Bitcoin Forum

8MB per 10 minutes is about 13.6 KB/s. What was the problem again?

Not that I think that simply increasing the block size limit to 8MB is a good solution (I'd rather see something more dynamic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1151061)) but if 13.6 KB/s is actually a problem, maybe you should fix your internet, rather than debate over Bitcoin.

8MB per 10 minutes is about 13.6 KB/s. What was the problem again?

Not that I think that simply increasing the block size limit to 8MB is a good solution (I'd rather see something more dynamic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1151061)) but if 13.6 KB/s is actually a problem, maybe you should fix your internet, rather than debate over Bitcoin.

It will solve the spam attacks problem.

I don't know of the downside though. Why are so many people against this? I don't understand.

How is that? What prevents anyone from sending 8 times (or 100 times) as much spam as what we've seen recently?

What we need is a slight change in the default fee setting for Bitcoin nodes, that still allow very cheap payments (also micropayments) but helps against mass spam / dust transactions. Something similar to what Litecoin does, by requiring an additional small fee for each small output in a tx (and perhaps for each small input as well, while we're at it).

How is that? What prevents anyone from sending 8 times (or 100 times) as much spam as what we've seen recently?

What we need is a slight change in the default fee setting for Bitcoin nodes, that still allow very cheap payments (also micropayments) but helps against mass spam / dust transactions. Something similar to what Litecoin does, by requiring an additional small fee for each small output in a tx (and perhaps for each small input as well, while we're at it).

afaik some bandwidth problem for miners(chinese) and probably the fact that 8MB is not a final solution, because you need to fork again in the future, that will arise all the same problems, that we are facing right now, for this size increase

We've identified a fundamental disagreement in:

- The block size maximum consensus rule serves to limit mining centralization

But as said I believe at least 2 different formal proofs can be
produced that in fact this is the case. One of them (the one I'm
working on) remains true even after superluminal communication, free
unlimited global bandwidth and science fiction snarks.
But let's just list the concerns first.

I believe there's 2 categories:

1) Increasing the block size may increase centralization.

- Mining centralization will get worse (for example, China's aggregate
hashrate becomes even larger)
   - Government control in a single jurisdiction could enforce
transaction censorship and destroy irreversibility of transactions
      - Some use cases that rely on a decentralized chain (like
trustless options) cannot rely on Bitcoin anymore.
      - Reversible transactions will have proportional fees rather
than flat ones.
         - Some use cases that rely on flat fees (like remittance) may
not be practical in Bitcoin anymore
- The full node count will decrease, leaving less resources to serve SPV nodes.

2) Trying to avoid "hitting the limit" permanently minimizes minimum
fees (currently zero) and fees in general

- If fees' block reward doesn't increase enough, the subsidy block
reward may become insufficient to protect the irreversibility of the
system at some point in time, and the system is attacked and destroyed
at that point in time
- Miners will continue to run noncompetitive block creation policies
(ie accepting free transactions)
- More new Bitcoin businesses may be created based on unsustainable
assumptions and consequently fail.
- "Free transactions bitcoin marketing" may continue and users may get
angry when they discover they have been lied about the sustainability
of that property and the reliability of free transactions.

Please suggest more concerns or new categories if you think they're needed.

This is a good question, I've also wanted to clearly know the answer to this.

What about companies that have API's or have built something connected to the blockchain? Will they have to do something at the fork? All of them? Because I imagine that would be a nightmare to do every two years.

Or is it not like that?

8MB per 10 minutes is about 13.6 KB/s. What was the problem again?

Miners cant wait 10 minutes to have their newly mined block trasfered to the next node.

China’s five largest mining pools gathered at the National Conference Center in Beijing to hold a technical discussion about the ramifications of increasing the max block size on the Bitcoin network. In attendance were F2Pool, BW, BTCChina, Huobi.com, and Antpool. After undergoing deep consideration and discussion, the five pools agree that while the block size does need to be increased, a compromise should be made to increase the network max block size to 8 megabytes. We believe that this is a realistic short term adjustment that remains fair to all miners and node operators worldwide.

Why upgrade to 8MB but not 20MB?

1.Chinese internet bandwidth infrastructure is not built out to the same advanced level as those found in other countries.

2.Chinese outbound bandwidth is restricted; causing increased latency in connections between China & Europe or the US.

3.Not all Chinese mining pools are ready for the jump to 20MB blocks, and fear that this could cause an orphan rate that is too high.

The bitcoin miners of China agree that the blocksize must be increased, but we believe that increasing to 8MB first is the most reasonable course of action. We believe that 20MB blocks will cause a high orphan rate for miners, leading to hard forks down the road. If the bitcoin community can come to a consensus to upgrade to 8MB blocks first, we believe that this lays a strong foundation for future discussions around the block size. At present, China’s five largest mining pools account for more than 60% of the network hashrate.

But they can wait 1.25 minutes to have their newly mined block trasfered to the next node?

Personally I believe that this well overestimating the rate internet connection-speeds and hard-disk space will grow. Just look at ADSL or even cable for instance.

