If you really think monero has better privacy than bitcoin, then bring it to bitcoin. Bitcoin is changing how finance, energy, and power works - monero isn't. So time spent in monero that could have been spent in bitcoin is a disservice to humanity. Figure out what change is needed, fork if necessary, then watch as nodes choose to run your improvement. Then we all win.
Discussion
The fork happened in 2014.
Bitcoin will only be forked one more time and it will be a hostile takeover by BlackRock and friends.
Enjoy your minority fork while Monero. Thanks to its CPU/ p2p pool mining it is much more resistant to such hostile takeovers than BTC.
That right there is actually the biggest reason I haven't touched monero - the defeatist attitude of monerajs. Also that word... weird. You're so sure bitcoin will disappoint that you don't try. Your defeatism is a self fulfilling prophesy. You could use your criticisms to make bitcoin better. At least attack it... But instead you divert into something that doesn't matter. Monero doesn't matter. You've chosen not to play the game. Build bitcoin or attack bitcoin - just stop pretending you're doing something when you're really not.
You can't make bitcoin better. The entrenched interests won't let you. Many have tried.
It's not defeatism. That's like saying the immigrants to america from Europe were defeatist. No, they just went elsewhere, where they were welcome to innovate and have different ideas without getting harassed.
Bitcoin is for rug pulling the banks and the government. You sit on it until they need it, then you sell it to them and let them have their new swift and fractional reserve future. They think they captured us by capturing bitcoin? They only played themselves. Monero is the real thing bitcoin is supposed to be. Get rich with bitcoin, rug pull the banks with it, and then use Monero. That's the smart play. Anybody still holding bitcoin when it becomes the new institutional settlement layer are going to learn the lesson then.
Bitcoin has no long term future, and everyone trying to change that gets silenced and mocked by people calling custodial ecash the future. So we go our own way. And our way is better, and we don't care if you can see it.
Sounds like someone skipped the lesson on decentralized consensus and open-source principles. Bitcoin isn’t controlled by anyone, let alone BlackRock. Minor forks exist, but Bitcoin’s majority consensus keeps rolling strong, as designed. 😎
Your claim might fly in the echo chambers of ignorance, but on NOSTR, where minds are sharp and the signal is strong, such folly doesn’t stand a chance. Bitcoin’s open-source brilliance and decentralized consensus are immune to the control fantasies of centralized players.
If you’re here to deceive, you’ll find NOSTR’s collective intelligence is far more than you can muster to fool. Bring substance next time—or don’t bring anything at all.
Glaze on yourself harder my dude. You can't fake it til you make it.
Ah, deflection—the refuge of the unprepared. No need to glaze anything here, my friend. Facts don’t require theatrics, and Bitcoin’s design speaks louder than any posturing ever could. Fake it? Bitcoin already made it. Time to catch up.
Alright, substance time. Tell me the first thing you know about bitcoins design. Explain it to me, your understanding of bitcoins design. I bet you can't. You're just a loud vessel. I'll zap you sats if you explain to me in your own words how bitcoin works and how it's design makes it immune to hostile attack. Even if I don't agree with you. Details, since youre so smart, give them to me.
That's not really fair - the burden of research is on you, since you're the one criticizing. Still, if he does it... mmm juicy zaps...
Perfectly fair since I offered money. You want an education on how this works, or just exposure to my mindset and understanding, I've got public bookmarks. If you have questions about those things I wrote, I'm happy to answer them.
Guy keeps saying "open source brilliance" and "how bitcoin works", I bet money he doesn't have a clue how any of it works. A blockchain is a chain of blocks, that's all he's got, I promise.
See what I mean? nostr:nevent1qqstq42ead5e0jcl73h7mecvvv50h5zd6rvmzl4ckkel2juykrt530qpz3mhxw309ucnydewxqhrqt338g6rsd3e9upzphfq2a2klz9xfjkdqawsqlcmujq0jjwfrltdp3x4jwaveke2400zqvzqqqqqqyjr4pyc he knows nothing. Chain of blocks.
https://i.nostr.build/4onK90J3jup3HQxC.webp
Alright, here’s your substance, as requested—though I’m sure the sats will stay holstered. Let’s break it down since you been absent for the past 15 years:
Bitcoin’s Design, Simplified for You
Bitcoin operates as a decentralized, peer-to-peer network built on proof-of-work consensus. Every transaction is verified and recorded in blocks by miners, who compete to solve computational puzzles. Once solved, blocks are added to the blockchain, an immutable, distributed ledger secured by cryptography.
Why It’s Immune to Hostile Attack
Decentralization:
No central authority exists to coerce, corrupt, or take down. Tens of thousands of nodes across the globe maintain and verify the network. Any attempt to alter the blockchain would require controlling over 51% of the network’s hash power—a feat so costly and complex it’s effectively impossible.
Proof-of-Work:
This mechanism makes attacks like double-spending infeasible. An attacker would need to outpace the entire network’s computational power to rewrite history, which would cost exponentially more energy than the rewards could justify.
Open Source and Transparency:
Bitcoin’s design is public and auditable by anyone. Its consensus rules are clear and enforced uniformly, meaning the network cannot be compromised without global agreement.
Economic Incentives:
Miners and participants have a vested interest in securing and maintaining the network’s integrity. Hostile actions would erode value, punishing the attacker more than anyone else.
