[kerkeslager]

> It’s not clear that it doesn’t need a central authority. There is a rich history of blockchain consensus failure needing a central authority to tell everyone which chain is the right one. Satoshi did it in 2010, the Bitcoin developers did it in 2013, Vitalik did it with Ethereum in 2016. When the ledgers don’t reconcile, the developers are the central authority. And proof-of-work can’t save it because that too is centralized.

There's a big difference between centralized influence and centralized control. The 2010 and 2013 examples were fairly homogeneous, because the changes were fairly obvious and reasonable, the thought leaders were widely trusted, and almost all the users followed them. But a large number of people didn't follow when Ethereum split (hence Ethereum Classic) or when Bitcoin split in 2017 (hence Bitcoin Cash).

Thought leaders like Satoshi and Vitalik can influence most of the community of their respective coins, but they can't force anyone to accept their blocks.

> So if it can’t do the first thing it promises it can do, maybe it becomes more like a Rube Goldberg machine than something that is meant to be useful/practical. The fact that people are praising CryptoKitties as a “practical application” seems to support the Rube Goldberg machine/toy theory.

The problem I think is that decentralized control is really the only thing that blockchains offer over existing data stores. If you don't care about decentralized control, existing distributed logs such as Datomic are superior to blockchain in every way.

I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of blockchain users fall into two categories:

1. People who don't understand decentralization. 2. People who don't care about decentralization but are riding the hype (whether they understand decentralization or not).

This is why so many "blockchain applications" look like Rube Goldberg machines:

1. People who don't understand decentralization use it to implement things that would be much better served by an existing distributed datastore such as Datomic. 2. People who are just riding hype don't need to implement anything serious to fool people. They can implement a Rube Goldberg machine and there will always be suckers who take it seriously as long as it ticks the "blockchain" hype tickbox.

Very few people actually understand decentralization AND care about it, and even fewer of those have the technical chops to implement them. So I think it will take time for more complex blockchain killer apps to emerge.

It's worth noting that the first simple blockchain application, cryptocurrency, has already had pretty immense effects on our society, from darknet markets to crypto exchanges. You can argue whether the uses people use cryptocurrency for are good, but you can't argue it isn't useful--it's just not complex (from a logical standpoint--it's just a ledger--obvously it's technically and socially complex).

[hudon]

Satoshi told everyone his fork was Bitcoin and Vitalik told everyone his fork was Ethereum. The fact that more people disagreed with Vitalik than people that disagreed with Satoshi doesn't change the fact that the same thing happened in both cases: a central authority told everyone which fork was the right one.

At the end of the day, when consensus breaks in unforeseen circumstances-- whether through a bug or an attack (the difference is purely syntactic)--people turn to the developers to tell them which consensus ruleset to follow. If you disagree with the developers, your chain gets called something else, as we've seen with Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic.

With the 2013 Bitcoin fork, there were 2 ledgers and the network could not find consensus until the developers realized this and told everyone what to do 4 hours later. That's the developers controlling the system.

And who controls the developers? Their big bad State.

[kerkeslager]

> Satoshi told everyone his fork was Bitcoin and Vitalik told everyone his fork was Ethereum. The fact that more people disagreed with Vitalik than people that disagreed with Satoshi doesn't change the fact that the same thing happened in both cases: a central authority told everyone which fork was the right one.

And not everyone listened.

> At the end of the day, when consensus breaks in unforeseen circumstances-- whether through a bug or an attack (the difference is purely syntactic)--people turn to the developers to tell them which consensus ruleset to follow.

Not everyone turns to the developers.

In a decentralized system, people have the ability to disagree with the developers and literally anyone else you might name as a central authority, and have that disagreement make a meaningful difference (a fork). That's obviously significant.

> If you disagree with the developers, your chain gets called something else, as we've seen with Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic.

Who cares?

When the Bitcoin fork happened, I supported the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. I don't give a crap about the name. If I get the blockchain implementation I want, you can call it whatever you want.

[hudon]

Your fork is not the same system though, everyone else considers it a different currency. The argument is whether or not 1 given currency is decentralized, not whether or not you as a human have the freedom to use any currency you want...

In other words, someone creating Bitcoin Cash doesn't somehow prove that Bitcoin is decentralized... We still need to analyze each currency individually if we're going to have any meaningful conversation about their merits.

[kerkeslager]

> Your fork is not the same system though, everyone else considers it a different currency. The argument is whether or not 1 given currency is decentralized, not whether or not you as a human have the freedom to use any currency you want...

No, everyone does not consider it a different currency, you consider it a different currency. The name changed, sure, but again, who cares? A rose by another name would smell as sweet.

Calling either BTC or BCH a different currency from the original bitcoin really just shows a lack of understanding of what a fork is. Both BTC and BCH have made changes that weren't in the original BTC.

