Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

Initial Impression --

The Good - Thin blocks, Weak Blocks (Also Found in Core's roadmap)

The Bad - Advocating for SPV mining , which is a problem exacerbated by their Validate Once proposal, and pushing off the many benefits of Segwit till the end of the year

The Ugly - 3rd/4th Q 2016 adaptive rule for a block size limit that heavily incentivizes those with better bandwidth which would drive miners from China to locations with better bandwidth and make many home mining operations obsolete because they cannot compete with the propagation times with larger operations who can afford better uplinks. There is no consideration for centralization concerns or the costs of nodes with this proposal which makes it a non-starter from the get go IMHO.

Ugly? UGLY?? This is exactly what we need, something that neutralizes the Chinese electricity and labor cost advantage. Without some way of doing that, we cannot regain censorship resistance. The fact that does so while increasing network performance is just a bonus.

The problem i see obviously is that Chinese miners will be reluctant to adopt it. But if they don't adopt it or something like it, I don't see much future for Bitcoin. Either it will stagnate or it will grow to the point where it becomes a threat to the PRC and they will take over the network.

This proposal is the only ray of hope I see for overcoming the duel problems of scaling and miner concentration.

Is he wrong about this?

There is no consideration for centralization concerns or the costs of nodes with this proposal

You are going to have some node centralization in either the CRTA or the Classic RoadMap. The problem is that there are always tradeoffs, so you have to judge which problem is worse: node centralization (nodes are cheap compared to mines) or mining concentration. Having overwhelming concentration of mining in a single political jurisdiction would be a serious problem anywhere, but having the same issue in Red China makes it much worse.

The PRC has murdered more of it's own citizens than any other government in the history of civilization. they massacred their own people by the thousands as recently as 1989. They manipulate currency as a standard matter of policy. They have made it illegal for banks in China to hold Bitcoin accounts or for goods and services to be traded for BTC within the country. Increasing hashing power within China is producing negative security returns.