Thread by @MZietzke

I think it's very telling that both Peter and Shinobi are having technical difficulties.

Are they trying to route a lightning payment or something?

Btw, here's the debate... I'll be responding here.

It's obvious that neither Peter nor Shinobi understand the BSV side, or they'd have taken a very different approach in their openings.

Kurt and Connor... Bitcoin has never been tried as designed by Satoshi, that's what BSV is about.

I think that's right on, but not the full picture.

Peter McCoremack... First question... Who is Satoshi.

Is Craig Wright Satoshi Nakamoto?

Etc.

Hotep letting Connor answer the question.

Connor giving in and answering. I get it's a hard position, but is this even relevant?

I don't think so. It's a huge waste of time.

Connor is pushing too hard... Put the facts out, and let them be.

And got to step away for a bit... Will continue watching later.

Ok, I'm WAAAY behind the live stream now, but watching again.

Shinobi doesn't understand that block headers alone are sufficient to follow the PoW chain and to validate that it is the most worked-on chain.

From there, is that block header indicated by anyone as invalid?

To answer that last question is embarrassingly simple, assuming at least 1 honest "node" exists. This is because an honest node can prove via Merkle proofs that a given transaction or set of transactions are invalid, and that it was in the block with that header.

This ease of identifying invalidity also translates directly to sharing that proof of invalidity.

In order to prevent the identification of such a problem, either ALL communication channels are blocked, or there are no honest nodes.

Both scenarios imply circumstances that make "muh raspi node" irrelevant anyways.

Ergo, the SPV model works at least as well as using "muh raspi" to "don't trust, verify."

Shinobi also conflates being a user with running a node.

Do no BTC lite wallets exist? Must I download ~288GB of the BTC blockchain to use BTC?

Connor NAILS it when he's talking about the whitepaper, and Bitcoin's innovation not as a technical innovation but an economic innovation.

Shinobi's response that difficulty adjustment was a technical innovation falls utterly flat to anyone who sees how the economics work.

The claim that Bitcoin is not a solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem because it's not deterministic, but probabilistic is absurd.

It's like saying wings + thrust aren't a solution to flight because there's a possibility that there's a hurricane grounding your plane.

Peter McCoremack, "I put my trust in experts"

Talking about "strong signals"... This ought to be good...

"How many protocol developers are working on BSV?"

Connor answers "probably 15?"

Peter responds, "No, it's 0."

Umm. Riiiight. He looks at Github commits.

What a fool. Kurt's response is 100% on point.

NOBODY made the protocol upgrades happen. They just magically appeared.

But hey, Peter doesn't trust... He verifies! With his "experts" and websites that aren't being used for development purposes.

Goooood one. Good one.

Connor's use of the Hayek quote seems a bit disconnected. I see what he was going for, but I think there was a step of logic missed.

Shinobi talking about "every user choosing to run X node implication" as a market system.

Under which market system does the fact that my neighbors all buy chocolate ice cream force me to buy chocolate ice cream, too?

The block size limit is NOT a market solution. Debate all you want about whether or not it's centralized, but it is ABSURD to call it a result of a market process.

I think the semantic difficulties are interesting. Debate over the definition of a node? Not really all that helpful. Saying "this is what we believe Satoshi meant, and this is what we're supporting in BSV" is helpful.

Give the BTC side all the room to redefine things they want.

What you don't do, however, is allow them to equivocate or to try to have their cake and eat it too.

Peter was adamant about a "death of the author" sort of approach, where Satoshi is irrelevant to BTC. Grant him that, but don't let him refer to Satoshi as a basis for anything.

Shinobi saying BSV is not an implementation of Bitcoin.

That's just stupid "no true Bitcoin/Scotsman" stuff. Your opinion doesn't define what is or isn't an implementation of Bitcoin.

Kurt's statement was on point.

Shinobi talking about application development, "no such thing as a cloud, only someone else's computer," seems like he doesn't have the foggiest clue what's actually being built on BSV, or how it's being done.

An example of ignorance being the best defense of a fool.

"What do you think is going to happen if you shove all of this data on the BSV blockchain?"

