Quote from: xcsler on January 27, 2015, 06:06:56 PM

Quote from: VectorChief on January 27, 2015, 05:58:17 PM

Quote from: xcsler on January 27, 2015, 05:48:01 PM

Quote from: NxtChg on January 27, 2015, 05:32:52 PM

Can we trade a little security for wider adoption? Would wider adoption make it more valuable? Nobody knows.

How much will the value of bitcoin drop when people realize it can never scale? Nobody knows.

You aren't sacrificing wider adoption of Bitcoin. You are sacrificing wider on chain adoption of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin can scale perfectly well with off chain transactions. History has shown us this when the "off-chain US dollar" was backed by "on-chain gold."

Your trading a little bit of Bitcoin security for adoption is akin to making the gold more easy to counterfeit.

You are suggesting to use divide-and-conquer tactic and back it with historical facts demonstrating that it worked perfectly well for the conquerors. I suggest we keep united and seek for solutions together. Bitcoin is here to stir the pot and wake people up. Ding!

It worked for the conquerors because they stole all of the "on-chain bitcoins". FDR made it illegal for citizens to own gold in 1933 with Executive Order 6102. This can't be done with today's bitcoins because of the transparent distributed digital ledger. Your proposals weaken security and makes bitcoin confiscation more likely.

First of all, the power players of today are not as united as we think they are. It means that for as long as we, the people, are not divided (into sub-chains), confiscation of Bitcoin's mining power locally would not result in a complete shutdown of the network. It would need to be a concerted effort and apparently not all the major participants in the geo-politics arena are interested in this.

Secondly, the power players of today might see Bitcoin as a solution to the problems of the world, which are otherwise hard to reach consensus on. The nature of PoW is such, that power players will be engaging at some point one way or another. I mean, you won't run away with your mining farm too far. The idea is then to let them embrace the rules of the game, and make the game more transparent than it used to be.