Quote from: brg444 on October 19, 2015, 08:16:21 AM

Quote from: Fatman3001 on October 19, 2015, 08:13:14 AM

Quote from: brg444 on October 19, 2015, 07:49:54 AM

Quote from: Fatman3001 on October 19, 2015, 07:43:19 AM

Quote from: brg444 on October 19, 2015, 07:15:49 AM

Quote from: Fatman3001 on October 19, 2015, 07:11:12 AM

Quote from: brg444 on October 19, 2015, 07:01:11 AM

Quote from: Fatman3001 on October 19, 2015, 06:57:50 AM

What happened to your analogy? Is the rainforest and endangered species of the world going to remain untouched, but we'll see forests bloated with wild game and cattle carcasses?

Negative externalities may be a foreign concept to you?

In the case of rain forests it concerns the destruction of the ecosystem and numerous other consequences that ensue. As for Bitcoin it relates to the externalization of costs to nodes, in other words destruction of the decentralization.

But that doesn't follow from your analogy... ughhh... my point is that you chose a poorly suited analogy to evoke a moral response which isn't relevant for this debate. You're not fighting FOR your stance, you're fighting against the opposite stance while using every dirty trick in the book. This might be effective in some environments, but if you assume that most people who care to read your posts are not idiots and are dying to hear some well thought out arguments that explains YOUR stance, it's quite annoying.

I think my analogy is pretty clear: in the presence of a known scarce value (rain forest & decentralization) it is necessary that controls be put in place so as to limit the potential damages cause by misaligned incentives from the various participants in the system.

Except decentralization is only a scarce resource if we make it such. The node problem seems to be more reliant on the popularity of Bitcoin than the technical demands for running a full node. People need to believe in the project and get excited for it to bother with maintaining a node. The reason we've had a decline is because a lot of people lost faith in Bitcoin in the recent downturn. The technical demands are secondary.

That is absolutely not true as evidenced by the numerous accounts of interested individuals who have had no choice but to stop running their full nodes because of technical constraints.

As the blockchain continues to grow the resources required to fully validate one's own transactions will necessarily continue to increase.

You'll find anecdotal evidence for everything, and there's no denying that people have different points where they find they cannot/will not continue running a node, but the fact that those people are not being replaced at a higher rate has much to do, in my opinion, with the stagnation in price since the last bubble and the lack of attractive use cases. Hopefully there will be more attractive use cases for ordinary people after the next peak. Use cases that will make Bitcoin more relevant to people and help the number of nodes to grow. Nodes run on enthusiasm and nerd-cred.

Here's another anecdotal evidence: the number of nodes did not increase with the latest price rise.

There is nothing in what I wrote that should lead you to think that it should have.