Well, first, miners will be a massive competitive business competing over scaling rather than just hashing...

Second, archival nodes built around serving up subsets of the data, augmenting it, dealing with pre-confirmed data, etc. will pop up serving various business cases.

Third, merchants and other non-Bitcoin infrastructure businesses will be the main (not only,) points of entry via an SPV system for transactions using Bitcoin - this is a consumer layer.

Fourth, users will have wallets with varying degrees of services provided around them.

These can each be thought of as a ring in a mandala network, constructed through the economic incentives of the system.

Through this network structure, economic specialization ensures "decentralization" of mining market share (including hash power distribution,) while services are immutably stored and served up, and the asymmetries in the system ensure validity is always verifiable at all levels.

Connor is spot on - the transaction fee is the determinant for whether or not data gets on chain, which means that's the limiter on block size.

Shinobi thinks that hash power providers are miners... This is another semantic issue, but one that *requires* conflation of ideas in order to suggest that merely hashing is the same thing as mining.

Pool operators are miners, contracting out the hashing portion to people with hash power.

To suggest that miners ONLY hash *requires* eliminating the creation of blocks from the role of miners.

What, then, does a "solo miner" do?

When you get into it, it is nonsensical to suggest that pools are not miners just because they have contracted out the hash power portion of production of blocks.

Mining *must be* the entire dark blue section at a MINIMUM. Light blue, too, to make sure they create valid blocks.

They don't even need to hold the archive of the blockchain, but depending on how quickly they prune, they leave themselves open to problems with orphaned blocks.

Shinobi then talks about a large blockchain making "miners" (hash power providers) subservient to the large node operators.

How are they not subservient to pool operators now? Because they could solo mine? The economics of that are absurd even now, unless you're large scale.

Over time, "mining" (hashing) will become even more competitive, and small "miners" (hashers) will be out-competed. This is the natural result when hashing is your sole competitive edge in mining.

So, mining becomes centralized in BTC, because hashing becomes centralized.

On the other side, though, large node operators have multiple things to compete over, hash power included. They also must compete over scale, which must be broken down into different transaction types.

More competitive opportunities -> more specializations possible.

More specializations possible -> more distributed market share on the whole, and more sustainable businesses serving niche market segments.

So in the long run, BTC is more centralized than BSV.

And now Peter is going back to "there isn't a single credible person working on BSV"

Ranting about the people he thinks aren't in BSV.

Uhuh.

Is it because they aren't doing their commits on Github, Peter?

Oh, look, CSW talk again!!

Peter, do you have anything else to say?

Good job cutting that bullshit off, Hotep.

Kurt's thoughts after Hotep reads off the paid chats is good.

Kurt gives a level headed response to some of the statements.

Shinobi's response once again just falls... Flat.

The number of devs is what matters?

Appeals to popularity?

Come on.

Yes, quantity has some importance, but it being the only important thing? Not by a long shot. Quality matters, too.

Hotep is consistently doing a good job.

"What are these dev group's jobs?"

Good question.

Connor on point talking about locking the protocol in stone.

Shinobi's response is ridiculous. It keeps operating on the assumption that the home node matters.

Oh yay, Schnorr.

Threshold signatures, anyone?

"Can you run different versions of the code?"

To an extent.

But there are breaking changes. No, Segwit won't work on a practical level (even if it doesn't break the node software) when you run a pre-segwit version.

And NO, which version of the software is run and the results that are therefore forced on the rest of the network, is NOT a market system.

Block orphaning approaches, on the other hand...

"Why isn't BSV susceptible to the same dev group problems?"

Because devs are hired by miners to code their implementations.

If you want to change the code, you need to be heavily invested in the operation of the network. That means scale + hashing.

To change Bitcoin under those circumstances, you need to have majority hash power on your side, but at scale, that requires that you are also profitable while doing so, or you'll fail as a company and lose your investments.

It's skin in the game, not Github pull requests.

As for being "impervious to communist takeover," I would argue that nothing can be impervious to the willful actions of a significant number of active human beings.

In BSV, however, the aforementioned requirement to have skin in the game makes it difficult for a communist to have any significant say in the system, assuming as I do that communism is a broken ideology (on many levels.)

