Bah, I don’t know if you’re just trolling me, Hector…but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and act like you aren’t.

We already have much more efficient, far more scalable systems that allow this kind of cooperation you speak of without the inconveniences of blockchains and such. These incidents do, fortunately, present some of the better sides of humanity…but…the design of the network *broke* - and for reasons that are now well understood to be only worsened by larger blocks. These incidents are *not supposed to happen* - and if they do, it means we’ve botched something up and need to fix it. And by fix it, I mean fix the protocol so that given our best understanding of things in the present we can significantly reduce the potential for its occurrence in the future.

The correct incentives here were not due to people potentially losing a lot of money. The incentives here were well-intentioned altruism. Some miners lost money as a result of these actions…and they didn’t put up a fight. if you want to design a system around the assumption that this is how all such incidents will be resolved, please don’t spoil this for the rest of us.

- Eric

On Aug 3, 2015, at 1:31 AM, Hector Chu <hectorchu@gmail.com> wrote:

What's wrong with a little cooperation to resolve things now and then? Man is not an island unto himself, we compete with each other and we cooperate with each other occasionally if it's mutually beneficial.

You said yourself that a lot of money would have been lost if the two hard forks cited weren't resolved - that's the correct incentives at work again.

On 3 August 2015 at 09:20, Eric Lombrozo <elombrozo@gmail.com> wrote:
There have already been two notable incidents requiring manual intervention and good-faith cooperation between core devs and mining pool operators that would have either never gotten resolved alone or would have ended up costing a lot of people a lot of money had no action been taken (March 2013 and July 2015). They were both caused by consensus disagreement that directly or indirectly were brought about by bigger blocks. There is *strong* evidence…and a great deal of theory explaining it…that links larger blocks with the propensity for consensus forks that require manual intervention.

Please, can we stop saying this is merely about decentralization and trustlessness? The very model upon which the security of the system is based *broke*…as in, we were only able to recover because a few individuals deliberately manipulated the consensus rules to fix it manually. Shouldn’t we more highly prioritize fixing the issues that can lead to these incidents than trying to increase throughput? Increasing block size cannot possibly make these forking tendencies better…but it very well could make them worse.

- Eric

On Aug 3, 2015, at 1:06 AM, Hector Chu via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

On 3 August 2015 at 08:53, Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org> wrote:
Again this should not be a political or business compromise model - we
must focus on scientific evaluation, technical requirements and
security.

I will assert that the block size is political because it affects nearly all users to some degree and not all those users are technically inclined or care to keep decentralisation in the current configuration as you do. This debate has forgotten the current and future users of Bitcoin. Most of them think the hit to node count in the short term preferable to making it expensive and competitive to transact.

We all need a little faith that the system will reorganise and readjust after the move to big blocks in a way that still has a reasonable degree of decentralisation and trustlessness. The incentives of Bitcoin remain, so everyone's decentralised decision throughout the system, from miners, merchants and users, will continue to act according to those incentives.
_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev