You know that your proposal will never be accepted in Bitcoin. I suggest you should do the next best option, fork Bitcoin and put every rule you want in there.


The Bitcoin Core developers are among the smartest people in the cryptocurrency world. If they made you look stupid, do not take it personally and move on.


But for Bitcoin, I believe the technically safer way forward is better. Let others dominate in market cap. Bitcoin will outlive them all.


Please explain how decreasing or increasing one trait will not affect the traits of one of the other two. Security, decentralization, and scalability.

It is not on me to reject every single ridiculous  claim Vitalik Buterin makes (believe me there is a lot), you better ask him to prove it. I mean a mathematical proof.

Actually the whole cryptocurrency movement (for which Buterin is just like a trojan) is based on axioms that guarantee  the feasibility of a secure, decentralized and fast p2p electronic cash system, check with Satoshi Nakamoto.

In your opinion, perhaps.  But for most people, they simply aren't voicing those concerns.  If the majority want change, change will happen.  What's proven on each and every day that no change occurs, is that the majority want it to remain exactly as it is.



It's on you to justify why you think change is needed.  No one seems conviced thus far.  Avoiding Wind_FURY's question probably isn't helping with that.  It's clear to me why they're asking you to provide an answer to that question.  If it isn't clear to you, maybe you need to come back once you've figured it out.

Bitcoin is not a democracy where 1 person = 1 vote... as far as im concerned, in Bitcoin you matter depending on the amount of Bitcoin you hold basically. So when there is a fork, you "vote with your coins", as you receive coins in both chains. If I support the original Bitcoin, I will dump on the other chain. If I don't, I will dump on the legacy chain. The conclusion as far as I can tell, is that whales sit at the top of the hierarchy since depending on what they do on this situation they will incentive miners to mine whatever chain whales are supporting. Of course whales aren't %100 controlling Bitcoin, but the point is, you better have as many whales on your side when attempting a hardfork.

If a whale has 100000 BTC, then that's 100000 votes so to speak.

So aliashraf, if you want your hard fork improvement proposals to be considered, you must go convince as many whales as possible, and other people that have a big stake in Bitcoin (miners etc).

Of course, the more peer reviewed your code gets between different experts on the field the better, so you must discuss with coders too.

I see both you and @Doomad are very interested in refuting Buterin's claim. I understand, I feel offended too  

First of all I have to maintain that it is on him to prove such a hypothetical trilemma exists either mathematically or experimentally.

Obviously, Buterin is not much of a proof boy and we are dealing with an intuitive argument inspired by:
-a Japanese maxim which states: everything comes with a price!
- the famous ideal gas rule in thermodynamics PV/T = constant
- recent congestion and performance problems in bitcoin and ethereum networks.

Yet and in spite of its  journalistic nature, this garbage and the magical key word, trilemma, is occasionally used to get rid of any serious discussion about improving cryptocurrencies or to make weird claims about impossibility of such improvements.

Some people go that far to use this fallacy (we will prove it being a fallacy) as a supporting assertion for their strategic interpretation of what bitcoin is or is not.

So, let's do it ... proving wrong an unproven, journalistic, ridiculous claim about block chain design being an engineering trade-off between security, decentralization and performance, made by Ethereum idol, Vitalik Buterin  

What is this trilemma of Buterin?
It is how Buterin and his proponents in Ethereum community present the trilemma: re-defining decentralization, scalability and security such that one might be convinced they are mutually incompatible or something!

What does decentralization mean in cryptocurrency?
Buterin suggests it is totally impractical to have a decentralized p2p network and we have always a degree of centralization. It is essential for his ridiculous trilemma: You got a distribution of votes not being homogenous? You are somewhat centralized!

Decentralization, the way bitcoin has established it is not such a naive concept. It is about Byzantine Fault Tolerance:
A cryptocurrency p2p network is supposed to be decentralized to resist against collusion between a majority of participants weighed by their power, for this to be achieved a network should be capable of maintaining a distribution of participants/voters being both divergent and granular enough.  

Although enough sounds to be relativistic, it is not. An adversary has always the option to consume enough resources to compromise the security of a network (Note for Buterin: regardless of how scalable it is ). He just doesn't commit such an attack because of the game theory analysis that shows him how irrational would be such an option.

No matter how granular or distributed are the participants, there is always a choice to locate them, bribe them and commit such a conspiracy against the network, it is just about the costs and the incentives involved.

