[Cryptography] Bitcoin is a disaster.

[Karl]

Hey Bear,

On 12/31/20, Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> wrote:
> As matters stand, if President Xi tells (or pays) the miners to shut
> down, or cuts the flow of stolen power suddenly, or seizes all of the
> warehouses full of miners, the Bitcoin network will NEVER, EVER, in a
> million years, get a single additional block.

So, obviously there's nothing in the protocol that indicates that.
Isn't it coded such that mining would transfer to other miners with
less electricity-access-capital, as the difficulty changed and
technology advanced?  I stored a video banned in china in a blockchain
once.  I think the file is in BCAT format on the BSV blockchain under
transaction 8c4336dd6965b21cc86bbf945a1336de40d4f6c919ecdea60199340059018e16
.  Any thoughts on that?

> The reason that issue became the screaming sewer knife fight it became
> is because of toll trolls. Miners have a financial stake in the blocks
> continuing to be small, because bidding goes higher for a smaller
> amount of block space.  So they hired a bunch of trolls to sabotage all
> discussion about raising the limit.

That's not the right capitalist causality.  An individual miner will
get more money if blocks are bigger, because more transactions can be
included.

Yeh the price fixing bullying is _incredibly_ evident though.  If you
ever want proof of mafia price fixing monopolies, look at the history
of bitcoin.

You're saying the current behavior clearly demonstrates a group of
people ganging up coercing others in order to fix prices.

> a cartel.  The trolls and screaming you've seen are just symptoms of
> their need to keep the user base conflicted and uncertain.  That way
>
> The current 1MB limit was added to the code at the last minute, because
> Hal was concerned about the size of the block chain (and time/cost of
> downloading it to set up a new node) growing faster than the Internet
> communications bandwidth.  Satoshi was confident that it wouldn't grow

The situation would be more manageable if all the hard boundaries were
coded to slowly and steadily grow.  I'm sure that's common among
altchains.

> 		Bear