Bitcoin Forum

 :)

Bitshares is centralized communist garbage that doesn't even work!

Looks like the more centralized/scammish a coin gets, the faster the transactions.

While I don't really like any of them to be honest, if I had to choose then I will be choosing Dash/Darkcoin that is where my vote goes but while keeping bitcoin because hell no do we need the instamine to deal with just for a faster smoother transacttion time. Saying that I really don't see a need as bitcoin/blockchain are fine.

I don't see the block times as a negative, but if it were to change, i would vote for around the 2minutes per block time.

Too man orphan blocks are really annoying, but I guess having a 12 minute confirmation time would be nicer than an hour when moving coins to exchanges.  For general use it makes no odds though.

You cannot judge a coin just based on it's transactions per second feature. I would rather use a crypto currency that are widely adopted and excepted by every merchant out there, than going with a coin, that has all the features, but NO support or demand.
It has taken MANY years to establish a merchant base for Bitcoin, and now you want people to switch coins and back a horse nobody knows? Good luck with that. 

Who would have thought?

GO GAVIN!

PayPal Lite

Ripple!

Holy Holy

Holy Dollar!

lol OP if you wanna pump your coin, you should be less obvious.


I don't know why anyone in the world would want any of the bitshare coins.

Changing BTC form 7 TPS to 70 isn't much... 

The fork needs a REAL solution hence why I don't like it.

When your target is 1M... going from 7 to 70 isn't a solution.   Perhaps we do need a kick the can move until someone can come up with a real one though.

Yeah, the true challenge is having coin with a huge network and decentralized, with fast confirmation times and big volume of transactions.
20MB is shit nothing tho, it's only buying us time. We need a true solution to avoid future forks.

I would agree with your choice if Tx speed were the only factor. But most alt coins aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on. However if you guys want to "vote against the status quo", I'll be there to buy your discount coins!

What can PPC do?

Bitcoin & Litecoin - all you need. The two mainchains.

I should amend my earlier post to include LiteCoin. It has demonstrated it's staying power and ability to expand into markets. 

I'm not saying that bitcoin can't be improved. I just don't like trying to fix things that are not broken. The Tx limit is something that needs to be addressed. Many of the arguments I hear against this step (not yours) have nothing to do with that problem and are uninformed concerns that Gavin is centralizing bitcoin. Things like Tx speed are not a problem, IMO.
There have been millions and millions of dollars poured into bitcoin because it works. It is a serious project and the backers of those efforts are not going to be interested in a copy of bitcoin based on some kid's love of dogs.
I do think it is worth discussing and you have a good post, but I'm sticking with BTC for the moment.

None of the above.

Monero (XMR) as the leading Cryptonote coin has no fixed blocksize limit and so no built in TPS limitation. It can scale easily with the growth in Bandwidth, CPU, Memory, Storage etc. It is currently 14 on the list.

Really? How long has it been around and what kind of growth has it had? Does it have an economy building around it? Is there an exchange that trades XMR directly for BTC? I mainly use BTCe and couldn't find it there.

It has been around for slightly over a year and trades on Poloniex. https://www.poloniex.com/ (https://www.poloniex.com/) If one wants a POW coin that does not have the fixed blocksize issue then the Cryptonote https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf (https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf) coins are the way to go and Monero is the strongest and most liquid. It goes without saying that it is imperative to do one's research first.

Edit: There is a strong community and the start of an economy around Monero. There is even now a service https://xmr.to/ (https://xmr.to/) that allows for one to spend XMR on many sites that accept XBT. It also trades on https://shapeshift.io/ (https://shapeshift.io/)

Thanks, I don't visit the altcoin section much so I don't really know anything about it. I'm looking for something stable to transfer a percentage of my coins into until the current drama shakes out. I really just want something that holds its value well relative to btc. I'll check it out.

You are very welcome. Ironically I found out about XMR in 2014 while researching the 1 MB blocksize limit.

nothing that bitcoin can't

it's a coin that combine pos with pow, and has not a cap limit like doge(i think doge copyed it) plu 1% interest on the minting, with all this ppc is aiming at a good scalability

personally i choosed litecoin, because i find it as a natural successor of bitcoin

dogecoin is not seirous enough i guess, and i don't like infinite supply

ppc same as doge because of inflation caused by infinite supply

ripple and stellar are the same crap(too much centralization)

nxt was heavily instamined and now it's pure pos, i don't like it

bitshares feels like a scam

I dont think we need any other coin than Bitcoin, with or without fork Bitcoin will keep adapting and solving any problems. I am tho a pro-monero guy, I think its a great coin and like the anonymity. Not sure if could reach mainstream status tho, a super anonymous coin with no chance of being non-anonymous has tons of cons to reach mainstream status.

