10 ms·

As for why the Bitcoin Core developers were so quick to do this, the whitepaper has been a thorn in their side for years as it runs counter to the argument of B

by lawn 6y ago

As for why the Bitcoin Core developers were so quick to do this, the whitepaper has been a thorn in their side for years as it runs counter to the argument of Bitcoin being "digital gold" and should just be a settlement layer. So they saw this as an excuse to remove it.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
The whitepaper is why I view bitcoin’s value proposition as a gold-like store of value. Can you say more about why you think the whitepaper discourages that view?
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  The whitepaper didn’t expect/predict most hashing power being controlled by very few actors. Edit: I’d say the whitepaper did expect this and basically said it could be a problem: From the abstract: > As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attacker.
  - tylersmith 6y ago
    That's a fundamental security assumption made by Nakamoto consensus. It's like assuming the discrete log problem is hard. If/when the assumption doesn't hold the security is gone.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      That’s a better way of putting it. It’s a good argument for ASIC resistance and CPU dependence because it’s a lot harder to control General-Purpose CPU supply than ASIC supply. Meanwhile my regular joe laptop can earn double its electricity cost in Monero (before it thermally locks up).
    - sedeki 6y ago
      I am not a hardcore bitcoiner, but the price would fall quickly if these few controlling nodes would do something malicious. Which is against their own interest.
      - Scoundreller 6y ago
        Probably. But a core aspect of decentralization is that you shouldn’t need to trust a few others at all.
        codehalo 6y ago
        I think it's more like limits: Trust minimization, not trust elimination.
        GoblinSlayer 6y ago
        Who cares about technicalities, the point was to let people hold the system in their own hands.
        ChainOfFools 6y ago
        In Trust we trust!
  - 153791098c 6y ago
    Satoshi did predict just that, even before he launched the network (in 2008). “At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.” – 2008. “At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the rest of the farm over a LAN.” – 2010. “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. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don’t generate.” – 2010.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mdoms 6y ago
  You only need to read the first couple of sentences of the whitepaper to understand that it was primarily designed as a digital currency with a focus on spending/transacting.
  - toolz 6y ago
    Are those two concepts mutually exclusive? A liquid currency that holds value in unstable economies would seem to serve both the purpose of being spendable as well as a stable investment like gold. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what it means to be "gold like" though.
    - lawn 6y ago
      No they aren't mutually exclusive. In fact sound money should be both a good store of value and a medium of exchange (in other words work well for payments). The problem is that Bitcoin's high fees has made it unsuitable for regular payments, so proponents only have the store of value explanation left.
      - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
        Exactly this. To me it was proof that 99% of the Bitcoin community (such as the Bitcoin subreddit which had an absurd amount of influence, thus why taking it over and censoring discussion was so effective) didn't care about Bitcoin as a currency and had never once used it as a currency. They just bought it on Coinbase and never even transferred to their own wallet. Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design.
        Melting_Harps 6y ago
        > Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design. Big blocks would have never solved this issue, and you're still free to use Bcash, but you won't as no one does... because that wasn't the issue. Second layer solutions are the crux of that story, and people who didn't or wouldn't understand that were vocal non-tech people (like Roger Ver) who don't understand basic network protocol topology and why things need to run on secondary, tertiary etc... layers on Bitcoin (the Network) that uses bitcoin (the token) to validate your $20 tx on the blockchain, which by the way if you paid $60 for goes to show you never understood Bitcoin the network. No one would sacrifice that much to miners instead of just opting for fiat at that point unless there was an absolute imperative need to do so, which at $20 is clearly not the case. I should know I did it. I've been in this for a long time and the only time tx fees were above $20 was when the Bcash fork happened and Ver/Jihan spammed the network. I paid $25 tx fee on behalf of a new customer (merchant I just on-boarded) that was panicking because they didn't understand mining fee priority (I did explain it to them) and thought they lost they money, when in reality the 5 sat/byte tx cleared in a weeks time and I just recovered my funds then. I discussed it and felt absolved of responsibility but rather than lose a potential client I just begrudgingly paid the mining fee, to Antminer/Jihan no less, which added insult to injury. This is far from ideal, and I have a stuck tx as we speak (2sat/byte were clearing without a problem until then) for a over a week now, but it just goes to show that these new billionaire class investors (Saylor) don't understand this tech at all and that they need to use their new found fortune to help flesh out LN to get it to function to its full potential without all this mempool bloat they've help create. Mainchain (layer 1) is doing EXACTLY what we would think would happen under these conditions even after Segwit, its purposely this way as this is the trade off for security, which makes it less than ideal as a settlement network for small, low cost, individual transactions. That's what LN is for and I wish these instituinal investment firms would understand that, to date only Jack Dorsey (an actual technologist/developer) has funded Lightening labs, while the Winklevoss, Saylors of the World just keep trying to compete for more headline grabbing media attention and ignoring this vital issue as they do not understand or care to take the time to learn this very obvious fact. As for me, I want them to keep doing this as it gives me a better buy-in position so I'm all for it. PS: Keep downvoting, but a 2.58 tx fee cleared in less than an hour with 5+ confirmations, thus proving my point. I think we're far from the bloat we saw back then proving Segwit worked as expected and block sizes weren't a viable option nor tenable a solution to our problem, which I sincerely remains one of LN progress .
