ftlio

> bitcoin is quite intentionally designed to encourage ever-higher energy consumption to "secure the blockchain"

It's designed to have have an average of 10 minute blocks using the feedback of cumulative proof of work over a given amount of blocks compared to a difficulty parameter.

The only reason it uses more energy is because people believe there is money to be made in mining. They will be wrong sometimes, and right sometimes, and equilibrium will be reached intermittently. This is called a market.

The mempool is whatever you want it to be. You set the fee by which a transaction rides past your node.

And yes, multiple attacks have been attempted by the miner side on full nodes. The most recent being Segwit2X, which didn't get off the ground because convincing 100k nodes that their version of Bitcoin was different wasn't going to work.

The white paper doesn't discuss wealth distribution at all. Bitcoin is a critique of money involving trust in entities not party to a transaction, and not much else. Where this leads us as far as far as wealth distribution goes is potentially interesting, but was never evangelized by the white paper or the community that built it.

The idea that money should be distributed more broadly than 1000 people controlling 40% of it sounds really nice, but it is missing the level of formalism that Bitcoin brings to the question of money.

> What is the success metric for these playlist companies?

I wonder this about the entire branding industry.

You can create a scarce token with all the qualities you desire in like 5 minutes. Creating 'internet money' with a stable value and network of potential transactees probably looks exactly like Bitcoin's development though.

Bitcoin has the best security model. In 10 years does a single massive ledger make more sense than transactions at the edges? The value proposition of Bitcoin has always been transaction scalability by elimination of charge backs. With a fundamentally irreversible ledger as a base layer, networks and services will develop around it that provide whatever combination of speed, fees, and liquidity you're looking for.

You consider Ethereum to be decentralized? I don't see its governance structure being any different than neoliberal central banking. Hence Ethereum Classic.

> it is far from too late.

Even if it's too late for the game, which does seem unlikely for at least some kind of ROI, it doesn't seem too late for the author in any capacity. People go way further past the brink than the author has yet to and recovered just fine. Staring down the barrel of insolvency is like a right of passage for creative work. Some people are luckier than others for not even thinking of it that way ('stupid') or just crazy ('high risk tolerance'). Hell, plenty of people go multiple rounds. Don't let the fear stop you from making moves.

> This is totally absurd. Bitcoin has no impact on the existence of aircraft carriers, diplomats, and social/class mobility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma

Can you show me where I said the aircraft carriers need to be gotten rid of? Can you show me where I even mentioned income inequality, let alone said it should be gotten rid of?

Your glib reply of 'lol, banks already do this, why do we need to put it on the blockchain' just assumed that banks exist without external costs. And now I'm supposed to get rid of all the external costs you don't know exist? Get an imagination, or beat up on a different straw man.

Bitcoin doesn't solve systemic problems with the existing global financial order in a single step, so it must be worthless!

Trust = money.

Do you think banks exist for free? What are the costs of maintaining a system of banks capable of acting as a trusted custodian in such a transaction, covering every jurisdiction the globe over? Have you amortized the cost of aircraft carriers, diplomats, social and class mobility, the set of externalities that ultimately end up reconciled through war and collapse?

We're trying to build a more stable system here. Cryptocurrencies are way cheaper in the long run. Some people have learned this the easy way, most will learn it the hard way.

The irony of course being that the US has even bombed USD cash reserves of ISIS. The USD network funds plenty of unscrupulous acts. It's a shame that people won't be able to see that equivalency though. When regulators come after Bitcoin, it will be from a conflict of interest, not a moral high ground.

The jury is still out on whether the things made possible by the data your phone provides to Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft (lol), Verizon, the NSA, etc. doesn't provide for a net negative in the end as well.

I'm doing OK YOY compared against Google, but I'm young and educated. Most people probably aren't.

My understanding was that between debt purchasing and exchange controls, China can keep the yuan cheap and demand for their exports high. I say 'was' because it's been a while since I tried to grok China's economy.

If you're a Libertarian and you believe spurring on global trade strengthens the right to property and disrupts governments from legislating moral imperatives, then you might be a globalist. Being neutral to OK with globalism is not the same thing as being a globalist.

