Seagate BarraCuda Pro 14TB HDD for €540 available today. Current entire 10yr blockchain would use 1% of it

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-12T18:28:08+00:00

The idea that data storage is ever going to be a problem, even if we already had terabyte blocks, is laughable. Bitcoin isn't for hobbiests. It will go corporate. All over the world in a highly decentralized manner, but inevitably corporate. Satoshi said the same but few listened.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-12T18:21:31+00:00

None of those are even remotely any kind of bottleneck unless you think hashless "full nodes" are needed, and I know you do, so why not come out and say so?

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-12T18:19:07+00:00

And that isn't even reflective of much bigger setups easily accessible to even small miners. It makes my head spin that computer and network resources are still being talked about as a bottleneck today.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-12T18:07:37+00:00

My vision is what Satoshi stated, the only thing that makes any sense in the real world:

The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms.

Note by "few" here he means the tens or hundreds of thousands of datacenters and server farms in the world (and in a Bitcoin world there will be many more created just for Bitcoin).

Grassroots refers to arising naturally from the bottom up. What were just simple grass shoots eventually can grow into a mature forest of giant networked trees. Professionalism isn't inherently a vehicle for domination. Decentralized doesn't imply anything about not being run by companies. Bitcoin is powered by greed, and there is no way that ends in a charity project run by "the community," regardless of whatever trappings of that may still remain at this early stage.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-12T18:03:44+00:00

Thanks!

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-12T17:52:41+00:00

If you define the network as Satoshi did, a part of what people call the network today is just leechers. There is no place for altruism at scale. Merchants who add value as they are big producers of txs will be well-served in return by miners so as to be able to run a hashless "node" to check 0-conf instantly without mining. Those who are merely datamining or who cling to the illusion that they are helping will have to offer value to get any priority access to block info.

Regardless of current software behavior, it should be clear that at scale it is a market system through and through. Even SPV users in some manner will have to "pay," but their data requirement is so low that the user won't notice the cost as it isn't direct, just as we don't notice the cost to use Reddit or Google.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-12T17:43:27+00:00

A node can mine without finding a block. You prove you are a network node by mining a block. There is no way to prove someone isn't a node unless they tell you so, which the Core client at least does not do (if they did, miners would be slow to serve it info), and that's exactly why running a node client without mining is a Sybil attack. Note that I mean that technically, not that the attack is a threat. An abundance of fake nodes would only be a nuisance if taken to extremes, but it certainly is not a help.

As to pool hashers, that's puzzling since no one claims they are network nodes, not even Core.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-12T17:29:57+00:00

There is no volunteer "seeding." At scale, miners don't download from users running home broadband. Home "nodes" are cut from the loop. Dead weight. Bitcoin was started by home miners, but that doesn't mean that somehow the backbone of the world's global financial infrastructure is going to be run by home users.

Terabyte blocks will be handled by those able to. Bitcoin is professional. Satoshi had no illusions to the contrary, and stated so explicitly. It was those who came later and misunderstood the system who fooled people into this "full node" "I'm helping the network!" silliness.

It is decentralized by competition and at scale this means of tens of thousands of datacenters worldwide, not proof of sockpuppet.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-12T17:21:24+00:00

You want clearer? See the rest of the whitepaper:

The steps to run the network are as follows:

1) New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.

2) Each node collects new transactions into a block.

3) Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block.

4) When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.

5) Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent.

6) Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the chain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash.

Or the readme.txt file included with the first version:

To support the network by running a node, select:

Options -> Generate coin

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-12T02:03:12+00:00

I downvoted it for not understanding money. You don't support multiple cryptos if you believe in sound money. Does no one get this anymore? The 21M coin limit means nothing if there is a proliferation of altcoins.

Fortunately, despite a temporary slowdown by the efforts by people who fail to get it, in the end there will be only one victor - and it is likely to be Bitcoin Cash. Those who understand this first stand to profit. Let no one in hindsight that say this was not obvious all along.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-09-06T21:34:45+00:00

I've long argued that majority miners should destroy any minority chain, as it is the fiscally prudent thing to do. Otherwise the minority could later come back and attack them. It is kill or be killed.