If they are smart and independent they will pick up the best futures from the mentioned coins...

I think they are "smart"...
but are they really... free?

Monero uses an auto-adjusting dynamic block size so tps aren't an issue.

LOL at the old fashioned static block sizes in the OP.   :D

Directed here from a different thread by OP

Are there any documented tests or better yet real world activity & evidence on these 3

Stellar – 300 TPS
NXT – 1000 TPS
BitShares 100,000 TPS

the 300 & 1000 TPS might just be possible to achieve a peak on a block chain tech with a controlled test environment....I remember a long while ago NXT was touting about something called "transparent forging", but I've lost touch with what they were up to recently.  Even so, I would be very surprised if either of the 2 could sustain that load, in a true P2P decentralized fashion over time, so I'd like to see some evidence :)

The 100,000 TPS that BitShares claim on block chain based tech is not possible.  So this must have something to do with the 100 super-nodes or whatever they are called, or dedicated nodes which process these transactions in a different manner to everyone else, which doesn't count in my opinion as its then (semi)centralized.  However I can't find any information anywhere on this supposed 100,000 TPS figure, what is your source?

Definately Monero if you only look at TPS, but I doubt more than 1% of buyers are buying because of that, it's just a nice addition.

In today's network infrastructure, none of the coins can reach 100TPS if there are serious amount of traffic on it

This is because: With faster block generation, you have much less time to broadcast the block to the whole network before the next block arrives and orphan your block. Only those very small blocks will reach the whole network quickly in time, but small blocks does not contain any meaningful number of transactions

It will take 1-2 minutes to broadcast 2000 transactions (about 1MB) to the whole network, that is the hard number, no matter what kind of coin design, this number can only be improved with better network infrastructure around the world

There is one item missing in the poll:

Magic Bean Coin - 100,001 TPS

You are joking, aren't you? In the eMunie project we've discovered almost two years ago that the blockchain is a deadend and started basically from scratch. Now we should go back to the blockchain?

blockchain = a clayman

Transparency is an option in Monero.

Mixin zero for transparency.

Mixin >zero for privacy.

how so? many just want this from bitcoin, and i'm one of these, it would be a blessing to have fully anon on bitcoin, only bank want it to be transaparent

i can still understand that without regulation fully adoption, maybe will never happen

but zerocoin is coming anyway

very interesting!

OP you forgot to add something to the poll: None.
Let me just put this here:

Whoever thinks that altcoins have superior technology should ask themselves a single question: Why isn't someone trying to implement it into Bitcoin?
None of the altcoins currently present offer anything worth the time of the current developers. Since you're already talking about incorporating new technologies into Bitcoin, we should rather stick with Side chains and see what happens.

Even though I have respect for Monero (especially fluffy), this is a no. Even though the coin is good, that's not the right path for Bitcoin.


NXT and BitShares are the worst suggestions that you could have pulled from the Altcoin section. It would be better if we used Trollcoin.  ::)

..it'll soon dawn on everyone which is the only No 1 - on it's own list that is - w/o comparison..
..and - no - I'll not tell you - you'll know it when it's here..

Litecoin or Peercoin!

BitShares = centralized scamcoin, how the f*ck can anyone put that in the "top 10".

In any case you need to realize that you're going to get highly (!) inaccurate results on this poll when it comes to those altcoins. They will probably group up and vote for their selective coins rather than actually thinking about this.
I'm going to answer this all in one. I don't think that you're right. Bitcoin can not change when it comes to the fundamental rules that were set, however there are many technologies in the altcoin world (raging from instant transactions and master nodes (DASH) to ring signatures and so on). I've already argued that while Side chains might have a great potential, they have a major drawback which is network complexity. This is something that would start becoming a huge problem if we start hand picking and adding things.
If you've been following and participating in the Bitcoin part of the forum here as I have (a certain period back in time from now), then you would see that there are only a few people who are true Bitcoin supporters that actually support some altcoin. Anyone who comes here and says: "Hey Coin X is the right option."; is most likely doing so because of their own stake in Coin X.

I was specifically talking about Monero when I said that. It's not my opinion.