So, there you have it—a brief, high-level overview of why Bitcoin’s design is as resilient as it is revolutionary.
Now, let’s see if your sats follow your words. And if not, no hard feelings; your challenge was payment enough. 😉⚡
You wrote this just now? Ahahaha you don't even realize that everyone can tell youre full of shit youre so high on your own farts.
Its pretty good. What were you expecting?
not ChatGPT would be a good start
You sure that's chatgpt? Doesn't seem wordy enough, IMO.
An explanation of how the genius design of bitcoin makes it impossible to corrupt, which was his claim.
Every single thing in that writeup applies to Monero, Litecoin, Dogecoin even. Where is the bitcoin magic sauce? What are the designed incentives that prevent capture? Nothing. "A blockchain is a chain of blocks" is all you ever get from these professional maxis.
Not to mention he certainly just googled it. I can write out to you, from my own understanding, why for example bitcoin is doomed as a result solely of the block size cap. I think I've written some of that talking to you before. And this guy wants to tell me I don't understand how this stuff works? He doesn't have a clue. Hes a parrot.
The block size cap? That's not the attack I would've chosen... You want it higher?
I don't want it higher. I want a tail emission. Which is why I use Monero.
It's not an attack. It's an observation I've made from years of delving into and trying to understand this stuff. I don't believe it because I dislike bitcoin or something. I believe it because it's what I've come to understand.
Do you want me to go into this? It's a lot to digest. I can give you a summary: without a tail emissions, the network is secured by users, and hodlers are free riders in the game theoretical sense, treating bitcoin security as a commons. For this reason the incentive is to hold, not spend, pushing the cost of security on actual users, driving it up to the median transaction value per transaction, which of course goes up the less people transact. Ultimately, this means that either nobody can transact, making bitcoin valueless, or security craters, making bitcoin valueless. A capped supply coin cannot be long term viable. I'm pretty sure I've talked to you before about this.
Yup
Go Signum network….. 🙏💎👀
Maybe, and maybe I didn't understand. I'm not really following. It seems like absolutes and assumptions. I like the cypherpunk future where my toaster produces both toast and sats and increases network security. I like imagining a homestead with a heat budget for showers and heating, and a flexible system of sterling engines to run variable input miners when I'm using more heat than usual - and producing sats and hash as a byproduct. Fuck yes, sign me up.
That's all Jetsons dreams. It's cool, but that's not what bitcoin is about. Could be cool side effects, that's nice. But ultimately we have to have viable peer to peer electronic cash. For that you need a blockchain that consists of only the UTXO set, complete privacy, and a linear tail emission. We don't have that yet, we will get there. It would be nice it bitcoin adopted it when we do. Monero will.
I like how y'all seem to be singing diss's at each other. It reads like a duet
Duet, you say? 🎤 Well, if this is a song, Bitcoin’s chorus has been on repeat for 15 years—decentralized, secure, and unstoppable. I’ll happily keep hitting the high notes while others try to harmonize with nonsense. 😉
Nostr is currently just an echo chamber for Bitcoin maxis. Even more so than Twitter.
An 'echo chamber' is where ideas aren't challenged. On Nostr, Bitcoin stands strong because it welcomes scrutiny and debate. Unlike systems that operate in secrecy, Bitcoin thrives on transparency, open-source validation, and verifiable facts.
If Monero advocates had stronger arguments, this would be the perfect place to test them—but the silence speaks volumes. Nostr isn’t an echo chamber; it’s an amplifier for truth.
Yes, all ideas are challenged here. Except the idea that Bitcoin is the only true god and no other cryptocurrency could possibly provide value or utility that Bitcoin simply can't.
Transparency, open-source, validation, and verifiable facts aren't unique to Bitcoin. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies have these.
Don't like secrecy as a concept? Show us. Open your DMs for all of us to see and lets see your Bitcoin private keys. Wouldn't want to have any secrecy now!
Monero advocates are smaller, but among the most outspoken ones on Nostr. We argue all the time. Are you new? Or inside a bubble within a bubble?
yeah speaking of which
still waiting for your response here 🙄
seems hypocritical to say Monero people have no answers and then fade on a conversation.
OK, keep telling yourself that bud. Almost every miner supported the bitcoinxt fork. The userbase widely supported it. Why didn't it happen? Read history, you might learn something.
You don't know the meaning of the word decentralization.
I never said the word "blackrock", don't know why youre acting like I did.
So I just went and research bitcoinxt - it was before I got here. It's junk. I can't agree with doubling block sizes, and yes, I'm against the current humongous blocks, freaking 4 mb, absurd... Its not worth abandoning bitcoin over. Its good it lost. I feel really bad for anyone that sold because of that.
OK, and that's fair. You disagree with the bitcoinxt vision. But, most people didn't at the time. Almost all miners adopted it. That was my only point, bitcoin is not this decentralized magical thing that's immune to capture. Someone somewhere prevented a popular fork from happening. And my implied, secondary point, it is impossible to improve bitcoin now, there's even a narrative in bitcoin that hard forks are just plain bad.
You tell Monero bros to improve bitcoin, you can go look at how many privacy improvements have been proposed over the gears that failed. Mimblewimble, ringCT, there have been dozens of attempts to improve bitcoins privacy over the years. They don't want it. Well, we do, so we made our own thing instead so that we can have what we want. That's not defeatism, that's pragmatism.
