__blockcipher__

> Elastic are alleging that Amazon abused the Elasticsearch trademark and stole code from the proprietary (not open-source) part of their product.

Sure, but that allegation has absolutely nothing to do with Elastic breaking its earlier promise to the community and making Elasticsearch/Kibana no longer open source. Indeed, the license change will have no effect on Amazon except to make Amazon's fork more successful because it's now been made necessary.

No, you've got things reversed - as do most in this thread.

Elastic's original announcement was disingenuous, they titled their blog post "Doubling Down on Open" when they were making Elasticsearch and Kibana no longer open source. Furthermore, Elastic promised in the past that ALL FUTURE VERSIONS of the open core of Elasticsearch would remind Apache 2.0. They broke that promise when they switched to proprietary licenses only with 7.1.1.

BTW, while the reasoning from Elastic is that they did it because of Amazon, the actual effect is just to make organizations like the one I work for (a non-profit that refuses to run proprietary software in prod) have to use one of these Apache 2.0 forks, while not stopping Amazon from operating their Elasticsearch service at all (since Amazon is always free to operate an Apache 2.0 service and indeed that's the whole damn point of the license)

There is nothing wrong with what Amazon is doing ethically. They're creating value for their customers, and releasing open source software while doing so. Indeed it's Elastic who tried to get all the positives of open source with none of the negatives (as evidenced by them making Elasticsearch/Kibana no longer open source)

BTW, not that it's super relevant but the narrative that Amazon is driving Elastic bankrupt is farcical. Elastic pulls in $500MM in revenue and is valued at $15B+. Elastic's doing fine.

Note: One thing Amazon did do that was unethical was claim that they had "collaborated with Elastic" when they announced AWS Elasticsearch long ago. That is indefensible. But there is nothing wrong with them forking.

Better quality is a better answer. AWS charges a big premium for Elasticsearch and I don't think they'd drop their prices to try to squeeze Elastic - for one, it would be unlikely to even work - but even so it's always best to differentiate on being the better quality/"value" than the lowest cost.

Having used AWS Elasticsearch, it has a lot of deep problems with it in its current state so Elastic can compete on value just fine.

In other news, I think the Elastic licensing change beyond being ethically a dick move (legally it's their right), is just horrible business strategy. I said on this site several days ago that Amazon was just going to make an Apache 2.0 fork and keep chugging along, and that's exactly what we're seeing.

Haha this whole exchange is such a good metaphor for classic academic gatekeeping. Satoshi gave birth to an idea that spawned an entire new type of financial system, with revolutionary implications for the world, and the GP is spending his time arguing that it didn't go through peer review and wasn't published by a real journal and therefore it's not real science :P

Yeah, not sure where they got that.

The problem with the LN is that it's like a gift card (I said credit cards before but gift cards is a better analogy). I need to send $X on-chain to establish my "store credit" so that we can transact off-chain for future transactions, before eventually resolving on-chain at some point in the future.

Imagine network address translation but stupider by orders of magnitude :P

Please specify what you mean by "the nodes". As I've discussed in other comments, the whole "full node" concept is basically made up and absurd; the security and therefore decentralization of the network is provided by miners. The network is only truly "centralized" if a faction gains a sufficiently large portion of the hashpower to perform a 51% attack.

If you can't see why Bitcoin is a threat to the status quo such that it could theoretically justify "Deep State Operatives" trying to either outright stop it by murdering the founder or compromise and neuter it by taking over the project, I don't know what to tell you.

I'm not saying anything about how likely it is or isn't, just that it's a theoretical possibility that someone in Satoshi's position would be considering.

And I find your dismissive references to absurdities like Q-Anon to be wholly inappropriate and a cheap shot.

> It's interesting, so he didn't see the limits of the system. Scaling tx/s is easy, scaling it without increasing block verification time and cost is what's impossible.

Nonsense, he absolutely thought about scaling and in his head it was quite simple...because it was. You just need blocks big enough to allow the transaction throughput the world requires, but they need to be a finite size. That's all.

Not sure what you mean about "block verification time" having a scaling problem. It really doesn't.

