Quote from: phelix on July 09, 2015, 07:42:55 AM

It seems you are mixing miners and pools? Pools have only short term power because miners will leave fishy pools. RBF in F2Pool was a good example for that.

F2Pool is still the second-largest pool, after AntPool; in spite of RBF and their role in the "Fork of July" incident (and of them saying that, sorry, but they will not change their methods).

Define "fishy". Most likely, a miner's cartel will use its power to increase their total revenue over some future time span. That means more money for their members. If the pool managers conclude that their plan is worth the trouble and risk, why would the pool members dislike it?

Quote from: iCEBREAKER on July 09, 2015, 12:22:28 PM

There are hundreds of forks which already provide parallel capacity to augment the Main Chain, LTC being the most significant.

Those are "deep forks" that split before their genesis blocks. Cheesy

I meant a hard fork with network partition and coin split, like the Beast of Apocalypse of the Anagavinists. The fork creates two independent bitcoins ("series A" and "series B"), each with its own set of miners and nodes, and with its own blockchain. Each blockchain is invalid by the other coin's rule, but the chains share a common prefix that is valid for both. So the history of both coins is the same up to the fork, and just after that each person owns the same amount of coins in the same addresses, on both chains. Each person can move either coin independently by using the proper version of software and wallet.

Each coin will have its exchanges and market price. The price (and therefore market cap) of the original bitcoin will probably be split among the two clones. Then, those who don't like one of the coins can sell all their holdings of the same and buy more of the other coin. One nice effect is that the nertwork capacity of each coin will be the same as that of the original bitcoin. So the two coins together can support twice as many users; however, to send payments across the "ocean" between them, people will have to use an exchange or a broker.

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I do have a problem with "the 5$ cost of your transaction being subsidized by investors."

You must have missed my participation in the furious blocksize debate raging in cypherdoc's thread.

TL;DR: My position is the network should be weaned off block subsidies ASAP, by allowing the fee market to mature (IE ossify) at 1MB by charging the highest price the market will bear, rather than continue (via larger blocks) the outrageous undercharging practice whereby users pay a nickle to use 5$ or more with of electricity/infrastructure/C&M/etc.

Good that you agree about the block reward problem. But you must have missed my preaching on /r/bitcoin about the illusion of the "fee market".

The "new devs" are impatient for the network to saturate so that the "fee market" will arise, and they have invented several spiffy gadgets to handle it that they are dying to use. No matter how people explain, they don't want to understand that

* even 80% of saturation would render the use of bitcoin a nightmare, driving users away from bitcoin and stopping its growth well before full saturation.

* when the traffic will stop growing, say at ~80% of capacity in daily average, the "traffic jams" will arise erratically at peak hours and at random variations of demand and supply;

* the queue lengths will vary pretty fast during a jam, and will be emptied in a few hours;

* the fees will be useless outside of the jams;

* the right fees will be impossible to predict during a jam, because each jam will be different, the queue status will vary too fast;

* the right fee that you should use to be among the first 2500 entries of the queue that will get into the next block depends on the 3000 transactions that will be issued in the next 10 minutes, by 3000 clients who are trying to choose a fee that will put their transactions ahead of yours;

* twidding the fees will not reduce the average delay by one second, only make everybody spend more money and make the individual delays more unpredictable;

* many clients will end up paying much more than the standard fee, only to wait more than if the transactions were processed first-come, first served;

* most clients -- espcially those who issue important transactions -- have better things to do with their time than sit two hours watching the queues and playing the silly "fee hopscotch" game.

It is useless to point out to them that no business in the world, from lemonade stands to airline manufacturers, uses (or could use) anything remotely like this bizarre pricing mechanism. It is useless to explain to them that the "fee market" will not be a "fRee market", because they have this silly libertarian definition of "free market" as "a market without government regulations".

Unfortunately, they are so detached from the real world, so fired up with the "fee market" fantasy, and so anxious to see their toys at work -- that they cannot even understand how that "fee market" will transform the act of paying something with bitcoin from a mildly complicated routine into an absolutely stupid, lengthy, incomprehensible and frustrating game.

They are like kids who set fire to the house because they want to play firemen and put the filre out with their water guns.

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The system's design accounts for the scenario you believe "could" happen, and its incentive structure was calibrated to keep that theoretical possibility in the realm of imagination.

No it doesn't. From the beginning, Satoshi himself was aware, and said so clearly, that the system would work only if a majority of the mining power acted according to their selfish immediate interest of maximinzing their revenue. If a mining majority decided to do something else, all bets were off. He was counting on mining remaining decentralized, so that such cartels could not form.

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And yet, there you are, proclaiming the Death Of Bitcoin^TM for what, the 51st time? Tongue

Bitcoin has been dead for more than a year, and was very sick before that. What is still twitching there is a bizarre and terribly expensive payment system that resembles bitcoin, and works like it for some puroses; but with a crucial difference -- it depends on 5 people not having bad ideas.

There is still some hope though: if the price crashes to below 1$, all the industrail miners will go bankrupt, and bitcoin may then return to how it was in 2009, with mining well distributed through the remaining clients.

That, if the "new devs" can be stopped and the fire can be put out before the house burns to the ground.