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.
The "
10k nodes" was suggested by nubbins`, not MP. Some of us in -assets are
testing the unit out, but no substantial quantities have been purchased. Regardless, the purpose of this device is partly to combat the hard fork. The fact that they are incompatible with gavincoin is by design; they are meant to be as cheap and easy to set up as possible. This ties back into my past comments about people who actually care about bitcoin; the people who actually care are researching ways to make the average american retard capable of running a full node out of his home internet connection. Meanwhile, derps like Gavin are actively trying to hinder this cause.
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.
You guys do a lot of assuming. And who are you to say things like "a valid concern?" Seriously who are you? I've
never heard of you, and yet apparently you're some sort of bitcoin expert. The imaginary poor people that "would use bitcoin except the fee is too high" are certainly not going to run a current full node, let alone a gavinnode monstrosity. And if they aren't going to run a full node, then they might as well not be using bitcoin; they might as well do it "off chain." If you're using a "wallet" that isn't a full node, then you are a poser. You are doing things "off chain." As for the blocked port, bitcoind runs fine without it.