Target: Don't subjugate people to work agriculture.

You know about slavery of the past and the labor practices of big agriculture today yeah?

The overhead of renting 10 houses, and the interest on 10 mortgages, is just zero or what?

> There's no reason to think "as many as possible" is needed. Realistically if there's even 1000 independent entities (nodes) is that not enough? What's a realistic attack that is blocked by having another 1000 people run a node in their home?

The same kinds of attacks that have been being orchestrated against Bitcoin for the past few years - political attacks. I run a node as a means to help foster a solution to the Triffin Paradox as much as I do to transact securely and to avoid the various attacks possible against me individually should I not run a node (like replay attacks should I trade BCC). My node is my means to enforcing monetary policy that doesn't destroy my Bitcoins, allow others to create more, etc.

> On top of that, with small blocks and 3rd party payment channels, there's very little reason for people who aren't big financial institutions to even care. Gavin Andresen put it well: "Hurray, we just reinvented the SWIFT or ACH systems."

This can be said of any solution that attempts to raise the block size as well. How different is a Bitcoin that only has a few hundred or thousand nodes due to resource requirements being prohibitive to others different than ACH and SWIFT either? Worse off, if I can't audit the blockchain because it's too big, then I have to depend on people. At least with lightning, I can audit the source of money.

> And if core hadn't been so pigheaded about even going to 2 or 4MB, we'd have solid evidence of the impact in block size.

Why get political? Can you really argue that Core is being pigheaded? Core's development has made a lot of sense to me considering that Bitcoin has been under attack for a long time now. What would you do if:

1. One of the primary developers went outside of the until-then productive channels of protocol development? [2]

2. To attempt to orchestrate a block size increase

3. At the same time multiple attacks meant to flood the blockchain with superflous transactions are started and continue [3][4][5]

4. While social media bots were employed in r/bitcoin that categorically downvoted all content not related to increasing the block size [6]

5. And, a massive bug fix that enables other means of scaling is propagandized against to the end of using it as collateral to raise the block size [7]

6. While the same people who have been attempting to raise the block size get behind a person claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, whom can't provide any credible proof and rather provides as convoluted as possible proof [8]

7. Who ultimately ends up on the team of the Bitcoin clone in question after appearing at a "Future of Bitcoin" conference coincidentally missing anybody related to Bitcoin's development of the past 8 years, yelling about things that no reasonable engineer can actually interpret as meaningful science or engineering. [9]

And at the end of the day, all these people call you pigheaded for continuing to develop software in such a way that I can maintain sovereignty over my bitcoins without having to ask anyone for permission. It's simply amazing to me that Core are successfully being painted as villains in this space. People are attempting to divest Bitcoin users from access to the blockchain. People are attempting to divest Bitcoin users of their ability to enforce a monetary policy realized by a token that those users provided the liquidity to make worth attacking. Core have been the only thing in the way.

And why should they get out of the way? The only argument people have is "because it will be fine and because Bitcoin needs to grow." That's not science and engineering. The internet is maintained by a few thousand entities, and can you say that it's decentralized enough? Once a year we have to black out websites so Congress doesn't destroy it. Once a week I read something about "if only we had better security at layer 2 or 3". And now we're going to make the same mistakes with the internet of money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma

[2] https://www.coindesk.com/where-is-gavin-andresen-the-quiet-e...

[3] http://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/innovation/coi...

[4] https://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitcoin-spam-attack-stressed-n...

[5] http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/03/20/appears-another-spam-attac...

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4biob5/research_in...

[7] https://medium.com/@zhangsanbtc/why-we-must-oppose-cores-seg...

[8] https://www.economist.com/news/briefings/21698061-craig-stev...

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1_gxvx_QGo

BCC = Block space isn't a big deal BTC = Block space is a big deal

The number of auditors is inversely proportional to the size of blocks.

If you don't think automated auditing of the mint by as many disparate entities as possible is a prerequisite of sound money, then you probably think BCC makes the right decisions. If you do, then BTC makes the right decisions.

