow massive scaling. Dark forces captured BTC to stop it from becoming a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. BCH is keeping that dream…

"Dark forces" like people commenting here with anonymous brand new created accounts, slandering people who were tirelessly supporting Bitcoin long before they ever heard of it? Come on.

> supporting

Come on indeed.

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

#208

Post by statoshi »

DrCraigWright wrote: post #159
sunshinerag wrote: post #78

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-...

Funny.... you seem to be exaggerating by a factor of 100,000x... And, that is before all the issues. Oh well... When Lightning comes to an end later this year, you will have a new boondoggle thing I guess?

Ha! Another empty prediction that we'll happily call you out on once it expires. Remember when you predicted that Bitcoin would completely cease to exist by the end of 2019? https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1211707215620530176

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

#209

Post by bufferoverflow »

sunshinerag wrote: post #78
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-...

Lightning doesn't address that, it's been broken for years and it's permanently "18 months till it's ready".

Plus the design itself is flawed. You have to be online to receive money. No cold storage. Routing at scale isn't solved.

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

#210

Post by etherael »

egdod wrote: post #68
dmitrygr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocks continue to be mined. It is just that the reward for doing so becomes zero

This is wrong and doesn’t even make sense. If there were no reward, blocks would not keep getting mined.

It's kinda wrong in the sense that the fees still exist, but it's right in the sense that the "block reward" is terminology used to refer to the fraction of miner revenue in each block which increases the total supply. That part does indeed stop after 21m according to the current codebase.
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