[Anonobread]

What outsiders don't seem to understand is the people shouting "Bitcoin is or should be a democracy" the loudest are the ones who stand to benefit the most from seizing power from the current core developers.

As if those people have any intention whatsoever to listen to the opinions of billions of poor people when making technical protocol decisions. They don't want real democracy - they want their democracy where they're in control. And for anyone wondering what that control looks like, here are some direct quotes from the "democracy" crew:

Gavin Andresen: "there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks" [1]

Gavin Andresen: "I think long-term the chain will not be secured purely by proof-of-work. I think when the Bitcoin network was tiny running solely on people's home computers proof-of-work was the right way to secure the chain" [2]

Gavin Andresen: "bitcoin is already more decentralised than it needs to be" [3]

Mike Hearn: "probably 2 or 3 racks of machines" [4]

Gavin Andresen: No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that.

[1]: https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3118.0

[2]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015...

[3]: http://www.bitcoin.kn/2015/09/adam-back-gavin-andresen-block...

[4]: https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=35...

IOW, the goal of their democracy is to usurp control of full nodes from individual hands and make that into a Corporate-dominated service. It would basically turn Bitcoin into an enterprise database that most people are stuck accessing as a proprietary SaaS.

[MCRed]

Consider that much of the opposition to Core comes from the perception that Blockstream, which employs many of the core developers, is usurping it to be a high-fee, low-transaction network so that they can incentivize (and profit from) the use of their lighting network.

That's why the opposition is called "classic" not "bitcoin democracy". Their position is they are getting back to what bitcoin should have been.

And bitcoin originally had larger than 2mb blocks. The 1mb block limit was a short term solution to a problem that existed back then... that was never lifted.

[Anonobread]

The performance test data shows 32MB blocks are the absolute maximum block size that can be handled on desktop PCs today [1]:

> After simulating the creation of blocks up to 32 MB in size, we have arrived at some interesting conclusions:

- a 32 MB block, when filled with simple P2PKH transactions, can hold approximately 167,000 transactions, which, assuming a block is mined every 10 minutes, translates to approximately 270 tps

- a single machine acting as a full node takes approximately 10 minutes to verify and process a 32 MB block, meaning that a 32 MB block size is near the maximum one could expect to handle with 1 machine acting as a full node

- a CPU profile of the time spent processing a 32 MB block by a full node is dominated by ECDSA signature verification, meaning that with the current infrastructure and computer hardware, scaling above 300 tps would require a clustered full node where ECDSA signature checking is load balanced across multiple machines.

In addition:

> Aside from the obvious network and storage constraints of running a full Bitcoin node at large block sizes, it appears the Bitcoin network is capable of handling a substantially higher transaction volume than it does currently. The CPU time being dominated by ECDSA signature checks at high transaction rates suggests a clustered full node architecture could process credit-card-like transaction rates by using a load balancing / offload approach to ECDSA signature checking, e.g. a full node with a 10 machine cluster would top out at >2,000 tps.

> The resources and know-how required to run a clustered node like this may impose a significant centralizing force on Bitcoin. Backpressure against the centralization of Bitcoin may well drive alternative solutions to having all transactions on-chain. Alternatively, it may end up that Bitcoin adoption grows slowly enough that the computing power of a single node grows quickly enough to avoid requiring a clustered full node architecture.

Under Gavin Andresen's original plan, the 32MB limit could've been crossed in Jan 2018 when the size doubled to 40MB. Importantly, Gavin has since dropped the idea for a block size of 2MB. Hence you really can't claim that your own preferred plan for block size won't result in "a high-fee, low-transaction network". It's 2MB - that's a very far cry from VISA and it's only 0.4MB more than the scaling roadmap - that's a difference of at worst 3 tps out of VISA's 56,000.

Unless your intent is to quite literally put 100% of Bitcoin full nodes in datacenters, it's as clear as day that raising and re-raising block size ad infinitum doesn't work, as it usurps control of full nodes from individuals. It effectively turns Bitcoin into an enterprise database only accessible to the rest of us through garbage proprietary SaaS platforms. Clearly this isn't a benefit and we should be pulling out every possible stop to avoid it from happening. Look, if your vision for Bitcoin is that it should be like Parse.com for credit cards, I'm sorry but we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

[aback]

> Unless your intent is to quite literally put 100% of Bitcoin full nodes in datacenters

It is a fallacy to think that unless people can run nodes on dial-up in basements, the Bitcoin network has failed in its mission.

Thousands of nodes running in data centers all over the world can provide a scalable, fault-tolerant, censorship-resistant, decentralized relay network.