Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] [patch] Switching Bitcoin Core to sqlite db

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2015 03:30:45 +0000

On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 2:58 AM, Peter R <[email-masked]> wrote:
> I think you’re being intentionally obtuse here: accepting a block composed entirely of valid transactions that is 1.1 MB is entirely different than accepting a TX that creates a ten thousand bitcoins out of thin air.  The market would love the former but abhor the later.  I believe you can recognize the difference.

It is not technically distinct--today; politically-- perhaps, but--
sorry, no element of your prior message indicated that you were
interested in discussing politics rather than technology; on a mailing
list much more strongly scoped for the latter; I hope you can excuse
me for missing your intention prior to your most recent post.

That said, I believe you are privileging your own political
preferences in seeing the one rule of the bitcoin system as
categorically distinct even politically. No law of nature leaves the
other criteria I specified less politically negotiable, and we can see
concrete examples all around us -- the notion that funds can be
confiscated via external authority (spending without the owners
signature) is a more or less universal property of other modern
systems of money, that economic controls out to exist to regulate the
supply of money for the good of an economy is another widely deployed
political perspective. You, yourself, recently published a work on the
stable self regulation of block sizes based on mining incentives that
took as its starting premise a bitcoin that was forever inflationary.
Certainly things differ in degrees, but this is not the mailing list
to debate the details of political inertia.

> Thank you for conceding on that point.

You're welcome, but I would have preferred that you instead of your
thanks you would have responded in kind and acknowledged my correction
that other consensus inconsistencies discovered in implementations
thus far (none, that I'm aware of) could be classified as "maybe"; and
in doing so retained a semblance of a connection to a the technical
purposes of this mailing list.