At this point it would seem that pretender-in-chief Gavin Andresen, he of poor and decrepit Bitcoin Foundation fame, has been sunk. While he’s still ringing alarm bells and shouting “the sky is falling” at the top of his well-worn lungs, the water is rushing into the engine bay and he won’t have to suffer this indignity that much longer.
As you’ll recall, his block size increase proposal was torpedoed right here, on these very pages, barely three months ago. The holy shyster himself, Gavin, commented directly on the article, three times!, for all the world to see. So to kick things off today, let’s take a walk down memory lane and look at a few of his arguments FUD for adding inflation to Bitcoin and how these were easily and effectively countered.i
First FUD:
i still have no idea what y’all are talking about.
You do know that no matter how large the block, only the 80-byte block header is hashed?
If you are just trolling, then kudos, you got my attention for about three minutes.
First Allay:
Pete D says:
October 8, 2014 at 6:02 AM
Eh? WTF are you on about here? You do know that increasing the number of transactions incorporated into a new block makes it larger, right? Maybe you do some reading and come back later.
Second FUD:
Gavin Andresen says:
October 8, 2014 at 9:28 AM
Lemme use small words so maybe you can understand:
The number of transactions in a block does not affect the amount of work miners need to do to solve the proof-of-work function.
All of the transactions are condensed using what is called a “Merkle Tree” into a single 32-byte value.
Larger blocks does mean that all validating nodes will have to spend more CPU time building the Merkle tree, but CPUs are insanely fast. Really amazingly, blazingly fast, and getting faster all the time.
So network bandwidth will be the limiting factor, not CPU or memory or disk– all of those have been growing, and are projected to continue to grow, faster than network bandwidth.
RE: disk space: please read the blog post. In the near future, most fully-validating nodes will NOT store the entire blockchain, they will store a few gigabytes of recent blocks.
Second Allay:
Pete D says:
October 8, 2014 at 11:34 AM
I don’t give a fuck about your “projections.” You can’t make linear forecasts about computing power based on Moore’s soon-to-be-defunct law and expect anyone to swallow it. The point is entirely that larger blocks require more processing power to validate. Processing power doesn’t grow on trees. You must’ve been thinking of that fiat money your handlers are shoving into your pockets.
Third FUD:
Gavin Andresen says:
October 8, 2014 at 4:01 PM
RE: Bitcoin as SOLELY a store of value:
Okey dokey, it is nice you think that. I see my job as paying attention to the needs of EVERYBODY using Bitcoin, and promoting technical solutions that make it better for as many use cases as possible — store of value, medium of exchange, and distributed ledger. I’m not smart enough to know how Bitcoin will be used in the future.
Third Allay:
Pete D says:
October 8, 2014 at 5:47 PM
This is what isii boils down to: scarcity. There’s no room in Bitcoin for inflation of any kind. Other applications and whatnot can be built on top of it as is. It’s for the world to adapt and conform to Bitcoin, not the other way around.
So that was basically that. Gavin walked into the lion’s den with some seriously weak sauce and got his head ripped clean off. He tried to pretend, as a scammer can only do, that bandwidth, CPU cycles, and hard drive space are as plentiful and renewable as snowflakes in the arctic, that they fall from the heavens whenever we need them and can never be depleted. And he failed because it simply isn’t true. He’s no Daniel, folks, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t persistent. According to qntra, over the weekend:
Gavin posted on his personal blog an article titled “Looking before the Scaling Up Leap”, stating “My goal is to prove that it is safe to raise the maximum block size from 1MB to at least 20MB” along with “I’ll argue we should schedule a hard fork.” Reddit soon blindly praised Gavin for his work, with comments such as “Fork it hard.”iii
It appears as if Gavin will not give up unless his hard fork is a reality, and thus Mircea Popescu has made a declaration of war if Gavin proceeds with his plans.
Like everything else worth doing, Bitcoin is war. So ya, MP is actively fire-bombing the already-decimated Berlin that is Gavin’s house of cards. Y’know, just to be sure.
La Serenissima, Bitcoin’s sovereign, has no choice but to unrelentingly dispose of any and all pretenders, frauds, and nihilists. We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we were led by the noses with pseudo-arguments.
