brg - the English language was on and left you a message:

"Please stop torturing me!!"

The limit I see with BU's market driven block size is that it supposes that every market participant is so poor that they have to be a rational economist. In fact the richer you are, the less you care about efficiency and profit, and you start to care about those higher level concerns

For example, the BU suggests that miners are willing to take a larger block when the fee is enough high to compensate for the orphaning risk. As a result, we would have many orphaned large blocks chasing for 50+ btc fee in each block. And transactions will often take longer time to confirm even if you paid lots of fee. This is the result of trying to squeeze every juice from the blockspace resource, an environmental hazzard

In comparison, if we have super fast block propagation and extremely low orphan rate, the network is much more healthy, and the value for this can not be measured by market, it is an environmental bonus on every user of the entire ecosystem

It seems to me like you are missing the point. The advantages that BU brings are primarily political, empowering the participants of the Bitcoin network. From a purely technical perspective BU is not that different from Core or from the protocol today as a whole. Considering that you are not interested in discussing the political implications only further proves to me that you are completely missing the point.

That you think that a flexcap is similar to BU in regards to the blocksize only further highlights this misunderstanding. Flexcap if introduced by Core is a form of centralized economic planning, which history has shown us is ill advised. Flexcap will be charging miners for creating bigger blocks, this can be seen as a type of "taxation" or "fine", which would then be payed out to the next miner if they create a smaller block, forever adding a new incentive structure to Bitcoin mining in order to keep the blocks small fundamentally changing the economic policy of Bitcoin.

Almost all of the blocksize proposals so far have been forms of centralized economic planning. Since we are free to choose alternative implementations, these alternative have their own proposals and policies. We are limited in our choice however by the options that are giving to us by developers. This is like a form a representative democracy, with some of the accompanying problems that this creates. Singular implementations must decide on the vision and path for Bitcoin into the future, this is where some implementations have now diverged. Bitcoin Unlimited in many ways is different since it has transcended this debate, both small blockists and big blockists can arguably use BU, instead of dividing up into political camps and fighting over what the vision of Bitcoin should be, which would most likely lead to a split. Many of us can choose instead to allow the free market to decide what the blocksize should be in a more distributed and emergent fashion. Bitcoin Unlimited helps to further remove any barriers to this free market. Bitcoin Unlimited is also about disempowering developers from having a disproportionate influence over the economic policy of Bitcoin.

I can see why you might think that developers having more control over the protocol is a good thing. I can bite the bullet and say that this would most likely also slow down development, as I did in my conversation with Greg Maxwell. This can be percieved as being a positive thing however, making development in Bitcoin more conservative. It can also be argued that many developers are not well equipped to decide on the future of Bitcoin, considering that many of them have engineering and computer science backgrounds, these questions have a very large scope where the humanities also become important. I would argue that it is better that the market decides, I think that the wisdom of the crowd will always be better compared to any other form of centralized authority deciding for us. We can only lose our freedom by allowing others to decide for us.

This bitcoin-dev post from 2012 by Stefan Thomas explains the philosophy behind BU exceptionally well:

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2012-June/001551.html


It seems the idea was not really explored further until now.

The counter-argument given by GMaxwell in that thread?


Funny that would be at the top of his mind.

The real question is where did Blockstream find a time machine to go back and bribe him then?

Please be more specific about how it does that.

Good.  Let's hope Dr. Back has learned a valuable lesson about flittering between forums just because (heaven forfend) a mod does their job when Peturd Rizun insists on shitposting in a Serious Thread.

The idea that the grass is greener and free of Sensor Ships onr/btc (of all places) is asinine.

For one (exorbitantly obvious) thing, posts here cannot be hidden by brigading Gavinistas or (charitably pretending there's a functional difference) Buttcoiners.

You'd think Dr. Back would know better after Bitcoin Judas's pet sub threw Drak under the bus.

Perhaps this is simply an extension of his admirably subtle strategy to counter-troll Unlimiturd's Redditard Army....   

[ I really like the concept of BU - mainly because it is the most decentralised approach ]

I am curious as to what people think will happen, IF people started running BU, and the CORE said ' USE THESE SETTINGS ' , would the majority of people use them ?

I think they would.

In fact I think the CORE boys are doing themselves a disservice, by not realising that 'almost' everyone would still follow their lead. Easily the majority.

AND - importantly - even though we would still be using the settings CORE feels is right, because we were given a choice and not forced, there would be no animosity. win win.

People are funny like that.

Actually because of the defaults set in BU it is more likely to follow the longest chain regardless of what the blocksize will be. Therefore it can be argued that BU is better for end users since if they where using Core instead they would be forked off the network when the blocksize is increased. BU allows for continued compatibility with the Bitcoin blockchain regardless of what blocksize proposal is adopted, unlike both XT and Core which will need to be upgraded and or patched in order to maintain consensus with the economic majority depending on the blocksize proposal that is chosen. Bitcoin Unlimited on the other hand maintains compatibility with other proposals out of the box from day one using the default settings.

Why are you posting that picture? Is the RED supposed to induce a negative emotion? Is RED supposed to be wrong?

BU is full of flaws and allows for Sybil attacks.

The crowd here are capable of thinking for themselves, this is not some political campaign where you just utter the same words over and over and show us 4 colored boxes. It means absolutely nothing that you draw those boxes. Its insulting how you present your option.