Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Scaling Bitcoin conference micro-report

From: s7r <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2015 00:33:38 +0300

Nobody said anything about trusting the governments in the way such as
you describe.

No matter how much you want to disagree here, Mike Hearn is right on
some aspects. He only said that bitcoin needs to have larger user
base, more use cases, making it more popular and less likely to be
banned by the governments because of political reasons. He did not say
"let's trust the governments and centralize bitcoin, give them the
possibility to trace/seize/control people's bitcoins, own all the full
nodes or hashing power" or anything like this. So, I think he wants to
suggest "be smart and Play by the rules, follow your interest". The
general threat model for which we want to scale is: larger user base
(not necessarily by increasing the blocksize - just increase the
transactions per second using the best way from all points of view),
more use cases for simple people who only do basic stuff, more
popularity but all these without the possibility for some actor to
control more than he should (like a government agency). For example,
just a summary (among many others): it will always be impossible to
freeze anyone's coins, or take them without the party's consent, or
make it mandatory to tie bitcoin addresses / wallets to real world
identities.

If we think governments are the threat, it's bad. This is because they
can make bitcoin illegal, and no matter what you or I think, there
will _always_ be more people who follow the laws (even the immoral
ones) than people who don't. If it's illegal / banned in relevant
places/countries/continents, bitcoin will be useless. What good will
it be if you can only use it anonymously in a dark-web via Tor, and
you can't tell anyone you do it and can't exchange it to fiat or vice
versa? Bitcoin has to be legit, have normal use cases and be as
popular as possible. Don't think that if tomorrow some government bans
bitcoin there will be a revolution supporting freedom and free speech
and who had this terrible idea will be jailed forever - this will not
happen. What will happen is that users under that jurisdiction will
not use bitcoin any more, merchants from there will not accept bitcoin
any more and exchangers from there will disappear. If some of them
will remain to continue doing it as an outlaw, I assume their number
will be insignificant anyway. If we move towards crypto-anarchy where
we want to say "f*** the laws, f*** the government, f*** everything",
we already lost and this should not be the consensus here under any
circumstances. We, a few computer experts on this mail list using
bitcoin is not what it will make it strong. What will make it strong
is millions of human beings from all social classes and with various
occupations using it for whatever boring reason each one might have.

+1: An outlaw currency is useless even to outlaws.

> On 9/20/2015 4:23 PM, Steven Pine wrote:
>> It's amazing how foolish some people are to continue trusting 
>> governments especially in light of recent history: a seemingly
>> endless, Orwellian 'war on terror', multiple regional conflicts
>> often justified by fake evidence, wholesale disregard of law and
>> basic human covenants such as do not torture, ubiquitous and
>> secret global surveillance.
>> 
>> Anyone who doesn't consider governments the proper threat model
>> is either a shill or an idiot.
>> 
>> On Sep 20, 2015 12:34 PM, "Milly Bitcoin via bitcoin-dev" 
>> <[email-masked] 
>> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>> 
>> Until this is settled, Bitcoin has no clear direction and 
>> developers cannot make effective decisions:
>> 
>> 
>> How exactly do things set "settled" in this environment?
>> 
>> People looking at Bitcoin think a small group of developers and 
>> miners "control" these decisions.  Not sure if "control" is the 
>> right word but that is the perception.
>> 
>> Russ