Bigger blocks take more time to process if they are stuffed with transactions that take a long time for a node to process because of quadratic hashing problems. A miner could make blocks like this and then also delay the release of the block to gain an advantage finding the next block. Also add in the whole asicboost advantage and the GFC lag and it would be a nice attack for the Chinese miners. It seems like this is why they want big blocks and no segwit.
Well first of all, segwit doesnt affect the quadratic hashing attack vector because legacy non-segwit transactions are still valid even with segwit activated, so the attacker would just use non-segwit transactions for his attack. Flextrans (a bitcoin classic proposal) on the other hand could actually solve quadratic hashing.
Secondly, the Chinese miners overwhelmingly support segwit2x, including the 2mb HF that comes with it. If they are trying to keep asicboost (which has not been proven to actually being used), why would they support segwit2x instead of trying to force BU instead? Segwit2x includes....you guessed it....segwit...which disables covert asicboost.
You don't need everyone to have a complete blockchain. Etherium, for example, lets you just do fast syncs that use a fairly fixed amount of storage space.
You need a copy somewhere to have an actual blockchain, but not every node need host that chain. The major players in the economy, however, with the resources to keep around 100GB every couple years of data are incentivized to to maintain the stability of their currency network.
Because blocks are reverse-signed, you can't have a limited pool of old blocks and forge the records. Its a chain for a reason - each blocks signature is dependent on its peer blocks, and we still don't have anything close to breakable sha-256 that would compromise bitcoin.
> You don't need everyone to have a complete blockchain.
You do if immutability, censorship resistance, and resistance to state capture is what you hope to achieve with your crypto.
> Etherium, for example,
If Vitalik Buterim were to be arrested for whatever, or if he were even to just have a skiing accident and die suddenly, you'd see how important that decentralization is in bitcoin. There is no single point of failure in bitcoin. That's the point.
Hey, for what it's worth, I think the tech behind ethereum is great. Most of the people who acquire it have no idea really what it is good for, but it has real potential. But as a 'store of value'? That's just one of the things that it isn't designed for.
And how does free loading on others avoid the non-aggression principle? Do you have examples of where voluntary taxation exists and works?
Do you think turning societies into country clubs is really workable, as in, does it scale? Tax payers are in effect members of civil society, but we have a technology that enables us to identify non-members so that we can each choose whether, and how, to exclude non-members from social and business ventures?
Depends what was the intended use for the law. It's not always about enforcing it on the spot. Take another example - declaring you never joined a war on some visa applications. Of course they're not going to check that. But if it ever comes up and is discovered for some (un)related reason, you're out without further discussion.
Same can be applied here. Found to have one during some checks? You're charged.
The tldr is that Balaji and 21e6 have done nothing more interesting than use millions of dollars of opm to build a huge mining pool out of custom silicon that performs so well the 70M it took to build it just makes financial sense on its own, netting in the low eight figures currently.
Now the followup strategy is to give away free mining chips for embedded systems to 1) mine more coins using other people's power (21 keeps 75%) and 2) stabilize the long the term value of their massive BT holdings by promoting consumer adoption of bitcoin (by bribing people with free coins mined by their own gadgets)