There, Connor just said it... Miners employ devs.

I'm glad that was said.

Peter is saying "No big company will build on BSV. It's just not going to happen."

Great argument, bro.

Shinobi's entire retort about the BTC dev model not being communist is still based entirely on the "muh node matters" fallacy.

But your node DOESN'T matter.

What, so you don't accept the next block in the chain? So what? The world will move on without you.

This then goes into the issue of Sybil resistance... Where the BTC crowd will say it's not about the number of nodes, but about the "economic weight" (or some variation thereof,) that actually matters.

This, however, utterly fails in that nodes do not play a role in the creation of transactions, nor in the holding (hodling?) of coins, nor in the purchasing or sale of coins, etc.

They will then argue that exchange's nodes do matter to those things.

So now you've replaced "my node matters" with "exchange's nodes matter," treating it as though it's the same thing when it's not.

Do you think exchanges are going to be a "decentralized" part of this economy? Will exchanges hold up to the same standards you apply to miners?

What skin in the game does the exchange have to have?

How "censorship resistant" are they?

How are they anything different than the current banking system?

Decentralized finance my ass!

The next step in this argument is "but we'll have decentralized exchanges! Atomic swaps!" etc.

What big business is ever going to operate on that sort of a system?

Not only will they never get the liquidity they need, nor the services, nor the insurance, they'll also never get the government go-ahead because of things like AML/KYC law.

So, the liquidity is held in centralized exchanges, and we're back to the previous point.

Moving on...

Shinobi claiming that Connor is playing rhetorical games is utterly missing the point.

And, why didn't he call Peter on it when he's repeatedly bringing up CSW? Feigned intellectual honesty at best.

Connor ON POINT bringing up Bitcoin XT and throw it against Shinobi's claims that "running your own node" is how you keep it decentralized.

Shinobi's claims against Gavin Andreson further prove the point that BTC development is not "decentralized".

Peter equating smearing him as a druggy (something I don't do or agree with,) with DDoSing entire towns for running a competing node implementation, which is purportedly, according to Shinobi, the correct way as a user to "vote on the market" for your desired rules?

That's an absurd comparison on its face.

Also, Peter, why are you so obsessed with CSW?

Have you said anything that's NOT about CSW at its core?

Honestly. What a waste of time and energy. Why did you even agree to this? It's not a debate.

On consensus set by Miners in BSV...

Shinobi is talking about how miners produce blocks.

He then says users *are* nodes, the consumers choose to value it.

This is going back up to the "muh node matters" thing.

Your node doesn't matter. Sorry. It doesn't.

The argument that you "won't pay those miners for those coins" is bunk because a) that's a separate market (your node has no say in the exchange of coins, the exchange's node does,) and b) you would have to be an active buyer of coins for a boycot to make a difference.

This is now getting into the "hodlers matter" line of consensus reasoning, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how pricing works in a market.

If I don't exchange on a market, I cannot, by definition, be a participant in the price-setting exchanges at the margin.

If I DO exchange, then I can only push the price AGAINST the asset that I am selling.

Said differently, selling an asset pushes that asset's price lower.

It must be the BUYER who is pushing the price up, and servicing the exchange for those who wish to sell.

If that miner can find a single person to buy the coins from a chain you've decided to orphan with your home node, the miner still wins, and your little boycott is irrelevant.

You have no economic weight, you exercise no economic weight. You are pissant.

At BEST you can say that the exchanges hold economic power, so if the exchanges decide that a miner's chain is invalid, then there is some power there.

But again, are exchanges any better than miners in your opinion? Any more "decentralized"?

"The consumer is the dictator of what happens in a market, not the producer"

No, shinobi. No. The consumer cannot choose from any options not given to them by the producers.

There is no "dictator" in the market.

Learn how markets work.

Shinobi's argument, even accepting his definitions, is utterly foolish and fundamentally flawed.

Kurt pointing out that the node doesn't have anything to do with the consumer's power. Right on.

I think Connor doesn't do an amazing job of explaining what a Sybil is... He gets the essence of it, but not in a way that would be conveyed to those who don't already get it.

