American medical system is not capitalist but mercantilist. It's illegal to offer services without explicit permission of the medical guild. It has the exact same effect all historical guild systems had: price gouging and reduced supply. Taxi licenses are another good example.
Capitalist medical system would mean the value of a particular medical certification would be set by the market, ie. everyone would be able to sell medical services. Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.
>American medical system is not capitalist but mercantilist.
This distinction is made on the fallacious idea that "capitalism" is equal to a totally free market. This is a common confusion but false nevertheless. There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government, and indeed it must deal with this to uphold property rights as even libertarian authors tell us.
Capitalism is the predominant employment of wage-labour, the private ownership of social means of production and the goal of accumulation of capital.
>Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.
It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.
>There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government
You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman where 'capitalism' can have any property you want, which then allows you to misrepresent an attack on a $random_negative_thing as an attack on 'capitalism'.
A system with state intervening in the market is called a mixed economy.
>It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.
The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.
If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.
>You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman
Isn't this exactly what post-Marxian authors did? By the time Marx was writing, it was clear what capitalism was - the predominant employment of wage labour, private ownership of social means of production, and accumulation of capital. The idea that a state which owns all or most of the productive capacity of society cannot be "capitalist" for some reason is outstandingly silly.
>The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.
This is a very ignorant statement; there exist heavy protections against high exploitation in the EU, but the EU is not a Socialist organisation nor are many people trying to escape it for its labour laws. There has not existed a Socialist society as of yet aside from the Paris Commune and Catalonia (which I must note, very few people tried to escape); before you reply that this is an NTS fallacy, I must say that the Socialist mode of production rests upon the abolition of the law of value (i.e commodities are not produced) and the working class as a whole hold ownership of the social means of production, and the functions of private property have been done away with. This was not observed in the regimes of the USSR, Soviet satellite states, Cuba or Venezuela.
>If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.
No. Cuba and Venezuela both operate the capitalist mode of production, and in fact Cuba is in very direct violation of the principles of non-alienated labour. How can a Socialist country be opposed to fair working conditions? This suggests to me that it is not Socialist at all. You must also note that I have not shown any appreciation for the economic models of either Cuba or Venezuela. The idea that I must support any country which calls itself "Socialist" is as absurd as saying that as a democrat I must support any country which calls itself "democratic", including the DPRK.
1. Jacek Dukaj [0] - virtually unknown due to refusal to write directly in English :( "Perfect Imperfection" is imo the best sf book about trans/posthumanism there is.
"Dukaj has interesting take on post-humanism, both as a state of being and as a process. If you recall Accellerando, even though Manfred Macx was a futurist and trans-humanist he was hesitant to augment himself past certain limits. Stross pretty much drew a line in sand and said: up to here, you are human and if you rewire yourself further you will become something both incomprehensible, inhuman and frightening. Dukaj is very aware of this problem, but in his universe there is no line – there is a blurred spectrum of humanity. Yes, if you continue augmenting yourself for pure performance you may eventually lose track of your humanity." [1]
Allowing for coordinated protocol changes, the optimal length of pre-cooperative identification code should depend on the probability of error (defector). Which after a long enough time of winning (ie. close to zero defectors) would lead to jumping into cooperation immediately. Which would make defense against defectors impossible and lead to a total collapse as they exploit the hapless cooperators.
It is a 'winning strategy' only for the winners. We can just as well call it a 'losing strategy'. As the players become more intelligent, they are able to cooperate better and everyone wins, meaning cooperation is even 'more winning'. That is, unless your intentions here are something like eugenics.
It's only possible for everyone to win if basic resources are infinite. Tribalism is the only pareto optimal strategy for finite resources, especially land on Earth.
POW can't work at these scales. At $250k/btc mining would burn something close to the equivalent of New Zealand's GDP. As this would be purely electrical energy, energy use alone would be equivalent to that of Spain or similarly sized country.
That's only partly true.
There are countries where average wage is $300/month. They are NOT going to buy legal software and media for $40/thing no matter how easy it is.
Brazil checking in. People still pay for steam games despite the cost. It is often cheaper than the currency-converted USD price, and otherwise you don't have multiplayer. Piracy is down by orders of magnitude from 10 years ago.
