Anonobread's comments

What part of "they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin" didn't you understand? What kind of person lambasts another for giving primary sourced, direct quotes to counter a misconception?

BTW, this too is a misconception: "and what we learned from that was that the nodes in datacenters are the only ones which can't be trivially knocked off the internet"

Right, because you didn't learn to run Tor hidden service nodes. You also didn't learn to proxy your connection over SSH. No, that would make too much sense. What you learned was that you had to physically relocate your node to a datacenter. Golf clap.

> If you want resiliance, get nodes in as many datacenters of different sovereign jurisdictions as possible. The nodes running on home connections are an illusion.

Welcome to 2013?

> Your suggestions don't stop the address published to the p2p network from being flooded.

    bitcoind -?

    -externalip=<ip>
          Specify your own public address
    -onion=<ip:port>
          Use separate SOCKS5 proxy to reach peers via Tor hidden services
          (default: -proxy)
    -onlynet=<net>
          Only connect to nodes in network <net> (ipv4, ipv6 or onion)

> they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin.

Hal Finney, the very first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction claimed, quote:

"Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient." [1]

And Satoshi Nakamoto stated:

"Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale." [...] "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." [2]

Did you have anyone else in mind? Perhaps Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen? It's a matter of historical record that these two believe gigablocks will assuredly cause Bitcoin P2P nodes to become confined to datacenters. Their gigablocker quotes follow:

Gavin Andresen: "there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks" [3]

Mike Hearn: "probably 2 or 3 racks of machines" [4]

Gavin Andresen: "No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that."

Amir Taaki, author of libbitcoin and one of the most ardent early adopters of Bitcoin is further in strong disagreement with Gavin and Mike, and always has been! So this notion that the "original people" are being hated on, is just false. Read the libbitcoin manifesto [5], or the "Political Neutrality is a Myth" interview [6].

After Gavin and Mike's push for radically reshaping Bitcoin from a P2P currency into a DatacenterCoin failed (multiple times), this whole issue culminated in Gavin exclaiming that Craig Wright must be Satoshi Nakamoto, "beyond a reasonable doubt"! Which may have had at least something to do with the fact that Craig claimed to be running Bitcoin with 340GB blocks on his (also confirmed fake) "supercomputer". But of course the Craig and Gavin show had been meticulously timed to coincide with a major industry conference. Had it not been for astute cybersleuths cracking the case within minutes of it making the media rounds, we could've seen Gavin reclaim the throne with the help of an utter conman.

Yes, some people are ticked at these guys, as they should be. It's a remarkably (!!!) hostile environment that we've been dealing with for over 18 months, as the current lead developer Wlad so aptly puts it:

"Day in, day out, there is trolling, targeted attacks, shilling on social media targeted toward us. I don’t know of any other project like this. I’ve seen developer teams in MMOs under similar pressure from users; but possibly this is even worse. There, there are avid disagreements about how the game rules should be changed, here people get worked up about changes affecting a whole economic system. And the people attacking are, in many cases, not even users of the software." [7]

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342...

[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289...

[3] https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3118.0

[4] https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=35...

[5] http://nakamotoinstitute.org/libbitcoin-manifesto/

[6] http://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoins-political-neutrality-...

[7] https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-movi...

Aaron Russo, award winning film producer, argues the opposite quite convincingly in an interview conducted with a former IRS Commissioner, here:

https://youtu.be/O6ayb02bwp0?t=33m

The IRS and Federal Reserve system is corrupt to its very core. The 15 minute interview linked should establish that.

Consumers don't buy 2% more chicken at the grocery store just because "inflation is 2%". That's total nonsense with no basis in reality. And investors will still make traditional investments in a deflationary environment, BTC denominated loan markets and "IPOs" are the case in point to that end.

Granted, in a deflationary environment, investments will be less profitable if the projects being invested in are dependent on consumers spending money frivolously.

> Investment is key to growth/innovation but there has to be some demand there. Demand creation is always overlooked, when wages aren't raised, when companies move out of the US etc. These things directly impact demand and purchasing power of consumers at all levels eventually.

Society gains purchasing power at large in a deflationary environment.

And note that, if the American economy grows 10% in a year, the Fed will still strive for inflation. If economic growth is 10% and inflation is 1%, the upper echelons of society will have skimmed 10% off the top, robbing society of that growth. Conversely, in a Bitcoin world, the 10% economic growth is returned to the savers in the form of more purchasing power.

> In a perfect game system you'd probably make labor income taxes less than capital gains on investment

Indeed you would [1]. According to some legal scholars, wages earned from labor were/are not supposed to be taxed at all in America. The tax code was designed to tax investment gains only. Just imagine if that were upheld

> The fact is lower/middle class labor income workers put more directly back into the economy than the wealthy "job creators"

By doing what? Consuming consumables marketed to them by Corporations? The same Corporations that would just as soon replace most of their menial labor with robots.

Also, I'd curb your exuberance towards believing the lower/middle class "puts more back into the economy", because to the extent the lower/middle class is increasingly replaced by robots or cheap foreign labor, if this is your true belief then we should institute a universal income. Because that's going to "put more back into the economy".

