If it’s not a claim you make, maybe it’s time for you to formulate your claim in a logically consistent way. So far you managed to touch most your favorite subjects, mixing them in a narrative looking superficially sophisticated, being nonsense in essence. You make a lot of intermediate claims that are taken from the thin air. While it’s perfectly correct to express opinions (as these are nothing more than opinions) there is no way to discuss it if its prerequisites are made out of wishful thinking alone.
So far, again, you proved to follow a scheme I described above - by subscribing to both mutually exclusive opinions, you feel entitled to switch to the area of your liking. They are exclusive (which I explained many times).
You went as far as to state that my argument that proof and belief never mix is a strawman. Such strategy can often be seen while debating believers - being unable to follow rules of logic to support their beliefs they claim that there is no opposition between their belief and facts. Such move has an important consequence - if accepted, it enables a believer to bring arguments from own domain and attempt to present them as being equally valid as logically inferred ones. They can come from scripture, Bitcoin manifesto, customs, whatever. It’s a dishonest practice, but often other participants of a debate accept it not seeing that danger or wanting to be nice and correct. I don’t accept. Bring only verifiable facts.
The verifiable facts I brought are:
- machine computation isn’t hard linked with human brains, therefore these environments are functionally separated;
- trust is a belief based on fuzzy prerequisites, easy to alter, unable to reasonably quantify, unpredictable;
- distributed ledgers infer data distribution based on simple algorithms;
- these algorithms are agnostic in terms of a data source, be it human society or machine actors;
- these algorithms abstract external input from internal processing to tame malicious inputs based on simple mathematical rules of decreasing probability;
- trust has no descriptor inside those systems, so there is no sense to dispute trust in those systems if viewed from internal perspective;
I brought many more facts here. Facts that are verifiable. Please, do the same.
Meanwhile, while waiting for them, let’s think about what you brought so far.
I don’t use strawman describing your claims - I try hard to figure out what it is, but so far nothing consistent was presented, so I presented my attempts to summarize what you wrote and figure out the meaning.
As to sticking to the subject - given that it was you who drifted from it on a regular basis, turning into a moral oracle now is hilarious at best.
What validators decide on with popular vote is which state to follow. Bitcoin has a number of forks (BTC, BCH and BSV), as does Ethereum (ETH and ETC), the social consensus mechanism is a signal to decide which fork to agree on, analogous to selecting a leader. You and I have disagreed on that for two years now, and as you mentioned, neither of our beliefs change the things we are talking about
There is a subtle difference between belief that you hold and facts that I present. You believe that there is a connection between internals of networks and the social agreement as to which fork to follow. At least as I understand from what you write. There isn’t. The existence of forks is a consequence of what is written in chapter 11 I mentioned. Networks still work as intended, ignoring anything around them, they just multiply in number without being even conscious about the event. There are also unforkable schemes that aren’t subject to that phenomenon. There is the zero-knowledge paradigm that was invented specifically to avoid meddling with internals. So, while what you wrote stands somehow for the networks you mentioned it’s not universal. However, you made it a dogma of your belief and as it’s with most dogmas it’s false. You cannot draw any general conclusions from a specific non-general case with counter-cases in existence.
I agree metaphors are often used when presenting concepts outside the literal grid of an audience, another observation that can be made is that double-speak is often used when communicating outside what you trust (using what psychiatric science calls executive function). Orwellian double-speak is a way to not meet the other person, and, a logical fallacy. Just like metaphors are often used to communicate new ideas, literal descriptions are also often used. The fact that popular vote was seen as the primary attack vector in Bitcoin, a 51% attack, is one way to see that the idea that validators in Bitcoin only vote in the metaphorical sense, is false. Popular vote in Bitcoin is not a metaphor, it is the social consensus that people use to agree on what state to follow, social from *sekw, to follow, like the creator of Bitcoin Craig Wright wrote in the Bitcoin whitepaper, miners vote with their CPU, chapter 4 and 12 of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
I don’t know what your passage about the double-speak referres to. Metaphors are used very often to generally describe ideas without any malicious intent. Double speak is a metaphor’s evil half-brother - its purpose is to hide actual intent under a guise. A modern double-speak was best characterized by George Carlin in this clip.
Neither you, nor Craig Wright could tell whether the sentence you brought was a pure metaphor or was to signal a flaw that allows exploitation of the network in a way that allows forking (the only case when miners can actually vote - a degenerate case). Even asking the real author doesn’t have to provide a clear answer, as intent is mostly an emotional matter and thus should not be trusted and considered fact.
So, again, you bring a degenerate, specific case and draw a general conclusion out of it. Seemingly it doesn’t matter to you that the original author of the paper for most of his work describes how independent the network is when it comes to actions taken by malicious actors. But your argument focuses exactly on such actions, as forking makes possible alteration of the state of a network and is against a purpose of it (a purpose being an unmutable, reliable ledger).
