This was taken from another thread but I believe it is better to discuss them here to avoid being off topic in the original thread.
I am trying to find out what is your stance in the "scaling debate", though I am too lazy to read all your past posts. But are you for bigger blocks? If yes, then what is your opinion on Bitcoin Cash? Is it good enough or can it be better?
I could give you a simplistic answer, but it wouldn't be the right answer. The simplistic answer is:
yes, of course bigger blocks. However, I think that a single question, like, "are you for bigger blocks" misses entirely the point, simply because everything influences everything. That's like asking a doctor "are you for or against chemotherapy".
Thanks for your honesty. I also have some questions on the following.
I think bitcoin has fundamental design issues on the deepest conceptual level, that far overshadow the simple question of "bigger blocks". I think bitcoin is fundamentally broken on the following points:
- the PoW consensus mechanism that is too wasteful and leads to centralization of power, even though it is a very good consensus (no dispute) mechanism, it doesn't provide the other desired factors, on the contrary.
But what would be a good PoW replacement for you? Proof of Stake? There is also Proof of Capacity, also called Proof of Space, which I heard from d5000. PoC does look more energy efficient but it is not without its "centralization problems".
I'm working on a write-up on that, but you can get the gist in the thread about proof of stake bitcoin. It is true that as theoretical offline trustlessness goes, if that's the ONLY criterium, PoW is essentially the only solution. This is maybe why PoW was the best way to start this thing, as an underground means of getting up and running. However, PoW induces so many other, bad, properties (of which waste and centralization are the most important), that we get here the situation of "the best is the enemy of the good".
That said, most other consensus schemes,
that "prove use of scarce resources", like proof of space, will fall in similar pitfalls: you will get a kind of madness of piling up HUGE resources, which are a form of waste,
in the merciless battle of.... just agreeing on a data set.
But there has to be value there. A value in immutability and censorship resistance, right? It is in my belief that that is where Bitcoin's brilliance came from. Together with trustlessness and decentralization, as originally designed.
PoS is different, because the resource is virtual ; however, the standard way of seeing PoS is self-referential (that critique is justified). All *working* PoS systems have in fact an auxiliary "backup" consensus mechanism that does the real work. Nevertheless, I think I can work out a real pure PoS system, if we drop, what I consider, crazy not-of-this-world trustlessness demands, of which the most important is: reached consensus by on-line parties shouldn't be required to be checked offline in a totally trustless way.
That is, as a newcomer, that wasn't online before, there's no guarantee to find the "right consensus" all by yourself in a totally trustless way. The reason why this a priori shocking statement, isn't, is that a newcomer trusts in any case the software he downloads, and the pointers he found on the internet to download it, so he left trustlessness already. If you are willing to download the latest Core software, and at best, you check the software with signatures from devs, and the https certificate of github, there are already a lot of entities you trust. If these entities or similar entities tell you that a recent consensus was X, you've not been losing your trustlessness, you didn't have if from the start.
The problem of PoS is issuance. How do we really know that a PoS coin's distribution is "fair"?
For the rest of your post, give me time to read and internalize them. I am short in memory today.