Think of it this way.

I setup a poll, but I have no identity verification or other costly signal required to make sure nobody votes twice. All you really need is, say, a Twitter account.

Now, someone has a bot farm and applies it to skewing my poll results.

That is a basic beginner's guide to thinking about what a Sybil attack is.

It misses a LOT of details, but again, it's a starting point.

I love how Shinobi's "PoW solves the Sybil issue" statements completely supports my summary of his arguments before he even made them (in my viewing of the stream.)

It's almost like I understand their position better than they do...

Hmm...

So *exchange's* nodes matter, but yours... Not so much. For all I, or any miner, or any business, or any *insert other entity here* knows, you're a Sybil.

You orphaning a given block on your node is irrelevant.

Your node is impotent.

He also brings up the electric company's node.

Yes. Economic weight. You have none.

Btw, if everyone runs a node *in order to validate their own transactions* then how can they do that with a 1MB limit in place?

Hmmm.... High fees are problematic, aren't they?

"The person receiving the money has all the power"

Really?

Your employer tells you that your paycheck was made to you, and he sees it on his node. That you disagree with your node doesn't mean he didn't pay you.

What's the result now?

Does your node matter, or does your employer's node matter?

What is the source of truth?

Ahh, the blockchain... Which is produced by who?

Miners.

Miners are the source of truth, as they "hash out" the longest chain.

Connor isn't seeing the "economic weight" aspect of the BTC "vision."

This is why Shinobi is calling foul.

It's fair that Connor is unintentionally attacking a straw man here... But, those semantic issues come into play here.

Add to this, even Shinobi doesn't realize he's talking about "economic weight" or he would apply it consistently and see how flawed his position ultimately is, as I've described above.

His node is irrelevant. He is pissant. No economic weight.

Also.... I don't need to run a node to exercise my economic weight, which further undermines his position.

Shinobi is telling the truth when he says Connor isn't making any sense.... To him.

Because Shinobi doesn't understand that Connor is talking about the consensus surrounding the blockchain.

It's literally that they're speaking two different languages.

This is why I give on certain semantics, because then it's about the arguments... Where I don't give is where those semantics are used to absolutely destroy the underlying logic in the arguments. See discussion above about what a "miner" is.

Connor calling Shinobi on contradicting himself between "PoW solves Sybil attacks" and "Users validate the blockchain" is correct, but the reason why is too subtle for the context. It's not getting through...

The problem is that under Shinobi's description, he says that consumers have all the power. How can that coexist with the idea that miners with PoW solve the Sybil problem?

If users have all the power, how can a powerless entity solve the problem?

At least, that's a bit of an oversimplification of the issue that I think might convey the meat of the point.

Kurt's point about building on top of a block is correct, but I'd disagree on the semantics.

You can validate a block, but you cannot provide a competing block to extend the chain in contradiction with a block you find to be invalid.

So in effect, if you and everyone else believe a miner's block is invalid, but nobody is mining on an alternative chain, what are you left with?

A stagnant chain. No more blocks. No more transactions ever coming to you (they're never included in a block.)

Took a little bit to get what Kurt was saying about the Model T...

I think I agree with it. It's just not how I would say it :)

Kurt is right on talking about whether or not BTC can survive the halvenings.

Peter talking about centralization because of big blocks.

"I'm not even technical and I know this shit."

You seem to know a lot of things, Peter. How is that Github development research going, btw?

But I'll say again, this goes back to the argument I made that Bitcoin can scale in a way that retains market decentralization because of its inherent specialization opportunities. Artificially limit that and it will become centralized.

BTC will centralize. BSV will not.

When you stop treating market structures as though they're fully dependent on absolute rather than relative barriers to entry/operational costs and you start incorporating a knowledge of how revenues flow to the firms, you start to see this.

There are multi-trillion dollar industries that are "decentralized" despite having high barriers to entry.

Look at real markets.

Fast food is a great example, as is cola flavored drinks.

It's all about the specializations available to firms. Niches in the market.

Connor is wrong... Monopolies DO exist in nature.

