Quote from: David Rabahy on January 16, 2017, 04:52:02 PM

I'm delighted we found the users to help us see a fuller picture of dynamics.

Still the users have to find good verses bad full nodes or they could be misled.

How do users reliably find good full nodes?
How does a user evaluate the blocks provided to them?

Even full nodes face the first question. I configure my full node with 60 connections (enough more than the default of only 8?) and just hope the builders of the software did a good job and that the network hasn't partitioned me away from the good ones. I do manually compare to various public sources of the blockchain, e.g. blockchain.info, etc., and hope they aren't compromised. My confidence in being able to reach apparently good nodes has built up over the years but I don't want to become complacent. I do examine peers for misbehavior and disconnect or ban them if I don't like what I see. I watch various news outlets including this forum for indications of trouble. If I am left behind or worse misled for awhile then I hope that eventually I will find the good ones and catch up and if needed replace the crap from the bad ones.

I would think it is simpler: can't you just connect directly to the mining pool node with whom you are in agreement concerning the rules, and that's the only connection you really need ? Of course, the number of connections that this node accepts may be limited...

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This I know; my fiat-denominated holdings are debased without any real effective say or recourse. The only redeeming fact is so is everyone else's so I don't lose ground. I feel very badly for folks without any appreciable holdings; the poor get poorer relative to the rich. Bitcoin, by the rules, can't be debased; this is one of the attractive features of Bitcoin over fiat for me.

Well, it can't be debased until miners and users decide so.

In fact, and I'm very surprised that this didn't happen yet, I wonder how it comes that people create alt coins with a new genesis block, and not as a hard fork from bitcoin. If you create an alt coin which is a hard fork from bitcoin (that is, which takes as initial distribution, the unspend outputs on the bitcoin block chain at a certain block number, and whose private keys can sign a single transaction on the altcoin's block chain) you do away with all the problems of premine, initial distribution and so on, and you buy this coin the whole bitcoin user base.
We've seen this with the ETC/ETH split: all ETH holders were now also ETC holders. In the ETC/ETH split, the two coins are very similar, but there's no need: the forked-off coin can be entirely different, just like an altcoin is different. The only thing that is taken from bitcoin is the user base and the initial distribution. As such, there can even be no need for mining/minting the coin any further.

If ever this happens, and I don't see how this can not happen in the future, you have ACTUALLY the same effect as a debasement. The bitcoin market cap will split over both coins (of course, initially with the large majority still on bitcoin).

Sound money doctrine is misguided, because it makes the assumption of a single, unique monetary asset. When monetary assets are in competition, and can be created/forked/... then there's no such thing as a sound money doctrine, by the flexibility of the market for monetary assets, and the variability of the market cap of each asset. The creation of new assets automatically debases the "fixed number" ones.