Could you please point to me where Satoshi discussed using "layer 2 architectures" to handle the scaling problem? To my knowledge he always talked about scaling from the perspective of every transaction being published to the blockchain, because that's how the whole system works.

Everyone having a copy of the whole blockchain is not needed. What you need is sufficiently distributed hashpower that no actor can perform a 51% attack. That's all.

Small-time users can use thin wallets; mega-power users can download the whole blockchain and spend whatever (in perspective, not super significant) amount of money they need for sufficient storage. Users in between can carry a reduced form of the blockchain that doesn't care so much about a full transaction log but accurately describes the state of every wallet's balance (thereby functioning the same from a "verify that they're not bullshitting me" perspective).

Misleading. He's talking about Bitcoin being an (ultimately) deflationary currency. Not any "it's a store of value but not peer to peer electronic cash" fallacious arguments.

> Bitcoin only really got any attention because of Silkroad

You just refuted your own argument. Bitcoin got attention because of its utility as a currency, in this case for illicit drug purchases. Now as soon as I have to pay an $80 fee, it ceases to be useful as a currency (except ironically for illegal drugs, if you had no other option - which is not the case btw because you can just use monero or bitcoin cash - some users would still pay a 50% fee to get their illegal drugs)

> but they have nowhere near the amount of currency transactions to legitimately call it a currency

What the hell is your definition of currency? A currency is whatever people use as a currency, and by that definition BCH or what have you is absolutely a currency. And fortunately you can send a transaction on-chain for 1 satoshi per byte, instead of having to use a stupid side chain / lightning network pseudo-solution

> instead one side got upset and created a hard fork at the next opportunity. Then attempted to call themselves Bitcoin, knowing full well they didn't have the hash rate and subsequent proof of work.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works. Within a protocol, the "real" chain is the longest chain. But when a hard fork occurs it splits into two different universes, where BCH people don't recognize BTC as valid and vice versa.

Frankly the software ignorance of so many shows when they discuss this topic of forking. It's worth nothing that the "soft fork" vs "hard fork" distinction, while somewhat real, is part of the whole Bitcoin Core propaganda belief system; they believe that there must be some arbitrary "legitimacy" to a hard fork (where legitimacy is defined as who can shout the loudest after having conveniently censored all the sane people out of the room).

And more importantly, what utility does that have for the network?

The whole idea in their heads is that nodes will "validate" transactions. Which doesn't make any sense because it's the person engaging in a transaction (on either end) that cares about the state of the blockchain, not some random neutral third party. Your full node can detect an invalid transaction all day but without a way to tell the guy who's about to treat that invalid transaction as valid, the utility isn't there.

No, the real threat to the Bitcoin network is and has always been that a hostile actor would get 51% hashpower (or almost 50% but not quite and roll the dice until they won a few blocks in a row) and issue double-spend attacks.

Not quite. Their argument is based around running "full nodes", which is made-up term for a non-mining node that stores a full copy of the blockchain. (There's nothing wrong with having the whole chain, but the fallacy here is that "full nodes" don't protect the network, it is miners that secure the network and it is miners who decide what transactions to uptake)

It's all moot though, because introducing sidechains and the lightning network destroys the value of Bitcoin in a perverted attempt to save it from a non-existent problem.

> Keeping it spread out across millions of individual home computers, laptops, and mobile devices is the strongest, and perhaps only defense of that.

No, because Bitcoin was built to be resilient to Sybil attacks, that's why it's proof-of-work and not proof-of-stake. So it doesn't matter if a million people in Africa have the whole blockchain on their raspberry pis or laptop or whatever, because all I need is one ASIC mega-farm in Antarctica and I can double spend attack the network into oblivion.

It's hashpower that protects and secures the network, nothing else. This is one point that the fraud CSW actually got right.

By "small payments" do you mean less than $1000?

A payment system's fees need to be 1-2% at most to match credit cards. I remember fees going as high as $80 for a transaction back in the day, so that means you could only reasonably use bitcoin for a minimum of $1000-$10,0000 when fees were the worst. But in reality, Bitcoin can be .000001% (I put a random number of zeroes don't take it literally).

