Quote from: inBitweTrust on February 02, 2015, 02:01:27 AM

Quote from: hdbuck on February 02, 2015, 12:35:40 AM

Quote from: stan.distortion on February 02, 2015, 12:21:37 AM

This thread makes the centralisation issue clearer:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=144895.0

lol this is from feb 2013.. ^^

I remember reading that very interesting thread, excellent read back in the day .

This is why I laugh at all the hero members making claims that Gavin is trying to rush this through and it is too quick when we have been discussing it for years.

Perhaps there may be a compromise(not really because we also want decentralization too) made and we implement some change in the hardfork which addresses privacy or centralization concerns at the same time?

Two years is not a long time. As far as I can tell, the issues are still exactly the same.

As mentioned up-thread, by current ISP is now offering new users less bandwidth than they did two years ago. One major reason is that they are rolling out "free" wireless access points that are obviously not garnering as many new users as they had hoped. (The cheapest Internet plan is $50/month, while the average cell phone plan in Canada is about $40/month)

I am thinking that staying with 1MB blocks would not be a horrible outcome. As it is, Bitcoin is not secure for the average user in part because privacy is very fragile.

Quote from: Andy Greenberg (Wired article)

If someone can identify a users bitcoin addressesin Ulbrichts case, by seizing the laptop he was actively using at the moment of his arrestthen they can often be used to trace his or her transactions.

Coinjoin helps, but I have my doubts that it will ever be used for the majority of transactions. The only Bitcoin wallet that I am aware of that tries to use coinjoin by default is the highly experimental Darkwallet (not to be confused with Darkcoin)

One of the "scamcoins" (general term for alts mainly designed to enrich the developer) actually came out with some strong privacy features in order to hide an 80% pre-mine. Seriously, the white-paper on https://cryptonote.org/ is worth the read.

As I mentioned in the other thread, Monero appears to be the generally-accepted community fork of this. Cryptonote-based currencies take advantage of something called "ring signatures" in order to allow you to automatically do coinjoin-like operations with an arbitrary number of addresses. Not only that, but transactions are automatically broken down into common units, so tracing by quantity is mostly pointless as well. Edit: "stealth address" appear to be implemented as well. And, most relevant to this discussion: the block-size automatically adjusts.

Quote from: Nicolas van Saberhagen

A good example of a hardcoded limit change leading to disastrous consequences is the block
size limit set to 250kb[1] . This limit was sufficient to hold about 10000 standard transactions. In
early 2013, this limit had almost been reached and an agreement was reached to increase the
limit. The change was implemented in wallet version 0.8 and ended with a 24-blocks chain split
and a successful double-spend attack [9]. While the bug was not in the Bitcoin protocol, but
rather in the database engine it could have been easily caught by a simple stress test if there was
no artificially introduced block size limit.

An extremely popular version of Bitcoin may well be a disaster for personal privacy: since the block-chain is public. Coinjoin operations can help, but are not really encouraged. It is easier to use a privacy-compromising "well known" address.

If the "masses" were moved to something like Monero instead, I have more faith that the privacy features would be used. MPcoin and Monero can co-exist as experiments in how block-size impacts both adoption and mining fees. Maybe the discussions from two years ago will turn out to be true. In that case, Monero will just be another payment system controlled by cartels. Maybe, the UN security council members will agree that "crypto-currencies" are of strategic importance akin to nuclear weapons. In that case, Monero and GavinCoin (20MB block Bitcoin) will be regulated out of existence. The more agile MPcoin (1MB block Bitcoin) would (hopefully) survive.