Quote from: rocks on June 25, 2015, 04:59:28 PM

It takes a version of Bitcoin that scales to the point that every person on the planet can interact with it directly, to achieve the status that gold once held. To get there requires that bitcoin scales, while maintaining it's decentralized and thus independent nature.

One option to get there is to let the blockchain scale to accommodate everyone, this could look like the following and still be OK...

- ~100 P2P nodes that are independently sponsored and paid for to perform validation (these would be several large institutions such as MIT, remember it only takes 1 node to flag cheating)
- ~10 pools that receive fees from billions of transactions and are located in several regions (or preferably behind tor or something similar)
- ~100,000 small independent miners connected by stratum to pools, the true location of each miner is easily hidden. These miners live off of the massive number of fees generated

Incorrect. It requires 51% of the hashrate to flag cheating. Why do you guys repeatedly forget this Bitcoin 101 lesson?

If you do not understand why 10 pools enforced to be non-colluding by politics of the masses is the antithesis of decentralization, then there is nothing I could possibly write that you would actually try to comprehend.

Ditto if you do not understand why 100 pools permanently cited at home bases of the establishment are the antithesis of decentralization.

Distributed != decentralization.

The only way decentralization remains AUTONOMOUSLY resilient (i.e. without the political expectations which are inherently centralizing due to the Logic of Collective Action), is for the full nodes to be the small miners with no proxies such as pools as middle men. There is absolutely no way to achieve this within existing PoW consensus algorithms. I know the solution, but I am not revealing it today.

Quote from: rocks on June 25, 2015, 04:59:28 PM

Another option to get there is to take transactions off-chain. This is the SC / lighting network path.

If I am not mistaken, the LN paradigm is only for setting up reused payment channels between a spender and a recipient, so it is inapplicable to a myriad of micropayments between all N possible participants in the system, because each setup has to go on the block chain. Thus it really isn't a general solution for micropayments, but rather a very specific solution for REAL TIME payments. I invented LN in 2014 also, and my application for it remains REAL TIME payments.

Side chains don't help you with micropayments unless you accept that micropayments will be done centralized on a special centralized SC. In other words, the decentralization of the consensus network design has to be accomplished no matter if you put it on a SC or in Bitcoin Core.

Quote from: rocks on June 25, 2015, 04:59:28 PM

The problem with this option is the bitcoin main chain is starved for fees, and so the mining security mechanism is too small to effectively secure the network.

This is another reason that doing micropayments in a centralized SC is death for Core.

Quote from: rocks on June 25, 2015, 04:59:28 PM

This thought process that small blocks will cause fee pressure and that will support a large mining community is just wrong. What will happen is bitcoin will not be used to the extent that it needs to be used to be secure.

That is true also. That is why I said it doesn't matter which direction you go on the block size issue, all paths lead to eating from my hand on the consensus network redesign (and when it is open sourced then everyone can copy it and refine it).

The argument for not increasing the block size is that it is better to move more slowly towards centralization and when it is clear that 1MB (or 8MB w/o automatic exponential scaling) has been too constricting, then consensus can increase it again. This allows time for real solutions to take form, such as mine. Whereas, if you open up the size to exponential scaling, then it is quite possible that the Coinbases, Circles, Paypals, 21 Incs, etc.. will be incentivized to flood the block chain with spam to force it to centralized before we get the chance to experiment (via pegged side chains) to find the optimum solution for scaling.

This is the way engineers think.

Quote from: rocks on June 25, 2015, 04:59:28 PM

A bitcoin with 10s of billions of transactions a day each generating 1 penny in minimum transaction fee, will be much more secure than a bitcoin with a small number of transactions and slight fee pressure (at best) and where most fees are captured by SCs.

Not if it is centralized, and centralization is guaranteed with the current PoW consensus design as Bitcoin scales.