As I've previously stated in another thread, someone should definitely make a explanation to the pros and cons to Side chains (one of the developers or someone like D&T) in addition to explaining why incorporating technology X from altcoin Y isn't the right way to go (if that is the case according to them). Even after (if) someone does this, there would still be people trying to waste everyone's time proving otherwise.

can you elaborate further?
can you prove what you are saying or do you just say what you heard from others?...

100,000 TPS isn't impossible, its just impossible to do on a block chain in a true P2P decentralized manner without some form of centralization, or "magic trick".  It seems to me BitShares may be doing both as per these 2 quotes in the link you provided.

"...assuming that all the witness nodes have internet connections capable..." so it is indeed confined/centralized to a set of nodes

and

"...with an average transaction size of about 100 bytes."

The latter concerns me, the absolute minimum core basic requirements of a secure verifiable transaction are a sender, a receiver, a value and a signature.  Just the signature alone with a 256bit key is in the order of 70 bytes,  sender pubkey is 32, receiver RIPEMD160 address is 20, and a value is 8 which is a total of 130 bytes with the bare minimum.  If the key space is reduced to 160bit, then it will just fit in 100 bytes, but with a huge loss of security.

I'm assuming that to achieve this 100,000 TPS something similar to this happens:

Transactions are filtered through these "witness nodes" and I send 100 BTS to A.  If within a certain time frame, A moves it to B, and B to C, etc etc that TX isn't recorded on the block chain until such a time that it lives at X for longer than a specified period of time.  The 100 BTS movements between A -> B-> C....X are not recorded in full on the block chain (if at all), only the transaction A -> X

Taking that approach could indeed give you very high TX throughput, but if that is the method used (or something similar) it's a total hack in my opinion and may well lead to issues later.  

Of course I'm speculating as I don't have the time to research this properly, so if you could provide some links/docs/something that details how this works rather than me hunting, I'd appreciate it.  I stand by the fact that it is not possible to do, on a block chain, while recording all transactions to said chain, and allow any node to be a full node without special requirements.


If Monero really has stated "infinity" as their TPS limit, then someone there really needs a reality check!  Regardless of what is possible on a block chain or not, the laws of thermodynamics will step in and dispatch a tough and thorough spanking waaaaay before "infinity" is even close :)

IMO the only way to achieve anything near a sustainable VISA level transaction throughput, stay in keeping with real decentralization (no special node sub-sets that are selected or voted), not perform any "tricks" which may compromise security, AND have all transactions on a public ledger is to scale horizontally, and NOT vertically!

Chain based ledgers can't scale vertically past a certain point, no matter how big your bag of tricks, nor your processing setup, horizontal is the only way and by that I mean a distributed and partitioned ledger of the ilk that we are doing over here.  No one has even attempted to do this, because its assumed impossible or too difficult, and if it is so be it, at least it was attempted.  However it's not impossible, we've ran it in many betas now and its is very close to being ready for use.


Heh thanks but no thanks, I've ploughed my life and everything I have into eMunie and I'm not jumping ship, ever :)


EDIT
----

So I did some more digging and came across this:

"...the idea being that if transactions have their signatures validated as they propagate across the network, a witness can have any number of computers surrounding him that validates all of these signatures, and then he gets a list of transactions and puts them in a block, and he doesn’t have to check those signatures himself, because he has got all these other nodes surrounding him that are dividing up the task."

Can someone clarify this?  Witness nodes, which build the blocks DO NOT check transaction signatures themselves, but rely on 3rd parties (which may be dishonest) to inform them that the signature for said transactions validate?  How does a witness node know if a 3rd party is providing false information regarding a transaction, claiming that it contains a valid signature when it may not?  If this happens, how then does the network resolve it, someone, somewhere must be doing a full validation of those 100,000 TPS to ensure that all transactions really are legitimate.

The critical error made in this post is the assumption that storing, processing or transmitting a given amount of data will take a fixed amount of resources for ever. The history of technology over that last 200 years has already proven this assumption to be completely wrong.

Please elaborate.

100 bytes of data will always be 100 bytes of data, regardless of what technological advancements are made in storing, transmitting it, or processing it.  All you can hope for is that these methods of managing it progress closer to the optimal over time.

The ultimate "fixed amount of resources" required to process that 100 bytes in any manner are governed by the laws of thermodynamics.  So ultimately, there is a fixed amount of resource required to perform an action on that 100 bytes, and it stays in place forever, we just aren't anywhere near it.

