------ Original Message ------
From: "Milly Bitcoin via bitcoin-dev"
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
To: bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
Sent: 9/20/2015 3:02:32 PM
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Scaling Bitcoin conference micro-report
Larger user base won't necessarily protect against governments if we
still have chokepoints they can go after.
Bitcoin will always have chokepoints governments can go after. Hackers
already targeted routers to divert mining traffic awhile back. Bitcoin
traffic is easily seen and blocked by ISP's. It has already been
pointed out that laws against merchants and exchanges cannot be
defended against any other way than to have many people use the system.
Almost none of these merchants depend on Bitcoin in any significant way
for revenue...and that's likely to remain the case for a good while.
Merchants that have chosen to accept Bitcoin are typically using a
handful of payment processors, again...chokepoints. And almost none of
them are contributing any network resources back to Bitcoin.
Exchanges are indeed serious chokepoints. But increasing the number of
users will probably have relatively little effect on this unless we also
increase the number of exchanges and decentralize the exchanges. If all
we had to do is increase the number of users, the same argument could be
used to claim that banks would be less susceptible to governmental
crackdowns if they just had more account holders.
Exchange decentralization is indeed another thing we must work towards -
but that's probably beyond the scope of the more pressing issue which is
building consensus in Bitcoin development.
(As a developer you, of course, did not mention the threat of having a
tiny number of developers who have significant influence over Bitcoin.
It always amazes me the endless discussion over miners centralization
and almost zero discussion of developer decentralization.)
I've pointed out this weakness of Bitcoin *numerous* times. That I
failed to mention it here does not mean it hasn't been discussed
elsewhere. Some of us have also been actively working towards developing
a more modular, layered architecture and better implementations that
will afford greater decentralization in software development with less
need for critical code reviews, less pushback from downstream developers
who must continuously rebase, a better process for building consensus in
the community, and simpler app migration.
Increasing the nodes by a factor of 2 or 3 or keeping the block size
small to increase the diversity of miners by a few percent will have
zero effect if those other government threats were to actually happen.
We need to increase the basic infrastructure nodes by a factor much
larger than 2 or 3...more like 100 or 1000...and it's entirely doable
with properly aligned incentives.
Russ
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