Quote from: smooth on March 16, 2015, 11:03:45 PM

Quote from: cypherdoc on March 16, 2015, 10:56:37 PM

when you say "just sit back with their cold storage coins and see which fork wins out", you're essentially saying the forks are close in properties (or at least difficult to choose between).

No I'm kind of saying the opposite. If they are not close in properties then one will quickly win out, and I think we all agree that is not a problem at all. It isn't a problem for passive participants, nor active ones.

so to be clear, i want to avoid the situation where 2 lengthy chains (20 blocks or more) get created repeatedly and frequently by protocol changes that aren't well thought out and not subjected to consensus building. sort of like what happened March 2013. that is the situation where ppl lose money. the only reason Eleuthria didn't lose out on all the blocks BTCGuild mined during that true "fork" was that Gavin, the BF, and the community donated BTC to make up for the lost block rewards they had mined. ppl like you and me who didn't have tx's layered on top of one another in those 20+ blocks didn't lose money but i think those who did (like many ongoing businesses that transact continuously) should have or did lose money despite the rollback. certainly they would have if the chain hadn't been rolled back and been left to die.

if you've never mined and lost a 50 BTC block reward from orphaning, it is painful, take my word. and that is just from a one or two block fork with orphan from everyday normal activity.

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The minority of cases where the choice is more difficult, you basically have two choices. One is to pick one or the other (including status quo) essentially by fiat, or recognize that these decisions are difficult and let a market sort it out. I argue it is more important to do that now, when Bitcoin is tiny, rather than suffer long term from having made the wrong choice earlier when the costs of change were relatively insignificant.

again, letting the market sort it out means letting the losing chain die out resulting in losses for those who made the wrong choice out of hubris or ignorance. too much of that isn't good for confidence and growth.

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I don't think we disagree that stability is important, I just think that stability at the multi-trillion dollar cap scale is better served by letting things sort out robustly and dynamically at the billion dollar scale, even if that introduces more risk short term (indeed that risk is what allows it to happen).

true

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Take this whole block size thing. It's pretty clear no consensus will ever be reached. Doing nothing is an arbitrary decision. Making a change to 20 MB or 20 MB + {some growth rate} is also arbitrary. We're not going to "figure this out." I say let the market play out with the toy system we have today and whichever system thrives will be far stronger at the trillion dollar scale.

Also, with respect to new participants losing money, that is fairly easy for them to avoid. Just buy both forks in equal proportion. That puts them in the same immunized position as existing holders with cold storage. If you don't do that you are making a bet on which fork is going to win. There is nothing wrong with making bets, but no one is forced to make this bet, and every bet has a winner and a loser.

that strategy of buying both chains means they will lose money at some level when the dominant chain eventually wins. the exchange price would start to reflect that first as the coins on the losing chain start dropping in price. one could try to sell the losing chain coins and jump back over to the other chain but certainly there will be losers and then bigger losers. too much of that is not good for Bitcoin.