Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Hard fork proposal from last week's meeting

From: Luv Khemani <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2017 07:11:21 +0000

>> If home users are not running their own full nodes, then home users have to trust and rely on other, more powerful nodes to represent them. Of course, the more powerful nodes, simply by nature of having more power, are going to have different opinions and objectives from the users.

>I think you're conflating mining with node operation here.  Node users only power is to block the propagation of certain things.  Since miners also have a node endpoint, they can cut the node users out of the equation by linking with eachother directly - something they already do out of practicality for propagation.  Node users do not have the power to arbitrate consensus, that is why we have blocks and PoW.

You are only looking at technical aspects and missing the political aspect.

Node users decide what a Bitcoin is. It matters not how much hash power is behind a inflationary supply chain fork, full nodes protect the user from the change of any properties of Bitcoin which they do not agree with. The ability to retain this power for users is of prime importance and is arguably what gives Bitcoin most of it's value. Any increase in the cost to run a full node is an increase in cost to maintain monetary sovereignty. The ability for a user to run a node is what keeps the miners honest and prevents them from rewriting any of Bitcoin's rules.

If it's still difficult to grasp the above paragraph, ask yourself the following questions,
- What makes Bitcoin uncensorable
- What gives confidence that the 21 million limit will be upheld
- What makes transactions irreversible
- If hashpower was king as you make it to be, why havn't miners making up majority hashrate who want bigger blocks been able to change the blocksize?

The market is not storing 10s of billions of dollars in Bitcoin despite all it's risks because it is useful for everyday transactions, that is a solved problem in every part of the world (Cash/Visa/etc..).

Having said that, i fully empathise with your view that increasing transaction fees might allow competitors to gain marketshare for low value use cases. By all means, we should look into ways of solving the problem. But all these debates around blocksize is a total waste of time. Even if we fork to 2MB, 5MB, 10MB. It is irrelevant in the larger picture, transaction capacity will still be too low for global usage in the medium-long term. The additional capacity from blocksize increases are linear improvements with very large systemic costs compared with the userbase and usage which is growing exponentially. Lightning potentially offers a couple or orders of magnitude of scaling and will make blocksize a non-issue for years to come. Even if it fails to live up to the hype, you should not discount the market innovating solutions when there is money to be made.