Additionally you're trying to "protect the blockchain" by having people never able to use it. Surely you see the absurdity.

If Bitcoin ever hit Visa scale, there'd be no problem with only well-capitalized miners maintaining a full chain. It's really not an issue, but frankly you should cross that bridge when we get to it anyway. In actuality Bitcoin was hard limited at 3-7 transactions/sec for no reason whatsoever.

Anyone who has the keys is Satoshi, for all intents and purposes. The problem is no-one has the keys (at least publicly).

Satoshi has never revealed themselves. That's because they're either smart enough not to, or they're dead.

Satoshi, Hal Finney, etc were very aware that it at least theoretically could become the world's primary transaction system. Indeed it was that insight that motivated Satoshi to make Bitcoin in the first place.

I see. Very interesting! I wasn't involved that early so wasn't aware :)

Anyway, my general point stands, just s/remember a seed/store an encrypted file

Personally I think Satoshi is either dead or never going to move his bitcoin.

And yet you can explain Adam Back/Bitcoin Core/Blockstream's actions much more simply as them being insidious actors that wanted to take over the Bitcoin project in order to promulgate propaganda supporting ridiculously high transaction fees so that they could establish a for-profit company to extract the delta between how high the fees are and how low they need to be for bitcoin to actually be usable.

Sending a message from Satoshi's e-mail is very obviously not proof of identity. Satoshi needs to move coins or sign a message. That's the only acceptable proof.

You claim Adam Back is compromised because the things he writes and does are so contrary to Satoshi and what he believed in that it's the only explanation that would make a universe where Back is Satoshi make sense. I much prefer to believe (with better evidence, btw) that Back is just not Satoshi. Boom, no logical contradictions to resolve.

Please specify what you mean by "decentralization". If you want I can explain the classic (fallacious) bitcoin core argument here, which is in essence: some poor person in the 3rd world needs to be able to fit the whole blockchain on their raspberry pi.

EDIT: Meeting ended early, so I'll just take this on now. First things first:

> Sure, doubling the block size a few times would likely be fine, so Bitcoin may be overly conservative right now, but I firmly believe any long term solution will require some form of “layer 2” for payments.

So, just to point out the absurdity here explicitly, you are worried that Bitcoin's "decentralization" will be harmed by block size increases eventually, to which your solution is to force a layer 2 payment solution which essentially will force transactions to route through centralized middlemen, rather than the transaction publishing to the blockchain, which is literally the thing that gives bitcoin its value. You don't see something weird about that reasoning?

Additionally, the "you can do a few doublings but eventually you run out of space" is a misunderstanding of how exponential growth works. The capacity to store data has increased exponentially over time, there's no reason to think it won't continue down that path. (I'd really like to avoid going down the "moore's law will end" rabbithole if we can)

Oh, and for good measure this goes into the Bitcoin Core dogma that what keeps the Bitcoin network secure/decentralized is the number of "full nodes" (nodes that have a full copy of the blockchain but do NOT mine), whereas the real security of the network comes from the miners, and it is the capitalist market mechanism of competition for hashpower that gives Bitcoin its resilience to double-spends.

Finally, the whole justification for the hurt "decentralization" is as I said above: the argument that everyone needs to be able to have their own copy of the blockchain. Firstly this ignores that most users use thin wallets and have no need of the whole blockchain; this does insert some trust at a point in the chain but it is a tradeoff most users are more than happy to make for their use-cases. That being said, like I said above, there's no reason to think that one can't keep a whole copy of the blockchain. Indeed the Bitcoin Core argument is just that it's prohibitively expensive, not even that it's impossible, although they define prohibitively expensive from the arbitrary threshold of a random 3rd world person living in poverty.

It's doubly ironic because the literal result of refusing to increase the blocksize - which, not that it matters but Satoshi was never against a blocksize increase; indeed he assumed it would happen - is skyrocketing transaction fees, so that same third world person Bitcoin Core pretends to be so concerned about now has to pay $80 to buy their $1 worth of rice. Oops.