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Satoshi couldn't have thought of a solution of the scaling issues, just like Mark Zuckerberg didn't design Facebook for billions of people originally. From the paper it's clear that he would have liked if all people could have access to P2P layer, but it's just technically impossible.
  - toomim 6y ago
    That's not entirely accurate. His solution was to increase the block limit [1], and use faster computers [2]. Note that Bitcoin Cash is currently implementing this, and succeeding at scaling to 1,100 tx/sec on testnet. (Bitcoin Core supports 3 to 7 tx/sec.) [1] "It can be phased in, like: if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete. When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade." ~ Satoshi Nakamoto, on bitcointalk.org, October 04, 2010, 07:48:40 PM [2] "Hi Mike, I'm glad to answer any questions you have. If I get time, I ought to write a FAQ to supplement the paper. There is only one global chain. The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size. By Moore's Law, we can expect hardware speed to be 10 times faster in 5 years and 100 times faster in 10. Even if Bitcoin grows at crazy adoption rates, I think computer speeds will stay ahead of the number of transactions. I don't anticipate that fees will be needed anytime soon, but if it becomes too burdensome to run a node, it is possible to run a node that only processes transactions that include a transaction fee. The owner of the node would decide the minimum fee they'll accept. Right now, such a node would get nothing, because nobody includes a fee, but if enough nodes did that, then users would get faster acceptance if they include a fee, or slower if they don't. The fee the market would settle on should be minimal. If a node requires a higher fee, that node would be passing up all transactions with lower fees. It could do more volume and probably make more money by processing as many paying transactions as it can. The transition is not controlled by some human in charge of the system though, just individuals reacting on their own to market forces. Eventually, most nodes may be run by specialists with multiple GPU cards. For now, it's nice that anyone with a PC can play without worrying about what video card they have, and hopefully it'll stay that way for a while. More computers are shipping with fairly decent GPUs these days, so maybe later we'll transition to that." ~ Satoshi Nakamoto in correspondence with Mike Hearn
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
I feel that /r/btc lunacy has made it's way to HN
- hanniabu 6y ago
  No, that sub is completely delusional
  - f430 6y ago
    A buttcoiner always sees another buttcoiner. edit: wow, didn't know so many people were against r/buttcoin its sad to see HN descend into this sort of madness.
    - 1996 6y ago
      Even if I'm generally pro-crypto and against HN negative stance on crypto, I upvoted you (and will vouch for your comments if needed) because buttcoin is an interesting community: they are educated on crypto, and their negative arguments are more than simple rebuttals. I spend some serious time there - it's a great source of news, a bit like HN Now to the moon with lambos! /s
      - f430 6y ago
        Sir, I tip my fedora in your general direction. It seems there are quite a bit of mEth heads here as well. /u/jstolfi has many disciples
- smelter 6y ago
  Excellent, yet another stream of text that must occupy my information grapevine to define a virtual value system utilized by people who are not creative enough to park their economic gains as deployed assets. One BTC is currently a post-tax yearly salary, a third of a tractor, at least one Bridgeport CNC lathe, 12 metric tons of cold rolled 304 stainless coil, or two springtime paid internships for folks out of high school (including their brand new Lincoln welders). When the price goes up, it means even more people do not know what to do with resources available to them. Kilowatt hour upon kilowatt hour that must be sequestered only because someone desired to "invest". A modern metric to measure mediocrity, stagnation, and indecision (a hockey stick graph).
hanniabu 6y ago
I don't think the 2 are mutually exclusive.
uncletammy 6y ago
They removed the whitepaper about as fast as they removed Gavin Andresen's commit access once they found justification. There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  From my experience in the community years ago, Bitcoin Core was a very insidious group of people that seized control of Bitcoin from within, obtained control of the Bitcoin subreddit and started banning anyone with even the most reasonable objections. They started promulgating this absurd notion that Bitcoin was a "store of value" exclusively: that is to say, was not intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash" (as Satoshi obviously intended) and that its value was purely related to "how much the other guy was willing to pay for your Bitcoin". So they turned it into this purely speculative thing. The whole fallacy of the "store of value" thing is two-fold: (1) Bitcoin's success and utility as a currency gives it a stable point to base its value around. For example, the value would be related to the net amount of transactions occurring (on the darknet usually) and the velocity of money, which would create a sort of natural equilibrium price where people are buying bitcoin as they need it, rather than hodling it to speculate. (2) Bitcoin, like any asset, is a store of value, but its ability to store value is the same whether it's worth $.0001 per coin or $40,000 per coin. So they basically turned it into a purely speculative instrument. --- The takeover of Bitcoin from within was a big red-pill moment for me. It was an attack vector I should have seen coming but didn't. I strongly belief that any cryptocurrency community where 99% of users are speculators who view the thing as a stock ticker and nothing more, basically dooms a cryptocurrency to failure. Anyway, Bitcoin Core as a whole and Blockstream as a company are very malicious actors who destroyed the beauty and elegance of Bitcoin so that they could build a company around exploiting the delta between what the tx fees should be and what they were. And beyond the unjustifiable censorship / suppression, they advanced tons of bogus arguments such as the notion that increasing the block size would ruin the decentralization of the bitcoin network. --- Oh, and lastly there will be a great need for public blockchain cryptos like Bitcoin: for example, if I donate to a non-profit I'd want all their transactions to be publicly viewable. But for normal usage-as-a-currency, I am a huge believer in XMR (monero), which masks who you're sending money to, how much money you sent, and how much money you have. It also has a lot of neat tech like adaptive block size limits, etc that avoided the transaction fee debacle of BTC.
eecks 6y ago
Why are you posting this as 'fact'? You do not know this, do you?
baby 6y ago
Source?

