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Love this response in the comment section by Jacob Eliosoff: > My point isn't who's right and who's wrong. It's that well-informed publications like Bitcoin Ma

by qopp 11y ago

Love this response in the comment section by Jacob Eliosoff: > My point isn't who's right and who's wrong. It's that well-informed publications like Bitcoin Magazine have an important role to play here in spelling out the specific technical questions and their pros and cons, and that requires interviewing more than one side Here's one way the article is wrong: > The main (though not only) reason bigger blocks favor bigger miners has to do with latency. Gregory Maxwell (a small block advocate) himself has said this is not true: >The technical/security implications of larger blocks are related to other things than propagation time, if you assume people are using the available efficient relay protocol (or better). Also calling Small Block advocates "Decentralists" is really silly in my opinion. Both sides want increased decentralization.

stingraycharles 11y ago
Yes, and they even acknowledge in the article that several mining pools are already sharing the block header with each other before propagating the entire block. They completely ignore that when talking about the latency issues with increasing block size, which makes me extremely skeptical whether or not this article is biased. Myself, attempting to write an application on top of the blockchain that would store extra information in the blockchain, have met a huge resistance from that community, that came along with a lot of name-calling and not understanding the implications of "filling the blockchain with garbage". I came to the conclusion that this is a really, really fragile issue within the Bitcoin community that many people feel extremely strongly about, and that the core issue is that every member with commit access can veto a decision out, effectively making the project come to a halt. Many organizations now have a huge financial stake in the success of Bitcoin, which for some is reason enough to be against it. I think the XT fork is an extremely interesting strategy, because it caters directly to those institutions that have the most financial stake in Bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised if this problem will escalate even further in the future, and it will be very interesting to watch.
martindale 11y ago
Reducing the scalability problem to "large vs. small" of a single variable is almost as damaging to intellectual debate as two-party politics are. That, or they're directly isomorphic.

by qopp 11y ago

stingraycharles 11y ago

Yes, and they even acknowledge in the article that several mining pools are already sharing the block header with each other before propagating the entire block. They completely ignore that when talking about the latency issues with increasing block size, which makes me extremely skeptical whether or not this article is biased. Myself, attempting to write an application on top of the blockchain that would store extra information in the blockchain, have met a huge resistance from that community, that came along with a lot of name-calling and not understanding the implications of "filling the blockchain with garbage". I came to the conclusion that this is a really, really fragile issue within the Bitcoin community that many people feel extremely strongly about, and that the core issue is that every member with commit access can veto a decision out, effectively making the project come to a halt. Many organizations now have a huge financial stake in the success of Bitcoin, which for some is reason enough to be against it. I think the XT fork is an extremely interesting strategy, because it caters directly to those institutions that have the most financial stake in Bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised if this problem will escalate even further in the future, and it will be very interesting to watch.

martindale 11y ago

Reducing the scalability problem to "large vs. small" of a single variable is almost as damaging to intellectual debate as two-party politics are. That, or they're directly isomorphic.