The critical question is that amount of resources that are consumed rather than the amount of data that is processed. Take for example the first hard drive developed by IBM in 1956. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/90156-the-history-of-computer-storage-slideshow/6 (http://www.extremetech.com/computing/90156-the-history-of-computer-storage-slideshow/6) Now compare this with a modern 1TB SSD drive. The latter can handle  200,000 times as much data while using a minuscule fraction of the resources.

The math is actually very simple if the exponential rate of data growth is less than the exponential decline on the resources required to handle say 100 bytes of data, then the amount of resources is actually falling at an exponential rate.

Edit 1: I was born in 1957 so I have experienced this relationship between data and resources for my entire life.

Edit 2: The 5MB hard drive in 1956 was far less sustainable and far more centralizing than the 1TB SSD is today.

Ok, that is technological advancement, and the resource requirements at any moment in time may be less than they were before.  I have little doubt that in 50 years time, my iWatch V10 can process 100k TPS with ease, but that is not the issue I was raising and your response also sidesteps away from your original statement which I countered.

My point was that as of today, it is not possible to achieve 100k TPS on a block chain, without using tricks and hacks, yet maintain the true nature of what crypto-currency is meant to be.  The resources required to do that vertically is too great, in 10-20-50 years time it may not be the case, but everyone wants this now, not in 50 years.

Yes but one cannot justify crippling Bitcoin to the current technology for ever. Furthermore many of us are looking at Bitcoin for its future rather than present value. Even over the life of Bitcoin we have a significant example. The cost of sending 1MB of data at the start of 2009 is the same as sending 21 MB of data in mid 2016. It is called Nielsen's Law http://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/ (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/)

To come to the VISA example should credit cards not have been launched in the 1940's because it was not possible to scale to the levels of the VISA network of today with the punch card and tabulating machine technology of the day?

Edit: One the subject of the iWatch V10 it could easily process 100k TPS or more in 50 years, but only the 100k TPS that is approved by the censor board at Apple. This is because of the DRM in the device.

I'm not suggesting it should be crippled, merely that it can only live within its technological means due to its architecture at that moment in time.  The architecture imposes its own limits because of the lack of available resources to perform better, or conversely, the resources available (or lack of) impose the limits onto Bitcoin.   This doesn't cripple anything, because over time as the resources available increase (or efficiency increases), Bitcoin is able to take advantage of them.

The same is for any currency, be it Bitcoin, Nxt, and others, they are limited in operation by the efficiency of the resources demanded by the implementation, at that moment in time.

There is no way to work around the resource limits available at any one moment in time in a vertical manner, which is the problem here with these "high TPS currencies", be it bandwidth, processing, storage...you can only be as efficient as the most efficient available resources will allow...past that, you have to start chopping things out and reduce the work load.

I'm sure that VISA didn't have 1 person verifying and doing all those punch card transactions, they had many, so it didn't matter that the resources available to do it were extremely inefficient.  

Block chains are like that scenario of just having 1 person, no matter how many nodes you have everyone of them is verifying the same data as everyone else, which is exactly the same (in terms of performance) as having just one verifying all the data.

not if we compress the data at least

Block & transaction data is high entropy, if you compress it, it takes up more space.

You can compress some sets of 100 bytes to < 100 bytes, but most sets of 100 bytes will compress to > 100 bytes.  Thus, all sets of 100 bytes, always require 100 bytes

Actually in the 1940's and up to the 1970's the primary methods of transactions were cash and other bearer instruments so nobody had to verify any ledger since there was no ledger to verify. It was simply too expensive to have even one entity doing the verification. With the more widespread availability of mainframe computers in the 1970's data processing costs came down and it became viable to have centralized ledgers so the widespread use of credit cards and in the 1990's debit cards became possible. Now as data processing costs have further come down it is becoming viable to have decentralized ledgers such as Bitcoin, Monero etc.

I really must emphasize that a historical perspective over the last 50 years and going back 200 years or more is critical to properly understand this issue.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree, purely because I think one of us is not understanding what the other is trying to convey.

Good talk though :)

I think the correct term for Monero is not "infinite TPS" but "virtually infinite TPS", it can scale to infinity but it doesnt mean you can make an infinite number or even a ridiculously big number of transactions right now all of a sudden.

technically it cant scale to infinity at all, because that would require more energy than there is in an infinite number of universes.  Its very frustrating how the word "infinite" is thrown around without any understanding of what it means and the implications of such.

