Lol, no.



https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6269#msg6269

You must improve your shilling game, theymos is paying you for this crap?

Sounds like laying the groundwork for a disinfo campaign when Chinese miners fork to a larger max blocksize. Sowing the seeds now to favor an adversarial mindset when it comes to plans coming from China.

Nah, I’m probably just wish thinking… More likely that “cobra” is just acting like a petty tyrant again, similar to the last time he showed up, wanting to edit satoshi’s whitepaper.

Thanks for the very thought provoking post Meni.

It may well be the most truly revolutionary component of satoshi's invention: While the system is operationally managed by machine law, there are always economic forces interacting with it and each other, and in a sense, the psychology of the market rules the machines. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it innately refuses to go back in, constantly reinventing itself to resist capture by those that would harness it for personal gain.

Forking away for ideological reasons is always an inherent right, but it will probably fail unless there is a significant psychological and economic power that is served by or attracted to it. Matters of proportional value between forks will be arbitrated on the exchanges. 

I'm of the opinion that hard forks are a sort of honest referendum on economic changes to the system. And in contrast, soft forks that change economic rules (segwit)... are subverting that potential referendum, avoiding it, dragging powerless individual users along... without active consent. However, if the number of those who disagree with the soft fork is strong enough... they might be capable of successfully forking off too.

A hard fork makes forking off much easier for the party in disagreement, and this isn't a bad thing, it's maximizing economic choices in the marketplace. This mimics the system of mutation and adaptation at work in the natural world, and is much more likely to survive in the long term vs monolithic and ideologically centralized development decision structures.

Your perception is wrong. They have the support of bitcoin.org, r/bitcoin, this here forum of elevated discourse... you know, the important stuff.

It's about control, and control of information is a key component. 


Letters and agreements are trash, cash and hash is all that matters.


Seem to be from where I sit.


Guess what happens if a prospective dev hops in the Core_dev IRC room and eventually voices a plan outside the scope of Gregory's roadmap?


Of course not, they will add merge mined sidechains like segwit which takes actual blocksize up to a potential 4MB. It also gives a 75% economic discount to signature heavy transactions like LN opening, balancing, and closing transactions, coming soon®. Your node will be crippled in terms of network awareness, but will still function, we want you to come along.


This is fine.

A strong miner majority hard fork to a bigger max_block_size would be much more likely to dominate in Bitcoin vs Ethereum's DAO bailout fork, directly because of the difference in difficulty adjustment. A good point, which can't be overstated. Core won't be supporting the HF though. Any change from Core, from here on out, will be a soft fork. And with some clever programming tactics, you can do just about anything you can imagine with a SF. Just need a half dozen miners on-board with Blockstream CTO Maxwell's the sole repo's roadmap to activate it.


There is going to be a split Bitcoin one way or the other... if HF supporters get mining support, the 1MB4EVA clan will change PoW and reset diff... and if 1MB4EVA + soft-fork-salad retains ASIC warehouse mining support, HF supporters will change PoW, and reset difficulty. Just need to get it listed to Polo, and you're off to the races. 

Wouldn't it be ironic?... if the "immutable 1MB ('cept for constant soft forks)" Bitcoin was mined in 4 gigantic chinese chicken coops... While the "higher max throughput" Bitcoin was highly decentralized with GPUs and stealing mining power and interest from ETH/ETC. It's a move in the game. We just haven't reached that point... yet.

On the contrary.


It could be sooner than many expect.



Some fault the miners for being slow to act, and too trusting... but in reality, they have to be very careful. If they do end up being compelled to do something contrary to the wishes of the dominant repository and its developers... they need to have taken every reasonable step at a compromise, an amicable middle ground. In a sense, they need to have been screwed over in an obvious way, to give them the moral justification to act in the spirit of the original agreement.



This may lead to the most ethically profound moment for Bitcoin yet, and the full "coming out" party for the functionality of Bitcoin's "core" incentive mechanism:



And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4seyk3/its_quiettoo_quiet/

I'm flattered. [hurriedly deletes snarky opener above]

Thanks for the engagement on the issues. Things get heated because both sides of this issue care passionately about it... and when you think about it... you can't have light without heat.

It isn't about terminology, it's about functionality. My non-segwit node doesn't understand anything about segwit. You may use it, but only miners and upgraded nodes understand anything about it. And if you want to pay a non-segwit address, you will not be using segwit. For further research see: Mircea Popescu (admittedly a loon), and his views on your altcoin.


I'm saying correlation =/= causation. SPV has served as an increasingly popular substitute for running a full node, which used to be the main way to use Bitcoin.

