In that case, let's just ask Hal's soul how it feels the next time we see it.

Miners can't fork without the userbase also doing so--not meaningfully, anyhow. There seems to be a misconception that miners are able to, "rewrite", the network rules if enough of them collude, and this simply isn't true. By the logic that miners could force the 2MB block hardfork, they could also decide that the Bitcoin reward per block should increase to 100, because they have majority hashpower and anything they say goes, right?

That's not how it works though. What happens if miners decide to switch to some rules that defy existing consensus rules is that all other nodes--users, merchants, exchanges, other miners--will see their blocks as invalid and reject them, and miners and nodes using the existing consensus rules will continue to build and validate their own valid chain. The forked miners will effectively be mining their own fork that no one else is using, wasting their own hashpower for a no-prize.

Something they could do with majority hashpower is harass the network by building malicious (but valid) blocks--perhaps by not including any transactions at all as a sort of protest. They'd have to be pretty nuts to want to pull shit like this though, as their profits come directly from the value of the Bitcoin they mine.

Well, this is bizarre. Assuming this is true--which is a lot to assume--this would seem to indicate that the miners don't understand the way their power works. Say they switch off to mining Classic_ and trigger the activation; give it a month or whatever, and they start popping out their 2MB blocks, which are then rejected by all non-Classic_ nodes on the network. Unless they convince the rest of the system to switch to an implementation compatible with their consensus rule change, no one else will accept their blocks as valid; all they'll have accomplished is that they've forked themselves onto an altcoin.

Not sure why mining pools would even really care all that much about 2MB... What do they think it would do for them? Make their operating costs a bit higher? If they're hoping to see increased adoption cause a price boost, capacity (especially in small amounts) seems like the wrong approach--it's not like 2MB blocks make Bitcoin easier to use, increase its privacy, increase merchant acceptance, or make it possible to buy milk at the grocery store without waiting 10 minutes for a confirmation

But hopefully this is just some bullshit scare and doesn't have any credibility. I'd like to hope that miners are smart enough to not bite the hand that feeds them in an absurd attempt to completely sink themselves.

If only Bitcoin followed the UK's lead and let big software changes be decided by a 52% majority vote--then Bitcoin could be as stable as Europe!

Well to be fair, Coinbase had already sold out to, "Classic"--they were already fans of trying to commandeer and centralise Bitcoin. This partnership will probably be helpful for some people, I suppose--I've sold small amounts of coin for PayPal credit in the past myself, though these days I just HODL most of what I get and spend (or donate) a little every now and again. Whether you like PayPal or not, it is useful for a lot of online purchases, so having it as an option will probably be handy for some Coinbase users. Obviously you lose a lot of Bitcoin's more interesting features when you go through something like Coinbase or PayPal, but if doing so suits your particular needs, then cool.

Though give it a few years and Bitcoin might well be able to do everything PayPal can do without having to give up your privacy and trust someone else with your money

Not sure if anyone posted this earlier when it happened, but the CSV softfork has now reached its mining consensus threshold and will activate in ~a couple weeks. If anyone was wondering why, "support", for the softfork has been dropping off on measures like these, it's because miners are now switching off their signalling as not to cause unwarranted warning messages after activation.

Personally, I'm impressed that miners were able to reach the 95% consensus threshold in the fairly timely manner that they did. Hopefully segwit's activation can go smoothly as well so developers can really start to roll out the first wave of payment channel implementations

Damn, thanks for that lengthy and comprehensive response--big confidence builder as it (more-or-less) confirms a lot of my assumptions regarding the concerns in the system. A decentralised backbone upon which other systems can be built seems like the right choice if decentralisation is something which we value. Second-layer solutions that make tradeoffs of decentralisation/whatnot to meet the demands of higher capacity can happen (and already do--just look at all the off-chain trades on exchanges) on top of a decentralised ledger, but second-layer solutions cannot return decentralisation to Bitcoin if it is lost.

Honestly, I'm going long on Bitcoin anyhow (most of my transactions involve combining small outputs from altcoin mining), so current usability/capacity concerns aren't especially pressing for me, especially with huge improvements in these areas already in development. It will be an experience to see how this plays out over the next few years--just what will Bitcoin look like by the 2020 halving?

Out of curiosity, would you be willing to state your personal opinion on under what conditions it would be appropriate and/or beneficial to raise the blocksize limit? What particular concerns, technical or otherwise, do you consider most important when it comes to considering alterations to this particular aspect of the system? Of course, blocksize is only one aspect of capacity (and a horribly inefficient method of scaling capacity), but I'm curious if there are any particular conditions under which you feel raising the blocksize would be the appropriate solution. Is it only a last-resort method of increasing capacity? And when it comes to capacity, to what extent should it be increased? Is, "infinite", capacity even something we should be targetting?

It is my understanding that Core's implementation of segwit will also include an overall, "blocksize", increase (between both the witness and transaction blocks), though with a few scalability improvements that should make the increase less demanding on the system (linear verification scaling with segwit and Compactblocks come to mind). Do you personally support this particular instance of increasing the overall, "blocksize"?

To be clear, I'm just asking as someone who'd like to hear your informed opinion. In the short-term I'm not exactly worried about transaction capacity--certainly not hardfork worried--as with segwit on the way and the potential for LN or similar mechanisms to follow, short-term capacity issues could well be on their way out (really all I want short-term is an easier way to flag and use RBF so I can fix my fees during unexpected volume spikes). What I'm more curious about at this point are your views on the long-term--the, "133MB infinite transactions", stage.

