Your argument centers around Miners being trusted and left to determine validity
without rules and then you complain about centralized reference client? You
contradict yourself constantly because your argument is not yet fully formed or
because you are a paid/unpaid entity designed to spread worthless garbage about
Bitcoin. Since majority of your argument are in favor of miner totalitarianism, as
well as past statements about how the miners graciously perform actions for us,
I would conclude that you work for or are a miner who is a disinfo shiller and not
a true forum member trying to understand the system we participate in. Your
agenda become apparent the more you attempt to explain your belief. Your
anarchism in conjunction with totalitarianism is very confused.
You could just as well say that Newton was a paid or an unpaid shill of the laws of gravity. As I said, bitcoin is a dynamical system, and we have to discover its dynamical laws (of which we know its basis: game theory, but we don't know the cost functions of the entities, although we can make reasonable assumptions about it).
That is fine to believe, but that has nothing to do with the rule set.
Those are all secondary systems that facilitate the rule set's existence.
If I'm complaining about anything, it is about people's lack of rational insight, and emotional ties to certain positions - usually based upon the confusion between intend and consequence, and their total lack of insight into the *actual* workings of the system they talk about. This leads them to propagate opposition to certain solutions on the basis of false arguments. The principal one is of course the idea that one shouldn't increase block size because that would drop the number of Joe's running full nodes in their basement "to keep bitcoin decentralized", while the number of Joe's running full nodes in their basement is absolutely of no importance what so ever in the power structure of the system.
If the "Joes in their basement" has no importance or power within the
whole Bitcoin system, then Miners do not need to sign agreements with
companies, exchanges, and services. It is as simple as that. If you don't
want to accept that there is something more going on with non-mining
verifying nodes, then so be it. I'm not advanced enough nor have the
time to try to convince you of otherwise. Time will reveal which one of
our beliefs was correct.
To the contrary, in Game-theoretics, the Miners must follow the money, so
united users have more power than you are willing to entertain.
I think you are missing the principal basis of game theory, which is
the *individual decision* of an entity as a function of his own advantages and disadvantages ; the behaviour of the overall system is a consequence of these individual decisions, and individual decisions are not taken as a function of the overall desired consequence (call it the tragedy of the commons).
The Game Theory aspect for Miners you describe was prevented since
2010. Can you give an example where this has occurred in Bitcoin since
the 1MB Cap? (Softcap is not actual game theory emergence since the
rule was maxed to 1MB.)
Since 2010, when Miners perform a change of chain, it is based upon a
majority Consensus with non-mining entities (some not bound to game
theory), and after a set future date only then does the Miner enact that
agreed change. That is entirely different than what you are describing,
which is full autonomy bound by game theory alone. Centralization within
the miner subsystem prevents that part of the original experiment from
being fully tested today. Consensus by miners alone died over 7 years ago.
The only users that matter for miners, are BUYERS of coins. The OWNERS of coins are not the ones that are going to pay miners. A miner will individually make the decision to change the block chain he is making (change the protocol) if he thinks that his individual change will let him obtain more value for the coins he obtains this way, than if he doesn't change his protocol. There is a very strong incentive for miners to stick to the protocol the rest of the miners is sticking to: changing *on your own* is almost always a losing proposition, because most probably, the chain you will be making, with minority hash rate and modified protocol, will most probably NOT find a lot of buyers. This is where your *miners follow the money* comes in.
Users in the sense of stake holders, are more victims than market players in fact. The stash they own on a chain, is dependent on their ability to transact, for which they are dependent on the miners including the transactions in a chain they are willing to make. For that, these users have to "bribe" the miners with a fee, and be willing to use the chain the miners are offering. These users are totally at the mercy of miners, because the miners can decide over their possession, and the miners are not interested in their possession ; the only thing miners want, is NEW users buying their coins, not "old users" needing to transact.
I agree with most of these statements in general, but I think you have
come to an incorrect conclusion. Since you assume that monetary value
must always increase to offset the miners hash and expenses over time
(ignoring disinflation), as opposed to decreasing or stabilizing, the conclusion
is that Bitcoin is a simplistic ponzi scheme designed for the benefit of Miners
alone and not for the users benefit. That is clearly not the purpose.
On the contrary, this is where Verifying Node come in. Their existence
prevents Miners from unilateral chain control, and stops those miners from
perpetrating what you have outlined. Your argument is one of the reasons why
Satoshi added the 1MB Cap and why today Miners are still waiting before
performing a hardfork. Without Verifying Nodes (especially Economic one),
your premise does become our reality. But currently, the miners must comply
in balance with the rest of the system otherwise the whole organism stops, but
you can't accept that. You wish to now reverse 7 years of history.
If you think your beliefs are valid, the Miners will perform a contentious hardfork
within the next year or so and we should expect all subsystems, including the
exchanges, following close behind. IMO that won't ever occur.
