Re: Is Gavin "The Financial Crisis Is Over" Andresen correct, compromised, or crazy?

Can we get back on topic please? This thread is about Gavin's naïve impression that internet bandwidth worldwide is improving over time.
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Sure. We all know (or think we know) that 'disk' is not really a factor in Bitcoin scaling...

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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.

We're not in violent disagreement here. Although, I don't think miners moving to software with a 2-4MB max makes this inevitable or even likely. My greater concern is that a company, with the involvement of none other than Eric Schmidt, is steering and molding our current (potentially former) first mover advantage to their own ends. I think a diversified array of software choices hardens Bitcoin even further from outside control. Hiring a majority of the devs of the inertia driven "reference" client has proven much cheaper than a 51% attack, highlighting a fragile facet of our antifragile currency.

Here's Gmax's take on it:

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We founded Blockstream to create a way to fund significant infrastructure work on complex cryptographic protocols that weren't getting developed due to lack of time and resources. The existing support for even the most basic Bitcoin development-- even just maintenance-- has been sparse to non-existent, unstable, and comes with its own strings attached. Developers going off to work for Bitcoin companies seemed to vanish, and the big tech companies pay very well to people with the skills required to contribute meaningful in this space... Most other Bitcoin companies, saddled by enormous regulatory and currency related risks have been unwilling or unable to substantially fund serious technical development. I believe that having a diversity of models is essential to building a sustainable ecosystem.