Of course, you're free to keep your opinions to yourself or only answer as much as you're comfortable divulging; it's not my intent to have you say anything that would encourage people to sling even more shit at you than they already have been lately

Live out a happy life, I suppose. Would probably diversify investment into a variety of things and otherwise sit on a stack of Bitcoins. If Bitcoin were to soar to something like that, it seems almost inevitable that it would have to be a practical currency that could be used for virtually anything, so actually, "cashing out", would probably be meaningless--I mean really, why would you cash out to dollars (which are guaranteed to lose value over time) when you already have a spendable store of value that has proven itself a million-fold

...Unless the reason Bitcoin is worth $1M is because the dollar has become completely worthless. In that case I'd probably end up dying in some war or another sparked by the global instability caused by the financially insolvent (but heavily armed) United States.

It really is impressive how much time you've spent spitting out numbers and crying foul about block sizes without spending 30 seconds looking up, "median", in a dictionary. Despite how often you like to bring up Lauda not understanding C++ or Java or whatever, you don't even bother making the effort to understand the basic terms you're trying to argue about--and it's not as if this is some isolated incident. Yes, the average transaction size is greater than 250 bytes. No one ever said otherwise. It doesn't matter what accusations you levy or what numbers you cook up if it's all based on basic misunderstandings.

Sorry for this rather off-topic post... My fault for not having franky on ignore, I guess.

Incoming Classic_, "argument", about how the, "Blockstream cult", is worse and claims that gmaxwell is the puppetmaster pulling the strings of dozens of independent developers. 

Yeah, when people are content with something, they tend to just stay silent and continue on--everything's working, after all. It's the same kind of mentality you get with product reviews where people who encounter no problems and just go on happily using the product don't feel the need to say much, whereas defective units are likely to get a big negative review about the thing being unreliable and having terrible customer service and whatever. Classic supporters generate a lot of noise because they are under the impression that Bitcoin is broken, but most of the people who don't share that opinion? They just continue on with life, maybe thinking about the amazing capabilities we might be seeing in the future of Bitcoin.

Upon activation of the Classic hardfork, around 25% of nodes on the network--probably more since the activation threshold only counts miners and plenty of people seem fond of running old node versions--would be either forced to upgrade or kicked off the network entirely... unless the user ecosystem (vendors, exchanges, etc...) isn't supporting Classic anyways so 75% of miners just end up forking themselves onto something no one uses

Yes, segwit activation will cause non-upgraded nodes to lose some functionality in that they will be unable to participate in new segwit transactions, but this is so obviously better than the alternative of a hardfork which would just kick them off the network entirely.

So how much longer before Toranoana and other such stores start offering Bitcoin payment options? Japan has a unique market for a lot of stuff inhabiting a, "grey area", in most other developed countries, so it would be very interesting to have a less conventional payment option for a lot of things...

Checked back (as I do from time to time) to see if anything has been done to address the shares issue; it would appear not. For those unaware, there has been a persistent discrepancy in shares credited to the tune of ~20-25%. Here's a little test I ran quite some time back on the pool. At any rate, it seems prudent to account for a 20-25%, "fee", when mining on this pool.

Like all YAAMP forks, zpool offers an api readout for all their algos, which gives current estimates. Not exactly the easiest to parse for a human, but great for a machine; which is what you should have handling switching for you unless you want to spend all day watching profitabilities go up and down.

I find it deeply troubling that you seem to consider an environment of multiple implementations that constantly threaten to fork the Bitcoin network over their pet issues to be the healthiest system. Altcoins are a fantastic mechanism for testing new ideas and proposing different models, without the threat of forcing, "upgrades", across the entire ecosystem, inadvertently stealing people's coins, and possibly breaking everything if a hard fork is made to a faulty client--which is what clients like Classic threaten to do. gmaxwell doesn't seem to express an interest in working in that sort of environment--for reasons that should be pretty obvious--and I'd imagine that a great number of other developers would share similar positions on the matter.

The amount of discussion had over opt-in RBF was rather surprising; making out a node policy change like that to be as contentious as changes to consensus rules was mind-boggling.

VS, is there some big _Classic post or something that states all the stuff you've been posting? I ask because I feel that many of your points are arguments that I've seen gmaxwell respond to before when brought up by other people. He argues this stuff far better than I could ever hope to (being an actual developer and all), so I'd rather refer you to his posting history than bother trying to repeat stuff.

You're forgetting the alternative solution estimated to allow billions of people to make essentially unlimited transactions while retaining node decentralisation once technology makes it safe to scale up to 150MB blocks--lightning network. Obviously 150MB blocks are a long ways off from where we are now, but they're certainly closer than the 24GB blocks which would be needed under the current design to allow a similar throughput.

The Core plan for blocksize increase is not, "never", but, "not today". It seems that they have judged the difficulties associated with deploying a hard-fork to 2MB outweigh the gains which might be had from such a small increase. Maybe after we see segwit and weak blocks/IBLTs implemented to alleviate some of the technical limitations we can consider a blocksize increase, perhaps to something more substantial than 2MB, though as the calculations regarding the bandwidth/computational resources required for any given blocksize are beyond me, I won't make any guesses as to what size we might want to target.

Or maybe a fork to 2MB will be announced after segwit to attempt to lessen complaints, though I can't imagine this will change the minds of anyone convinced that, "blockstream is evil". My understanding is that segwit will fix the biggest technical problem associated with 2MB blocks (validation times potentially getting really long for particular blocks), but deployment is still a problem regardless.

So of course, most of the comments on that article on its website are along the lines of, "Blockstream is the evil empire!" Fantastic. No arguments you make or facts you present can breach that wall of ignorance. Blockstream people like gmaxwell can post ad infinitum saying things like:

But it doesn't matter, because in their heads, Blockstream is still somehow in control of and scheming to destroy everything.