If you have a million coins in BTC, you have to pray that a miner is going to be willing to include your transactions in a chain of his liking he's making for you. The miner doesn't care about your possession, but you do. The miner cares about people buying the coins he's making on the chain, not about the owners of coins that are going to transact ; apart from the fact that these owners need to pay for the favour of including a transaction in the chain they make.
This is a very simplistic understanding of the whole ecosystem and how it
works. It also ignore all the years in which the token had no monetary value
or very little.
If the Miners stop allowing transactions or blacklist certain txs, then the
system stops. If new users stop buying bitcoins, the system still functions
just as it did in the early days. What you are ignoring is that major miners may
die off and fall away as a result of less new users and their increasing profits.
The miners should assume there will be times of stagnation in profits and even
times of great losses. In the past, some miners went bankrupt because of these
and other associated reasons (over extension). Ultimately, your conclusion is
that "Miners are too big to fail and we need an ever increasing group of new
users to keep them afloat through time". That is a classic ponzi, not a
digital truth being used as a currency/asset.
The truth is that big miners will fail and home mining or the like will increase
like the old days, but will ultimately be centralized again and create a new
generation of large miners. This ebb and flow is natural and healthy for the
system over time
It is basically
the same theory as to why people form "working unions". You are purposefully
disregarding that in order to make a conclusion that doesnt follow normal logic
or past historical world events.
Yes, but worker unions can only obtain stuff because the legal system intervenes. Worker unions without any legal backing break up, because some workers want to eat and break the cartel. BTW, that's also why you have employer's syndicates. But all these things are centralized entities. In fact, miner "worker unions" (miner cartels) are much, much more probable than "bitcoin users forming a worker's union", simply because the miners don't care about most of the bitcoin OWNERS. They only care about bitcoin BUYERS. The owners are at their mercy. Not the other way around.
No, I disagree with every statement.
First, legalities do not apply here nor in regular unions (unless you're referring to
unionbusters being prevented from physically harming union members).
Second, if you threaten the old buyers then the new buyers never manifest.
That is like saying people who went to a movie and left and told others it was crap
has no bearing on anything, and new people (their friends and family) will go it
anyway to watch the crap. The reality is that the new users only exists because
the old users are currently still satisfied and providing "outside support". If you
disregard old users, then you disregard your future (simple ex. recent Ghostbuster
movie bombed because they purposefully disregarded the old audience/"users",
plus those who actually did see it told others it was crap and not bother.).
A miner cartel, to be made of, say, 20 entities, is way, way, way easier to form than a user cartel, made of millions of new users/buyers. In any case, if such a cartel is working, the system has lost its decentralized aspect.
Only time will tell. A "user cartel" may be easier to form since the exchanges and
services are the proxies to the users, in this particular case of USAF. The exchanges
and services are incentivized to follow their users, not the "miner cartel". But, it is
true that the "Miner cartel" could organize faster and take action before a "User cartel"
could ever do.
The only thing that is still holding back the power of miners, is the visible incapacity of them finding a decent group of developers. That's scary because a crypto is not really a big or difficult software project once you lay out the protocol to implement.
I disagree.
Even if the miners got the world's best developers on their payroll or "took over
the reference client" and implemented rules without the non-mining consensus
(violation and thus an attack by default), then all the non-mining subsystems will
just stop participating in that version of Bitcoin. Some exchanges (some controlled
by the miners themselves) will still sell that token as they come in from "leaving
users" and new ignorant ones, but the community overall will leave and its users
and token value will be near worthless. Majority of the crypto-community will at
that point move to another Bitcoin implementation or an altcoin that is ASIC resistant.
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The major disagreement I have with your overall argument is that you wish to change
Bitcoin back into the Whitepaper version that Satoshi understood had a fatal flaw.
He implemented the 1MB Cap to balance the problems his lack of foresight anticipated
and then "placated" the dissenters who understood what the far reaching consequences
of this patch would be. They made appropriate arguments to him and tried to
convince him that over time it would be almost impossible to remove. Satoshi
understood that since he intended a future freeze, but listened and decided that
the patch was more important. The consequences was that the original experiment
from the whitepaper was restricted (or died) when the 1MB Cap became the main
chain. Then the new experiment began using independently decentralized non-mining
verifying Nodes to share the "Consensus" for serious rule set changes. It has been
that way since. It is that simple. Majority of your arguments about game theory,
decentralization, anarchism, markets determine protocol, and emergence has not
applied to Bitcoin, if it ever did, since 2010. The truth is Satoshi changed his mind
& version of the Whitepaper within 1 year of testing and never made it plainly
obvious through written gospel for certain ideological participants to digest.
Majority of those people only started understanding this around late 2015.