> Demand comes from people that spend

But for example, planned obsolescence encourages spending. But is planned obsolescence really a tangible benefit for the "people that spend"?

Also, imagine if "cash" was of fixed supply (Bitcoin) rather than inflationary. In which case, you could make paper gains over time by not spending it or investing it. Wouldn't this provide more people with financial security given the risks and complexity of investing money in general?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_protester_statutory_argume...

Bitcoin and Ethereum investors who put a few thousands of their own money on the line years ago have seen it rocket up in value into a considerable fortune.

Naturally, to the extent an investment makes you "rich", the investment occupies a proportionately larger share of your net worth. And to the extent it's a major component of your net worth, especially if your net worth allows for you to retire early, this makes for a situation where you will justify doing and saying anything and everything possible to promote your own interests, which are now dominated by, in our case Bitcoin or Ethereum.

This is why distinguished readers can practically see the greed pouring out of people's eye balls as they discuss these "technologies". Pro tip: call it a "technology" when you're invested in it, but call it an "investment" when you're not.

As you've noted, this gets incredibly frustrating to deal with in the cryptocurrency world. Not just because it applies to so many people, but because cryptocurrency itself is all just a confidence game of trying to get people to buy into a particular unit of account.

For example, I doubt if any of the Ethereum people actually use smart contracts, like ever. They're only using that as an angle to poach investment capital off Bitcoin. We all can see this is true because no one is making any money on "smart contracts". Ironically, the only people who have ever made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by selling other people on the idea of smart contracts. Buy smart contracts now!

> With blockchains, only the user has write access to the database with their cryptographic identity. Users are in full control.

That trait is far from being unique to blockchains.

But no, users aren't in full control of cloud software.

> Users can run a node of the peer-to-peer component if they want. Anyone can. They just don't have to.

After 18 months of block size debate, this is deja vu. No, anyone can't run a node if you make it cost $5k/mo

My point is running all the nodes in the cloud means that the users of those nodes don't own them.

> the user's choice to use the application in the first place.

Right, but if none of the users can even run the so called "peer-to-peer" component, what's the difference between that and run-of-the-mill centralized DB software? Either way nobody but the chosen few can directly access the DB.

Users don't control cloud software.

> Ethereum is a world computer. As in, it acts like a single public computer that can perform computations for anyone who is willing to pay for them, but instead of this computer being run by a third party, it's run by the network as a whole.

Compared to actual Python code, or Ruby code, or any code that you can imagine, Ethereum VM code is a hobbled down child's toy. Think: Gameboy from 1995. The memory is scant. The performance, abysmal.

> This is useful for any situation where you would usually need a trusted third party to perform some computations or enforce one side of a bargain - for example ecommerce/escrow, trading, voting, bets, issuing stock/currency, plus other things that probably have not even been thought of yet.

You can do all of those things with Bitcoin. We don't promote it much because no one has cared to use any of it for years. It's always hooked in investors, though. Lots and lots of investors.

> and now think that without a leader it's doomed to design by committee and stalemate on key decisions

As a regular in the cryptocurrency world, it's evident that no matter what you do, someone is going to find a reason to criticize you. One day these people are criticising Bitcoin for being run by a cabal of closely knit developers, the next you see this guy saying Bitcoin doesn't have a leader and is instead being designed by an apparently leaderless committee. They seem to alter their concerns and their approach to criticising Bitcoin depending on which way the wind is blowing.

BTW, I'm going to assume something and you should too: adrianmacneil here is almost assuredly long ETH. He probably albeit less assuredly so doesn't own any BTC. In any case you can assume I have the opposite portfolio.

First and foremost, Bitcoin and Ethereum couldn't possibly be more different. Bitcoin is a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Bitcoin places a higher value on securing the cash. It places tamper resistance above all else, and generally takes no chances on that. That's a feature, not a bug.

Because if that core unit fails, then the entire cash system collapses. You can't exactly have a global currency that fails mid voyage. Modern financial systems don't do that very often and neither should Bitcoin.

Conversely, Ethereum is a smart contracts platform through and through. It has 15 second block times. It has its own VM. This VM has had critical vulnerabilities in the recent past, and is less than 1 year into production.

Notice how Bitcoin could never be about smart contracts like Ethereum does, at its core, since Bitcoin could only do that by taking on existential risk?

However, that doesn't mean Bitcoin can't better manage its risk by making what is essentially a "unikernel" for Ethereum functionality on top of the Bitcoin network. Sure it won't be totally perfect, but it will do everything Ethereum does, without exception, and will do so without compromising the core of Bitcoin's network, when doing so would jeopardize the cash system.

And this is what the poster I'm responding to completely misses when he says:

> [Ethereum] offers a "bytecode" type language which can be created by compiling contracts in >=2 languages already. Bitcoin currently lets you define contracts in the equivalent of assembly code, with no higher level languages available. So this statment seems to apply more to Bitcoin than Ethereum.

