Quote from: DooMAD on Today at 01:17:41 PM

Not sure about everyone else, but I'd rather this topic didn't degenerate into another inane "who is satoshi?" thread. We've got hundreds of those already. I'd politely ask if everyone kept the focus to the historical interest aspect (and definitely don't engage with deranged shitgibbon LeezHamilton, because that's a sure-fire way to ruin a topic rapidly). Faketoshi does not belong in this thread. Talk about him elsewhere, please.

Thank you DooMAD.

Switching topics back to the emails, I've been reading them quite carefully (and therefore slowly) for a better understanding. What do the esteemed ladies and gentlemen think about https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/#email-19, where Satoshi's email confirms that Bitcoin was meant to be a digital cash, not an investment tool, as outlined in the Bitcoin white paper title?

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I'm uncomfortable with explicitly saying "consider it an investment." That's a dangerous thing to say, and you should delete that bullet point.

Also, I'd appreciate your thoughts on https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/#email-3, specifically his response to a question about scaling.

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100,000 block generating nodes is a good ballpark large-scale size to think about. Propagating a transaction across the whole network twice would consume a total of US$ 0.02 of bandwidth at today's prices. In practice, many would be burning off excess allocated bandwidth or unlimited plans with one of the cheaper backbones. There could be millions of SPV clients. They only matter in how many transactions they generate. If they pay 1 or 2 cents transaction fees, they pay for themselves. I've coded it so you can pay any optional amount of transaction fees you want. When the incentive subsidy eventually tapers off, it may be necessary to put a market-determined transaction fee on your transactions to make sure nodes process them promptly.

To think about what a really huge transaction load would look like, I look at the existing credit card network. I found some more
estimates about how many transactions are online purchases. It's about 15 million tx per day for the entire e-commerce load of the Internet worldwide. At 1KB per transaction, that would be 15GB of bandwidth for each block generating node per day, or about two DVD movies worth. Seems do-able even with today's technology.

Important to remember, even if Bitcoin caught on at dot-com rates of growth, it would still take years to become any substantial
fraction of all transactions. I believe hardware has already recently become strong enough to handle large scale, but if there's any doubt about that, bandwidth speeds, prices, disk space and computing power will be much greater by the time it's needed.

I also discovered that Satoshi himself discussed this topic right here on the forum:

Quote from: satoshi link=topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

As I delve deeper into these emails, I get a peculiar feeling that Satoshi might have opposed much of what Bitcoin has become and what it represents today...