Bitcoin Forum

Obviously this is hardly a scientific poll or in any way indicative, but just curious of the result even if it is gamed.

And, please don't game it :)  This is an important issue and everyone has the right to their opinion. We all would benefit by seeing what most people think and the benefits from gaming it would be very much 0.

Smarter people than me should answer this.

Is 20 megs just for DDOS protection?  Would DDOS'ing consist of real transactions? 

From a layman's point of view, a more elegant solution is to remove the cap completely and look closer at what the problems really are with the system that this is a problem.

Here we go again..
I'm going to assume that you haven't taken part of the main thread that was used to discuss this a few months back? It had over 100 pages of nonsense.

Removing the cap is not an elegant solution but rather a mistake. It would be open to abuse.

I am neither, for or against.
I wouldn't know what the difference would be, so I suppose I couldn't care less.  :P

it was without limit at the beginning, then satoshi has set a 1mb limit for anti ddos, so 20mb should increase the possibility of ddosing it, not lower it

said this, i'm favor of it, ddosing should not play a major factor

I didn't know that.

Another thing that I don't know is:
How can Bitcoin be DDoSed?

Nodes are worldwide and it's not just one central location.
I am confused.

This is really a stupid thing to fight over. It's necessary. Satoshi envisioned it. It is natural growth.

Ask the whales and the big mining farms. If they accept it then its fine, let's go. If they are not happy with this change then back to the drawing board, and let's find something what is acceptable for all. This isn't nice but I think this is the reality.  

Creating lots of issues with 20MB blocks.
-Bad syncing
-more centralisation
-vulnerable to dos
-potentially huge blockchain, too large to store for most people. So newcomers will less likely bother
-no more use over TOR
-Possible fork into 2 chains

and so on and so forth. Just bloating the chain is hardly genius.

No. It's a extremely important subject. If the answer was so obvious, there would be a consensus in the core dev team.

One thing I haven't seen much of is an alternative to the 20 MB proposal by opponents. What do nay-sayers plan to do when the network maxes out the 1 MB blocks more and more consistently and then transactions start queuing up and getting delayed because of the bottleneck?

In a way it's a self-correcting system if we do nothing: Bitcoin will hit the choke point, and then people will get frustrated with it and begin migrating away to altcoins or back to fiat, until the transaction volume drops again and the bottleneck is no longer an issue. But this means bitcoin remains forever a minor niche curiousity rather than a mainstream product.

There are a lot of things that need to happen as BTC becomes more mainstream, and the 20 MB change or something functionally equivalent is going to be one of them.

Nay, as long as there is no solution to prune or shrink the blockchain in an efficient way.

But if the blockchain should used as a data storage one day, the increase to 20mb block size is just a question of time.

What are you talking about?
Check out the github page: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/f9ec3f0fadb11ee9889af977e16915f5d6e01944
We are getting there.

Yes, and also No, are the wrong answer. Block Size should be able to adapt like Difficulty. More transactions, larger Blocks.

There are really interesting alternatives like Peter Todd's replace by fee (version 2), coupled with a conservative dynamic maxblocksize increase (+1MB /year).

This way we enable the blockchain to grow safely and slowly enough to preserve decentralization and to incentive offchain solutions. Replace by fee(version 2) enables users to change their fee if their transaction gets stuck because blocks are full.

There is already a thread on this... But I guess it doesn't have a poll :) I voted yes. I'm all for changing it. If we're eventually going to need to change it, why not get over with it already? If we want to evolve and make Bitcoin even bigger, we've got to adapt this change.

well i think they can always ddos single node, or those nodes that are more important, but in the way that i understood it, i think that in this case if the number of transactions are simply too much the network could reject them

It's not up to the "core devs". It's up to the big miners. They control block size.

Who is going to want to fiddle with fees after they send a transaction? That's like the postal service getting bogged down around Christmas and letting people know that they can send in extra postage if they want their packages by Christmas. It would be a hassle and universally annoy people.

The dynamic blocksize increase only makes sense if you can securely project the rate of increase in block size needed. If you guess wrong then the trajectory is off and you end up needing to hardfork again anyway at some point.

But isn't this made officially already? i heard its happening in 0.11.
From the emails by satoshi it seems he predicted he would be ok with 1 MB only, but it's pretty risky to keep it at 1 MB only, 20 seems like the reasonable thing to do.

