Quote from: tvbcof on June 15, 2015, 06:57:31 PM

Quote from: thezerg on June 15, 2015, 06:13:50 PM

Quote from: tvbcof on June 15, 2015, 04:58:35 PM

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tvbcof, in an alternate universe where we were ALREADY dropping 50MB blocks or so every 10 minutes your arguments would be very sound. But you can run a full node on a freakin' Raspberry PI! This very premature limiting of the blockchain size, coupled with Blockstream's possibly competitive technologies, is what makes us cry foul.

The last time I ran bitcoind in support mode (allowing incoming 8333) was on a soekris router which is comparable to an RPI. That was many years ago, and while it worked, it was very close to not 'working fine'. Granted, leveldb and some other optimizations have happened since then which helped but things were pushing the envelope, and that is ignoring considerations such at UTXO size and network capacity. Since I won't allow UPnP on my network and won't run bitcoind on an important machine, I need a sacrifice machine to run it. I'm currently stuck on satellite here at home which pretty much precludes supporting the network even at the 1MB setting due to total data constraints. To run bitcoind I have to arrange a remote system that I can trust and that is something of a challenge for a suspicious and careful person. I'm not about to sacrifice the time and money in support of Bitcoin when the likes of Andresen and Hearn are hanging around trying to kill it.

I'm running it on a used laptop that I bought on ebay 3 years ago for $45 (had to add a disk). The same laptop doubles as my music player. Satellite has always been pretty downstream skewed so I'm not surprised if you have issues with any symmetric P2P application. But your situation is not typical, and you can always purchase a virtual machine for very little if you really wanted a node.

I wish Bitcoin used almost no bandwidth as well... but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Quote from: tvbcof on June 15, 2015, 06:57:31 PM

Quote from: thezerg on June 15, 2015, 06:13:50 PM

We don't need to shunt Bitcoin off into a settlement-only currency just yet. We could grow 50 times greater before we have to think about doing that, and there is tremendous value in doing so. For one, it would allow all the layered technologies time to develop. And also, we'd probably have 50-100x more users, which IMHO pushes bitcoin over the mass adoption chasm.

To understand my thoughts you need to understand that I consider joe-sixpack users to be a liability on all fronts. 'Outrunning regulation' is laughable to me, and idiots do more harm than good when they try to run critical systems. Multibitch users are not helpful to the network and, as I say, not helpful in the 'critical mass' equation since Bitcoin with it's batch-mode native function is simply not competitive as an exchange currency and never will be a big factor there. IOW, the kinds of percentages we need for anything remotely resembling 'critical mass' are completely pie-in-the-sky. Even if Bitcoin worked worth a shit here, a lot of people love big brother and would hate Bitcoin for that reason anyway. All Bitcoin traction does is to attract attack from TPTB by virtue of it's positive attributes such as lack of counter-party risk.

Time and time again we see idiots losing their money to criminals and hucksters. Being a Bitcoin enthusiast has been like watching a fight between a skilled boxer and a punching bag and I don't see that changing as long as idiots are using Bitcoin in it's native form.

Sidechains breaks the single-point-of-failure problem which vexes a 'one-size-fits-all' solution and pushes the critical infrastructure support role to people who can handle it. It also pushes the benefits of a counter-party-risk free solution down to the masses. Nobody can stop the masses from giving their money to shysters but it's very possible to arrange for the sidechain operates themselves to have a tough time robbing their users (unlike general alts.)

Am I an 'elitist'? Fuck ya. At the end of the day, though, my goal is to have everyone who wants to be able to enjoy the benefits of distributed crypto-currencies. I just don't want to see Bitcoin ruined in the process of trying to achieve this...but am prepared to deal with this eventuality if that's the way the cookie is to crumble.

Alright, but I think that if you look at Bitcoin's peer-to-peer architecture, consumer wallets like Bitcoin-qt and SPV phone offerings, writings by Satoshi, scalability discussions on the orginal wiki, and countless presentations by others you will see a strong theme where Bitcoin is presented as a universal currency for everyday use by people. "Be your own bank"

So feel free to make an altcoin with a limited block size. But for Bitcoin, please stop trying to morph a temporary "growing pains" patch into "the-way-it-was-meant-to-be" to scratch your own personal itch. It won't work. We'll see massive abandonment as loss-of-confidence results in holders selling their coins. And competitive highly scalable crypto-coins will emerge even if I have to build one myself.