So, a network is safe in terms of decentralization as long as collusion is much more costly to achieve than the rewards.

Although it is possible to imagine a hypothetical function taking a range of parameters and giving us some quantitative index for decentralization, that function by no means would be such a stupid linear relation with the total network resources: O(c). This kid is obsessed with computational theory's O function. He thinks it is very prestigious to use O(something) whenever you have no clue of the actual behavior of a variable.

Decentralization is a sophisticated property for a p2p network and the only legitimate framework to make an assessment regarding it, is game theory. There exists no linear, simple function that can be used to give a practical index of how decentralized a given distribution of resources and votes in a network is.

Plus and more importantly, there is a gap between a protocol (or an improvement  proposal for a protocol) and the way the resources are distributed in the real network. A protocol can encourage/discourage a distribution pattern but is not able to actually impose it!

Suppose we have this protocol freshly started with a very limited hashpower, if for some reason its coin gets unpredictably more attention from the market, no matter what the protocol is or how it encourages the distribution of resources, it will become radically centralized in few days and there is nothing the protocol can do about it as long as it is supposed to be public and permissionless.

What does scalability mean in cryptocurrency?

The way Buterin puts it, scalability is another impractical agenda for cryptocurrency. Actually it is impractical for any computing system.

Any educated, experienced software engineer is aware of the limitations in how scalable would be his design. Simply asking for O(N) > O(c) as a measure of scalability is nothing more than a joke (again using the infamous O function ). In software engineering we always need a criteria for designing a system to be scalable within. Once the requirements grow higher than the boundaries, you have to reconsider the design properly and you may have to do it from scratch.

When in crypto ecosystem we talk about scalability we are not looking for a solution to compete with a stupid centralized data center like what Visa runs. Who put this in front of us as a challenge and why?

we don't need tens of thousands tps now and in near future. We are speaking of tens up to few hundreds tps for now and next few years. Neither bitcoin nor any other crypto coin is supposed to replace fiat currencies in like 5 years. Neither fucking Ethereum universal machine is going to be used as an alternative legal system for resolving day-to-day contracts between people.

Why people are screaming scalability or making fantasies about it? what's the catch? Making an embarrassment out of it for the community? For what? Selling their own shitcoin?

Although we are always dreaming of such days, they are not gonna happen right now and we have to worry about real problems with real performance bottlenecks at this very moment.

Scalability for crypto currencies should be considered as:
The capability of a network to  process transactions without unexpected delay or costs if the projected numbers and indexes of popularity and usage growth happened to become real or exceeded their initial values moderately.

For bitcoin, I suggest 100 tps is more than enough for next 4 years. So, we just need like 10-15 times better utilization of resources and technologies available nowadays.

What happens next, when network grows even larger and demand gets meaningfully higher?
Nothing! We make more assessments based on more data we would already have, and try to utilize more advanced technologies and sophisticated protocol enhancements to make the network even more efficient.

Next?
We don't know! We should wait for more improvements and more technological opportunities, may be?

Simply, we should improve and evolve gradually to keep the network efficient in the criteria that is dictated by the market.

What does security mean in cryptocurrency?

I don't understand WTF Viralik means by 'attacker with O(n) resources' but in crypto we have two important security measures:

1- Being resilient against double spend attack by 50%-1 resources.
2- Utilizing network resources fair enough to keep the above index in the same level by avoiding orphan blocks.
With orphan blocks and unintentional forks, we will have parts of the resources wasted making it possible for the adversary with less resources to commit double spend attack.

A protocol is considered to be safe if its consensus mechanism is solidly supporting the first property and other implementation and operation parameters
do not put the network in the second danger.

Now, suppose we have our coin designed (for some reason) in a way that a relative number of stall blocks or unintentional forks happen more often than a coin like bitcoin. What happens?

Firstly the adversary may find it practical to fork intentionally for a double spend attack using his hashpower which is  considerably less than 50% with a good chance of winning the competition because the network's honest majority of hashpower is already splitted between other competing, unintentional forks.  

Then what? a double spend has been made and somebody has lost his funds/assets.
But wait ... The loss should be considerably high like a very large transaction of coins? Shouldn't it? And why a user dealing with our coin shouldn't wait for more confirmations before releasing his $$ assets? Of course he should and he would wait for that.