Now the argument comes in: "no they don't need to pay $80, because they'll use the lightning network and thus never need to push to the blockchain!" Which I already addressed above but just to recap, now you've introduced a system of centralized middlemen, AND the very design of the lightning network means that (a) you have to make at least one transaction to seed your "store credit" (and even a single $80 transaction is unaffordable for our hypothetical third world person), and (b) they are required to pay in advance which again puts unrealistic financial stress on them. (For those who aren't familiar with the lightning network, the idea is basically that rather than making bitcoin transactions like normal, I send $20 to a middleman who now gives me $20 of credit and now I can "send" money via an elaborate form of IOUs that never end up on the blockchain, until some point in the future where you resolve onto the chain. It's an optimization strategy that destroys all of the utility of Bitcoin in a misguided attempt to "preserve its decentralization".) If I'm failing to be articulate here it's because the whole concept is so mindblowingly absurd that I don't even know how to properly explain how ridiculous the whole thing is, and is a large part of why I assume that anyone who advocates for it has just literally never used Bitcoin except to speculate

This issue resolves itself. Miners will refuse to uptake transactions into blocks that pay insufficient fees. There's no need to arbitrarily force $80+ transaction fees.

As a review for anyone reading, miners are compensated via the block reward - a direct grant of Bitcoin to the miner - as well as transaction fees for any transactions they decide to include in their block. (The person who mines the block gets to unilaterally decide which transactions go in the block; functionally this means they just sort in descending order of $/kb and include as many as they can)

Exactly this. To me it was proof that 99% of the Bitcoin community (such as the Bitcoin subreddit which had an absurd amount of influence, thus why taking it over and censoring discussion was so effective) didn't care about Bitcoin as a currency and had never once used it as a currency. They just bought it on Coinbase and never even transferred to their own wallet.

Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design.

They're not mutually exclusive, and that's always been the point made by those like me who supported a blocksize increase and were on the BCH side of things.

Those on the Bitcoin Core side of things believe that they are mutually exclusive, and that you can either be a gold-like store of value (that is to say, absolutely fucking useless) or a peer-to-peer electronic cash, but not both.

To me it's so obvious that the value of something as a currency is what makes it equally a good store of value.

From my experience in the community years ago, Bitcoin Core was a very insidious group of people that seized control of Bitcoin from within, obtained control of the Bitcoin subreddit and started banning anyone with even the most reasonable objections. They started promulgating this absurd notion that Bitcoin was a "store of value" exclusively: that is to say, was not intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash" (as Satoshi obviously intended) and that its value was purely related to "how much the other guy was willing to pay for your Bitcoin". So they turned it into this purely speculative thing.

The whole fallacy of the "store of value" thing is two-fold:

(1) Bitcoin's success and utility as a currency gives it a stable point to base its value around. For example, the value would be related to the net amount of transactions occurring (on the darknet usually) and the velocity of money, which would create a sort of natural equilibrium price where people are buying bitcoin as they need it, rather than hodling it to speculate.

(2) Bitcoin, like any asset, is a store of value, but its ability to store value is the same whether it's worth $.0001 per coin or $40,000 per coin.

So they basically turned it into a purely speculative instrument.

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The takeover of Bitcoin from within was a big red-pill moment for me. It was an attack vector I should have seen coming but didn't. I strongly belief that any cryptocurrency community where 99% of users are speculators who view the thing as a stock ticker and nothing more, basically dooms a cryptocurrency to failure.

Anyway, Bitcoin Core as a whole and Blockstream as a company are very malicious actors who destroyed the beauty and elegance of Bitcoin so that they could build a company around exploiting the delta between what the tx fees should be and what they were. And beyond the unjustifiable censorship / suppression, they advanced tons of bogus arguments such as the notion that increasing the block size would ruin the decentralization of the bitcoin network.

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Oh, and lastly there will be a great need for public blockchain cryptos like Bitcoin: for example, if I donate to a non-profit I'd want all their transactions to be publicly viewable. But for normal usage-as-a-currency, I am a huge believer in XMR (monero), which masks who you're sending money to, how much money you sent, and how much money you have. It also has a lot of neat tech like adaptive block size limits, etc that avoided the transaction fee debacle of BTC.