Hey, a Core dev, and altcoin founder, Mark Friedenbach, has confirmed:

The HK Agreement was a Farce: "Haha"

Sure they can, in fact, any nodes that don't upgrade to a segwit friendly version will consider pure segwit txs to be an altcoin.


Check your premises, running the qt client used to be the most common way to interact with the network, now it's not. SPV type interaction is well developed and widespread at this point. 


Incoherent non sequitur.



You strongly favor a centrally planned economy, which is a position, just not one I agree with.

Imperfect analogy is imperfect, obviously. But there is something to be learned from the idea that if capacity is fully saturated... any additional demand prices out some of the old users and some of the old use cases, as long as they are willing to outbid their competitors (other Bitcoin users). Yes, increasing throughput increases resource demand on full nodes, but so does segwit, moreso than a simple 2MB upgrade. (3MB increase in potential max load with 0.8MB throughput gain). Yes nodes can ignore segwit and consider it an altcoin, they can prune, they can reject inbound... I'm talking about full archival nodes. It's important to recognize that hardware and internet bandwidth has improved over the last 7 years.


Now we get to the heart of the matter. You say that miners would include any non-zero fee transaction just because they can. This is where the philosophical difference comes to a head. Some feel that without a production quota on blocksize, set by a priesthood of Core devs, miners would simply bloat blocks to infinity. They would willingly destroy the independent node network, simply because they're dumb? or they only care about this week's profits?

Others find this argument ridiculous, and counter to the very "core" principles that govern Bitcoin: Where free market incentives, and CPU consensus, rule the system... not centrally ordained software ministers.

Miners are uniquely placed [and designated by satoshi via the consensus mechanism] to best determine the size of their own blocks because they are directly beholden to the market, unlike devs with ambiguously disclosed stock options in VC startups.


I suppose this is the point where you should produce a chart where blocks were constantly at 1MB for the last 6 years... because free globally replicated storage. The reality would probably be more like what we've experienced so far... a steady rise in the use of Bitcoin, and a commensurate increase in blocksize. Not an immediate jump to the new max.

Again with the argument that miners bloat to infinity without a central authority stopping them...  all records of blocksize statistics refute this position.

• Miners do face a supply curve, and a propagation cost to larger blocks. The distinction of fee paying/spam is non-functional, as zero fee transactions are already ignored by miners and most nodes. Median fees are 8 cents or more, up from 2 cents a couple months ago, a 400% increase.
• He doesn't have to. It's obvious to an honest observer that 8 cents for the smallest tx possible is already greatly diminishing potential use cases. Blockstream says this is fine. Because (not currently available) payment contracts in LN will handle all that.
• It's not really up to Roger, or the most influential developers, to determine the dynamics of a fee market. It would and will exist with miners facing the free market and subsequently setting their own production levels. Beware the dangers of a centrally planned economy.

I could mirror your petulant conclusion, but, meh.

He’s also cunning enough to wait several months before vociferously denouncing it, calling the participants, including the president of his company, well-meaning dipshits.

Does nothing hm? The only risk is the risk of Core throwing their toys out of the pram and starting a 1MB4EVA keccak altcoin. Please explain the danger of header first mining, for the network, not for the miners that could potentially mine a block that nodes consider invalid. Concerns about SPV security can be assuaged, as Gregory once described.

Some of us recall, at the time of the second Stalling Bitcoin conference, your email to the mailing list literally became the Core roadmap. Some of us see the leadership dynamics at work in the core-dev irc chan. Bring down regulatory hellfire on you? Please. We just want to see you, your company, and your fellow Core devs make a good faith effort at a reasonable compromise… like the HK agreement.

The main concern about regulatory hellfire won’t be because it is directed at you, personally, that’s silly. It will probably relate to lightning hubs being designated MSBs depending on jurisdiction.


It would be a huge mistake to underestimate your competence in this field. Your influence on the Core project isn’t magical, most of it is well deserved. To deny that your influence is elevated above most, if not all participants though, is wishful thinking.

Your ideas are composed into an email to the mailing list… that email becomes the official Core roadmap… the initiatives outlined in your email are implemented…

The careful observer can see that you haven’t chosen to support things that just coincidentally happen to be what is meritoriously implemented… they are implemented because you chose to support them, while ignoring input from outside sources (notably from miners and [non-Blockstream] Bitcoin businesses).

If you wonder about the acrimony… consider that people, especially Bitcoiners, don’t like the idea of the table being tilted by those in positions of power. The “online community management” employed by Theymos on r/bitcoin, for example. The censorship and steering feels and looks like an attack, so... surprise surprise, perceived (and criminally real in the form of DDoS against classic nodes) aggression is met with retaliatory aggression.


