Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
by
Melbustus
on 20/11/2014, 05:19:25 UTC
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You don't seem to give Satoshi himself much credit.  He surely would have recognized the significance of slipping in the 1MB block size and commented on the commit if he felt like discussing it.  I'd say he likely had something deeper in mind.  But unlike our friends above, I don't pretend that my mind reading abilities are strong enough to overcome the space-time continuum.

Satoshi didn't seem to consider it a problem for bitcoin to centralize significantly:

Forgot to add the good part about micropayments.  While I don't think Bitcoin is practical for smaller micropayments right now, it will eventually be as storage and bandwidth costs continue to fall.  If Bitcoin catches on on a big scale, it may already be the case by that time.  Another way they can become more practical is if I implement client-only mode and the number of network nodes consolidates into a smaller number of professional server farms.  Whatever size micropayments you need will eventually be practical.  I think in 5 or 10 years, the bandwidth and storage will seem trivial.
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There's also the metzdowd quote along those lines from Nov 2008.


Hearn pointed that out too.  For a while I was pretty demoralized by this, but now I think that perhaps he was actually playing the burgeoning community along realizing that very few of them really had the vision and technical prowess to see beyond very far into the future.  We may never know.

For my part I find it hard to believe that Satoshi could have (and would have) achieved what he did just to make a PayPal-II, and I am certain that he would have seen that this is exactly what it would become under a scenario as he described.  I also very much doubt that he blew it on his infrastructure capacity estimates as badly as he did (though in fairness, if he really did welcome the centralization of which he speaks it is true now 5 years later that corporate entities have plenty of capacity to run very high transaction rates...as it was when he (supposedly) wrote that.)




Go read through his posts. He was a pragmatist. I really don't think he considered a significant degree of consolidation to be a systemic problem. He may not of considered it ideal, but he probably (correctly, in my opinion) considered it both inevitable and non-fatal.