A more correct term would be "unbounded", or "unlimited", which suggest exactly what it is, there are no limits imposed by the protocol.

technically the term is correct too:


and how do you know the universe isn't infinite? are you Satoshi our god?

How do you define "almost" in terms of infinity when infinity itself has no upper boundary?  You don't know where infinity "stops" (because it doesn't), so you can never know if you are almost there or not.

The definition of infinity is abstract, so its impossible to quantify it in a non-abstract manner as "virtually" attempts to do :)

In one of the infinite universes, yes I am ;)

Yes this is correct. The limits should be imposed by the market given what is practical using the technology of the day and not baked into the protocol. That is why adaptive limits that are market driven is the way to go here. In this fashion as the cost of data processing falls the TPS can increase while maintaining the same level of decentralization.

This is not the point of the word infinity, it means without any limit and its exactly what we have in Monero, the add of "virtually" is just a honest distortion to the fact we are limited to the amount of energy we can extract and store, like you said early.

Please show me how you are more or less, practically, almost, nearly, close to, verging on, just about, as good as, essentially, to all intents and purposes, roughly, approximately, extracting all the energy from the universe to get close to infinity processing capability? :)

For anyone curious as how to Monero's adaptive blocksize limit precisely works:


http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/389pq6/elastic_block_cap_with_rollover_penalties_my/crts1do

Now this is just getting retarded, you know very well what I meant with virtually infinite and I have shown by definition of both words its (one of) the correct term for Monero, now go play with your emunie.

Indeed I do, I'm just pointing out that the definition you presented yourself, is not an accurate representation of Monero's capabilities, and so, it is wrong.

You are only convincing yourself here :D

Not really, this is one of the many reasons that the mass market is confused, because people involved with projects make statements such as that which are fundamentally wrong, can not be achieved or proven, and only serve the purpose of "bragging rights" against other technologies.

Additionally statements such as that result in good projects such as Monero not being taken seriously by academics and other educated individuals in the real world, because statements are presented as fact, that can not be fact.

haha ok...

just confirming you wanted to FUD Monero btw  :-*

https://lab.getmonero.org/

Monero is one of the few coins besides Bitcoin with real mathematicians and cryptographers behind.

emunie is just a joke like XEM  :-\

I didn't want to FUD anything, just pointing these claims and the possibility of them being true or not.

Yeah yeah, eMunie is a joke, XEM is a joke, XYZ is a joke, awesome, lets descend to childish playground statements.

I'm a little biased by nature since i am a part of the emunie project, but i cannot see why asking critical questions regarding claims made by different devs/projects is speading FUD. There are several problems highlighted in this thread surrounding these claims, which i do not see you or anyone else have been able to answer to a satisfactory degree.

Then you have the audacity to go so low and proclaim that emunie is a joke. Its the same thing every time here on BTT. You go in and try and have a civil debate and all it turns out to, when people have no counter-arguments, is schoolyard bullying.

Either acknowledge that Monero's performance claims are not true or don't. Let that be your opinion and lets close it there. Do not downplay other peoples projects just because they found a hole in your Noahs ark.

The idea that one can push an infinite number of transactions through the Monero network is utter nonsense. Monero uses adaptive limits that limit the blocksize dynamically. This is explained in section 6.2 of the Cryptonote Whitepaper https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf (https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf). This means that there is no fixed maximum number of TPS that cannot be exceeded regardless of the market conditions. This is the critical difference with not just Bitcoin, but with Litecoin, Dodgecoin, Dash and many other alt-coins.

Thats what I was looking for, thank you!

The only coins in that poll that are worth anything is Monero and Bitcoin of course.

yup, thats why I'm trying to make OP change to at least virtually infinite, its pretty clear that respecting laws of physics is a major hole in the XMR ark :D

The issue is that sequencing and finalizing a block production is done single threaded, because validity is dependent on sequencing.  That makes that step the bottleneck, since it can't be scaled to more threads.  The signature checking doesn't have to be done by third parties, just separate threads.  Those separate threads could be spread across a cluster, or possibly handled by GPUs, or anything else, they just have to be running somewhere trusted by the Witness in order to feed the final Witness thread valid transactions to sequence and include in the block.