Slippery slope, defined.

Well, I'll leave your opener alone... but, the difference would be 100%/1100%/2100% greater potential throughput vs the ~3.7 something global tps we have now.

Just because your personal automobile can't hold 100 passengers, doesn't mean you shouldn't never try fitting a couple more in there with you. 


I agree that the miners made a mistake. Basically, if Gregory Maxwell wasn't at the agreement, you don't have an agreement. 


If doubling the throughput of the network does almost nothing for scalability... then segwit does less than almost nothing for scalability with its 3MB per block max increase to data requirements and its 0.8MB gain in effective throughput.


Check your premises, the chinese miners are really the only ones left to put a check on the real cartel, the information/software cartel that is using artificial production quotas to centrally plan the economy. 

HaoBTC is signaling their displeasure, again, with the way the HK agreement is being unceremoniously turned to confetti.

HaoBTC and BTCC were the main pools to convince the others to attend, and reluctantly sign on to the HK agreement. Thus, they are the ones that look the most like fools for falling prey to this ruse.

Making agreements, shaking hands, smiling, having the agreement met with great fanfare from the press and the wider Bitcoin community... To toss the agreement into the garbage now, several months later, is about the biggest insult possible to eastern business sensibilities, where one's word and honorable dealings are very important.

This is turning out to be a poker game, with Core acting like they've got a royal flush, let's see if they get called.



https://twitter.com/HaoBTC
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-miners-hardfork-according-circulating-rumors/

 

The motivation behind “Cobra”s call to edit/obfuscate the original satoshi white paper seems clear as water from where I sit:

When you have changed Bitcoin and your views about its terminology so drastically as to actually be contrary to the white paper… you either humble yourself and revert to that original vision, or you scrub that history, literally or practically, from the collective memory.


While the title of this OP is not literally true, it is arguably an accurate depiction of the motivations involved.

“Cobra” - Only seems to pop up to aid the dominance of the Core repo. Scrubbing Coinbase from bitcoin.org, for deviation from the party line, is the last appearance I remember.

David Harding - Bitcoin Core contributor and public supporter “I started re-reading the paper a few minutes ago in order to inform this reply, and the main thing that seems changed so far is terminology---we have different names for many things than those Nakamoto used and we've decoupled some things that started out coupled (like mining and validation).”

Luke-Jr - Blockstream Contractor and major Core contributor. “Sounds reasonable as long as it's clear it isn't the original paper. Maybe an updated HTML version, with a clear link to the original at the top?”

Theymos - The strongest force in the “online community curation”  that reinforces Core dominance over the protocol, and an indispensable tool for making the Blockstream vision of Bitcoin’s future, a reality. “Interesting suggestion. The paper is definitely outdated, and I do often see people saying "just read the whitepaper!" as if the paper is still a good way to learn about Bitcoin.”

Thankfully, hours later, many voices of reason began to flood in, and put a damper on this extreme hubris.

Strange way to phrase that, as if the contrary would be a (good) thing. Also, this came a day(?) after that mysterious call for clarity from HaoBTC, a strong supporter of Core, almost as strong a Core supporter as BTCC.

The HK agreement includes something similar to this “horribly risky” plan, let that sink in.

The idea of the poster’s plan was to bring the 75% activation point to 90%, those in favor of strong consensus should favor such a development.

While I agree this seems to be largely conjecture and a wish-post on 8btc, the lack of any strong formal (or weak informal) denial was deafening. Keep in mind the context of Luke-Jr basically flicking HaoBTC off his shoulder the day prior.

Unlike here, where staff are paid to remain staunchly objective.

Created sick, and commanded to be sound.


Segwit on Litecoin first: 2016!


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphaloskepsis


Agreed


No, and yes, that is the storyline. The simple solution sits in the wheelhouse (or was it bikeshed?). While the complex one, is rushed along. 

Besides voluntarily bringing activation to 90%, miners could soft limit themselves to producing <1MB for as long as they wanted... thus bringing about a change, but not a fork, until they felt the economic support had formed.  

Yes, we can, as I’m sure Democritus could attest.  

An aside: I keep nervously hitting refresh on https://twitter.com/Excellion, it's showing nothing new... same for anyone else?

A year ago uncertainty was scary, 6 months ago uncertainty was scary, 4 months ago... "individuals" said some nice things and took some pictures, and made a deal they don't intend to keep. Now... well... hell, it almost feels like a relief someone is calling the big bluff.

P.S. murder isn't cool you two