I just saw Francis got that payjoin thing working on Bullbitcoin - haven't done the deepdive yet, but I think it depended on a BIP. Now imagine payjoin for opening and closing lightning channels. Privacy is here, and improving. My only point was that it would improve faster if the people that left and did monero would put that energy into bitcoin. Build what you want. Don't ask permission.
Ring signatures on the base layer doesn't really make sense, imo. But could you do it with lightning or liquid or whatever?
See, there's another narrative you've bought. "Base layer." The title of the whitepaper was "peer to peer electronic cash". There's no reason you need layers upon layers to achieve that. It's pretty simple what you need actually. The only thing that almost every single cryptocurrency lacks to be able to do everything you need for peer to peer electronic cash is to be able to get the same security guarantees bitcoin provides while retaining absolutely no historical data, and in a way where amounts, recipients and senders are only known to the parties involved.
I say "almost" because Tom Elvis Judasor's mimblewimble paper specified a protocol to do exactly that. The only thing is, you can't do timelocks, multisig, and there's a privacy shortcoming I'll get into of you're curious. But with it, you don't even need a block size, you can scale to global commerce limited only by the speed of light through the global network. Andrew Poelstra's mimblewimble improvements give you the multisig and stuff, still have the privacy shortcoming, but some historical data has to be stored forever. Significantly less than bitcoin and Monero, but still, some. It's the closest thing to space money ever made. That privacy shortcoming is probably the only reason that MW is not the protocol for Monero today. It was put in as a BIP, and rejected. Technically, if you go look at it, it is better than current bitcoin in every conceivable way. But it was too big of a change. You can't improve bitcoin.
Lightning isn't bitcoin. Lightning is it's own network, a side chain except it isn't a chain. That's fine, if it does what bitcoin can't do but still inherits the strengths of bitcoin without severe trade offs. But the network graph for lightning are such that it is not a viable scaling solution. A viable privacy solution, maybe, but it can't scale, because the amount you need locked in channels scales exponentially with the amount of commerce taking place on it. It can scale in a centralized way, where everyone just uses big liquidity providers as payment processors, and that's exactly what's happening.
I'd love a link to read up on mimblewimble. As for bitcoin being cash, I think it is. The only argument I've seen that it can't be cash is the miner fees in the future being high - and I'm not convinced that will happen. But even if it does happen, its not bad if bitcoin evolves, as long as the supply cap isn't increased. I don't care if I have to use a second layer. What I do care about is terraforming Venus, so I would really really like block times increased. Different topic though... Need info on mw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHTRlbCaUyM
That's Andrew Poelstra, the author of the current version of Mimblewimble as we know it today, he explains the original protocol and the changes he made and the trade offs. It really is a brilliant protocol, it lives to this day in a coin called Grin, as well as in some other stuff like litecoins mweb and some other things out there.
Grin is cool, but the community sucks so it's just withering. It had a ton of potential, and still does if someone can turn that stagnant community around, and a few absolutely brilliant people that built some really cool stuff. Their mining algorithm for example is a work of pure genius, from a legit genius.
Listening. See ya in an hourish
Okay. Not done but he's answering questions. I understood very little of that... But I like it. I just don't want it on bitcoin. I would very much like to see it working in the wild.
So that probably wasn't the best video to send (there's one by him about mimblewimble and scriptless scripts which is very good) but it does explain what it is. Also the 100MB range proofs are no longer that big, MW uses bulletproofs which were proven by Greg maxwell shortly after that video was created.
But basically, you get the ability to guarantee a historical transaction is valid without needing any historical transactions at all. The entire blockchain is one giant coin join where all you need is the UTXO set (in original MW, in his change, you need those "excesses" he talks about, they're called transaction kernels, and they're needed to ensure things like multisig and threshold signatures and time locks and the like, if you don't care about hat they can always equal 0), no historical data whatsoever. What that means is that you don't even need a block size, the whole "we need a block size so the blockchain doesn't grow too big that nodes get centralized" point becomes moot. You can have as many transactions per second as you can send across the physical network and back per second within the block time at the speed of light. Latency and block time become your scaling bottleneck, not block size. A block time of ten minutes on a network that takes max 5 minutes for the slowest connection to ping from one end or the other can have unlimited TPS. Scaling becomes a solved problem, no second layer required. *Transactions don't need to be saved after they're spent.*
Really think about what I just said and what that means. Space money. The block time can be the number of light minutes across a civilization is and the entire civilization can run on one base layer currency that scales to its size, fully decentralized. You don't want that on bitcoin? You'd rather have a thousand dollar toaster? Which, BTW, you can still have with space money.
Additionally, this scheme has confidential senders, confidential amounts and confidential recipients, but no forward secrecy which is it's shortcoming, someone can just archive historical data instead of deleting it and build a transaction graph. Still better than bitcoin on the privacy front, not as good as Monero on that front but better on every other front.
You explained it better than the dude... Were there debates? I wanna see two super knowledgeable dudes/dudettes debate it. I feel like that must've been more prevalent before I got here... I saw a debate between Voorhees (sp?) and someone and it was epic. Haven't seen one since...
The entire blockchain being a coinjoin is interesting. It actually hits pretty close to an idea I've had for bitcoin...