Nope it's not only up to big miners. It's also up to every full validating nodes. That's why it's a hardfork.


You only need to fiddle with fee if you are greedy by taking the risk to pay the very least fee.


No, you didn't get the point. The goal is not to project anything. it's to make sure Bitcoin doesn't become centralized and it's to incentive offchain solutions. if you don't care about decentralization, why don't you just use ripple? Ripple scales great. Lol.

Once the Blockchain reaches around 200 gigs I have a feeling bitcoin will die.

It already does. The block size is exactly as large as is necessary to include the transactions in the block.  What's increasing is the cap on the block size.  It will increase incrementally over time.

Clearly.  And we know this because hard drive space could never grow exponentially. Never.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png

Yes ... but only if pruning is activate at the same time (or before to check the result like in the begin of 2016).

No it won't. You obviously don't realize that 200 GB is equal to 2 movies in 4K resolution.
Besides I've already linked to the pruning that is probably going to be available soon. What's the problem there?
10 years ago the current Blockchain wouldn't have fit on quite a number of systems actually (depending on where you live).

x ^ 2 ^ 2 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> X ^ 2

To break it down nice and simple for you ;)

allowing a super whopper block in the chain is not really DDOS , but its problematic for the network in a similar fashion.

This, we very desperately need to do something about the size of the blockchain.

The size of the blockchain is increasing faster than the size of a harddrive this is a big problem which will only be made worse with increasing the block size.  However 7 transactions per second is also a large problem.

I can only guess you meant to quote spazzdla and not me?  That, or you're not very good at detecting sarcasm.

What I want to know is what we're going to do when the blockchains download size reaches 60+ gb?

Could you please draw that line  to 2015 , it seems i'm missing my 100TB HDD.

Is there relevance between this statement and the current discussion?  The block chain is not growing at a rate exponentially higher than the rate of hard drive size increase.

At its current rate of increase, in five years the total size of the block chain will cross the 1 TB threshold.  Wow! Sounds terrible!  Except it isn't.  Based on current trends, 1 TB of hard drive will cost $6 in five years.

Increasing the maximum block size is not a permanent panacea.  It is a necessary stop gap solution.  If other development hasn't obviated the block size increase within five years, the very last thing we'll have to worry about is hard drive space.

It's not my graph.  The long term growth of hard drives has been 40% per year.  So, if in 2010 it was 1 TB, it should now be 5.4 TB.  Hmm... eerily accurate. http://www.amazon.com/Red-6TB-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B00LO3KR96 (http://www.amazon.com/Red-6TB-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B00LO3KR96)

But i have to pay 13$ for my flying car that was promised in 1980 =))).

It took 5 year to increase the maximum hdd from 500gb to 4tb  (8x times).
It took another 5 to increase it again just 2x to 8gb.

It's demand that is driving the space storage development. But that might quickly hit a flat spot.

The world's first 4tb drive came out April 3, 2012.  The world's first 8tb drive came out August 26, 2014.  That's not five years, it's 2.4 years.  And, it corresponds fairly closely to the "40% per year" that we've been experiencing.

While we're at it, the world's first 500 GB drive came out March 29, 2005.  That's seven years before the 2TB drive.

2011 – First 4.0 terabyte hard drive[26] (Seagate)

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png

I was comparing internal drives to internal drives.  However, if you include external drives you can move the dates a bit.  Even going with the Seagate, it was September 2011.  That means 3 years.  Still not 5.

It has to be done as a short term fix.  People just won't tolerate the delays in confirmations if blocks ever get full on even a semi-regular basis.  We get the odd thread now complaining about a block that to 30 minutes, but there would be dozens of angry posts per day if lots of people were waiting for the next available block.  Hopefully more a more elegant fix comes along in future, like side chains/treechains/etc.  But those still feel like a long way off.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CEl6tA4WMAAx25o.png:large

The other option would be to change the block time to 2 minutes.
I'm not sure why that wasn't discussed more.

Because that will cause more frequent orphan blocks. It has been said in this kind of threads before.

I'd like to see an estimated % of increased orphan blocks at 2 minutes. Then weigh that against the inconveniences that will arise from 20 Mb blocks. Pretty sure a "slightly" higher increase in orphans would be preferable. Still, I'm sure Gavin and co have their reasons.