by lawn 6y ago

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

The whitepaper is why I view bitcoin’s value proposition as a gold-like store of value. Can you say more about why you think the whitepaper discourages that view?

Scoundreller 6y ago
The whitepaper didn’t expect/predict most hashing power being controlled by very few actors. Edit: I’d say the whitepaper did expect this and basically said it could be a problem: From the abstract: > As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attacker.
- tylersmith 6y ago
  That's a fundamental security assumption made by Nakamoto consensus. It's like assuming the discrete log problem is hard. If/when the assumption doesn't hold the security is gone.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    That’s a better way of putting it. It’s a good argument for ASIC resistance and CPU dependence because it’s a lot harder to control General-Purpose CPU supply than ASIC supply. Meanwhile my regular joe laptop can earn double its electricity cost in Monero (before it thermally locks up).
  - sedeki 6y ago
    I am not a hardcore bitcoiner, but the price would fall quickly if these few controlling nodes would do something malicious. Which is against their own interest.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      Probably. But a core aspect of decentralization is that you shouldn’t need to trust a few others at all.
      - codehalo 6y ago
        I think it's more like limits: Trust minimization, not trust elimination.
      - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
        Who cares about technicalities, the point was to let people hold the system in their own hands.
      - ChainOfFools 6y ago
        In Trust we trust!
- 153791098c 6y ago
  Satoshi did predict just that, even before he launched the network (in 2008). “At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.” – 2008. “At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms with one or two network nodes that feed the rest of the farm over a LAN.” – 2010. “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. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don’t generate.” – 2010.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mdoms 6y ago
You only need to read the first couple of sentences of the whitepaper to understand that it was primarily designed as a digital currency with a focus on spending/transacting.
- toolz 6y ago
  Are those two concepts mutually exclusive? A liquid currency that holds value in unstable economies would seem to serve both the purpose of being spendable as well as a stable investment like gold. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what it means to be "gold like" though.
  - lawn 6y ago
    No they aren't mutually exclusive. In fact sound money should be both a good store of value and a medium of exchange (in other words work well for payments). The problem is that Bitcoin's high fees has made it unsuitable for regular payments, so proponents only have the store of value explanation left.
    - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      Exactly this. To me it was proof that 99% of the Bitcoin community (such as the Bitcoin subreddit which had an absurd amount of influence, thus why taking it over and censoring discussion was so effective) didn't care about Bitcoin as a currency and had never once used it as a currency. They just bought it on Coinbase and never even transferred to their own wallet. Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design.
      - Melting_Harps 6y ago
        > Meanwhile people like me who actually cared about using the damn thing, would be paying a $60 transaction fee on a $20 purchase simply because the powers that be decided that increasing the blocksize, (aka increasing the arbitrary global transaction throughput cap) was somehow antithetical to bitcoin's decentralized design. Big blocks would have never solved this issue, and you're still free to use Bcash, but you won't as no one does... because that wasn't the issue. Second layer solutions are the crux of that story, and people who didn't or wouldn't understand that were vocal non-tech people (like Roger Ver) who don't understand basic network protocol topology and why things need to run on secondary, tertiary etc... layers on Bitcoin (the Network) that uses bitcoin (the token) to validate your $20 tx on the blockchain, which by the way if you paid $60 for goes to show you never understood Bitcoin the network. No one would sacrifice that much to miners instead of just opting for fiat at that point unless there was an absolute imperative need to do so, which at $20 is