Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Is Gavin "The Financial Crisis Is Over" Andresen correct, compromised, or crazy?
by
tvbcof
on 10/01/2016, 19:59:51 UTC

Can we get back on topic please? This thread is about Gavin's naïve impression that internet bandwidth worldwide is improving over time.
...

Sure.  We all know (or think we know) that 'disk' is not really a factor in Bitcoin scaling...as useful as it may be for propaganda purposes...but here's an observation which goes to the subject of 'Moore's law':

About the time that Satoshi was birthing Bitcoin, I was building a new workstation.  2008-ish IIRC which is within spitting distance of a decade.  I decided to finally 'do it right' and throw costs out the window.  What I ended up with was an i-family chipset, and for bulk storage a couple of 1.5TB drives (which I built a mirror an encryption on top of.)

Now, in 2016, after a bunch of years and a possible disk anomaly in my mirror, I decided to do a bit of work on the system.  I replaced the disks with another set of WD 'green' drives of a whopping 2TB capacity.  A full 25% increase.  OK, I might have decided to go with 6TB drives if I were feeling the same about spending money as I was back then.  That would make roughly a 400% increase.  Impressive, but vastly out of touch with the Moore's Law mythology.  I might have decided to upgrade the motherboard as well...if the technology had advanced significantly beyond the i-class base that I already owned.

I actually don't doubt that 'Moore's law' has held up better than my 'consumer grade' experience of the decade or so, but it is fairly clear that the friuits of this phenomenon are realized by a wholly different class of beneficiaries.  And I don't trust this class to serve my interests when it comes to protecting my assets against attack.

I've always said that market forces will not distribute technological advancements evenly, and the reasons for this are fairly obvious (to me at least.)  At this point it probably is the case that the likes of Google, Facebook, etc, could run Bitcoin as the global monetary system for everything and everyone.  If not now, they will be able to within a few years while it is completely unlikely that lesser class infrastructure providers will.  Bitcoin could 'evolve' to take advantage of this support base, but in doing so it will lose any advantage it may have over established fiat systems.

From a market perspective, once the bandwidth capacity reaches a point when 'hive-mind consciousness' can be streamed directly into the brains of a household, there is really no more demand which makes it unlikely that further increases will be forthcoming.  The actually bandwidth required for this, after sufficient optimization of the protocols, may not even be all that great.  Basically, as long as a sufficiently strong message to spend all of one's debt limit on new shit is downloaded there is not a lot more that needs to be done.  That is within the reach of what is possible for a lot of people living in appropriately structured 'human habitats' today.