It's always a trade-off between decentralization and therefore redundant block validation and transaction fees.  Once you get to a globally useful scale, processing transactions has a real cost, and it has to be paid either by inflation of the currency, transaction fees, or subsidies from somewhere else.  The BitShares approach is to let the shareholders decide how much redundancy and decentralization they're willing to pay for, and where to set the transaction fees based on that.

Huh? Stopped reading after that.

It is kind of true though. Not because he's a cult leader. Anyone in the lead dev position would have the same support unless he's a a loser that steers us in the wrong direction constantly. The surprising thing is that four members of his own team don't support him.

He's actually quite right (on the definition).

As for Monero scaling to infinity: block size may have no upper bound, but you can be sure current processing efficiency will cause issues before a "high" TPS is achieved (define it as whatever). Lots of work to do...

Yes block production is single threaded, and multi-threaded signature verification is common sense, but even with the latest CPU's, performing 100,000 signature validations per second is an extremely tall order, commodity CPU's wont get anywhere close to that.   GPU's could be an option, but has anyone actually attempted to perform signature verification on a GPU?  I'm not aware of anyone doing it, or looking into it at the moment.

The statement made by BitShares was that witness nodes can rely on 3rd parties to verify the signatures, and that doesn't sit comfortably with me, because you have to trust these nodes.  Any of those nodes could become dishonest at any moment and then you have to resolve it in the network.  A proofing scheme could be created that proves the 3rd party is honest with regard to the transaction, but that will likely be just as expensive as simply doing the verification.  Seems like a lot of risk for a TPS value that will likely never be required, or at least not for many many years.

Tinfoil hat much?  I don't know what it is about crypto that seems to attract conspiracy theorists, but that's some definite crazy right there.  This isn't about individual developers "winning" or "losing".  Grow up.  The choice we're being given is whether bitcoin can scale to support the masses and remain affordable for all, which it simply can't do at the moment unless the fork goes ahead, or whether it becomes a niche, elitist network that most people won't be able to afford to use.  I support a network that's open and accessible to all, not just the privileged few like the anti-fork crowd want.

The next big thing would be a thing that allows for all of the world's electronic transactions per second combined in a decentralized manner. It seems that Bitcoin will not be able to do it, so can't the rest of shitcoins, so for now Bitcoin is still king.
I am a proposal of doing less important shitty small transactions off blockchain, because who cares about 0.000001 type of transactions. All of them should go off blockchain to favour 1+USD ones. We should push in this direction to be able to fight against VISA, Mastercard, and all the banks combined. Bitcoin must be #1 in the world.

Huh, well you'd have to find all the credit card companies, all the online payment platforms, and add them up all together to determine "the world's electronic transactions per second". Besides that, it is possible for decentralized entities to do that already, such as Monero(has no hard cap).

Thanks for sharing, but even Monero has unlimited TPS, yesterday when I send Monero to poloniex.com I wait 16 confirmation and get it at balance after 30 min+, withdraw BitShares from poloniex.com take me 3 min until I get BTS in the wallet confirmed. So theoretically Monero can be very fast, practically it's even slower than Litecoin.
Sure I will be very happy to see fast Monero network in future.

You're barking up the wrong tree, trying to make Bitcoin like ripple, nxt, or bitshares....
what kind of nonsense is this?

We already know the solution-- short term simply increase the block size, and longest term let's see if we can get sidechains working.

I'm still not convinced, there are a lot of assumptions made, and some information is incorrect or not possible and needs some explanation further...

Also, bear in mind the 2 following quotes when I present the points made that don't seem to add up, conflict or simply don't make sense.


So, lets proceed...


That is a bad assumption to make if you intend BitShares to run on commodity hardware as is stated in various texts relating to BitShares 2.0....if you wish to achieve that, then you should really be assuming that the network, and disks are NOT capable of such a thing.


Erm....what happened to commodity hardware already?  Who has a 36 core CPU lying around?


I just don't see how this is possible while maintaining the minimum amount of data required to ensure a validatable transaction.  A 256bit EC signature is ~70 bytes, 30 bytes sure doesn't seem like enough to specify 2 addresses, a transaction value, and anything else that is required.

Its worth noting that quoted figures for average BTC transactions are also incorrect as per this http://bitshares.github.io/technology/high-performance-and-scalability/


I recall a few respected members here doing research into this, and the average BTC transaction was at least 2x that, usually 3x and greater.


 ??? so we have gone from commodity hardware, to data-centers?  What about keeping things decentralized or on commodity hardware?


