The problem with maintaining BTC's monetary security and the GigaBloat fork is that huge blocks will have predictable and unpredictable negative effects on the network.
Pure strawman. You have zero evidence to support that conjecture.
You must be new to this thread and have a lot of catching up to do. But I'm happy to help you with your remedial learning. Please cry moar about ad hom if it help you cope with being wrong about this:
Exactly what block size the network can support is very much debatable. I currently think that 10 MB would be fine and 50 MB would be too much, though these are mostly just feelings. There should be more rigorous study of the actual limits of the network. (Gavin's done some nice work on the software/hardware front, though I'm still worried about the capabilities of typical Internet connections, and especially how they'll increase over time.)
Exactly. 30 kBps upload is common in Australia, and
you sure should be able to run a full node in a typical internet connection in Australia, or Brazil, or Philippines, or whatever. The block size needs to be useful for the (lowest reasonable) common denominator, not the median.IMO 10 MB is too much, maybe 5 MB.
Maybe it is to others. Fine. I'm not going to be putting a lot of my eggs into that basket however.
Many do not with to risk BTC's secure store of value function to chase the impossible dream of every Coke machine, laundromat, and hot dog stand transacting directly on the One True Blockchain.
Said nobody.
Actually it was tvbcof who said it best:
In the mean time, we have one chance to stay within the constraints of what is achievable behind TOR and realistically likewise hardening methods. I'm not interested in throwing it away... especially when there is no need and a very promising solution is around the corner.
TOR has nothing to do with the Bitcoin protocol. TOR was compromised recently. If it was used, it would be in very limited fashion.
I've never trusted TOR as many of my posts here in trolltalk make clear. That's why I phrased things as I did. Onion routing generally is adds overhead that can dwarf a small payload such as a Bitcoin transaction and other kinds of cloaking (specifically steganography) can add much more.
I think it more likely than not that at some point there will be the long promised 'cyber 9/11' and some big changes to the global internet even here in the 'free world'. I've no intention of walking away from my stash just because some douche-bag government administrator and media echo-chamber says that a peer-2-peer internet fosters terrorism or whatever. If it never happens then that is fine and great, but it means that crypto-currencies are just toys and never did become indispensable tools for wealth protection. If it does then I want to be prepared and have my wealth protected by the most robust solution available.We were sold Bitcoins backed by a defensible network accessible via TOR or other slow/hardened connections. Changing the quality of that social contract is no better changing the quantity 21e6 (The Sacred Number).
Bitcoin HD wallets are better than TOR.
You have zero evidence to support that conjecture, just as Gavin has zero authority to change the social contract by excluding slower nodes.
Let's quote tvbcof again:
Some people may remember 'megauploads'. The case is instructive.
At its peak it accounted for a noticeable percentage of total global internet traffic. Then, at the flip of a switch it was gone along with everyone's data who had been using the service no matter what the nature of the data.
Why was it so trivial to shut down megauploads? All of the gear and networks that the service used were trivial to identify and valuable to the owners.
people who live under the assumption that somehow 'freedom' and 'fairness' is going to protect the Bitcoin network if the mainstream financial players, and thus U.S. govt, wants it shut down are living in a fantasy la-la-land. There are several things which could keep it going:
- It more useful alive than dead to the existing powers that be, and/or
- It is decentralized and supported by gear which is both cloakable and dispensable by the operators. There would need be a lot of potential operators and they can be born anywhere and pop up anywhere overnight.