The point is, even with not being fully obsessed with preventing unintentional forks, this network should be considered safe as long as it supports the more crucial 50%-1 attack resistance, deep in its protocol and thus resists long range attacks properly.


Conclusive remarks:
This is why I call this hypothetical trilemma, pure garbage. It is nothing more than a naive fallacy, a strawman flavor of fallacy to be exact:
The kid is trying to convince us we are not capable of keeping our promise for a p2p, decentralized, secure and adoptable electronic cash system because of some magical contradictions between features nobody have promised.


Vitalik Buterin is now an adult and has rights to attack our axioms but it should be clearly understood as an attack from outside of the cryptocurrency discourse .
All this thing is about weakening bitcoin/cryptocurrency agenda: building a better world by inventing a better monetary system.
He deliberately suggests/forges impractical and void definitions of basic features and says it is impossible to achieve the design goals of interest.

Why? Because he is a trojan horse. He says:

And I'm like

The above argument for scaling illustrates the basic difference in the approach for Big blocks vs Small Blocks. Big blockers seem to view bitcoin's demand growth as the basic motive. They want to ensure that any foreseeable demand is immediately filled by a step -wise increase of blocksize, even though it'd need a hardfork and even though there'll be a lot of unknowns.

This seems to ignore the basic ideal of keeping bitcoin within reach. Nobody should be able to takeover bitcoin sheerly by the amount of resources they can put into it. @ali mentioned in one of his opening argument about the small miner with a 200K investment versus the big data center with upwards of a million dollars in investment.

There is surely a point of exit for the enthusiast between this 200K and 1 Million, where he'll no longer be able to afford running a mining node. Apart from the hardware cost, access to crazy fast internet that will be needed for, say, a 32 MB blocksize syncing, further shrinks the set of people who can contribute meaningful hashing power.  For bitcoin to remain in the domain of the enthusiast and to remain usable for everyone, block size is probably the only thing that is under this community's control. Once that increases without an upper bound, it'd still function but the number of people who can still afford it will drastically reduce.

Maybe it is time we had a proper study on this. Is it possible to check the details of who is connected to a pool and respective hashpowers of such connections? We have some 9500 nodes live as of now. How many of them are mining nodes and what percentage of them are at the enthusiast level?

I agree with you, and I believe the Core developers also agree. There is no hurry. Why pressure the developers to make a dangerous hard fork to bigger blocks, or your proposal of reducing block times?


Apples and oranges if used an example for Bitcoin.


Yes, who's in a hurry? The Core developers are very conservative and they are also taking their time to not break anything.


Yes, why are we arguing? Hahaha.


Or a reliable layered protocol capable of off-chain transactions. Why not? It maintains security and decentralization at the base.


What are they? Can your crystal ball see 20 years into the future?


But meanwhile the developers should be very careful not to break the network.

You don't have to fall to the levels of slandering to make your point.

On one hand, your ideas on "winner takes all" vs "shared effort" sound reasonable while on the other hand, you seem to be a big fan of the conspiracy theories. Why can't you understand that this is basically a difference of ideology-driven vs business-driven thinking??
More than enough people have suggested you above to focus on the merits of your argument rather than trying to make unnecessary accusations on core devs. There have been enough people and their alts doing that on the forum. Why'd you want the system to be a running experiment for your ideas? You should probably see that this can be done a lot less belligerently and a lot more collaboratively.

Why don't you implement a testnet for your ideas. People will notice. If you have put up code results at IRC or some other place with suitable peers, a link would be welcome.

You have talked about how we need 100 tps right now or in the near future, which would require a blocksize increase, even mentioned blocktime modifications and other things which require a hard fork.

You still have not explained how the hard fork is done without causing a big mess with different factions dumping tons of coins into each other after the split.

And you are assuming that if Core (by Core, I guess we understand the most known developers?) agreed with a blocksize increase then we would have a smooth sailing to a 2MB hard fork or something which seems delusional to me.

Then prove your theories by running a test net as said by amishmanish.

How many minutes between blocks does Dogecoin have? I believe it is close to your 2.5 minute target. Do you believe it solved Bitcoin's scaling problem?


Ok. I cannot comment, but I hope someone will in connection to "Step 3".


You "think" it will happen that way in theory, but everyone does not have access to the same speed of bandwidth.


Have you made a proposal or is it possible for you to tell everyone in the Bitcoin mailing list?