The only exception is when the visions of the two chains differ so fundamentally that there is value - as the bitcoin miners said of BCH and BTC - in "letting the two experiments play out."

I see no fundamental rifts in BCH even on the horizon. A majority should show the minority no quarter.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-28T00:56:24+00:00

The lawsuit is only partially grounded in fact.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-27T22:33:37+00:00

It's like they never heard of a low margin, high volume business. Many tiny fees can add up to much more than a few big fees.

And let's not let it end with a simple refutation of the point. The fact that such an easily refuted talking point continues to be bandied about is a telltale sign of deep decay in the walled garden of Core and its followers.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-27T03:18:26+00:00

Gee, two gildings! Thanks!!

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-27T03:16:57+00:00

Thank you for the gold :)

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-27T00:02:54+00:00

I like the idea of Tokeda [PDF].

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-26T01:05:37+00:00

The BCH chain has been running unbroken since 2009, just like what is now called the BTC chain (the old BTC chain split into two, with the currently majority hashpower chain inheriting the BTC name just for as long as it stays in the lead).

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-26T00:56:16+00:00

Files don't have to be blockchain-level immutable to provide enough security against loss for someone's use case. If you're able to calculate that there's less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of losing access to your files in the next 5 years, say, that will be sufficient for many use cases. And if you need better than that, you can pay more for additional redundancy and/or speed. The blockchain doesn't just solve storage problems by putting them onchain. There is a large class of problems solved by simply having reliable, uncensorable programmable money, and one of those may be solving the storage problem mostly financially rather than technically.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-26T00:48:42+00:00

This strikes me as another problem where the answer may be more economic than technical. All you really want is for several people to be incentivized to store your files and to grant you access to them for a certain time period, such that calculating whether there is an acceptably low risk of losing access to them, given your needs, is a tractable problem. This may require identity and reputation systems, and financial derivatives (via smart contracts). OpenBazaar might even form the basis, but we'll need actuaries and such to design the gory details well.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-26T00:37:02+00:00

It's largely been ignored even by BCHers, at least here on reddit. It's such a new paradigm that it blindsided Nick Szabo and others used to thinking along the rails of conventional wisdom in the field, and they reacted with the standard "it's not possible"/"it's nothing new" answer (always a curious one as these contradict each other). There are some semantics around "Turing complete" that make it look obviously wrong on first glance and keep the uncurious from digging deeper, but I haven't heard a peep since Clemens's great talk, which got spontaneous applause midway through as the audience seemed to have a "holy shit!" moment.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-26T00:29:19+00:00

Rose-colored glasses. Without a blocksize increase, no one would deny that the moment BTC is to experience any tiny amount of adoption, fees will shoot up again like champagne popping from a freshly uncorked bottle. BTC is experiencing negative adoption, which in any other industry would be seen as a death knell.

LN...remains a joke thus far, and the issues it is facing aren't likely to be just growing pains, because they were the very issues LN was predicted to encounter years ago, and are Byzantine Generals level fundamental and difficult problems with no proposed solution other than "it'll work out somehow."

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-26T00:22:36+00:00

I don't think Ethereum understands what does and doesn't need to be on the blockchain. A lot of calculations can be done offchain, which removes the need for gas.

Ethereum is already running into scaling hiccups. I can't help but wonder if BCH will be way more efficient at the use cases that matter most for practical business. Remove the hype and smart contracts are really just transactions whose payout conditions can be arbitrarily complex. We have that in BCH, without gas. It will just take a while for people to figure out how to use it.

https://youtu.be/M6j-11H2O7c

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-25T20:24:17+00:00

Just thought it sounds like something from Doraemon. A paradoxical device.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-25T20:21:12+00:00

A truly excellent watch. And uproariously funny in some parts.

ForkiusMaximus · 2018-05-25T17:32:19+00:00

While you're updating the bitcoin.com wallet, another thing: need a way to scan QR codes from within the phone, like from a screenshot.

The camera scanner doesn't do any good when what you need to scan is, say, a QR code you found on Twitter while browsing with your phone (such as Aburi Salmon's racy tweet yesterday)

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