It all depends on how you define the market.

There is a monopoly on the Big Mac. There is not a monopoly on fast food burgers.

The question is, which monopolies matter, and which don't? That's dependent on consumers.

So, do consumers care that there's a monopoly on Big Macs?

By and large, no. So many other products exist to service their desires in the way the Big Mac does.

Now, let's look at blocks.

Is there a monopoly on block production?

So far, no. And I argue in an unlimited Bitcoin, there will never be such a monopoly. In a limited Bitcoin, there will be.

See argument above.

Connor DOES make a good point about devs artificially helping or hurting certain miners.

This is the root of it. I argue that the 1MB limit is artificially helping miners specialized in hashing, to the extent that no other specializations matter. Hence, centralization over time.

Shinobi wants to go back to Sybils... Connor explains what he meant, and Shinobi calls foul... By not at all addressing the vulnerability that Connor was calling out.

So let's say it's not a Sybil.

You've still not addressed the attack enabled by your design. GG, bro!

Connor isn't getting to the core fallacy of Shinobi's position... Too bad. But this is hard stuff. Shinobi is going Gish Gallup on this.

"PoW must be attached to a block for me to consider it."

Yes. So as a consumer, you're limited to accepting only blocks with PoW attached to them.

What happens if no PoW is attached to the blocks you accept?

Or if the longest chain that you accept is full of empty blocks?

It is a fantasy to suggest that the consumer is the dictator here. If there's a majority of hash power going against your rule set, you're screwed.

You have basically two options:
1) Fork, change PoW
2) Do permissioned mining

Neither is Bitcoin.

"You have a node that everybody in the world connects to with their wallets - that every single lite wallet user connects to this node, and all the miners in the world connect to a different node, and there's just these two nodes. Who decides the rules there?"

I'm answering this before I hear the responses.

First, this is like a trolley problem meme where the scenario can't be used to extrapolate to the real world because it is fundamentally different from the real world.

With that being said....

The miners define the rules.

This is because only the miners extend the chain.

This is true regardless of whether you define the node the miners connect to as a pool, or the miners as individual miners each running their own nodes. (Notice the semantic difference?)

The issue here is... Who is/are the miner(s)?

Under one definition, it's the "one node that miners connect to." Under the other, it's all the miners who compete to have their blocks accepted in the network.

So is the "one miner (pool)" the decider or is it the competing miners?

These are two very different dynamics to consider.

If the competing miners are connected ONLY through the one node, then it's the one node because that's the choke point of all data flowing between miners. Only the rules they like will get built upon by other miners...

Meanwhile under that scenario, anyone who disagrees just thinks that nobody else is creating any blocks. They have their own chain that they build on.

See how this scenario isn't Bitcoin, and isn't applicable to real life?

Under the scenario that the miners are all connected to each other, but they're all connected to the rest of the network through that one node, they'll build a consensus chain, and either that one node won't propagate it, or it will.

In that scenario, it's unrealistic because only ONE connection with the longest chain needs to exist in order for the rest of the network to route past a single non-cooperative node.

If, however, that one node is a pool, then all the hash power provided to it builds on the blocks that one node likes, and no competing blocks exist.

So I ask...

Who is playing games? This isn't politicking out of it. I answered three different scenarios, and I can't imagine another one in which your question might apply.

Isn't that interesting. It's the producers who determine what's mined next in all cases.

The only thing is, in one of the cases, where miners aren't connected to anything but a single node, there's as many chains as there are miners.

That is not Bitcoin in the slightest, yet it's the only scenario in which the node held all the power.

Now to hear Kurt/Connor's response...

Not gonna lie, I like Kurt's response talking about truth vs opinions, communism, etc. a lot more.

Ok, let things go for a little bit until Peter says that it's 2 hours of a technical discussion that people don't care about...

So you are saying that your audience is ignorant, "real people can't understand this stuff"...

What will people care about?

Hotep talking truth.

I like this guy. He's earned my follow.

"What is Bitcoin's unique use case?"

What *isn't* Bitcoin's use case? When it's unlimited, look at what can be done with it.

Valuing information is one big thing.

