[nivexous]

"Non-authoritative" ... this is why BTC people just suck to talk to.

Everyone DYOR. It is indisputable that Satoshi wanted big blocks. Here are a couple quotes:

The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost.

https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/mike-hearn/1/

At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.

https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/cryptography/...

I find it interesting that these are missing in the Nakamoto Institute's quotes on scaling.

[dogman144]

I hear ya. The view is that by references to a large network, split bt SPV and miner nodes, the miner nodes can run expanding blocks and the Rec users just hold block headers, more or less. That implies bigger blocks can occur, will occur at scale, and the miner can roll with it, users are still able to verify, and SN saw nothing wrong with that. Similar evidence as yours exists elsewhere.

I tend to think it’s too easy to cherry-pick SN quotes to make compelling logical cases on SN implying large or small blocks. I don’t think he ever gave a really strong statement on it, in the style the discussion now needs to close it out. As such, he’s not a great source.

I can pick something like this: /the more smaller farms resort to generating bitcoins, the higher the bar gets to overpower the network, making larger farms also too small to overpower it so that they may as well generate bitcoins too./

SN is arguing here, it seems, that the security model holds by enough small farmers, who he equates earlier to recreational users, being able to mine too.

That quote, and your quote, feel fairly at odds with each other! Miners can worry about the block size, they’ll be the super computers with TBs to spare v we need small users to participate in mining too as a key part of the security model, small users won’t have TBd to spare. If we can leave out how this steers into asics, do you note that contrast.

[nivexous]

There's no problem - the word farm is being used differently in different contexts. In the quote you posted, farm is in reference to hashpower. You can have many smaller miners (zombie farms, in your quote) that know nothing about the transactions they are mining. That is how mining pools work today. All that is required is one big central node that can validate the transactions and build the block, which is what my quote was referencing with farm.

[dogman144]

I don’t think mining pools were what SN had in mind with that quote, although the solution you note fits smaller miners contributing hashpower, and not needing to store a big block.

[uncletammy]

> I find it interesting that these are missing in the Nakamoto Institute's quotes on scaling.

Here's a source directly from Mike Hearn

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149668.msg1596879#ms...