clearly not the case. I should know I did it. I've been in this for a long time and the only time tx fees were above $20 was when the Bcash fork happened and Ver/Jihan spammed the network. I paid $25 tx fee on behalf of a new customer (merchant I just on-boarded) that was panicking because they didn't understand mining fee priority (I did explain it to them) and thought they lost they money, when in reality the 5 sat/byte tx cleared in a weeks time and I just recovered my funds then. I discussed it and felt absolved of responsibility but rather than lose a potential client I just begrudgingly paid the mining fee, to Antminer/Jihan no less, which added insult to injury. This is far from ideal, and I have a stuck tx as we speak (2sat/byte were clearing without a problem until then) for a over a week now, but it just goes to show that these new billionaire class investors (Saylor) don't understand this tech at all and that they need to use their new found fortune to help flesh out LN to get it to function to its full potential without all this mempool bloat they've help create. Mainchain (layer 1) is doing EXACTLY what we would think would happen under these conditions even after Segwit, its purposely this way as this is the trade off for security, which makes it less than ideal as a settlement network for small, low cost, individual transactions. That's what LN is for and I wish these instituinal investment firms would understand that, to date only Jack Dorsey (an actual technologist/developer) has funded Lightening labs, while the Winklevoss, Saylors of the World just keep trying to compete for more headline grabbing media attention and ignoring this vital issue as they do not understand or care to take the time to learn this very obvious fact. As for me, I want them to keep doing this as it gives me a better buy-in position so I'm all for it. PS: Keep downvoting, but a 2.58 tx fee cleared in less than an hour with 5+ confirmations, thus proving my point. I think we're far from the bloat we saw back then proving Segwit worked as expected and block sizes weren't a viable option nor tenable a solution to our problem, which I sincerely remains one of LN progress .
xiphias2 6y ago
Satoshi couldn't have thought of a solution of the scaling issues, just like Mark Zuckerberg didn't design Facebook for billions of people originally. From the paper it's clear that he would have liked if all people could have access to P2P layer, but it's just technically impossible.
- toomim 6y ago
  That's not entirely accurate. His solution was to increase the block limit [1], and use faster computers [2]. Note that Bitcoin Cash is currently implementing this, and succeeding at scaling to 1,100 tx/sec on testnet. (Bitcoin Core supports 3 to 7 tx/sec.) [1] "It can be phased in, like: if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete. When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade." ~ Satoshi Nakamoto, on bitcointalk.org, October 04, 2010, 07:48:40 PM [2] "Hi Mike, I'm glad to answer any questions you have. If I get time, I ought to write a FAQ to supplement the paper. There is only one global chain. The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size. By Moore's Law, we can expect hardware speed to be 10 times faster in 5 years and 100 times faster in 10. Even if Bitcoin grows at crazy adoption rates, I think computer speeds will stay ahead of the number of transactions. I don't anticipate that fees will be needed anytime soon, but if it becomes too burdensome to run a node, it is possible to run a node that only processes transactions that include a transaction fee. The owner of the node would decide the minimum fee they'll accept. Right now, such a node would get nothing, because nobody includes a fee, but if enough nodes did that, then users would get faster acceptance if they include a fee, or slower if they don't. The fee the market would settle on should be minimal. If a node requires a higher fee, that node would be passing up all transactions with lower fees. It could do more volume and probably make more money by processing as many paying transactions as it can. The transition is not controlled by some human in charge of the system though, just individuals reacting on their own to market forces. Eventually, most nodes may be run by specialists with multiple GPU cards. For now, it's nice that anyone with a PC can play without worrying about what video card they have, and hopefully it'll stay that way for a while. More computers are shipping with fairly decent GPUs these days, so maybe later we'll transition to that." ~ Satoshi Nakamoto in correspondence with Mike Hearn