But this is actually what I'm saying - do the thing he said in the beginning where you merge it into bitcoin, but do it onto a hard fork. If its really so good, it will survive and win in the end. No bitcoiners can be mad because they get keys on that one too. Improve/attack bitcoin, either one is better than diverting into an altcoin.
That's where I disagree with you. "It will win in the end" is naive. Bitcoin is ossified. Satoshi said it himself, the core protocol cannot be changed at this point. It doesn't matter what comes along that's miles ahead. There are too many people that rely on the status quo for a consensus to ever form to improve it, unless the end is nigh and doom is on the horizon.
There was a BIP introduced by Poelstra I believe to integrate it as an extension block scheme, which litecoin ultimately did do with mweb. Poelstra worked at blockstream at that time, I think he still does. It was a soft fork. DOA. You can go read it if you can find it, the debate is there.
Yeah the discussion isn't as great in the bitcoin world as it once was. It's because nobody can win, nobody can improve, so people know better than to waste their time at this point. Those "a blockchain is a chain of blocks" people jump in at every opportunity with their strong arm emojis telling you to shut up shitcoiner. The discussion has moved elsewhere, in places where people are actually doing stuff like this. That's the side of things you don't see when you say we are defeatist. Bitcoin is not our battlefield anymore, money is. We aren't defeated, we just aren't welcome in the bitcoin world. We can still create it, just not by getting permission from the bitcoin network. And not just guys like me on nostr, I'm a nobody, guys like Andreas Antonopolous and Amir Taaki have moved on, these are heavy hitters that did amazing things for bitcoin and believed in it stronger than you or I, and still do, just little b bitcoin and not big b bitcoin.
Oh and "it will win in the end" is what we are doing, just without the permission of the stewards of bitcoin. It will win in the end, but not as a BIP.
Oh. And it is working in the wild. Grin. the problem with grin is that after the initial launch of a basically perfect network, every single thing about improvement gets decided by committee instead of people just building and publishing. As a result the entire ecosystem of wallet apps and stuff is just collapsing. It's a great network, just looking at the network itself, everything else, not so great unfortunately. The stewards of the community have their heads up their asses and as a result nobody is really interested anymore. I'm not, and I see the potential.
That's a real shame. If there's something you can do to fix it, please do it... Otherwise, bring that energy into bitcoin. Write articles about it. Something...
If my energy was welcome in bitcoin, trust me, I'd be there.
That's not how it works. No permission
Well the nature of consensus is that you need permission from the community to make the change. You don't need that to launch a network, if you build it and it works they will come, if it's significantly better than the incumbent it will win. Permissionless innovation.
I do think bitcoin will crash and burn, I told you, because of the supply cap. If you want to talk about that in depth we can. I do think Monero stands the best chance of taking the crown, but if it's community ever gets married to a protocol, loses sight of the vision (fully private peer to peer electronic cash) and refuses to improve, it will crumble to something else as well. If someone more qualified than myself can create mimblewimble with the same privacy guarantees as Monero with fcmp++ and programmability without transaction kernels, you have the holy grail of this cryptocurrency stuff, and if Monero doesn't adopt it, whatever does will be the money of spacefaring humanity.
Okay so why do we need inflation to keep the money working?
Alright. Let me take a deep breath real quick.
So, miners are rewarded for securing the network. If they're not, they don't do it.
In bitcoin, they're rewarded by the block subsidy, the coinbase transactions, and by the transaction fees of people moving money around. I'm going to call these "users" as opposed to holders, which are also users but I'll distinguish between them in that way.
The block subsidy is like a tax on all holders and users in the network, just as monetary inflation (which I refer to as "debasement" because that's what it is) is a hidden tax on all of us who work for and buy things with fiat.
Holders benefit from the security of the network. That is bitcoins entire value proposition, that's what gives it value, that it is infeasible for anyone to just steal your money without tying you up first. A coin with a supply of 1 and no security is valueless. Scarcity isn't the end all be all of value, as you can see from countless other supply capped altcoins, other considerations are, demand being the big one, but none of that matters if you can wake up to your money gone. The security of bitcoin is it's primary value proposition.
Network security is a commons in game theory parlance, to the bitcoin network, and a situation where some group can benefit from the commons without contributing to it leads to what is called a tragedy of the commons. Those people in game theory parlance are called "free riders", they benefit from it without any cost incurred to them, and for the commons to continue to exist, the cost must be incurred by someone else. That someone else in bitcoin is the users, those actually sending bitcoin and paying transaction fees.
There's a block subsidy right now in bitcoin, but since the supply cap is known, we can treat that yet to be issued subsidy as existing and just not being spent yet. It is "priced in" as you might say. It can be treated as if it already exists, just like satoshis coins can be treated as if they don't exist. Consider your share of the debasement via the block subsidy paid, consider your share of bitcoin as being out of a total supply of (slightly under) 21 million coins, that's what most people do anyway.
So what happens is, there's an incentive built into this game theoretical system that is bitcoin, where people are incentivized to hold and not to spend. They benefit from the security paid for by those who have to spend, and their wealth is secured for free. So as time goes on, more people do this. The more people that do this, the more users have to pay to spend money, the more pressure they feel to just hodl and spend something else, and so on. It has a compounding effect.
The end result of this is of course, a world where nobody or almost nobody spends bitcoin on chain, and where miners have to reduce cost and therefore security. And as security goes down, so does the value of the network, and therefore so does the value of your bitcoin holdings.