"Argument from authority" i.e. you dismiss arguments by people worth listening to as 'weak' because you don't like that they are relevant, authorities on a subject and you are not.

Proof by assertion i.e. leaving off the second half of a sentence and leaving only the assertion.

ie 'u dumb' i.e. I have picked up on that you are calling me dumb and can only reply by misusing Debate 101 nomenclature.

> Calling it 'weak' is giving it too much consideration

You can only say this if you're too ignorant to be worth a damn on the subject, or are insane enough to think that the people who have developed the protocol for the last 8 years are all misguided. If you launch into some conspiracy about Blockstream, Inc., then we'll know it's a combination of both.

> Remember that decentralization in bitcoin concerns miners, and miners only

And exchanges, merchants, consumers. If you have a stake in the ledger by owning or accepting BTC, then you have a stake in the monetary policy of BTC. If you have a stake in the monetary policy of BTC, then you can only hope to enforce it (or attempt to change it) by running a node.

That's before the mathematics of bigger blocks, where the decentralization of miners is threatened even by a 2 MB block size, as those with more hash rate get another bonus due to the latency increases of even a 1 MB block size increase.

If all that mattered in Bitcoin was the decentralization of miners, this game would have been over a long time ago. Anybody who thinks that even a landscape of thousands of miners, pooled by very few pools, is decentralized enough on its own, without others validating and auditing the blockchain, is too capable of assumptions to be let near engineering.

Why does every currency that has ever existed get devalued into dogshit by its policymakers? Every currency dies because those close to the mint can afford devaluation more than those further from it.

None have shown it to be a weak argument. None. If you could post your links so that HN can see the kind of pseudo-science the Bitcoin community has had to put up with, it would be much appreciated.

If you don't hold your keys, you're subject to the decisions of those who do. Coinbase is a good enough steward of most people's bitcoins that it's a fine trade-off.

What I think a lot of people will initially miss in the critique of money provided by blockchains (read: Bitcoin) is the topology of the network as helpful in modeling cryptoeconomics (read: economics).

Any meaningful definition of a blockchain should prove useful in modeling the systems of money preceded by it. I honestly don't know why people think bitcoins and dollars need separate economics.

They've been in development for a couple years now.

They most definitely were. It should also be noted that most transactions already occur off-chain at exchanges.

And yet the people who maintained the protocol and scaled transaction throughput while it grew to tens of billions of dollars in value largely dispute it. If SegWit could activate without a hostile takeover, it would be much easier to demonstrate why there are no scaling issues.

A lot of ignorant people want to throw the baby out with the bath water though, so ultimately we're probably going to have two chains, one that does it the way the talent in the community says it should be done, and another that shifts responsibility around to a few scaled entities. My money is not on the latter.

That "Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems" is the topic of debate.

SegWit was not created toward the end of increasing the blocksize, it was created to fix transaction malleability along with various other improvements. That it arranges the partitioning of witness data from transaction data to sort-of not count against the block size was a bonus, especially since a lot of dubious attempts at forking to a larger block size we're being given decent backing in terms of funds.

The point of fixing transaction malleability is that it allows for more robust smart contracts that depend on transaction validity. Once you enable these smart contracts, you start scratching at the surface of scaling methods that shift risk to the willing participants. As every Bitcoin transaction must be validated by every Bitcoin node, the entire network must inherit the risk of attempting to satisfy demand for transactions. Not just in terms of hardware requirements, but also in terms of the viability of paying for security of the network against a diminishing block creation subsidy.

The maintainers of Core, and plenty of other people in the Bitcoin community, see the scarcity of block space as a positive and as an inevitability. It's a positive in that it provides the incentive for security as the subsidy gets reduced, and inevitable as any 'spare' space in blocks can incentive superfluous transactions. There's plenty of development on the front of moving bitcoins between other chains with different consensus rules that would allow for better scaling, and for better development and testing of solutions that could eventually make their way to the main blockchain.

I'm personally of the opinion that once you allow for the transfer of bitcoins to and from second order chains, that Bitcoin can essentially enter a version freeze.

It's as good a text editor as it is a terrible operating system

(to flip an old one on it's head).