It's not a hollywood interpretation at all, Satoshi created something that was an existential threat (at least long-term, in terms of the doors it opened) to fiat currencies / fractional reserve banking more broadly. It's not farfetched to see that certain government organizations would want to disrupt that, or at a minimum gain control over the founder to be able to direct things how they please.

Regardless, intelligence community subpoint aside, I think the fact that third-party criminals would want to kidnap him and force the transfer of his bitcoin mega-fortune is very plausible, even if you don't see governments as a possible threat vector.

I do agree in general that maintaining pseudonomynity helped keep the focus on the project and not the person(s). But I think it's undeniable that being publicly known as a figure with billions of dollars of value stored in their brain puts a target on one's head. And it puts a target in a way that being a normal fiat billionaire does not, because you can't just wire a billion dollars to another country without having the transfer stopped, whereas with bitcoin once they force him to transfer Bitcoin (if he caved to torture etc) it's irreversible.

You think a guy smart enough to give birth to Bitcoin, and maintain complete anonymity while doing so and while communicating in public forums etc, would forget his private key?

You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't think that's a realistic possibility.

This is so bizarre.

For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof as such, and uses his supposed identity as Satoshi to justify having a bunch of sketchily-acquired Bitcoin (I forget the full details here, it's been years).

Even someone without much prior knowledge should be able to trivially deduce that this guy is a fraud:

- The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back.

- If Satoshi ever did want to reveal themselves, they would do it in a cryptographically undeniable way (moving coins from their wallet or signing a message with a known keypair of theirs). Also, given they dedicated at least a huge chunk of their life to giving birth to Bitcoin, which unified a bunch of cryptographic primitives and Austrian-economics type theories into a system that found the right balance of technology and economic incentives to be viable, they wouldn't be issuing frivolous lawsuits and trying to get their (anonymously distributed, freely released) whitepaper pulled from websites.

- The fact that Bitcoin Core would even consider taking the whitepaper down is lunacy.

Note: There's a (mostly) unrelated whole dramatic history of the great Bitcoin fork, where Bitcoin split into BTC and BCH. Supporters of BTC believe it's the one true bitcoin, and likewise for BCH. Personally, since I actually have used bitcoin as a currency, I'm team BCH because BCH is the fork that increased the blocksize limit, which was arbitrarily limiting the global transaction rate to a level so small that it led to fees in the $20-80 range at its worst (and the way BTC works is the fees are related to the bytes in the blockchain, not the amount of bitcoin itself transferred, so you'd pay an $80 fee on a $5 tx just as much as a $500 one). That transaction fee insanity was also necessary for Blockstream (a private company supporting the BTC side of the fork) to be able to profit off the delta between an idealized $0 tx fee and the actual $80+ fees, by creating systems like the lightning network which basically reinvents the whole credit card system in Bitcoin and moves transactions off chain, which as far as I'm concerned misses the point and destroys the value completely. I'm only mentioning all this because at least at one point, CSW threw his support behind BCH, which was unfortunate because now you have an actual fraud backing the coin which was actually the better coin, but made it appear like a total joke.

Lastly, it's worth mentioning that even though this guy is a charlatan and fraud, he has some ideas that aren't bunk. He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). I believe that paper was this one for the curious: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312

You’re drawing a false dichotomy here.

> but they seem to be using their size and market share to snowball competitive advantage in a way that doesn’t necessarily add value for humanity

How can you argue with a straight face that there is no value to humanity? If I have a project and need application logging at scale and I pay AWS for managed elasticsearch, obviously that’s providing me value - that’s why I’m paying for it.

For lack of a better word you seem to have this marxist/communist mentality where you view voluntary free market transactions as somehow not being an example of mutual benefit (the underlying principle of free trade). Isn’t it self-evident that when I buy an iphone or buy food at the grocery store, that I am gaining value?

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BTW, you seem to also ironically confuse the concept of monopoly with the concept of free market competition. Being a good competitor, like AWS Elasticsearch, is not a monopoly. Indeed it is Elastic who is trying to change their license in order to monopolize this market.