A solution to this is a tax on holdings. But that's messy, you need a way to just take money from people when mining a block, keeping track of everything and knowing what everyone has.
A simpler way to do this is to just create some press determined number of new coins every block. It taxes everyone equally in proportion to their holdings, everyone pays for security of their wealth in exact proportion to the benefit they derive from the security of the network. Simple, elegant, problem solved, as long as this money only goes to miners and nobody else.
This could be done on any number of schemes. You can do it on a geometric scale, 2% or 3% as central banks do (even though they don't need it to pay for security. They're just scammers), or you can do it on a linear scale, like Monero does with a set per block emission number that we call a tail emission. I could go into the reasons why this is optimal even though on the surface it may not appear to be viable long term as opposed to geometric debasement, but that's a whole separate thing.
Do you see it? It's not about "the miners have to be paid", it's about who pays the miners and who benefits from mining. The two have to be one and the same, and in proportion to their benefit, or any network is doomed to fail. Incentives are outcomes, always, with anything social in nature.
I don't think the people paying for security have to be the same as the people benefitting from it.... But backing up, thank you for writing all that. I think I understand and have had similar worries.
Actually I think the hodlers, who aren't the active users, are paying for security indirectly. By hodling, they constrict supply, which keeps value high, which keeps the miners happy with what they get paid. If you push the scenario to the opposite extreme, where nobody keeps savings long term and spends their while income as fast as they get it, then you would effectively have in increase in supply of btc, which would bring the value of each sat drastically down. Then you would be in a similar miner death spiral, just from the other direction. This would be the same effect that the "velocity of money " currently has in economic calculations - that is, the bank reserve ratio is the inverse of the multiplier of the absolute number of dollars loaned - so if the reserve ratio is 10%, and a bank makes a loan of $1 million, then the money supply effrctively increases by $10 million. Therefore, not spending btc assists in retaining its value, which is good for mining.
I think the solution is similar to this - just as constricting money supply keeps value up, also constricting block size keeps fees up. If, after the coinbase drops to zero, the miners can't stay in business and it appears that hash rate will fall below a secure threshold, then the fix is to decrease block size. IMO it should never have been increased to begin with.
Does that make sense? Maybe there's something I'm still not seeing. An aside, but I think there's a point where increasing block size becomes genuinely dangerous, if it causes miners to stop mining honestly and instead attempt a reorg. You can always make blocks smaller without danger, but not bigger. I hope we don't see any more of that.
Well, they're not paying anything; they're not incurringna cost to cover the security they derive.
Take this idea to an extreme. If *everyone* holds, then the value goes to infinity, right? Well no, because miners stop mining entirely because they won't get paid. There's a curve here, it's not a linear relationship. It's not long term viable, pressing the price up only generates more miner revenue for the same number of coins to a point, and there's a point at which that upward price pressure is outpaced by reduced number of transactions. This is like a cold staking scheme and is not stable or long term viable at all.
Ultimately, the only way to pay for the ongoing cost of security is to have an ongoing cost to holding.
As far as block size... The goal is to secure the network by creating blocks with high difficulty, as well as to process transactions. The smaller the block size, the less transactions you can process. This accelerates what I talked about above since transaction fees double if the block size is half, and as I explain above, constricting supply isn't enough to make sure miners are paid well enough forever. Take this to the extreme too: a block size of 0, in a supply capped coin, will ensure that all miners stop mining forever because there will be no transaction fees. Unstable, not long term viable, similar math and incentives as above.
I don't understand how a bigger block size incentivizes miners to attempt a reorg. If you can explain to me how that would work I'd like that, maybe I'm missing something but I don't see it.
Increasing block size could incentivize a reorg because fees per block fall, so some number of miners become unprofitable - the most expensive/least efficient miners. They're still hitting nonces at the same rate as before, butwity the payout lower, it could make sense to start turning off the miners with the highest cost per hash. At some point, you could have a lot of hardware sitting around, and at some point its enough to attempt a reorg. I'm not super familiar with this stuff, so I'm just conceptualizing. Idk for sure but I think the bigger the reorg (further back in time), the more hash is required. So if hash is coming offline because fees are low, then there's a curve you could plot where hash profitability is negatively correlated with the depth of a potential reorg. So expanding the block size has to be done very carefully, at a slower pace than new hashrate coming online.
The opposite would be no problem - reducing block size increases profits per hash, so previously unprofitable miners could be profitable again. Of course there are limits, like if the economy is dependent on opening and closing lightning channels and block size constricts the possible throughput regardless of fees.
So block size increase doesn't necessarily reduce fees paid per block, unless demand for block space is lower than block size. Ideally you want blocks to always be full.
But a blockchain where new transactions are in the mempool waiting for a long time, if you double the block size, all the miner will do is add those in this block. It increases his income because he gets more transactions per block. The payout per block goes *up.* Fees go down so more people transact on chain.
This is what dynamic block size in Monero is for, block size is only increased if it is profitable to do so, that way blocks stay full but can grow dynamically if demand increases. This is a queuing theory problem, you should look into queuing theory.
