There are folks in crypto who both consider most of the industry to be a scam while at the same time are working to fix it because there's something good here. We get hated on by almost everyone - both those in crypto for criticizing (BTC is a ponzi, ETH cannot scale, etc.) and those outside for being a part of it. It's easy to get bitter about this, but recently I spoke to a financial advisor who runs an investment fund that only invests in businesses that share certain values. He felt exactly the same about the financial industry and he's doing fine. If you resonate with this comment, realize you don't need to please everyone.
Honestly, you don't know this. Users != nodes. A single individual could have spun up tons of nodes to vote for Segwit. Given the stakes and how manipulated social media was at the time, I consider this what likely happened. This is also what proof of work solves.
and almost all hashpower is still with Bitcoin.
Everyone knows the game by now. Whoever keeps the ticker keeps the hashpower. We saw this with BCH/BSV and also BCH/BCHA. Because most users don't follow these details. It doesn't mean users won.
Even granting that, it's still not user nodes that matter. We've seen from history (BCH/BSV/BCHA) that applications and exchanges decide which fork gets the ticker.
So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes. Users do nothing to extend the chain! If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it. And there always will be another group, because miners compete. From the bitcoin whitepaper: "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules". And let's get serious: users will hear about such a protocol war on news outlets, not by watching their node. Then they can choose which fork to buy, sell, and use.
No. In this design users don't trust miners. Users trust Bitcoin. This is important. Banks can censor. Banks can go down. Banks can be forced to confiscate your money by a single court. But if one miner were to act up, other miners around the globe could keep them in check, and apps and users could switch around as desired. It's an incentivized complete system that you can't reduce this way.
Almost all IP traffic goes through an Internet backbone router which can process 100Gbps+. It's no problem. I suggest people think of Bitcoin miners like this in the future. These would be big operations, yes, but they are economically incentivized to honesty, and there will be plenty of competition. Once you use your imagination, or try to build a node yourself, you'll see the only real bottleneck in Bitcoin's architecture is the updating of the UTXO set, and this can be made extremely fast - eventually in hardware. All other transaction and block validation and propagation can be parallelized or removed as a bottleneck. Users share transactions p2p and settle them onchain, and apps and services create sub-networks of transactions they care about. It all works. But to do that people need to drop the assumption that home users need to run a node - it's a broken idea that holds Bitcoin back. The original design of Bitcoin was remarkable in its ability to scale, which was written about by Satoshi and ignored, and this is being demonstrated again in Bitcoin SV. On the other hand, almost every other cryptocurrency has deviated from that simple design. Ethereum for example requires a global state database and cannot parallelize this way.
The reason UTXOs parallelize better is because when you look at a transaction on a UTXO-based blockchain like Bitcoin, you can deterministically and often immediately know from it exactly how the state of the system will change, and which states will change. A Bitcoin transaction for example completely describes which outputs will be spent, which new outputs will be created, and the new amounts in those outputs. This is a really nice property. It makes validating and analyzing transactions parallelizable by design. The system still has to protect against double-spends globally, but this part is light in comparison and can be very fast.
In contrast to Bitcoin, basically every other smart contract blockchain is account-based, not UTXO-based, and has shared global state. This does not parallelize naturally at all. I like to think its similar to using cash vs transferring money using Venmo. Giving someone cash parallelize naturally, like UTXOs, whereas Venmo requires a database lock.
In account-based systems, it’s impossible to tell how a transaction will change the system's state without executing it. The order that transactions are executed is crucial too, which is why people say Ethereum is single-threaded. Attempts to parallelize account-based systems fall into different categories. Ethereum 2.0's plan is to basically create separate VMs with separate state, called shards or rollups. This can work sometimes, but it makes interactivity between shards (think applications) much more difficult, and interactivity to me is a major reason for using blockchain. Another approach is to embed information into transactions to make them parallelize more like UTXO-based transactions, which is what Solana does. But they parallelize only at the smart contract level, not at the asset level as UTXOs can.
Whereas UTXO-based designs get parallelizability by design, creating a programming model for smart contracts and tokens has to-date been harder on these systems, and frankly there aren't even that many people trying. I've been working on this problem for a while and believe I've found a breakthrough. Check out https://run.network if it interests you.
It's worse. How do people think this will work? You will keep your money in institutions. Transfers will be settled in databases. There will be management fees, insurance requirements, dispute costs, censorship, and surveillance. Read the 1st page of whitepaper folks. High fees bring about the same trusted third-parties that Bitcoin was built to avoid.
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.
Mike Hearn, Gavin Andreson, Roger Ver, and countless names I interact with on a regular basis support big blocks and were involved since the beginning. Folks, this what BTC does. Eventually the lies runs out.
"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.
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.
Bitcoin.com has the Satoshi Archive (https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/) with all his emails and forum posts. Satoshi wanted big blocks, and so BTC largely ignores him or says "We are all satoshi", but there is a ton of wisdom if you go back and read. This was put together by Derek Magill, who is also a good person to follow on Twitter.
If I send you a stolen iPod in the mail, do I forever taint your home address? Are you forced to accept it? No, of course not. You can return it to the police, throw it out, or return it to the sender. If you keep it and use it, then it becomes your problem. The same is true for Bitcoin. You can refuse any transaction output. You are not your address.
Edit: This post is being downvoted by people who don't want it to be true. Sorry folks, it is. Bitcoin is UTXO-based, and every output sent to your address is a unique piece of mail. If you don't like that, use an account-based system where it all gets mixed together.