FYI, I disagree with both of you regarding the idea that transaction volume is not essential to Bitcoin's growth because Bitcoin can function like gold.
I didn't make that argument. I'm building an altcoin with unlimited transaction scaling.
If your altcoin doesn't solve blockchain sharding, then no you are not building any such thing. There are too many humans on the planet and bandwidth costs are not trending anywhere near fast enough to make an unsharded blockchain feasible for the levels of transactions that humans demand. Worldwide transaction volume in 2015 was 426 billion transactions, which at 600b per transaction works out to needing a 2 gigabit per second link to the internet for every single node - nearly 1/5th of the internet link of some whole datacenters. That's just for 2015; It is growing by ~8% a year while bandwidth is improving at only 8-18% per year, and that's with the vast majority of humans on earth not sending any transactions at all (unbanked). 18% does not outpace those numbers in our lifetimes.
Computers don't do unlimited. That said, I don't know anything about what you are building, not trying to insult you, but people need to understand the scope of the problem.
But BU will never get you there. All you do is enable the mining cartel to create a billion tokens out of thin air.
I don't support BU so that's a mute point. This is my proposal that I would like feedback on:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1844059.0It is the whales who will decide, whether you like it or not. That is the reality of the PoW. If you don't like it, find a different design that is not PoW.
That much I'm inclined to agree with. However, I do believe that weakness of PoW is not as bad as the weaknesses in PoS, which are subject to a very different kind of abuse by a whale attacker - namely the fact that "emptied" addresses on the main chain still retain historical staking value of coins that aren't supposed to exist according to the consensus chain. Without checkpointing, there's no way to invalidate the historical staking value those addresses no longer contain, but checkpointing is vulnerable to attacks by authorities like what EU regulators are hoping they can do.
So either the whales are for BU or they are for Core. And they will decide. I analyzed all the technical and economic game theory in great detail already. The Bitcoin whales have to choose small blocks, else they enable the mining cartel to HF to a billion tokens in the future. They will never allow this. BU will be destroyed if they attempt a HF. All of you who buy the BU token will end up bankrupt.
You've been warned. So don't cry later.
Aside from the BU-specific stuff, which I most likely already agree with you on, I'm curious about your game theory findings. What do you mean the mining cartel will HF to a billion tokens in the future? Did you find something that indicated that the Bitcoin whales could not support a blocksize increase on core?