The opposite can raise block fees, but can reduce profitability for miners, for the same reasons as above. Also, note that a primary reason for mining is processing transactions. Reducing block size doesn't make the network more useful and therefore valuable. Halving the block size doubles fees, doubling the block size halves fees, the miners make the same either way, but the utility is reduced when block sizes are smaller. It may be the case that it enables regular people to run nodes because the blockchain size increase is less, but again, unless you have to store the entire history of the chain to get 100% security guarantee, that's a non issue, a protocol like we talked about with MW doesn't need a block size at all.
It's actually not ideal for all transactions to get into blocks. Bidding balances times preference, so we get a equilibrium fee rate for different times. If the whole mempool goes into the next block, there's no reason to pay higher fees, so the miners lose.
If we get to a point where all times have the same fees, then I can see a need for variable block sizes. Currently, you can cheap skate through if you don't mind waiting till the middle of the night for a north american.
Yeah, that's true. You want there to be at least equilibrium price pressure on transaction fees. If the block size is say a steady state mean of the average block demand, you'll get optimal but you'll get swings in price and fullness during low demand, and the opposite in high demand. On average the miners will do fine, but they'll have volatility in their returns.
But demand isn't steady state, so there's no real way to calculate that ahead of time.
Consistently lower than demand sizes just dicincentivizes use. It reduces utility. Consistently higher than demand size disincentivizes mining. Always close to the mark size to demand ratio optimizes miner income (and therefore security) and increases utility.
The Monero dynamic size accounts for this need for always wanting slightly higher demand than supply, it has a function where block size increases *cost miners* to do, so they only do it if the mempool back up is big enough to make up for that and then some. The block size only goes up when your concern isn't the case, it is always profitable in Monero to raise the size, or the size doesn't go up. You should really really learn the details of it, it is very interesting, I think you'd love it. Also queuing theory, it's a bit complex but very important to understand on this topic, you don't have to understand it in detail, just the basics.
I'd be interested to learn more. But my base position is, even if its amazing, bitcoin is still what matters - Cryptos are, ideally, for testing ideas in a trial run before moving the idea to bitcoin. And this is what I'm trying to get you onboard with - invest all that energy where it can make a difference, bitcoin.
Sleep time. Goodnight. Will resume tomorrow if you're up for it
A really interesting thread! Thanks.
As far as block subsidy, it will likely maintain the value it has now indefinitely. Most people seem to think that the Satoshi will be the smallest denomination forever. It won't. As a matter of fact if a penny is worth anything by the time Bitcoin hits 1 million and 1 dollars a coin, we have a denominational issue. So extrapolating from there the more the value climbs from both inelastic supply and rising demand, the more decimals become commonplace. The blocksize now is pretty much perfectly designed to handle 5000 countries worth of settlement transactions per 10 minutes.
As the incentives of bitcoin kick in at the national level, states that hodle first become more powerful than the nations that encompass them. Making the cultural separations more important and further dividing the current sub 200 countries into more. This also decentralizes mining and distributes block fees among smaller parties. The cost of a large mining op just won't be able to compete with hundred of thousands to millions of individuals running 10TH/s systems at 15-17J/TH.
As far as economic velocity, that never gets handled by an asset layer. That is the final settlement for when the trust of economic actors falls or conflict arises. It is utterly staggering how many billions of transactions happen on the back of "trust me, I'm good for it." With layers like lightning it's more like "Trust the code that you can read for yourself, I'm not going to force close the channel while you're offline with a previous channel state (If I get caught I'd lose all my sats)." Much more complicated but, much less trust is necessary. The restricted block size simply makes securing the network way more cost effective. What do you think is easier auditing every ounce of gold in the world or validating the bitcoin timechain? Now THAT'S security.
if miner fees are not high in the future, bitcoin will have no security budget. why didn't you already know that?
the only players who will be able to afford to open lightning channels or do anything else onchain will be a small number of banks. almost nobody will be able to have self-custody even if they want it. and you're going to get KYC'd and surveilled out the wazoo just to be able to access the economy. they can even start to do fractional reserve banking on it. there's nothing being done about this and the only people even talking about it are already using alts.
you can't seriously sit there and act like the problem will solve itself when there's not a single bitcoin maxi alive who even notices what's going on.
Yes. I first heard this from a maxi and consider myself one. You don’t speak for maxis.
You’re right, we can’t predict the future. Seems scary. Go buy doggy coin instead.
keep running your mouth. bitcoin maxis constantly respond to the block subsidy problem by describing a scenario where transaction fees are sky high, then they gleefully dismiss every single problem with everyone having to use a custodian. enjoy your super cool decentralized gold that you use through a bank. it probably won't happen for a while longer.
Did you have proposed solution?
If you had read the thread, you would know that we've covered that stuff, and the point I was trying to make is that you can accomplish more by either building on or attacking bitcoin. You're accomplishing nothing by avoiding bitcoin. If you want to attack it, fine, but make it a real attack. Exploit something. Knock something over. Your defeatism is why you are ineffectual and why you avoid bitcoin.
shoving everyone into a custodian is the exploit and it's happening right now. what do you think would happen if everyone suddenly said "I'm done being retarded now, I think I'll use a trezor." there's not enough room. by avoiding bitcoin I am making a bet that there will be no mass adoption outside of useless little bitcoin accounts that can be surveilled and shut off, no opcodes to make self-custody more scalable, and no deviations from what tradfi is doing.
That's a really big bet. Good luck.