[hudon]

> everyone does not consider it a different currency, you consider it a different currency.

Um ok we're spreading lies now. Do you have evidence that the vast majority of people consider Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin to be the same currency and I'm alone in considering these 2 blockchains 2 different currencies?

[kerkeslager]

> Are you saying you have evidence that the vast majority of people consider Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin to be the same currency and I'm alone in considering these 2 blockchains 2 different currencies?

No, I didn't say that.

I'm saying that neither Bitcoin nor Bitcoin Cash are identical the original Bitcoin. Both have added changes, and this will be true of any blockchain that is being actively developed. In fact, to say that Bitcoin before the fork is the same coin as Bitcoin when Satoshi made it is also a bit off, because there were changes added before the fork, too.

I'm saying that saying that considering either one of these to be different from the original Bitcoin is a moot point, because any conceptualization of being the same coin doesn't really fit. The only way you could say that any variation of Bitcoin is the same coin is by saying that they build on the same blockchain, but both BTC and BCH fit that criteria.

You've focused in on the names people call the coins, which is pretty much the least important way one could say that coins are the same--implementation is far more relevant than name.

In the end, the only thing that really makes sense to say is that modern BTC and BCH are both variants of the original Bitcoin. It doesn't really make sense to say that either is the original Bitcoin, because both have introduced changes. It also doesn't make sense to say that either isn't the original Bitcoin, because they both originate on the same blockchain. The idea you're trying to apply here, that a fork means a new coin was created and the old coin continues on, just doesn't really capture the full truth of situation.

Looking at popular opinion as if that had any relation to reality is not going to help you understand what's going on here. Most people don't understand Bitcoin, so looking at the opinions of most people as if there's any truth there is pointless.

[shanusmagnus]

While there's a lot that could be written about what decentralization even means, or how to measure it, no reasonable definition would require a decentralized system to be entirely outside of the influence of everyone all the time.

For instance, Satoshi told people something that all participants considered reasonable, and so the participants reacted accordingly. Systemic reasonable behavior is not inconsistent with the principle of decentralization, it's a consequence of it.

The origin of systemically-reasonable policy is orthogonal to the idea of decentralization, unless that origin is structurally mandated.

[hudon]

In 2013 literally the system could not find consensus until the central party told people what to do. If you're still calling that "decentralized" then I'm afraid the word has lost any useful meaning...

But I'm with you man, if we as a decentralized group come up with a reasonable hierarchy of trust supported by free speech and democracy, then we can create a systemically-reasonable Money that we can all agree is good.

[shanusmagnus]

I'm not trying to nitpick, but I don't think there has ever in the history of man been a system that was fundamentally social and about shared consensus (which is about the most literal definition of money that there is) that would work any other way.

Having some Eminence say "This is what we should do" and then having a wide network of people go and do that is _not_ a problem. What _is_ a problem is if some eminence says "This is what we should do" and having a bunch of other people say "I don't want to do that" or "That doesn't make sense" or "This will be bad for me" and then _having to do it anyway_. That's the issue. Having to get permission for the US Govt before you change how nodes work, that's an issue. Having some dev frown and say "I can't get the majority to adopt my pull request because of stupid Greg Maxwell" is not an issue.

No complex system involving humans will ever get around the importance of human communication and coordination and agreement, and that is not a technological problem to be solved. A system that artificially mandates who those humans should be, or what kinds of solutions they can offer, that _is_ a problem to be solved, and Bitcoin does a nice job of solving it as well as it can reasonably be solved.

Of course, this is an empirical question. I could be wrong, and the data will demonstrate that in time. But so far there is no such demonstration of wrongness, and the chaos and arguing between various factions (e.g., Segwit2x, Bitcoin Cash) are not evidence in favor of that hypothesis.

[woah]

Sounds like you’re mostly talking about trademark law here

[hudon]

Are you saying trademark law would help resolving forks?

[kerkeslager]

No, he's saying that you don't seem to understand the technology, because you only are talking about the names of the coins, which is of little importance compared to the implementation.

[hudon]

Sorry you've lost me. How do you differentiate between blockchains if not at least by name? How will a merchant know which currencies to accept if they have no names? When I'm trading Bitcoin for Litecoin, am I just trading the same thing for itself?

[kerkeslager]

> How do you differentiate between blockchains if not at least by name?

By validating the blocks against the rules you've chosen and choosing the longest valid blockchain.

> How will a merchant know which currencies to accept if they have no names?

By choosing the blockchain they agree with the rules of.

> When I'm trading Bitcoin for Litecoin, am I just trading the same thing for itself?

No, but the name isn't the important difference. The important difference is that Bitcoin proof of work uses SHA while Litecoin proof of work uses Scrypt, so the blocks of one don't validate under the rules of the other.