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Transaction costs did become a huge drag on the system and a drain on wealth [edit: what I mean is, at some point they overwhelmed the initial value of cutting

Transaction costs did become a huge drag on the system and a drain on wealth [edit: what I mean is, at some point they overwhelmed the initial value of cutting out the middleman in other types of digital currency transfers], although I don't think this was a conscious or coordinated decision; it was a result of the inherent limit in block size / mining capacity. Basically, "Satoshi" never imagined so many people would be trying to trade so frequently... so perhaps this focus on storage of value was in a sense baked in unwittingly. I was for BCH becoming the "main" branch. Honestly, though, I don't think making it easier or harder or more or less expensive to trade had any impact on whether or not con artists used it to con people.

mrguyorama 4y ago
Satoshi explicitly was making bitcoin as a medium of exchange, as described in his paper, but apparently couldn't do the math to realize that his system would never manage more than a few hundred transactions a day. That's a pretty massive oversight IMO, and evidence that satoshi is just a normal dude, not some prophet or messiah. The decision to not expand block size limits was 100% coordinated by a huge amount of chinese mining capacity because the ingress routes to their networks of miners would not have handled the higher throughput, and like six dudes who controlled 80% of the miners sat up on a stage together and talked about it. How is that not coordinated? Bitcoin had every chance to improve it's ability to be a currency, but guess what, the oligarchs who controlled all the mining thought it would give them less money to go that route, so they stopped it. It's almost like a system that allows you directly more power based on how much wealth you personally control doesn't work "For the people"
- notch898a 4y ago
  Satoshi as far as I know never indicated he meant bitcoin to be an ultimate solution and not an incremental stepping stone. It seems weird to expect some anonymous guy to create a perfect end-all and be a failure if he merely ended up with something with some merits that can be improved on.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  Satoshi did the math just fine, and later I repeated his calculations with more detail. There were no inherent problems with scaling Bitcoin up beyond the question of how to pay for mining post-inflation subsidy, which could be solved with assurance contracts. > It's almost like a system that allows you directly more power based on how much wealth you personally control doesn't work "For the people" That's proof of stake. Mining isn't about how much wealth you control but about how much hardware.
  - mort96 4y ago
    How much hardware you can get and how cheaply you can get electricity is decided by how much wealth you control.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      That's not entirely true. When I was mining in Vietnam, we were not rich. We just picked a country where power was cheap and it was close to China so that we could get hardware into the country more easily and inexpensively. The Vietnam govt wasn't using the excess power and they were happy to have someone filling their datacenter spaces.

mrguyorama 4y ago

Satoshi explicitly was making bitcoin as a medium of exchange, as described in his paper, but apparently couldn't do the math to realize that his system would never manage more than a few hundred transactions a day. That's a pretty massive oversight IMO, and evidence that satoshi is just a normal dude, not some prophet or messiah. The decision to not expand block size limits was 100% coordinated by a huge amount of chinese mining capacity because the ingress routes to their networks of miners would not have handled the higher throughput, and like six dudes who controlled 80% of the miners sat up on a stage together and talked about it. How is that not coordinated? Bitcoin had every chance to improve it's ability to be a currency, but guess what, the oligarchs who controlled all the mining thought it would give them less money to go that route, so they stopped it. It's almost like a system that allows you directly more power based on how much wealth you personally control doesn't work "For the people"

notch898a 4y ago
Satoshi as far as I know never indicated he meant bitcoin to be an ultimate solution and not an incremental stepping stone. It seems weird to expect some anonymous guy to create a perfect end-all and be a failure if he merely ended up with something with some merits that can be improved on.
mike_hearn 4y ago
Satoshi did the math just fine, and later I repeated his calculations with more detail. There were no inherent problems with scaling Bitcoin up beyond the question of how to pay for mining post-inflation subsidy, which could be solved with assurance contracts. > It's almost like a system that allows you directly more power based on how much wealth you personally control doesn't work "For the people" That's proof of stake. Mining isn't about how much wealth you control but about how much hardware.
- mort96 4y ago
  How much hardware you can get and how cheaply you can get electricity is decided by how much wealth you control.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    That's not entirely true. When I was mining in Vietnam, we were not rich. We just picked a country where power was cheap and it was close to China so that we could get hardware into the country more easily and inexpensively. The Vietnam govt wasn't using the excess power and they were happy to have someone filling their datacenter spaces.