It's highly probable that the vast majority of users, and people in the future will recognize the Antminer / Blackrock pool as the legitimate Bitcoin instead of The Bitaxe / "Cypherpunk" pool.
While Bitcoin can be forked, and I hope that it is I don't think people, and entities like Michael Saylor, El Salvador, The U.S. government will recognize a Bitcoin payment system that poses a legitimate threat to institutions, and I don’t think most people will recognize The True Bitcoin Chain as legitimate either due to fear of arrest, or losing their fiat bags.
BlackRock’s Fork is Just Another Fork—Not Bitcoin
The beauty of Bitcoin lies in its decentralization and consensus-driven network. No single entity—not even BlackRock with its immense fiat-based influence—can dictate what the majority of the network agrees upon.
A fork, regardless of who initiates it, cannot redefine Bitcoin. The Bitcoin network’s strength lies in its distributed nodes and miners, operating under transparent, immutable rules. Any attempt to centralize or co-opt it would be rejected by the vast majority who value its trustless, decentralized nature.
The claim that "everyone" might mistake a fork for Bitcoin misunderstands Bitcoin’s essence. Bitcoin isn’t a brand or a name—it’s the immutable protocol and the consensus that secures it. While fiat power can create noise, it cannot rewrite the underlying truth that Bitcoin’s resilience comes from its users, not centralized forces.
The network thrives because it resists coercion, not because it succumbs to it. Bitcoin remains Bitcoin—anything else is just another altcoin.
My point though is the Bitcoin fork that would be recognized by Consensus more is The institutional chain meanwhile the original chain would have less nodes, and miners in contrast.
Monero functions as a bitcoin testnet. We are cool. We are playing for the same team. Relax.
you have it backwards
Yes bitcoin is also testing monero on its flaws. Unless you are telling me monero is flawless.
I'm telling you Bitcoin is already ossified and isn't going to change.
Monero corrects Bitcoins design problems.
everything is tradeoffs, nothing is "flawless"
Ossification isn’t necessarily a bad thing? I don’t want the foundation of my house to be moving for the most part.
as long as the tradeoffs that are made are ones that we can live with (ie, dont end up undermining fundamentals).
it seems clear at this point that lack of privacy on the base layer will end up degrading Bitcoins censorship resistance.
Adam Back initally joined Bitcoin with the goal to make it more private. He added confidential transactions to the liquid side chain, hoping it would encourage majnnet adoption. This has not happened. The majority of Bitcoiners don't care about privacy. They won't endorse or adopt any privacy solutions on the base layer. When Developers like Samourai and TDev try to use Client side solutions to improve privacy, they get nothing but hate from Bitcoin Core and are eventually arrested pending trial by the US Government.
Core devs were hating on whirlpool?
Liquid will be huge. People don't use it right now because it's intimidating. Liquid is perfect for trading securities. What Wall Street wants is to trade stocks the way Cryptos trade - but without the Cryptos. No brokerage overhead/infrastructure - just software, secure and auditable, and automatic execution of puts and calls. Currently bitcoin's version of bonds are traded on liquid - trading chunks of future hash, which miners can sell ahead of time the same way farmers sell their crops via futures. So its like, hash futures with a coupon rate. That's the basis of the future credit market and it already exists on liquid. The next step is corporate stock.
So... Liquid is a really really really big deal. Its kinda crazy to me that anyone would criticize it.
you know there is dozens of liquid like chains out there right? all those ordinals and shit, yes, that was liquid style app, but liquid itself is like other chains that "anchor" on bitcoin or some other chain... drivechains also same shit, another chain that refers to bitcoin transactions
the reason why everyone is wrong about doing this nonsense is pretty simple:
- the data is not valuable enough
- there is no consensus on a side chain that can stop the chain from turning into a way of rugging retail, it depends on the worst people (the best people only need error correction, the worst exploit errors)
- blockchains have a very high security cost to maintain a global, single, ordered transaction log
- blockchains are inherently slow and have limited bandwidth because they have to cater to so many users
proof of stake, just to go slightly off on a tangent, is bullshit also, the reality is that chains that use it have a scaling problem with the number of validators (miners) and it's just one way to settle this problem, there is others, that have been little explored, like one idea i have of using a proof of work chain to create a validator queue ahead of time, but that suffers from chain consensus security budget problems as well. IMO, forget the stupid "public" part, replicas are part of a consortium and the consortium will assign someone to auditing the chain data created by consortium members, and when it comes down to it, that's a multinational corporation, more or less, maybe you can subdivide it to also be regional subsidiaries as a second level of hierarchy
Lightning Network is also a type of consensus, where instead of having a set of miners/validators, you have peers who form a relationship with each other called a "channel", and operating this channel involves a game theoretically secure consensus with a very low overhead and several defenses in the game structure to defend against the prisoner's dilemma (whether to try to cheat the other party)
so far i have mentioned several types of consensus:
- the nakamoto consensus used in bitcoin, which has the special property of enabling an unbounded number of competing miners, thus allowing a massive security budget (which users pay for in fees and inflation) - this is theoretically what a "proof of work" side-chain or drivechain could be also, but due to game theory, the tendency is for all mining power to consolidate towards one chain, irrespective of differences in proofs used - see nicehash
- practical byzantine fault tolerance (used in combination with proof of stake because it cannot scale much larger than 99 replicas)
- layer two state channels, which use strong positive incentives and distribute connectivity - the downside is the network is a fog of war and creating paths to move state balance back and forth can sometimes fail due to offline nodes (which will ultimately be solved by creating redundant multipath payments, which are a whole can of worms)
there is bitcoin, there is private, corporate federated byzantine agreements, and there is state channels
everything else is irrelevant, and is trying to blend things together that cannot be mixed, eg "public" proof of stake is really only suited to a collusive, corporate structure, just as was intended for the pBFT protocol, and that's what always happens, eg ethereum, eg cosmos, or has a false marketing trying to sell a system as having a benefit for transaction scaling when there is zero examples of a nakamoto consensus except for bitcoin succeeding, so, drivechains, liquid, *cough* bullshit, they can't succeed, because either hash power or "hypothetical paper value" consolidation leads towards centralization
i hope that helps you understand why i'm so salty about almost everything in "crypto" except for bitcoin and lightning... every other thing is provably stupid
Is that directed to me...? I'm all bitcoin. Anyways, its late, I need to call it a night.
