4 ms·

That's temporary.

by disordinary 9y ago

That's temporary.

themagician 9y ago
That’s what they said. Then it wasn’t. Then it forked. I wouldn’t be surprised if it forks again.
- rjromero 9y ago
  You are legitimately the most retarded person I’ve ever encountered on the internet. Thanks for wasting my time.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - sctb 9y ago
    If you comment like this again we'll ban you. Please read the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- disordinary 9y ago
  Forking is positive and healthy. It's how they innovate.
- erentz 9y ago
  “They” are? Everyone seems to expect everything in Bitcoin development to happen by magic and complain when things don’t happen quite fast enough. These complainers are rarely writing code to make it happen themselves though. If you don’t like it, get involved and help it move faster. Lightning is testing right now, so people who want to help could start there by helping to test the network.
  - themagician 9y ago
    I’m using “they” to refer to the larger community. Go back a few years ago and look at hypotheticals about changing bitcoin to deal with scaling issues. The thought was that when changes were needed the community would vote for those changes. Simple. Until it wasn’t. But now voting power is too consolidated for any real community change to occur. The block size needs to change. Lightning doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. It just creates a new group of people with power to confirm transactions. Decentralized… until it isn’t. There was this idea early on that power would be distributed across a wide range of people and the future of BTC would be transparent and democratic. I don’t know that mining pools were really forseen, at least not in the way the exist today. I guess my point of this whole thread was that we quickly found out when something is “decentralized” it just results in a relatively small group of people becoming the defacto authority through force (in this case, sheer computational power). It was thought that wouldn’t be possible. But here we are.
    - erentz 9y ago
      Lightning solves the fundamental problem that a blockchain can’t scale to support the number of transactions needed. A block size limit increase can only get you so far. The block size will still need to increase with lightning at some point but it’ll be many orders of magnitude less. Under lightning who is this new group that confirms transactions you’re concerned about? At the moment hashing power is fairly well distributed on the Bitcoin blockchain, not at all well on BCH. For lightning transactions there could be thousands of “people” you can decide to open a channel with. You can set up your own nodes if you wish.
    - not_kurt_godel 9y ago
      > when something is “decentralized” it just results in a relatively small group of people becoming the defacto authority through force Failure to grasp this principle accounts for a large percentage of libertarians, and to somewhat of a lesser, though still significant, degree, ideological conservatives.

That's temporary.

themagician 9y ago

That’s what they said. Then it wasn’t. Then it forked. I wouldn’t be surprised if it forks again.

rjromero 9y ago
You are legitimately the most retarded person I’ve ever encountered on the internet. Thanks for wasting my time.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sctb 9y ago
  If you comment like this again we'll ban you. Please read the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
disordinary 9y ago
Forking is positive and healthy. It's how they innovate.
erentz 9y ago
“They” are? Everyone seems to expect everything in Bitcoin development to happen by magic and complain when things don’t happen quite fast enough. These complainers are rarely writing code to make it happen themselves though. If you don’t like it, get involved and help it move faster. Lightning is testing right now, so people who want to help could start there by helping to test the network.
- themagician 9y ago
  I’m using “they” to refer to the larger community. Go back a few years ago and look at hypotheticals about changing bitcoin to deal with scaling issues. The thought was that when changes were needed the community would vote for those changes. Simple. Until it wasn’t. But now voting power is too consolidated for any real community change to occur. The block size needs to change. Lightning doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. It just creates a new group of people with power to confirm transactions. Decentralized… until it isn’t. There was this idea early on that power would be distributed across a wide range of people and the future of BTC would be transparent and democratic. I don’t know that mining pools were really forseen, at least not in the way the exist today. I guess my point of this whole thread was that we quickly found out when something is “decentralized” it just results in a relatively small group of people becoming the defacto authority through force (in this case, sheer computational power). It was thought that wouldn’t be possible. But here we are.
  - erentz 9y ago
    Lightning solves the fundamental problem that a blockchain can’t scale to support the number of transactions needed. A block size limit increase can only get you so far. The block size will still need to increase with lightning at some point but it’ll be many orders of magnitude less. Under lightning who is this new group that confirms transactions you’re concerned about? At the moment hashing power is fairly well distributed on the Bitcoin blockchain, not at all well on BCH. For lightning transactions there could be thousands of “people” you can decide to open a channel with. You can set up your own nodes if you wish.
  - not_kurt_godel 9y ago
    > when something is “decentralized” it just results in a relatively small group of people becoming the defacto authority through force Failure to grasp this principle accounts for a large percentage of libertarians, and to somewhat of a lesser, though still significant, degree, ideological conservatives.