The block time set to 10 minutes is permanent so changing that would be infinitely harder than changing the 1mb cap which has always been a temporary measure from the start.
Change something permanent and you open Pandora's box to future permanent things changing. Then nothing is permanent, and nobody trusts bitcoin anymore, and becomes worthless.

I think the majority of people who are against increasing the block size do not run full nodes. What an incredible amount of fake outrage.

yes! and they haven't read any of what the devs have written either. You don't have to look very deeply to see that increasing the block size is absolutely necessary right now.
I'm not even clear on what argument there is against it? Trying to make life easier for the miners? That is ridiculous. Things should be HARDER for the miners, I'm sorry but mining is almost entirely run by huge commercial concerns, bitcoin network is already starting to look like the big banks (a few centralized controllers)

aside from all that, block size matters. Imagine if transactions took an average of an hour? Most users here cant handle it if a tx takes longer than 10 minutes!

the problem with free speech and democracy is - every fool thinks they are entitled to an opinion, and that their opinion actually matters. The devs know what they are doing. Conspiracy theorists simply have too much time on their hands (diametric opposite of devs)

If there's any confusion over what the argument was, it's because the 1mb supporters weren't being honest about their motives.  They claimed it was about centralization, bandwidth, security and who knows what other straws they were desperately clutching at to try and win support.  But ultimately it boils down to some greedy early adopters and whales not wanting to share the network with the masses if Bitcoin does ever hit the mainstream.  They want a two-tier system where they get all the benefit.  Bitcoin for the privileged few.  If they can force the masses off-chain by imposing an arbitrary limit, they get all the protection and security of the blockchain for themselves and everyone else gets to rely on a third party and introduce risk to their transactions.  All the other arguments they came up with were merely a distraction from that.

I've supported the 20 MB increase, but Gavin himself just acknowledged a potential major issue - see http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh (http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh)

Here we go again. If we know the fundamental of the system will not be able to support future growth , then by all means we need to consider working on that and remove the caps. If we need to do it anyway so why not now? The problem is there we just can't turn away from the reality

ofcourse yes . we cannot adjust the bitcoin mining difficulty with owr efforts nor we can control the network like we want everything is atomatically adjusted so we don't have any choice just to wait for new powerfull equiments for mining

Hard drive space is a non-issue. The portion of the size of the space you use, in relation to what is currently out there, is not worth a discussion.

So far, we have had a nice smooth ride {Secure protocol with average confirmation time}

What do we want to sacrifice, when "Mass adoption" enter the Bitcoin scene and we did not make provision for scalability?

Technology has to adapt to the needs of the people. {We want faster, more reliable and easy to use things in our life} Will no change bring that?

Why don't you try running p2pool with their 30 second blocks? P2pool blocks (or shares) are essentially lower difficulty Bitcoin blocks used to measure your mining contribution. If you have a slightly slower connection than the other p2pool miners it is not uncommon for 50% of your blocks to get orphaned. Now 2 minutes is not as bad as 30 seconds, but you should not assume that the number of orphans would be insignificant.

what about dynamic block size increase or lightining network? they seems a better proposal(they aren't the same thign right?), but i'm not an expert here

The 99th vote goes to.. Undecided. Well, it is perfectly fine for me to increase or decrease. Bitcoin will still work for me and there wont be any big difference.

I haven't heard about the lightning network before. The dynamic block size seems vulnerable to manipulation, just as if there was no limit at all.

This. I guess people don't think about this in the proper way. There a specifications that should not be tampered with. Changing them would cause problems in regards to trust.
Bitcoin has decent block times. There is no need for very quick transactions as this system is much faster than what the world already has.
Although if we want to see more transactions over the network we have to provide enough room for them.

Changing something permanently doesnt mean that it will become worthless as we still dont know the real effect of what might happen after the change. The change could give a better good for bitcoin to stand up in the future because unchange thing remains to stay at the past and not the futuree

Na
 The limit is in place to stop spam, prevent the size of the block chain from growing to large and creating bandwidth requirements to large for the average person thus leading to a further consolidation of the Bitcoin network; and to provide incentives to the miners in the form of higher fees.

  No block size limit means bloated block chain, slower confirmations, fewer miners and fewer nodes and a broken system open to attack.

Nay,I think in current situation it should be let as it is.It is working quite fine so I don't see any use of doing any modification in block size.In future with more broader adoption and usage of bitcoin any positive change according to the need of time will be useful.

