Jolon, your article is very good from an informational/background standpoint, but what you’re missing is several things Satoshi already accounted when designing the protocol:
#1. you mention Moore’s Law (I believe) in the beginning of the article, but then ignore it’s consequences when talking about the cumbersome nature of miner’s storing data. How much would it cost you personally in 2019 to store literally the entire decade’s worth of stored computation from the 1950s? Probably a cheap key drive, no? We could keep doing this example for each decade, but you know Moore’s Law as well as I do. Moore’s Law isn’t just the physics of circuitry (thus limited by quantum mechanics; ALTHOUGH on even that point, we also don’t have PROOF quarks and photons can’t somehow be broken down into smaller dimensional, utilizable, parts) but also an economic law, right? It’s about how much RELATIVE cost it is to store data now vs in the future.
#2. Satoshi intended to create as LITTLE rules as possible (I’m sure even HE laments the 1mb block size limitation, but at the time he had a reason) in his protocol, so why buck that perfective design goal? Let miner’s do what they want, there are MULTIPLE incentives baked into BitCoin which direct miner behavior. I’ll list a few of the major ones:
a). Miner’s need to be on the correct blockchain or else they lose the value of all the machinery (capital expenditure) they’ve invested. Let the fees govern their behavior. If they think they can do better than nChain’s node software, let them. This is the nature of competition, no?
b). Hard Forks. Satoshi in his brilliance even pre-solved the problem of btc and bch, right? He gave miner’s an out. FORK. BSV was born from miner’s who no longer believed the btc and bch chains would live, long term, so they forked. This is a decision, and its baked into BitCoin. If one miner comes up with a better system, VOILA! A new star is born. Leaders lead, followers follow, winners win and losers lose. In the end, it’ll all work out. If your proposal is how BitCoin can better exist on a new fork of your creation, have at it and continue writing/supporting your idea and perhaps you’ll gain a following?
c). 1 satoshi/Byte is a market price, not a protocol price. Miner’s are free to make their own transactions with customers (transactors, storers of data). Thus miner’s can elect to change the price, lower it, raise it, as they like. At the end of the day, it’s an economic decision governed by their own religious and economic needs.
d). Genesis, I believe, is about creating this system of competition, it’s about releasing the original protocol and perhaps with better guidelines for the vision. Hence the name, Satoshi Vision. Does really ANYONE have better vision than Satoshi? If so, please DM me on Twitter @EquityDiamonds bc I for one would like to meet the chap who better understands Satoshi’s invention better than he. It’s been 10 years and the only person who seems to know as much as Satoshi is Craig S. Wright, a core guy involved in Genesis. Seems like safe hands to me, but I do appreciate your deep understanding of BitCoin and thoughtful solution. I just don’t think they need it yet, data storage is part of the design of BitCoin. In fact, if you run the numbers, it HAS to be.
At 15mm transactions per day and 1 satoshi/Byte (and nChain is enthusiastic about how this price will come DOWN), the value of BSV’s market cap would end up quite low. Certainly the market cap of Visa + MC would be an unreachable cieling, right? I mean, their transactions are min of like 30 cents per transaction, not including the > 2% banks are raping (sorry “charging”) you for airline miles and cash back nonsense programs (which frankly all end up in the pockets of Google and Facebook and Snapchat for advertising: ‘What’s in YOUR wallet?’ annoyances). So if BSV is 1/10th of a penny, that’s easy math for how big BSV can get, in terms of valuing the network. If that’s all we’re “playing for”, then WTF are we wasting are time even writing these articles and responses??
BitCoin is money and can replace all world money, fine. But that’s small potatoes. If BitCoin doesn’t replace the internet and AWS and iCloud and Google Cloud and the farce that is Azure (which is really just cloud storage of Office suite of LEGACY software — a massive price raise at EOL for a former titan), then BitCoin will have failed, Satoshi will have failed, nChain will have failed. For nChain’s patent portfolio to be worth anything, BSV (or whatever fork emerges from it which is strongest and doesn’t go to zero which by design will be the most useful chain) simply MUST become a data network. I think if you talk with anyone high up at nChain or CoinGeek, you’ll find their interests align with this thought process, no? Think about it: Coingeek, the Bitcoin Association and Craig himself don’t market to investment banks; their conferences are aimed at DEVELOPERS (like my current self) not “money men” (like my former self). Developers and storage and transactions (COMPUTATION) is what BitCoin was originally created to do, and you can even see it in Satoshi’s original writings in the early days. Gold was both money and a display of wealth and a useful commodity (damn nice circuits they make), and it lasted 3,000 years as the winner of all asset-backed money competitions. BitCoin is the best challenger to gold in thousands of years, and I can think of only a HALF of one bullet point where gold might still have an advantage, but BitCoin wins all the other bakeoffs for what money should be in a perfect world. BitCoin, should it succeed, would be the universe’s most efficent money and one of the greatest human inventions of all time — combining economics, math, physics, psychology, money, and market forces all into one invention. It’s an invention ONLY a polymath could concieve, but like all inventions, someone prolly would have built it eventually but we’re lucky to have Satoshi who conjured it and gave it to us 10 years ago instead of 1,000 years from now (shit, prolly someday a computer, one that understood human emotion, would invent it if a human didn’t).
Bottom Line: Let’s see what Genesis do, and if you still think BSV has problems, you can always fork it!
