I'm genuinely curious if you folks think open source politics plus proof of
work consensus will really be sufficient to manage and maintain a global
multibillion dollar currency.

So far it has worked fine because there have been few to no obstacles. PoW
is relatively autonomous and the "sanctity of core devs" has been respected
enough for them to push new features and make critical fixes and upgrades.
But now this whole Hearn fiasco is really giving bitcoin's governance
process a run for its money and even villainizing the development team.

Obviously Bitcoin wasn't designed for every cup of coffee. But the design
is so inherently unscalable I sometimes question its future. Mining is a
destructive and wasteful phenomenon that, through inflationary incentives,
distracts us from building out real governance and community infrastructure
and from compounding wealth in the system, in much the same way excessive
printing of fiat currencies has distracted world governments and investors
from building real wealth in their communities. Bitcoin is supposed to be
better than this, but right now, functionally, its an inflationary
shitstorm.

Most/all the blocksize concerns seem related to centralization and the
disadvantage to small miners in a big block world. Though mining is already
so centralized its laughable - the BIP66 hiccup earlier this summer is
testament to the mess we are in, where pools aren't even running
transactions.

I wonder if transitioning Bitcoin to a security backed Proof of Stake could
actually be it's saviour. We could do it in a way which incentivizes miners
to make the switch, and we'd end up with a system where both major
stake-holders and what were once mining pools would run the validator
nodes. I suspect instead of being controlled by practically three dudes
like it is now, with PoS it would be more like fifteen. And from there PoS
offers more formal grounds for governance infrastructure and for scaling.





On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 7:38 AM, Julia Tourianski <juliatourianski@???>
wrote:

> Actually this is a perfectly smart thing for them to do. Several people
> including myself have been very frank with those on the foundation's board
> regarding how association with Gavin and the continuous support of him as
> "chief scientist" is becoming incredibly laughable. They are simply trying
> to get away from propping up a single individual whether yhey are sincere
> about it or not. I'm actually surprised that they got point finally.
>
> From several people that I've spoken to that deal with Bitcoin dev -
> credible people from my perspective - both Gavin and Hearn are pointless
> for Bitcoin and have been reduced to r/Bitcoin speaking points. They lost.
> I wouldn't bother discussing them much further.
> On Sep 7, 2015 11:09 PM, "veleiro" <veleiro@???> wrote:
>
>> The Foundation joins in on bashing Blockstream with Gavin/Mike, how
>> surprising.
>>
>> The recent fuckery of public bitcoin communities like reddit,
>> bitcointalk and bitcoin-dev leads me to conclude that Corporate-aligned
>> bitcoin has been silently creating a massive army of Internet gnomes
>> that downvote and drive out any sensible comments about bitcoin's more
>> conservative future. Bitcoin will fail if it doesnt process every cup of
>> coffee.
>>
>> I am disappoint internet.
>>
>> Fuck BitcoinXT
>>
>> Cody R Wilson:
>> > Explain the politics to me here.
>> > On Sep 7, 2015 8:18 PM, "Amir Taaki" <genjix@???> wrote:
>> >
>> >> https://twitter.com/btcfoundation/status/639856958317707264
>> >>
>> >> Today’s shoutout is to @Blockstream who has funded more core dev than
>> >> anyone, including us. Their knowledge & depth is extraordinary.
>> >>
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>> >
>> >
>> >
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