What you did in that paragraph fits well with defending a belief. There is a scripture (Bitcoin WP) and a single sentence there that proves your point - “miners vote with their CPU”. Forget about the rest. I saw it somewhere - focus on parts where השם is nice and merciful, forget the rest full of atrocities and inhumane behavior.
One more thing, as I said before it doesn’t matter for veracity of a statement how many times you repeat it. The same applies to etymology of the word “social” that you repeated already 3 or 4 times. The fact that it derives from PIE *sekw doesn’t imply that its current meaning is limited by it. Since PIE (4500-2500BC) some changes happened to both our understanding of the society and the scale it operates. Now “social” is more about a communal structure than about following. However, if you insist on using *sekw root, far more reasonable choice would be “sectarian”. The etymology is the same, but emphasizes following a leader and a blind faith. So, maybe “sectarian consensus”?
The social consensus in Bitcoin happens to allocate voting power using proof-of-work, and that is why people tend to assume it is “trustless”. It was a simple way to implement a way to do popular vote, the technology stack already existed, a simple hash function, and the probability of finding a valid hash was similar to throwing dice, and mining pools was a way to maximize how many dice you could throw, one-CPU-one-vote.
It was a primitive way to implement a mechanism that would be resistant to manipulation to some extent (excluding 51% case). No sane person claims it’s absolutely trustless. Though, it’s practically trustless, as the amount of money needed to cross the 50% mark is very large. Also, secret agreement between miners is possible, but if discovered would cause more harm to them than profit (but happened in the past at least three times). The scale of the market makes the scheme effectively trustless even with flaws being its integral part.
Yet, I still don’t get the connection you picture between a popular vote, being an attack vector on the network according to your definition (as far as I understood it well) and a regular way the network was intended to work. Both schemes counteract each other and are the opposites.
As to mining pools - your claim here is either bogus or stems from your lack of understanding of matter. They aren’t about “a way to maximize how many dice you could throw”. The probability doesn’t change with mining in a pool vs. mining solo. The amount of computing resources doesn’t change as well. The only thing that changes is a way a reward is granted (high probability to get it and split between miners in a pool vs. low probability to gather it full while being solo).
When voting power is allocated with proof-of-stake or proof-of-vote then people have an easier time seeing that it was never trustless (while the machine consensus parts, the hash linking and digital signatures, are trustless. ) Who gets to authorize transactions or a block in PoS is often also by random, and the more stake a validator has the more probable it is that they are selected. PoV works the exact same way, only difference is that validators stake people-votes.
So, the internals are trustless, but externals aren’t? More or less you got the point. Less, because even internals in forkable blockchains aren’t 100% foolproof (provably). As to PoV - I don’t find walking back a way toward really trustless ledger attractive. That’s why I never considered anything similar for Bitlattice` - it would be unreasonable.
I do not see any dispute between you and @Brooks, so I agree with both viewpoints.
With every iteration I’m less and less surprised.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are “follow the leader rule”, they are leaders. They just happen to be computers and not a human being. An “exocortex” is still a leader, it mediates and leads human attention, by trust (or coercion but primarily by trust. ) The nation-state consensus is a proof, it uses proof-of-person (personbevis) suffrage and voting rights. The same reformation that is happening now as a result of the internet took place with the printing press, leading to representative democracy and the nation-state consensus, rule of law and proof over superstition (it has not succeeded but has been a stepping stone. )
I won’t even attempt to break the above down into parts. I don’t get what you actually want to say, and what are the prerequisites of your reasoning. Also, I can’t see any valid conclusion. The only answer I could give: POMO - whatever it generates would be similarly consistent.
Last but not the least - you stated: “To project is a logical fallacy, at the root of social intelligence in humans that both you, me and @Brooks are bound by”. I can’t say neither for you, nor for @Brooks, but can for myself and on a basis of some life experience also about humans in general. Social abilities are common among fauna on our planet, however a scale it’s found in particular species differs greatly.
We aren’t bound by social interactions to the extreme, we are only inclined to take them into consideration. Ants are bound, not humans. However, by writing “social intelligence” you probably meant “capacity to know oneself and to know others” as per the definition (psychological mumbo-jumbo btw). Which even further obscures what you meant by being bound by it. I don’t feel being bound by social abilities, awareness, knoledge about the society I live in, it’s only one of many tools at my disposal. There’s also cognition for instance that in many cases effectively helps me consciously shape social interactions. Certainly, social intelligence isn’t a dominant factor in every case, neither in what I do, nor in other humans.
I have a suggestion. Before you write another post, draw a scheme on paper. Use logical quantifiers and rules of inference. And write only those things that you can defend without resorting to thin air arguments.
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