riprowan

Block space is always a little bit of a bidding war, even with zero fees. That's because each additional byte added to a block increases the time it takes to propagate the block by just a little bit.

When miners find a block, they race to get it published as quickly as possible to as many nodes as possible. If A finds a block, and stuffs it full of transactions; and shortly thereafter B finds a block, and includes no transactions, B might actually "win" the race because B can propagate his tiny block much faster than A. So each txn added incurs a tiny penalty just by virtue of adding to the payload.

> they decide which fork to run

In reality most hashpower is pooled and pools autoswitch between forks depending on which is more popular in the moment. So most people running miners are mining all forks.

> the validation that ensures that consensus is maintained between nodes

That's a terrible misunderstanding. If nodes can reach consensus by simply agreeing on transaction validity, then what purpose do you believe miners serve?

The definition of a node is provided in Section 5 of the white paper mentioned in OP. The logic that explains "why you must mine in order to be a peer" is explained in Section 4.

Non-mining nodes are trivial to Sybil, they are "one-IP-one-vote" per Section 4. Only miners are "one-CPU-one-vote." That is why nonminers (what you call "nodes") are not peers to the system, but rather leeches / relays.

> Isn't a node a process on the network that is mining blocks?

Yes, see section 5 of the white paper referenced in OP. It is quite clear what "peer" means in the context of Bitcoin. Others are mistaken here.

> A peer is a node, which is a client that validates all transactions and blocks in the blockchain.

According to the white paper, Section 5, a peer is a miner. That has not changed, regardless of attempts to redefine the paper. To be a peer, you MUST contribute proof of work.

Running a non mining node gives you a copy of the blockchain data that you can trust is valid according to the rules you used to validate it. It does not make you a peer.

You're referring to isolated incidents, which is an invalid comparison.

Instead, if you have information that I have a pattern of murdering lots of women, and my friend has a pattern of murdering lots of men, and you choose to release information about me and not my friend, it immediately suggests that you support killing men but not women.

What language can be better peer-reviewed?

How can tainted evidence be used to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt, when the entire basis of trust in the collection of the evidence is ostensibly gone.

> I actually hate the sound of most of the Beatles albums. I think they sound crap by modern standards - tinny, rattly, clogged-up, mid-heavy mixes with no deep bass.

Of course the whole point of bands like the Beatles was that they stood "engineering" on its head, as it was understood at the time (actual scientists wearing actual lab coats attempting to capture sound as accurately as possible).

EMI engineers making classical records were trying to create photographic style recordings. The early Beatles records sound, mostly, like you're standing at the Cavern club in front of a late-1950s sound reinforcement system. Photographic.

The Beatles helped to change the idea of making "photographic" records into making records like painting on canvas. Together with the other influential artists of the time (Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, etc) they transformed modern music.

When yo

>Put them up against a modern trance single mixed ITB and the latter sounds huge, dynamic, cinematic, and infinitely more polished.

>Which is better? It depends...

I think you make my point here.

If I were making a Crystal Method record, of course I would use a different signal chain that if I were making a Dawes record.

That's the whole point.

My view on everything related to musical art is summed up by Joe Meek:

"If it sounds good, it is good."

There is no one right way to make a record.

These are all amazing benefits, but when you're making art, you'll throw all of those out the window if doing so get you the sound you need.

The problem is thinking that this is either/or. I use a 48 channel ProTools HD system married to gear that's largely 40-70 years old. Best of both worlds.

It's just systems theory. The optimized whole is not equal to the sum of the optimized parts.

> technically better system

Define "better".

"If it sounds good, it is good." - Joe Meek

> all of those phenomena can be perfectly modelled in the box

Nope.

How you gonna model the interaction between a microphone and the preamp load it's driving, and the compressor that's driving, and the EQ it's driving, and the nonlinear summing bus that's feeding, when all of these are interacting in a live signal chain, and all entering various forms of nonlinear behavior based on the age of components, their tolerances which vary from box to box, heat, etc? It might be theoretically possible, but past a certain point, to model these devices requires modeling physics at the materials level. In point of fact most digital "simulations" of these sorts of devices are not simulations at all, but approximations that impart similar EQ, dynamics, and harmonic distortion.

I'm a dev by trade, been doing audio for decades too. I used to believe this was all modellable too. I think there's a tendency for people who are strong in digital signal processing but naive to what these devices are really doing to the signal to be overconfident in our ability to simulate them in realtime.

You can definitely achieve a reasonable facsimile! But if you want the sound of this console then you're going to have to make one or buy one.

> There's a reason they never use actual data and measurements to prove their points

Artists use the most advanced measurement devices in the world: a binaural listening device connected to the world's most advanced neural net. The neural net is the best part.

Sorry. There is much more to sound than frequency response, dynamic range, phase shift, and total harmonic distortion -- and moreover, the "optimum" amount of each of these is not fixed, but depends entirely on the material and the taste of the engineer & producer.

You can get great sound "in the box," don't get me wrong, but ultimately there is, as yet, no substitute for the real thing. A saturation plugin is nowhere close.

To accurately simulate this device, you would have to practically simulate at the molecular level.