A prominent group of Bitcoin developers are attempting a hard fork

cryptog 2016-01-15 03:18:02 UTC #15

At the end of the day, what matters is not decentralization per se but finding a consensus in a trustless way over the internet I believe.
If Nu shareholders decide to have a few very big nodes that somehow process most of the transactions (because small nodes cannot keep up with bigger and bigger blocks) rapidly and in a “multi-sig way” while being funded by the DAC, so be it.

Bitcoin would work much better if it was a DAC.
Shareholders would decide in a trustless way who mines.
People would say that the network is centralized by a handful of shareholders but that is not bad per se. What matters is that shareholders do not need to trust each other when they make such a decision.

In fact what we have right now is centralization of bitcoin because more than 50% of mining is operated by 2 miners and 90% of mining is operated by less than 10 miners.
The big big problem is that nobody has any control over those miners in a trustless way.

In Bitcoin, there is no clear distinction between mining and voting, and miners and shareholders so much so that there is no mechanism that lets you take decisions in a trustless way.

I feel that now is the start of the dismiss of bitcoin as a decentralized network to leave the way for DACs. That smells bad for bitcoin but luckly Humanity has Nu!

masterOfDisaster 2016-01-15 11:21:22 UTC #16

Should Nu or BCE consider offering Mike Hearn a job as contracted developer?
I mean it.
And not as marketing gag.

So much of what he is concerned about for Bitcoin, has been solved by Nu already. Espcially the motions, which could have saved so much trouble, are available for both Nu and BCE and have shown their power so often.

zoro 2016-01-15 12:35:56 UTC #17

He is going to work for a consortium of banks!
What do you think o bank employeer would say about crypto currencies, especially about BTC!
sorry, he is already working for them since November!

MaVo 2016-01-15 13:04:56 UTC #18

Nonetheless, I really liked the idea of MoD. Mike Hearn might very well be deep into Ethereum if you ask me. The way he presented his opinion was intentionally very harmful to Bitcoin, that was my feeling at least. Though, he might even be right. I am pretty sure that Ethereum would explode (even for no real reason) if Bitcoin really gets into trouble, just because people believe that Ethereum because of its complexity solves problems rather than creating them. Counterintuitive to the tech-savvy, perfect logic to all others

mhps 2016-01-15 15:19:12 UTC #19

major media attention. sell side alert.

MaVo 2016-01-15 16:01:43 UTC #20

Isn’t this really the time to advertise our governance system somehow heavily to the public? Don’t ask me how specifically… I am just saying that, when you read the article posted above, it is in most parts the problem that Nu could solve. MoD already outlined that. Demonstrating that people have a say in the network is really something that impresses them, once it has been proven of course.
Few questions in this regard: how centralized is Nu actually in terms of voting power? Not sure how many Nushares @JordanLee holds, but is it possible that the motions are actually decided by one single person if that person holds a large enough amount of NSR? Might that even be already the case? Aren’t we prone to similar attacks like Bitcoin in the form that someone just might purchase the majority of the shares and destroy the network?

Sorry for being off topic.

Cheers

masterOfDisaster 2016-01-15 16:05:56 UTC #21

The first round could aleady be tackled:

Nagalim 2016-01-15 16:42:13 UTC #22

If you watch what happens when the data feeds add votes, it’s clear that > 50% of the network follows feed. While it’s possible JL has 50% and subscribes to multiple feeds, i think thats bringing the conspiracy theory to a high level.

masterOfDisaster 2016-01-15 16:57:48 UTC #23

I fear and hope that it’s impossible to find that out.

If somebody purchases half of the shares (actually half of the minting shares is required) that person owns half of the corporation.

Wouldn’t you agree it’s ok, that the person with half of the stake in this corporation is allowed to decide just as a distributed majority is?
That is bad in terms of centralization, but in economical terms it’s ok.

The ones who own, run the network, decide.

That much is true for Bitcoin as well.
But Bitcoin can only come to consensus at controversial topics through forks, deciding which software version to use - NSR holders can vote in more elegant ways.

cryptog 2016-01-15 23:14:00 UTC #24

-12% bitcoin price 377 usd

crypto_coiner 2016-01-16 01:23:44 UTC #25

The De-Throning of Bitcoin: If It Happens, This Will Be Why

zoro 2016-01-16 05:51:01 UTC #26

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/413pwp/mike_hearns_latest_blog_post_was_a_strategic_move/
so many different opinions and approaches!
What is the truth? Who to believe?

crypto_coiner 2016-01-16 05:57:00 UTC #27

This also: http://hoskinsoncharles.blogspot.jp/2016/01/goodbye-mike-and-some-thoughts-about.html

masterOfDisaster 2016-01-16 05:59:36 UTC #28

Time will tell what the truth is.
Although Mike Hearns blog post made a lot of people unhappy and it might be even called a rant (albeit a quite civilized one), it might have opened the eyes of some;
opened the eyes to let them see, that Bitcoin has flaws, of which I’d call some fundamental.
This post of his was not just FUD, although uncertainty was created by it - the BTCUSD shows that.

zoro 2016-01-16 06:02:25 UTC #29

Yes, Don’t forget also the Crypsty’s insolvency (officially). A lot of money were lost there.
It could be also a good reason for this fall.

masterOfDisaster 2016-01-16 06:06:13 UTC #30

Maybe. Another possible reason: the stolen BTC got dumped - or are they still sitting on the address(es) where they got withdrawn to?
I’m too lazy to research that on my mobile phone

zoro 2016-01-16 06:08:34 UTC #31

And it is quite interesting that i see a big difference since last time BTC was down.
Some coins were stable and some were up!
I think people were trying to find a safe harbor other than fiat. Cryptos in general are winners in this matter.
Sadly, we don’t have yet the capacity to provide this harbor altogether!

I really don’t think so. The theft had been conducted for over a year now.

masterOfDisaster 2016-01-16 06:15:22 UTC #32

And yet I read somewhere, that the stolen BTC haven’t been moved after the withdrawal.

cryptog 2016-01-16 08:03:06 UTC #33

Very good find.

Look at his conclusion:

In effect, we don’t have a blocksize crisis, we have a governance and philosophy crisis. And the pain will continue until this crisis has been resolved either out of some cabal gaining control of the network or by a new mechanism to decide things in a decentralized manner (See DAOs).

The final phase is to make Bitcoin a self-funding evolutionary system. There needs to be a DAO that integrates into the core protocol that provides a framework to discuss and implement BIPs as well as cover their associated costs of implementation.
Until the development of Bitcoin is free from outside corporate influences, it can be discussed in an objective and fact based way, and the stakeholders of the system are able to decide instead of a cabal of well capitalized actors, we aren’t going to gain the resilience of the crowd.
This phase is probably an innovation of the size and scale of Bitcoin itself and thus is unlikely to materialize immediately, but organically over a collection of hundreds of experiments. And like Bitcoin, it would fundamentally change the very nature of organizations, their mandate and the flow of funding.

Basically he says that the creation of a DAO that would control in a decentralized manner the direction of bitcoin’s development is necessary for protecting bitcoin from a centralizing cabal.

He also says that it would take a long time (100 experiments) to create such a mechanism.

It has been solved by Nu already.

crypto_coiner 2016-01-17 04:06:13 UTC #34

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/r3cev-42-banks-mike-hearn-launch-fud-destabilise-bitcoin-davidson