Quote from: tvbcof on October 26, 2014, 06:54:16 PM

As far as I'm concerned Hearn, who absolutely _has_ made some very valuable contributions to Bitcoin, has always been in direct opposition to many of the aspects of Bitcoin that appealed to me. To his credit he has been relatively open about these things (debatable on some of them though.) Discriminating against arbitrary users via mining consolidation, consolidation of blockchain maint to a small number of large entities, Red-listing, mainstream passport use for individual identities, etc. I've developed a sense that Hearn has Andresen's ear in a fairly big way and significantly through the medium of the Bitcoin Foundation which also seems to align with Hearn's direction for Bitcoin. When Gavin went to the Council on Foreign Relations (some of the most wealthy and influential people in the world) and refused to either commit to openness or even debrief on the conversations he may have had, this further damaged whatever credibility he had (to me.)

I snipped the first part of your comment because, I don't pay attention that closely and won't argue something I have no clue on. Regarding this last comment, I've seen plenty of what Hearn wants to do and probably disagreed about as much as you have. As such, your suggestion that he has much pull concerns me. While I was also already somewhat concerned about TBF in general and the lack of openness with the council, for lack of a better way to put it, I don't think TBF is Google (with a motto of don't be evil and pure evil ambitions/intentions). TBF may be stupid, but I prefer have opinions on the ideas instead of the people/groups who came up with said ideas instead of assuming the ideas match my opinions of their source.

Quote from: tvbcof on October 26, 2014, 06:54:16 PM

Quote from: The00Dustin on October 25, 2014, 11:32:10 AM

ETA: Considering the cost of ASIC mining equipment, storage technology would actually have to start shrinking and increasing in cost to the point that individuals couldn't afford computers before it would begin to matter to miners.

Aside from the fact that 'that don't make no kinda sense', nobody has ever really considered storage capacity (indicated by your use of the term 'shrinking') to be a factor in much of anything. At worst one might need to physically deliver media in order to get a node operational, but that's doable. Access to the local data for 'old school' full verification modes of operation is a somewhat different matter, but it's likely to be a solvable problem. Both of these assume some simbalance of reasonable system growth at least. If TPS limits were lifted completely all bets are off, but that's not what Gavin is suggesting here (for the next decade or so at least.)

Here, you just said exactly what I was saying about the size of the blockchain not being important to miners, so I'll pass that off as a communication glitch. Similar comments could be made on the size of blocks and the cost of bandwidth. If you agree storage and bandwidth aren't problems for miners, then you have not made it clear to me at all what you think the problems with a block size increase are.

Quote from: tvbcof on October 27, 2014, 01:25:07 AM

OTOH, I foresee howls of rage and despair from those alts which are pump-n-dump scams designed with the hopes of making some early adopters rich. I suspect that a fair amount of the negativity toward sidechains is from this corner right now because I can see no other legitimate complaint against sidechains. This from a risk perspective, economic perspective, philosophical perspective, or any other rational perspective. At least not one that is based on any skin-deep understanding of things. (Actually, I take that back; those desperate to destroy Bitcoin as an empowering technology for individuals will also be quite alarmed by sidechains.)

For the record, I never touched any alts other than Namecoin and Litecoin. Namecoin was never about value, and I only dabbled in Litecoin like a hedge more than anything else, although I had little doubt that ASICs would make their way to SCRYPT as quickly as they made their way to Bitcoin (this was before ASICs, and I had no idea they would make it to either near as quickly as they did). That having been said, as I have previously stated, when the idea of sidechains came about, it was so that non-Bitcoin functions could take advantage of the biggest most secure blockchain without bloating it with non-Bitcoin information. To that end, I am not against sidechains, and would even say it would have made sense for Namecoin to be a sidechain if it were going to catch on and actually compete with our centralized domain name registry. However, I have yet to see obvious any arguments that adding complication and storing Bitcoin information outside of the Bitcoin blockchain will actually solve any legitimate problems.