What pseudo-arguments am I referring to? MP lists a few in this recent article and this one too:
I. “I agree a big discussion is necessary before changes are made, but we shouldn’t act like a hard fork is somehow inherently an issue.”
II. “If the community can’t hardfork today we could stop using bitcoin now and look for the better suited alt coin. If bitcoin can’t fork-update it has no value.”
III. I don’t understand why anybody would be against a larger block.
IV. Satoshi himself envisioned much larger blocks.
V. The fork is needed because otherwise some people won’t be able to use Bitcoin.
VI. This is a clerical issue, because block propagation and other considerations incentivize miners to keep blocks small anyway. The 1MB is just a hard limit getting in the way of things, the marketplace of miners should be allowed to fix block size as it seems appropriate.
VII. The miners decide.
VIII. “By the time the hard fork rolls around, all miners (and wallets, and other bitcoin software) will have dormant code ready to switch over and start mining the new fork.”
IX. “Hard fork block size politics: do we want decentralized digital gold, or just another Visa? We want both. And there’s no reason we can’t have both.”
After listing these verbatim from reddit and the qntra comments section, MP entertainingly and logically skewers them all, one by one, with retorts such as:
II. Obviously Bitcoin “has no value” to you. That is probably because you were expecting to defraud the faith others put in Bitcoin by inflating it. While it’s true that welfare states finance themselves that way currently, and in the process create the unwelcome and unwarranted impression in the heads of the nobodies in the street that their voice matters to any degree or is important in any manner, Bitcoin does not work that way. Bitcoin does not work that way intentionally, specifically and by design. So… yeah, pack it and get lost.
IV. Bitcoin is not a reflection of your hopes and aspirations, but a check on them. Bitcoin isn’t here to make it easier for you to do what you want to do ; Bitcoin is here to make it trivial for others to prevent you from doing what you want to do every time that’s stupid. The sooner you comprehend this fundamental difference between Bitcoin and “technology” especially in the “revolutionary & innovative” subsense of that nonsense, the better, for you.
VII. There’s absolutely no difference between Keiser’s scamcoin and Gavin’s scam coin as far as the network is concerned : while one’s a scammer that I humiliatingly defeated in the past whereas the other a scammer that I humiliatingly defeat in the future, this makes no difference for Bitcoin. As far as anyone will be able to perceive, miners simply left. […] Sll the holdings on the Bitcoin chain are accepted as valid on both Bitcoin and Gavincoin, but holdings on Gavincoin are rejected by Bitcoin. Consequently, everyone involved with the fork is writing options to everyone in Bitcoin, free of charge. That they have no ready way to finance these should be obvious, and consequently the grim prospects of the Gavin side of the fork should be just as obvious. At least, to people who understand economy to any degree.
VIII. The various gunk added to Bitcoin (past 0.6 or so) is currently only supported by the scam foundation Vessenes created back when nobody was looking, and everyone’s been abandoning ever since.The actual Bitcoin Foundation is not supporting any of that.
IX. Yeah, yeah, you’re thinking “but Bitcoin is decentralized”. Sure, it’s a decentralized implementation. But it is an implementation of a centralized concept. Bitcoin is universal money, and that’s quite by definition central. Even if implemented in a decentralized manner, as all usable money always has to be implemented, it nevertheless is a centralized thing, by the very nature of what money has to be in order to be money. Now why marry to this an obligation that’s burdensome on everyone and not really useful to anyone ?
Pretty good eh?
So yes, Bitcoin is war, and yes, war is hard and requires hard people in kind.iv It should be pretty clear based on the FUD and pseudo-argumentation that Gavin and his hoard are impossibly weak, while La Serenissima remains a force to be reckoned with.
Lest you think you now have a choice between the two sides and I’m going to intreat you to “choose wisely,” think again. Your strength is what dictates which side you end up on. Nothing more.
After all, what is the Internet if not Nature herself?
___ ___ ___
- You’ll note his derisive tone towards my exposé. “You called the emperor ‘naked!’ I don’t like you anymore! You’re not my favourite”↩
- s/is/it!↩
- This shouldn’t be surprising in the slightest. It’s Reddit!↩
- Hard people are those that are honourable enough to call a fraud a fraud. Like Taleb says, if you see a fraud and don’t call him out, you’re also a fraud. This, in addition to persistence is what makes people “hard.”↩
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