Calling it 'weak' is giving it too much consideration. The only sensible argument against larger blocks is that they boost mining centralization because larger blocks may take more time to propagate. Which may be true but it requires 1GB+ blocks. 10Gbps connection isn't a noticeable cost item for a serious mining operation, which means latency for a 1MB block and a 1GB one should be almost identical.
That's it. Remember that decentralization in bitcoin concerns miners, and miners only. 'Nodes' in the whitepaper are synonymous with miners.
Non-mining wallets need to have enough bandwidth to download blocks from miners as they appear. For 1GB blocks 20Mbps is enough. Which means a full verifying wallet for 1GB blocks is practical on a LTE connection.
Storage is also a non-problem with utxo commitments.
I thought the main concern with the block size was not typical western connections (where as you say 10 Gbps is no problem) but the limited performance of data crossing the Great Firewall of China?
That's complete FUD on several levels. On a most general level, mining itself only needs the header. Chinese miners can verify blocks and transactions elsewhere and only send headers to the actual mining sites. A dial-up should be enough.
Regardless, from what I heard it's not a problem anymore. Even if it was, allowing 'fast passage' for bitcoin blocks seems like a obvious course of action for the Chinese government, it's just another export industry at this point.
> Calling it 'weak' is giving it too much consideration
You can only say this if you're too ignorant to be worth a damn on the subject, or are insane enough to think that the people who have developed the protocol for the last 8 years are all misguided. If you launch into some conspiracy about Blockstream, Inc., then we'll know it's a combination of both.
> Remember that decentralization in bitcoin concerns miners, and miners only
And exchanges, merchants, consumers. If you have a stake in the ledger by owning or accepting BTC, then you have a stake in the monetary policy of BTC. If you have a stake in the monetary policy of BTC, then you can only hope to enforce it (or attempt to change it) by running a node.
That's before the mathematics of bigger blocks, where the decentralization of miners is threatened even by a 2 MB block size, as those with more hash rate get another bonus due to the latency increases of even a 1 MB block size increase.
If all that mattered in Bitcoin was the decentralization of miners, this game would have been over a long time ago. Anybody who thinks that even a landscape of thousands of miners, pooled by very few pools, is decentralized enough on its own, without others validating and auditing the blockchain, is too capable of assumptions to be let near engineering.
Why does every currency that has ever existed get devalued into dogshit by its policymakers? Every currency dies because those close to the mint can afford devaluation more than those further from it.
> the decentralization of miners is threatened even by a 2 MB block size, as those with more hash rate get another bonus due to the latency increases of even a 1 MB block size increase
This is completely ridiculous. If someone can't send 2MB of data across the network in less than a few seconds, then of course they shouldn't be mining.
>You can only say this if you're too ignorant to be worth a damn on the subject, or are insane enough to think that the people who have developed the protocol for the last 8 years are all misguided
Argument from authority
>where the decentralization of miners is threatened even by a 2 MB block size
proof by assertion
>is too capable of assumptions to be let near engineering.
ie 'u dumb'
I'm sure you convinced many people with your thoughtful comment. :)
"Argument from authority" i.e. you dismiss arguments by people worth listening to as 'weak' because you don't like that they are relevant, authorities on a subject and you are not.
Proof by assertion i.e. leaving off the second half of a sentence and leaving only the assertion.
ie 'u dumb' i.e. I have picked up on that you are calling me dumb and can only reply by misusing Debate 101 nomenclature.
It turned out to be a misconception because computers are astronomically easier to use now. If you had to ever configure a config.sys entry for a specific game you know what I mean.
You should ask the question about Core developers' incentives: what do they personally gain from scaling bitcoin? Nothing, at best increase in value of their holdings which they share with lots of free-riders, and only until they sell. They only gain continuously if scaling is prevented as that opens space for their second-layer solutions - presumably to be enabled by planned 'improvements' to bitcoin. Ie. their only incentive is to capture bitcoin for rent extraction.
Miners are the only entities that have a continued incentive to improve bitcoin directly.
There's an old idea that solves the storage issue completely - utxo commitments.
Literally the only real throughput limit is end user's download bandwidth, which means 500MB blocks or so for 10Mbps download. Spv clients are fine for those unfortunate to have monthly limits.
>making it even more profitable to mine for big investors, than smaller fish.
Both storage and bandwidth are utterly insignificant cost items in a mining operation.
Capitalist medical system would mean the value of a particular medical certification would be set by the market, ie. everyone would be able to sell medical services. Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.