
10 GB Blocks - kushti
https://ryanxcharlestimes.com/10-gb-blocks-e7ed69e54a66#.4di6guakh
======
Strilanc
Running a tweaked client like this seems really risky. Bitcoin is a
_consensus_ protocol. If clients disagree about which blocks are valid, you
lose consensus. You're allowing attackers to inject controversial blocks that
fork the history, resulting in double-spending or DOS attacks on _you_.

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supergreg
Which will only work if at least half the miner population agrees to use this
tweaked client

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ybx
Actually around 75%

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lappa
51% is guarantees that over infinite time consensus will be achieved. 75% is
just a stronger guarantee that it will with higher probability come to
consensus in a shorter time.

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superkuh
Direct democracy is great but it has problems. Even though I'm a technical
user and early bitcoin adopter I still don't understand enough about the
protocol itself to decide between the proposed solutions to transaction rate
scaling.

So I just end up running, and implicitly supporting, the core client from my
distro's repositories.

~~~
yc1010
So you chose "representative democracy" option by having the distro
maintainers decide for you

At least bitcoin gives options to chose...

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comboy
It's about trust. No matter what software you are running you always trust
somebody. Intel, gcc, maintainers etc. You can't verify everything yourself.
But one screw up can ruin somebody's reputation and then you can decide to
trust somebody else. Well, with a client. Not with the protocol though.

Most people simply can't have deep understanding of Bitcoin internals. It
would be terrible if Bitcoin would be driven by democracy in the way that
protocol becomes what most people want (yeah, I'm not hoping for karma with
this one). Because then it would become the same as politics. It would drop
down to marketing and manipulating memes by some small minority optimizing for
its profit.

The protocol is decided by miners who optimize for their profit and Bitcoin
success is in their best interest because their earnings depend on it.

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rmc
> _But with bitcoin, I can implement any change I want, immediately, just by
> modifying the software._

No, you've created software that works the same now, but could cause a fork.
Which means it's not a change to bitcoin, but a new software version./

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wolfgke
> No, you've created software that works the same now, but could cause a fork.

Where is the problem? As far as I understand it (but prove me wrong!) in the
extreme case we'll have two Bitcoin blockchains: One without the block size
restriction and one with. In each of these two blockchains there will be a
consensus (that's what the Bitcoin protocol is in principle about). In the
"typical" case the supporters of one of these two forks will stop mining in
it, since they see that it is "not mainstream enough". If both blockchains
have lots of supporters behind, we'll have "two different bitcoins". Here it
can get interesting, since now we have "two different products/bitcoins",
where the market will have to decide (and in the extreme case this ability to
choose will damage bitcoin - here also things get interesting).

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JayJee
Every time I think I understand Bitcoin a little bit something like this comes
out and washes that feeling away

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yitchelle
For a bitcoin newbie like me, is this not like getting a dollar bill, change
the picture on the front to my face and calling a new currency?

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inoop
It's more like introducing a new $10.000 dollar bill that only you accept, but
no-one else.

He's making it sound like Bitcoin is all about freedom of choice, when in
reality a small group of ~6 Chinese miners decide what the block size is.

~~~
tyho
That's a common misconception. The miners can do what they like, but if they
start mining blocks that the exchanges (and everyone else) don't accept the
blocks they mine, then they can't sell their coins. Bitcoins democracy comes
not from what the miners think, but what the people who accept bitcoin as
payment think.

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XorNot
Almost like every other currency?

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transfire
Why was a limit made at all?

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1ris
Because every transaction has to be stored forever, on every single client.
This was the easies method to prevent somebody from makeing the blockchain
serveral terabytes.

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oleganza
Not exactly. You can prune txs if you don't need to keep them for archiving
purposes. But you have to validate the whole blocks to verify your own
payments. You cannot selectively validate portions of blocks ("shard
blockchain") and still have perfect proofs of validity of payments to you.

If every block was capped at 100 Gb and there were miners creating such
blocks, then only a handful of companies would be able to validate the
blockchain and therefore mine and receive payments. That would reduce
censorship-resistance and make the system less decentralized.

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purpled_haze
"Personally, I’m in favor of global adoption, but I don’t really care if it is
used for more than just settlement."

If you want global adoption, why not go all the way?

Personally, I will never use bitcoin unless I have to, because I don't trust
much currency these days, much less a currency/ETF that is used for illegal
activities, that you had to "get in early" to make any money off of, and that
people have had problems with or need to hack clients for because of problems
with its definition.

I think eventually we will "regress", although I cringe using that word
because I think it was always a better option, to trading and bartering
directly without some flawed and inappropriate way to represent value.

The things that really matter for trade are basically services, products,
resources, or food, etc. for sustenance. We should be able to share these
things, and for those that don't want to share or want a workable system
around sharing, they can trade.

Sure, our society's not really setup for this anymore at global scale,
although we do trade services and products both at micro and macro levels.
But, I think if we keep relying on (virtual) currency or similar, whether it
be dollars, euros, yen, rubles, bitcoin, or anything else, then we are just
setting the chessboard for something to completely screw the system.

In the end, there are things that matter, and things that don't. Money for the
sake of money never mattered. And even if you think it matters, you don't
matter to it. Love and life are what matters. There is no virtual currency for
those things.

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travisby
> Personally, I will never use bitcoin unless I have to, because I don't trust
> much currency these days, much less a currency/ETF that is used for illegal
> activities, that you had to "get in early" to make any money off of, and
> that people have had problems with or need to hack clients for because of
> problems with its definition.

You're in luck! I think USD is just what you need. It's never been used for
illegal activities, and there are no clients built on top of it that add extra
layers of abstraction and bring with it their own sets of problems. In fact,
you can start collecting USD tomorrow and have just as likely of a chance of
being rich as if your family started collecting it when they "got in early"

~~~
icebraining
And it never had problems of definition, like being suddenly and unilaterally
unpegged from other assets.

~~~
purpled_haze
like gold