I feel that there is little difference in changing a block time vs block size.
They are both hard forks, which are essentially a reboot of Bitcoin from that point. The trust is always in the core BTC team doing what they feel is best for Bitcoin and the community in large either agreeing with those changes and continuing to use Bitcoin, or creating their own fork and going from there.

I suppose speculation in this thread doesn't matter though because Gavin and team already made their decision and 20 Mb is coming.

LOL, blockchain bloating is a serious issue of btc, when i downloaded btc wallet in 2013, it was 20GB blockchain, needed 2 days sync time, but if they still increase the block size, the bloating issue will be very anonying for new users, maybe in the future 100GB blockchain, it's insane to download it for new users.

moreover in the future new ssd are approaching, which will make downloading it less painful, we should get a 1:1 ratio with the hw technology, so no problem there i think

do it. dont waste time on debating this "simple things" and move on.

It doesn't seem very smart to take a measure like a hard fork when we have tons of people, whats the point?
Stuff like this should be done literally now, while Bitcoin is still quite underground and understood by geeks only, not when its already a thing.

I would have to vote nay on this matter..

I don't think their is any good reason to increase the block size so large at this point in time.
In the future I could see it being a good thing but as it sits right now I think it would just be a waste of resources.
Not to mention that if the block size goes up the transaction fees may as well.. Not something I can stand behind at the moment.

This isn't even correct at all. What kind of resources are we wasting? Bandwidth, storage? This contradicts your first statement.
We aren't wasting anything, we are just making more room for more transactions. This does not mean that the room will get filled instantly, it doesn't even mean that it will ever get filled.
Why would the transaction fees go up? This should actually make them remain where their are instead of going up once the blocks are filled.

Indeed, completely back to front.  If anything, Bitcoin needs more users to keep fees low over time as the block rewards diminish (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1010569.msg10979798#msg10979798).  Without a larger blocksize, the network wouldn't be able to handle those additional users without forcing people off-chain or making them wait for a block that isn't full, which means longer confirmation times.  When the block reward halves next year, miners will either need to see an increase in the fiat price of Bitcoin, or an increase in the amount of fees they collect, or they're going to be worse off.  More users equals more fees collected, less users equals a need for larger fees.  People need to understand the choice they're making before they make it, so let's get this right.

Nay. Going straight to 20MB is a huge change, and too risky.

I think besides dangers to decentralization this might kill off alternatives like the Lightning Network. And yes I know the LN would be awesome even with 20MB blocks, but the necessity for it will be reduced.

I would agree to a modest, conservative change, maybe over time and/or coupled to indicators like difficulty. Enough to survive, little enough to drive research and implementation of alternatives. But this is too much.

Not like my opinion will count much, but I will reduce my stockpile appropriately if I see reckless behavior.

-coinft

Yes FTW

IMO btc needs to remain competitive as being capable of handling many times the tx it does today.

Increasing block size seems like the logical step.

If we keep the current cap without altering anything things are going to go the wrong way. Sending money won't be as it used to, it will be a competition. People will keep pushing for higher fees so that their transactions get included sooner. That's not how Bitcoin was intended to work.
I don't want to send $1 with a $1 fee (if not more).

Yes. I agree we can't grow the block size indefinitely, but for the short term we simply don't have another option. Lightning, Factom, side chains, etc, none of these aren't ready to be implemented and used in everyday transactions. They are options for medium/long term.

Transaction with fees waiting for another block because the actual blocks are already full is bad. Increasing the fee is not good, what should subsidize the network is the volume, not high fees.

I don't know... This is only a temporary solution and anyway, I doubt we will ever be able to overtake credit cards in tps. Maybe we need to look towards off-chain transactions or something.

I read somewhere on this forum that we will only be able to do ~50 tps when credit cards can do 1000 already.

Well yes, they have more capacity right now but their transactions go very slowly. I'm not sure about the exact number but it is not within hours.
Also there is room for error. I've had my balance drained more than once due to a mistake with Visa.
A temporary solution is better than none since I don't see any other suggestions.

Nay.

Bitcoin is too important to make quick & dirty changes.

If everyone had such great arguments the world would be a much better place.
If you've carefully read the change is neither quick nor dirty. Although I'm not sure what you mean by dirty. This was already discussed months prior. Besides this won't get implemented before 2016.