That is a statistic I can swallow, but my question is, WHO is doing the signature validation?  Only people with 32 core machines and 1TB of memory?  If so, how are the rest of the nodes in the network ensuring that this now centralized task is done properly?  How can I with my lowly 8 core, be sure that the transactions are indeed valid and signed correctly without having to also verify 100k transactions per second.


Ahh so 100k per second really is only available to people who own 32 core CPU's in a spare data-center?  If this single machine consisted of commodity hardware, and thus most users of the network will have similar, its not 100k per second is it, its 2k.

Remember this from up top It should be noted that we are talking about the capability of an individual computer which is the ultimate bottleneck, which is in turn confirmed by this next statement


If the speed of the 100tx/s is really achievable on commodity hardware, why limit it to 1000 transactions per second on release?  Could it be that 100k/s on commodity hardware actually is not possible, and this 1k limit is actually to mitigate machines slower than the test bed machine that could achieve 2k/s

If that is not the case then I am totally confused. Is it limited by an individual computer to 2k tx/s, or is it not?  Do you need the suggested 32 cores to be able to process 100k tx/s and if so, what about my question for machines that are slower?  If the majority of machines are indeed only able to process 2k/s what purpose do they serve in the network?  Are they redundant in ANY transaction processing?

To me on the surface, it all seems like conflicting statements, and contradictory numbers.  If the system can process 100k/s, without having centralized nodes packing 32 cores and 1TB of RAM, then I'll take my hat off, but all this information is so confusing, I don't even know what to take away from it.

YOUR THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE IS MUCH APPRECIATED


Since you took the trouble to read some of our BitShares 2.0 documentation and have prepared a polite, professional response, I am pleased to join you in a serious exchange of ideas.  :)

I'll limit my first response to just one of your lines of questions, lest too many trees hide the forest.

You can think of the transaction rate setting in BitShares 2.0 as a form of "dial a yield".  It can be dynamically adjusted by the stakeholders to provide all the throughput they want to pay for.  Since BitShares is designed to be a profitable business, it only makes sense to pay for just enough processing capacity to handle peak loads.    

The BitShares 2.0 block chain has a number of "knobs" that can be set by elected delegates.  One of them is throughput.  The initial setting of that knob is 1000 transactions per second because right now that is plenty and allows the maximum number of people to provide low cost nodes.  A second knob is witness node pay rate.  If doubling the throughput requires slightly more expensive nodes, the stakeholders just dial up the pay rate until they get enough bidders to provide the number of witness node they decide they want (another dial).  Pay rate scales which throughput which scales with revenue which scales with transaction volume.

Now, suppose that a few big applications were to decide to bring all their transactions to the neutral BitShares platform one summer.  If we needed to double the throughput, here's what would happen.

The elected delegates would discuss it in public and then publish their recommended new knob settings.  Perhaps they pick 2000 transactions per second and $100/month pay for each witness node provider.  Everyone who wants to compete for that job then has the funds to upgrade their servers to the next bigger off-the-shelf commodity processor.

As soon as they change those knob settings, the blockchain begins a two week countdown during which time the stakeholders are given a chance to vote out the delegates from their wallets if they don't like the change.  If they are voted out, the blockchain automatically aborts the adoption of the new settings.  If not, the settings are changed and the BitShares network shifts gears to run faster.

There is enough reserve capacity in the software to double our throughput about 8 times - scaling by three orders of magnitude with a simple parameter adjustment.

The current knob setting gives us plenty of reserve capacity at the lowest possible witness node price.  It could absorb all of Bitcoin's transaction workload without needing to even touch those dials.  But, if we ever need to take on the workload of something like NASDAQ or VISA or Master Card, we can dial up the bandwidth to whatever level the stakeholders vote to support.

So, the BitShares 2.0 platform has plenty of spare bandwidth to handle the ledger bookkeeping functions of just about every blockchain currently in existence.  You are all welcome to join us and start using your mining expenses to pay your own developers and marketers instead of electric companies. Nothing else about your business models or token distributions would change.  Simply outsource your block signing tasks and get on with your more interesting earthshaking ideas.   Think of the industry growth we would all experience if most funds spend on block signers were used to grow our common ecosystem instead.  We could all share one common, neutral global ledger platform, where cross-chain transactions, smart contracts and other such innovations were all interoperable!

Or will we waste our industry's development capital on a never ending mining arms race?  Carpe diem!

Stan Larimer, President
Cryptonomex.com