Quote from: pineapple express on August 31, 2019, 11:22:55 PM

Quote from: CryptoRobert on August 31, 2019, 10:12:59 PM

Quote from: jbreher on August 31, 2019, 08:29:44 PM

Quote from: CryptoRobert on August 31, 2019, 09:16:53 AM

As ethically perverse as it may be, proof-of-work happens to have this probably in the origins unintended feature of introducing a powerful deterministic skin-in-the-game variable into the mechanism.

Whaddayamean 'unintended'?!? The skin in the game aspect is the fulcrum upon which the entire Bitcoin ecosystem balances.

Well, I didn't express myself clearly on this point, as it also refers to my long post in the Ivory Tower. Most of today's skin in the game with Bitcoin is consisting in the huuuge expenses miners have to continuously fund to keep mining. I doubt that Nakamoto would have foreseen the rise of ASICS and the Bitcoin network swallowing more energy than entire countries like Ireland. That's so much more skin in the game than anyone had predicted in the early days.

The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate. "satoshi" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306

At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node. "satoshi" https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014815.html

OK, this is really agood quote - didn't know that.

Quote from: tarmo888 on August 31, 2019, 10:19:57 PM

Quote from: CryptoRobert on August 31, 2019, 05:22:13 PM

Most of your argoments are correct and they are not contraddicting mine, just fine tuning them. I don't pretend to state absolute truths, just want to draw attention to the complexity of the creation of value in crypto, where Metcalfe's law is only one of the agents in play, and it doesn't apply if the nodes are not real nodes.

My point was that non-participants are not users/nodes at all, you classify them as "fake nodes" and you consider "real nodes" only those who have put real money into it? Same with telephone, just having it, but not using it doesn't make it you a node of the network.

The way you are making your points suggests me you are likely a programmer Cheesy

No offence intended, but to my taste a too schematic way to see things which eventually would make you in some cases miss the big picture. There is no real difference here between the expressions "no nodes" and "fake nodes", we are meaning exactly the same things just with different words.

Quote from: tarmo888 on August 31, 2019, 10:19:57 PM

As I understand "skin in the game", it doesn't matter what is the source of the income. If you play a lottery or you inherit fortune, you have earned it.

Here we totally disagree. If you inherit a fortune from your parents, it's your parents skin in the game the one you end up holding. If you waste your inherited fortune you waste their life of savings, not yours. It did cost you nothing to get that fortune. This is why most people who are winning a lottery end up losing everything. It does cost them nothing to get the fortune - to buy a lottery ticket is not really a cost, nor a merit - and the "skin-in-the-game" value of that fortune is zero. When the skin-in-the-game value of something you are holding is zero your pain in losing it is infinitely lower than the pain of losing something where's a lot of YOUR skin-in-the-game. If you make a mistake which leads you to lose all the savings of all your life you are much more inclined to commit suicide than if you make a mistake which leads you to lose the saving of someone's elses life, which happened to be in your possession just by the way of luck because you have won it or inherited it.
In my Ivory Tower post I'm mentioning also modern politicians ruling without skin in the game. Of course if they make mistakes they have something to lose - their power, but they don't really have to pay the whole price of their mistakes, like it would happen in a distant past. The same applies to top bankers. It's not THEIR skin-in-the-game at stake. All those aspects have been widely and well described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book "Skin in The Game". Understanding the meaning of skin-in-the-game is not limited to the concept of "having something to lose", but it deals with the true subjective value of what you have to lose in a game.