The point is, once you have the unikernel model down, who cares if it's Ethereum? Ethereum's VM is very first generational, highly unproven, highly unstable, has God knows how many vulnerabilities not to mention competitors who develop competing languages and competing VMs. We don't want to be in that business. We want to be in the business of running the best of it as a unikernel without even remotely jeopardizing the entire system all at once, though I understand Ethereum kind of had to do that in order to raise money. Turns out if you don't raise a bunch of money from a bunch of investors, you don't get people to voluntarily promote you on HN and Reddit.

> That's basically what Rootstock[0] is supposed to be. Although at present, it seems to be vaporware.

Speaking of Ethereum promoters, they do have a knack for reminding you how the unikernels of cryptocurrency will surely never exist. Nothing to see here.

You'll have to excuse me for this, but what you've just written has been said so many times in the past 18 months it's basically a cliche.

If you're willing to put the entire system into the cloud and hand over the backbone of Bitcoin to big banks and megacorps, you end up with a system no different from fiat currency over time. It ends up being a State controlled fiat money, because all of the infrastructure providers are Corporations - creatures of the State.

Inflation? No problem, we'll just have the usual suspects update the code. Freezing accounts? Narcoturrerism? No problem, we'll update the code. Etc. Having a P2P electronic cash system means accepting that the system is going to be different than government scrip.

The blockchain was never meant to be PayPal. It was meant to bootstrap a cryptoeconomic system outside the bounds of politics and the law. It's completely irresponsible to give that vision up for the ability globally broadcast low value, meaningless consumer payments - especially since you can achieve that by building higher layers of abstraction.

Ironically, the only people who have made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by convincing other investors to part with their money subsequent to selling those investors on the idea of smart contracts. That whole sub-niche industry is just a big cess pool of people chasing investment gains that we're told can be had by pointlessly tilting at windmills.

Conversely, Bitcoin never promised smart contracts. To the extent Bitcoiners take part in Ethereum debates, we're only doing it because we know the real game Ethereum is playing is diverting investment capital away from Bitcoin.

> If there's enough customer adoption where there's a need to handle that kind of volume you can rest assured there will be infrastructure to support it and instead of a loose group of "core devs" there will be an official salaried department (at visa? :) ) working on this full time.

But since we're talking about "decentralized systems", the question is who owns the blockchain infrastructure. Is the blockchain going to be serviceable on home desktop PCs, or are you going to need a datacenter?

To really drive this example home, could you please quote me a price on building out a Tier 1 datacenter with gigabit fiber? Because last I checked most people don't have that kind of money in their sofa cushion. And it isn't even remotely feasible to acquire that sort of infrastructure anonymously.

Yet that's what it's going to take to hit 56,000 tps on a blockchain any time this decade or perhaps even after [1]:

> Next month, the worldwide semiconductor industry will formally acknowledge what has become increasingly obvious to everyone involved: Moore's law, the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end.

A common mistake is confusing "popularity" with decentralization. BitTorrent is both popular and decentralized. It doesn't take a datacenter and a 10-machine cluster to participate in a BT swarm as a full-on peer. As an aside, it's no surprise the creator of BitTorrent is staunchly against scaling Bitcoin in datacenters [2].

[1]: http://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-down-for-moore-s-la...

[1]: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=417

[2]: https://medium.com/@bramcohen/bitcoin-s-ironic-crisis-32226a...

Global electronic cash is a zero sum game. Money is pure network effect and only one unit of account can have 90% global market share at a time. I want that to be BTC. You want that to be ETH. Let's just agree to disagree?

But you can port any and all features to sidechains or Enigma [1], and in doing so make them accessible to a much bigger market, denominated in BTC which is a more stable and proven unit of account.

Or at least that's how the story is supposed to go. In theory, porting nice-to-have features to a larger audience results in more revenue and more overall societal benefit than starting a new scarcity race, which Ethereum has done, pitting investors against each other.

[1]: http://enigma.media.mit.edu/

Gavin is no longer lead developer and hasn't been for years now.

> I generally agree with this sentiment--the biggest value blockchains provide to decentralized applications is an inimitable 100%-replicated log

You're coming at this backwards. Once you have the most valuable cryptocurrency unit of account, you have the most security and the highest availability log in the world. On that basis, you can do just about anything, e.g. sidechains or payment channels.

A "highly replicated log" is a prerequisite of that, and Bitcoin is currently winning that battle due to first mover advantage. Hence, anything can be built on top of that basis.

If you have small competitor to Bitcoin that aims to do more, it's more valuable for the majority to snipe the features from the small competitor and make those features available denominated in the majority owned asset.

The throughput capacity of Bitcoin, being programmable money, isn't a user limit. We can just as soon put billions of users with BTC-denominated accounts at higher layers of abstraction, and in fact this is exactly what Bitcoin's core developers aim to achieve. It doesn't make any sense to globally broadcast every last Starbucks coffee and permanently etch it into an immutable database at enormous cost.

> The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running)

Right, but that wasn't the question I raised. I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable? The answer is, of course, nothing. If merge-mined sidechains and overlay protocols are your solution, Bitcoin is non-stop innovating in that direction.

> It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!".

But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud", that's no different than what Bitcoin bigblockists want to do.