And he's going back into "block sizes need to be small because decentralization!"

Here's where my entire argument comes up.

Kurt also does a good job talking about how high fees are censorship, too.

Regarding 2nd layers, Kurt does a good job answering.

I'd add that the theoretical solutions do not actually answer the issues completely.

There is not a single routing solution even theoretically ready to solve the real problems satisfactorily.

I've been starting to just skip over things I've already responded to. Lots of rehashing.

Now they're talking about data on chain... How do I know what was put on chain was true?

This is a great question. I don't think it's entirely solved.

But, if it's on chain, truth and falsehoods alike, then the record of both remains. At the very least you know without a doubt that there are two (and no more,) versions of events. Then you can look deeper if you are so inclined.

But it reminds me of something my grandpa said, as passed down through my dad...

"Don't lie to me, son, your memory isn't good enough."

Truth is consistent because it is true. Falsehoods rarely endure with such a luxurious ease of consistency.

To put falsehoods on chain repeatedly requires an investment (tx fees at a minimum,) on an ongoing basis, and that truth can be either supported or disputed on chain, too.

If someone puts in contradictory weather data, first, who is to say that will serve some future manipulative agenda? The options are already limited to what can be planned in advance.

Now, if people notice this, they can call foul in real time, as things are being uploaded.

The real issue then is sybil resistance of that data.

If there are 100 nodes saying X was the temperature in Seattle, WA on 10/18/19, and 1 says the temperature was Y, which is true?

This gets to the nature of truth on another level.

All of that can be solved in time, I think... But it cannot be denied that this is a MAJOR step in the right direction, and without a system such as Bitcoin, such truth cannot be established over time.

Shinobi's explanation of Open Timestamp is interesting, but ultimately useless unless you already have the data independent of the blockchain.

Also, it still costs money, that money is just shared across all data put into that single Merkle tree. Just a nitpick.

"Do you think Satoshi's vision was to create better money, or to put all information that ever existed on a blockchain?"

False dichotomy. That's not mutually exclusive.

In fact, I'd argue both are necessary for the other to happen, especially since Core derailed straight-to-money adoption.

Losing steam here... They're going in circles a lot.

So, I'm going to wrap up my responses for now. I'll keep watching though. Got another hour or so left. If there's anything significantly new, I'll add to this thread.

I'll give my take so far on the whole now though...

I think Kurt and Hotep won the debate.

Peter was a dunce.

Shinobi tried, but he doesn't understand the arguments he's putting forward. He hasn't done the work to understand them.

@Bitcoin_Beyond ... Made a lot of good points, but I think he was largely ineffective here. I think he doesn't fully understand the BTC position, so he ended up talking past the others, and not understanding what was being said back to him at times.

Big props to @kurtwuckertjr for his ability to pull away from the infighting and things only "we" care about, to give a great, level headed response incorporating the bigger picture on a lot of things.

I think Kurt made fantastic points pretty damned consistently.

And huge props to @HotepJesus (I'll be following you in a minute here as promised, been busy watching this show,) for his moderation and his good questions. I think he did a good job managing a panel of people who are less than happy with each other. Well done.

Now... Taking a break, then watching the last hour next.

Ok. Deep breath.

I'm going to try to watch some more.

Not gonna lie though, this is wearing on me. Partly because it's a LOT of content, covering a LOT of ground, and partly because if Peter says one more goddamned word about CSW......

Deep breath... Here we go again.

(No promises on further tweets in response, btw... I'll try to keep it only to new things if I do respond some more.)

It's come to my attention that I have Shinobi blocked, and he doesn't like that.

Here's the ground rules... I'll unblock him, and if he starts pulling intellectually dishonest bullshit, I'll call him out and block him again. Fair? (Yes, yes it is.)

@brian_trollz want to discuss this here, or elsewhere?

Let's have at it.

I'm calling you on your bluff.

@brian_trollz Keep in mind, btw, that he just went through a ~3 hour live debate, and I've just watched ~2 hours of it and created a massive tweetstorm about it... I'm guessing we won't be getting to this right away.

I'm happy to do this as time and energy permits for both of us.