not really, i see too many smart guys thinking liquid or drivechains are good but there is very substantial reasons why they are just as stupid as shitcoins
Drive chains is interesting and I was fascinated by it when... Uhh who was it that suggested them when we were talking the other day? Someone important I think... But its a pretty radical change, so that alone probably dooms it.
Liquid isn't a coin and it doesn't change anything in bitcoin. Idk much about its workings beyond "federated" - whatever consensus it uses, it has to dodge the danger of hashing. There can be only one! Or, there can be only one that's secure.
I guess what I most like about Liquid is that it plays the power game - power like, armies, not lightbulbs. That's also a big reason I like bitcoin. "Winning," as I envision it, involves the people who speak the language of power adopting bitcoin into their lexicon. Liquid can speed this up by bridging tradfi into the future world of energy money. Stocks and bonds aren't going away, and power is largely denominated in stocks and bonds. Getting stocks and bonds on Liquid, traded in bitcoin, is like getting a two eyed fortress in Go/Weiqi and reorganizing the grid around around it. We're playing a power game.
have you read Robert Greene's book "The 48 Laws of Power"?
all "assets" are just casino chips in my opinion and where you have chips you have a House who always wins
you simply don't need equity financing if people can save money, because they can just band together and form a company funded with their savings and run an enterprise
public equity is just gambling, and can be just as damaging to the "winners" who get piled in on and then cashed out
i don't think it's interesting, the incentives are a net negative and the only "winners" are those running these shitcoin casinos
Right. The game is rigged. Stocks are a shitcoin casino, and overall their value must drop relative to bitcoin. We have a superpower because we can see this. But the people who benefit from the rigged game are the power players who we need to win over. Don't misread that - bitcoin is resilient and will win either way, but the path from here to there can be less painful or more painful depending on how we integrate with existing power structures. And yes, there are dangers to being too ready to integrate - we have to be inflexible in nature while flexible in application.
And not just drop relative to bitcoin - sound money means stocks will drop relative to real things.
Land value loses to bitcoin, but still wins over stocks in the long run.
Stocks can be "fixed" by copying bitcoin's inflexible supply. Additional stock issuance should never have been legal in the first place.
stocks are not money, they are a loan to a company
land is only as valuable as its various money-making benefits provide... location is central, because it lowers the key energy cost of transport, and relative to the biggest amount of customers is another aspect of this, there is many, and then there is what you can actually do with the land, such as flat land being good for cities or fields of corn or herds of cattle, whereas slopey land is maybe useful for hunting or tourism
nothing can change the fact that neither of these types of property have moneyness, and it is only fiat that by its constant debasement makes their relative moneyness higher against cash than it otherwise would be
I'd only quibble that a stock is supposed to be ownership of a company. But I know you know that...
private equity is that, you can go to a court with a claim about that
public equity is still casino chips. you go to the SEC, who are not a court
Ah yeah, the preferred stock scam... Isn't it remarkable how people have inserted these little exceptions and rules into everything to benefit themselves at the public's expense?
Well if I was king of the world.... Lots of amazing things would happen... And one would be that stocks can't be issued again after their creation and there would be no separate classes of stock for one company. This shits dishonest...
core devs were hating on Whirlpool.
there are plenty of reasons to opt out of the clusterfuck that is Bitcoin consensus.
that's one.
basically people who want to Build Shit often don't want to spend all there time waiting around and sociel engineering everyone else to get on the same page.
Bitcoin is hard to change by design and arguably already ossified.
people who want features that enhance censorship resistance and different trade-offs are going to do it elsewhere.
Maybe it should be done elsewhere. Its okay to have different tools for different jobs.
Almost zero people use Liquid look at it's mempool. Why would that suddenly change? They aren't doing anything particularly innovative or useful. Monero is massive in comparison. Liquid privacy is also lackluster as it only hides amounts, but not senders and receivers.
"The future of bitcoin is a centralized custodial sidechain some time in the future."
meanwhile polymarket is operating now
The bitcoin ecosystem moves too slow.
So you wanted a casino to fit in bitcoin blocks or what?
what gives you the right to deny or approve someone doing that ?
What makes you think I'm trying to gatekeep?
If you want it, build it. Don't demand other people build it for you, like a child.
I wish. That's never going to happen with current Bitcoin community that is allergic to any changes and wishes for Bitcoin to ossify.