Quote from: nullius on February 10, 2018, 04:05:03 AM

Quote from: gmaxwell on February 09, 2018, 08:23:12 AM

It's sad that people are getting bamboozled by malicious disinformation on this subject.

I wish to reply to some of the other above posts; perhaps later. For now, I want to explain something about this post I gave +40.

Bitcoin would not be what it is today without the efforts of a select few people, including Greg Maxwell (gmaxwell). Without them, Bitcoin would be slower, less reliable, and less secure. Early on, the Satoshi software was run-and-gun cypherpunk code; it was important because it created Bitcoin, but many parts wereproblematic. Nowadays, despite some necessarily remaining idiosyncrasies in the RPCs, etc., Core is a product of professional software engineering. This is thanks to the work of many contributors, but principally among them, a few who have more or less dedicated their lives to the project.

Money cant buy the combination of expertise and devotion which gmaxwell has given to Core. That can only be bought by ideological dedication to the freedom made by a new form of money. Im not saying this to praise gmaxwell; I doubt he needs some Internet hagiography. Rather, I want to make sure that newbies reading this will understand who gave the answer I deemed to merit +40 (which would have been +50, but the system wouldnt let me). Hes not just someone who knows what hes talking about: Hes someone who helped make what were talking about. I think he knows how it works.

gmaxwell (a/k/a nullc) is also active in places where Bitcoin is discussed, and used to be much more active here in those days from the archives of the Bitcoin Forum as I wish I could experience it. To variations of the same disinformation, hes given that same answer (often at greater length) so many times over the years that I really only gave him a few millimerits for each time hes explained this. Sorry about that.

I remember thinking nullc was nullius due to the similarity!! i did later see that it was Gregory Maxwell. I've taken the liberty to quote and credit these posts. LOL.
I wanted to add that this discussion also puts light to the fact that this "dishonest miner" scenario is kept in check because normal users, small merchants CAN run full nodes. That should explain why keeping block size within sustainable limits is important. A lower block size keeps the entry-barrier for running a full node as low as possible.
The 'core' idea of giving preference to basic developments like SegWit that optimize data usage for transactions is much better than randomly increasing block size to say, 8 MB, 32 MB and so on. This way you give more time for the hardware costs to go lower while code improvements are built upon.