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

I feel that /r/btc lunacy has made it's way to HN

hanniabu 6y ago
No, that sub is completely delusional
- f430 6y ago
  A buttcoiner always sees another buttcoiner. edit: wow, didn't know so many people were against r/buttcoin its sad to see HN descend into this sort of madness.
  - 1996 6y ago
    Even if I'm generally pro-crypto and against HN negative stance on crypto, I upvoted you (and will vouch for your comments if needed) because buttcoin is an interesting community: they are educated on crypto, and their negative arguments are more than simple rebuttals. I spend some serious time there - it's a great source of news, a bit like HN Now to the moon with lambos! /s
    - f430 6y ago
      Sir, I tip my fedora in your general direction. It seems there are quite a bit of mEth heads here as well. /u/jstolfi has many disciples
smelter 6y ago
Excellent, yet another stream of text that must occupy my information grapevine to define a virtual value system utilized by people who are not creative enough to park their economic gains as deployed assets. One BTC is currently a post-tax yearly salary, a third of a tractor, at least one Bridgeport CNC lathe, 12 metric tons of cold rolled 304 stainless coil, or two springtime paid internships for folks out of high school (including their brand new Lincoln welders). When the price goes up, it means even more people do not know what to do with resources available to them. Kilowatt hour upon kilowatt hour that must be sequestered only because someone desired to "invest". A modern metric to measure mediocrity, stagnation, and indecision (a hockey stick graph).

hanniabu 6y ago

I don't think the 2 are mutually exclusive.

uncletammy 6y ago

They removed the whitepaper about as fast as they removed Gavin Andresen's commit access once they found justification. There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
From my experience in the community years ago, Bitcoin Core was a very insidious group of people that seized control of Bitcoin from within, obtained control of the Bitcoin subreddit and started banning anyone with even the most reasonable objections. They started promulgating this absurd notion that Bitcoin was a "store of value" exclusively: that is to say, was not intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash" (as Satoshi obviously intended) and that its value was purely related to "how much the other guy was willing to pay for your Bitcoin". So they turned it into this purely speculative thing. The whole fallacy of the "store of value" thing is two-fold: (1) Bitcoin's success and utility as a currency gives it a stable point to base its value around. For example, the value would be related to the net amount of transactions occurring (on the darknet usually) and the velocity of money, which would create a sort of natural equilibrium price where people are buying bitcoin as they need it, rather than hodling it to speculate. (2) Bitcoin, like any asset, is a store of value, but its ability to store value is the same whether it's worth $.0001 per coin or $40,000 per coin. So they basically turned it into a purely speculative instrument. --- The takeover of Bitcoin from within was a big red-pill moment for me. It was an attack vector I should have seen coming but didn't. I strongly belief that any cryptocurrency community where 99% of users are speculators who view the thing as a stock ticker and nothing more, basically dooms a cryptocurrency to failure. Anyway, Bitcoin Core as a whole and Blockstream as a company are very malicious actors who destroyed the beauty and elegance of Bitcoin so that they could build a company around exploiting the delta between what the tx fees should be and what they were. And beyond the unjustifiable censorship / suppression, they advanced tons of bogus arguments such as the notion that increasing the block size would ruin the decentralization of the bitcoin network. --- Oh, and lastly there will be a great need for public blockchain cryptos like Bitcoin: for example, if I donate to a non-profit I'd want all their transactions to be publicly viewable. But for normal usage-as-a-currency, I am a huge believer in XMR (monero), which masks who you're sending money to, how much money you sent, and how much money you have. It also has a lot of neat tech like adaptive block size limits, etc that avoided the transaction fee debacle of BTC.

eecks 6y ago

Why are you posting this as 'fact'? You do not know this, do you?

baby 6y ago

Source?