# Last edited on 2015-12-04 00:11:06 by stolfilocal
# NOT POSTED

Just a reminder:

Satoshi did not design and develop bitcoin to replace VISA, banks, and
Western Union -- which he explicitly considered adequate for everyday
payments. Bitcoin was not meant to be a way to violate the law, hide
money, break the Fed, make people rich, be a reserve currency or a
"digital gold", or any of the "goals" that have been tacked on it
afterwards. It was not meant to be a way to notarize documents,
implement fair dice, or any other non-currency use. Satoshi's stated
goal was to design an internet "cash" to be used for peer-to-peer
payments [i]when a trusted intermediary was not available or
desirable[/i].

In his carefull thought out design of the bitcoin system, block size is
not supposed to be limited. In 2010, when the 1MB limit was added, it
was more than 100x the then current traffic volume; and, up until 6
months ago, the actual block size always remained below that limit.
Therefore, it was the same as if there was no limit. And his
next-to-last message was "we can increase the limit when neeeded".

His design has only two kinds of players: miners (which he called
"nodes" or "full nodes") and simple clients (who do not keep the
blockchain and trust what the miners tell them). 

In the design, also, miners are to be supported by transaction fees,
that compel them to confirm every transation that they receive. The fees
are expected to be sufficient protection against spam attacks.

I think that Satoshi made a couple of serious mistakes in his design;
but they do not include unlimited blocks, nor leaving control to the
miners.

Now, for several years, even before Blockstream was created, Greg has
been advocating a different design. In his view, the block size should
be limited, so that block space would be a scarce resource and the fees
would be set by a "fee market". 

Greg also seems to believe that the network should be governed by a
third class of players, the "full clients" or "relay nodes"; who do not
mine on their own, but sit between clients and miners, storing and
verifying the blockchain. Apparently he thinks that it should be those
nodes, not the miners, who set the fees, filter out undesirable
transactions, decide transaction priorities, and accept or reject
protocol changes -- and "censor" any miners who try to do "bad" things.

And he seems to have a different idea of who the users should be: large
corporations and rich guys moving millions, instead of plebs sending a
few bucks to a friend.

I think that all three ideas are totally stupid. In particular, there
are several reasons why no business on Earth uses a running auction to
set its price. The "full non-mining nodes" are an aberration: they do
not get rewarded (since, by the original design, they should not exist);
they have no power over the miners; and having them reject transactions
is a violation of the very goal of bitcoin. Finally, a currency that
cannot be used for small payments will not be attractive for large
payments either.

Greg may be a brilliant cryptographer, but he does not seem to have an
ounce of common business sense, or any sensibility for user needs and
psychology. But, stupid or not, now that he has got control of the Core
implementation, he seems determined to reform bitcoin according to that
design -- no matter what the community thinks of it ...