Quote from: phillipsjk on January 29, 2015, 03:28:07 AM

Make no mistake: the "Elite" can be effective when they want to be. Their leader, Mircea Popescu, claims to have invented paywalls now used by the New York Times and other newspapers. Currently, they are in the process of producing a small, cheap "set it and forget it" box that will act as a full node on the "MPcoin" network. They plan to distribute upwards of 10,000 of these. They will be difficult to upgrade to "Gavincoin", and not necessarily due to technical reasons: but also due to inertia. Because they are not designed for easy upgrade-ability, they will likely run modified Bitcoin 0.5.x until they die. They will studiously ignore blocks larger than 1MB.

Thanks. This is very enlightening and reveals the true motivations behind Mircea Popescu objections. He has made an investment in up to 10k nodes that would be obsolete if Gavin pushes through his hard fork. Why doesn't he honestly bring to the community these concerns as one of his principle motivations so we can try and find a solution together? The fact that he is not being forthright with this concern is troubling to say the least. Secondly, not designing something of this nature where it is easily upgradeable is foolish as well.

Any more information on this? The fact that he is secretly building 10k nodes on a network with 7k active nodes and dropping is a concern in itself and makes me want to support Gavin's hardfork even more so. I am all for increasing the node count but in a open and distributed fashion.

Quote from: phillipsjk on January 29, 2015, 03:28:07 AM

A competing "Gavincoin" box will need the OS and Bitcoind on separate media from the block-chain storage. The reason is cost: to store 5 years of full 20MB blocks will take about 5.3TB. 5 Years of full "MPcoin" blocks would take only about 262GB (+~30GB for the current chain). The "Gavincoin" solution in version 0.10.x is to start pruning old transactions. Reasonably safe if you go back at least a year (implying 1TB of storage), but is still strictly a reduction in security.

Edit: BTW, full 20MB blocks would have been a problem for my full node recently shut-down. 1MB blocks with 64 connections (+namecoin+P2Pool) were using about 100GB per month; out of a 300GB cap. I am not really aware of consumer-level Internet access that allows 2TB of transfers per month (even if the Head-line "burstable" rate can technically handle it (about 2Mbps down, 4Mbps up)).

This is a valid concern, but an exaggerated scenario. His proposal assumes a 50% increase in bandwidth per year http://blog.bitcoinfoundation.org/a-scalability-roadmap/ thus a cheap 5 dollar a month VPS should handle those bandwidth needs no problem for many years in the future. Most High speed consumer connections these days will handle that as well, and the slower (about 2Mbps down, 4Mbps up)) ones you refer to typically aren't being used as nodes regardless because ISP's block 8333 port by default and rarely do consumers request to open the port.

Quote from: tvbcof on January 29, 2015, 05:52:00 AM

It certainly calls to attention the feeling that the gavincoin fork is the proverbail 'camel's nose in the tent' and most of the adherents have no intention of stopping there. As I said, stopping there would be pointless.

The end-game is a vastly larger block size so it is not the slightest bit irrational to consider the choice as being between a lite-weight and defensible (and hopefully decentralized) system and one which is very far from this.

The end game doesn't stop there because we cannot foresee the future. Perhaps there is never any need for increasing the block size past 20MB, perhaps we use sidechains in the future, perhaps we keep increasing the block size because future mesh networks can sufficiently handle larger blocks in a decentralized manner, and perhaps a new innovative solution is created to solve the problem.

There isn't some secret conspiracy with an end goal of centralization and I doubt Gavin wants that either.

Quote from: davout on January 27, 2015, 02:19:46 PM

Ask anyone with a bit of money in the bank, that's fucking cheap to teleport gold.

This is an odd statement and one that betrays all common sense. Bitcoin tokens intrinsic value exists only with the utility of the network and we are attempting to make that network more valuable. Gold's intrinsic value partly is within the commodity itself and its properties.

If bitcoin costs 4 dollars to teleport "virtual gold" , I'm going to switch to an alt that can allow me to teleport another form of "virtual gold" for a couple pennies.