Chinese mining pools seem to have played the decisive role in the debate. As CoinFox wrote recently, a joint statement of BTCChina, Huobi, F2Pool, BW and Antpool favoured a compromise – an increase of the block size to 8MB instead of 20MB.


The long debate over the bitcoin block size is over. The updates being done to the bitcoin code have been published by the core developer Gavin Andresen on GitHub. The block size will change from 1MB to 8MB, with further doubling every two years – so in 2018, it will reach 16 MB, then 32MB in 2020 and so on.

2016: 8 MB
2018: 16 MB
2020: 32 MB
2022: 64 MB
2024: 128 MB
2026: 256MB
2028: 512 MB
2030: 1024 MB
2032: 2048 MB
2034: 4096 MB

Personally I believe that this well overestimating the rate internet connection-speeds and hard-disk space will grow. Just look at ADSL or even cable for instance.

4096 MB per 10minutes in a year will grow to: 205TB per year worth of storage.

I wonder if they took in account the laws of physics in this equation. It is not impossible but who can and will pay for such an investment just to be a unpaid bitcoin client (full node).

I don't think storage will ever be much of an issue. Bandwidth sure as shit is and they seem to be a little casual about that with the ever increasing block size proposal.

Nothing you can do about it yourself. You have to wait for your friendly phone company to come around and do some digging up and install major hardware upgrades.

My bandwidth is unchanged in over a decade and there's nothing on the horizon either. It suits my purposes fine but it's not going to like running a node in such a future.

Actually I don't think bandwith is that much of an issue. It will take a bit longer to sync but that's that, the worst part will be downloading the blockchain the first time, then if you open it daily is not that bad.

40 gb!!!!
With my connection speed the block chain will be downloaded in 4 to 5  days or maybe take a week.

Currently I've installed new os on my pc and electrum is also taking a while to synchronize.

Why didn't you make a backup? It took me 4/5 hours last time I downloaded the blockchain.

Chinese mining pools seem to have played the decisive role in the debate. As CoinFox wrote recently, a joint statement of BTCChina, Huobi, F2Pool, BW and Antpool favoured a compromise – an increase of the block size to 8MB instead of 20MB.


The long debate over the bitcoin block size is over. The updates being done to the bitcoin code have been published by the core developer Gavin Andresen on GitHub. The block size will change from 1MB to 8MB, with further doubling every two years – so in 2018, it will reach 16 MB, then 32MB in 2020 and so on.

2016: 8 MB
2018: 16 MB
2020: 32 MB
2022: 64 MB
2024: 128 MB

....

Do larger blocks give an advantage to the larger mining pools? Ex. Getting some sort of edge on mining the next block after finding one, seeing that the blocks will be larger?

An increase in size of the blocks changes nothing to the nodes and daemons, only, of course, in the main mining code.

I have to say, I can't see what the exact point is to keep the blocks at 1mb.

My admittedly very limited understanding: Currently because of the limited block sizes the bitcoin network could never handle the traffic if a large amount of new bitcoin users came online and started using bitcoin. The network would be so slow that people would not have a very good experience.

The solution to this is to increase the block size to 8 MB per block allowing for many more transactions and a much faster network capable of handling an event in which a large amount of new users start using bitcoin.

I don't know of the downside though. Why are so many people against this? I don't understand.

I'm not sure if you are aware of the centralization pressure that occurs when miners are allowed to pick their own block sizes. Miners have incentives to encourage a very high orphan rate, if the orphan rate is properly targeted. Mining is a 0-sum game, which means that miners have incentive to hurt eachother. (less competition means lower difficulty and more blocks for you).

The ideal scenario for a miner is that the block they produce immediately hits a large portion of the hash power (at least 51%, but I'm not sure what the optimal percentage is), and then never hits the remaining hashpower at all. That remaining hashpower will have to find 2 blocks before the rest of the hashpower finds a single block - this will be detrimental to the profits of the minority hashpower, significantly so.

Large blocks provide a way to achieve this to some effect for bigger miners....

...This attack can be levied by a single large miner with no collusion. Simply by prioritizing the other large miners, and refusing to send the block to the low-bandwidth minority, a big miner can create blocks large enough to heavily impact the orphan rate of smaller miners without significantly affecting their own orphan rate.

This is very bad. The block size limit is important to stop this class of attack. (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fpuld/a_transaction_fee_market_exists_without_a_block/ctqxkq6)

The vast majority of research demonstrates that blocksize does matter, blocksize caps are required to secure the network, and large blocks are a centralizing pressure.

Here’s a short list of what has been published so far:

1) No blocksize cap and no minimum fee leads to catastrophic breakage as miners chase marginal 0 fees:

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2400519

It’s important to note that mandatory minimum fees could simply be rebated out-of-band, which would lead to the same problems.

2) a) Large mining pools make strategies other than honest mining more profitable:

    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcArXiv.pdf

2) b) In the presence of latency, some alternative selfish strategy exists that is more profitable at any mining pool size. The larger the latency, the greater the selfish mining benefit:

    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.06183v1.pdf

3) Mining simulations run by Pieter Wuille shows that well-connected peers making a majority of the hashing power have an advantage over less-connected ones, earning more profits per hash. Larger blocks even further favor these well-connected peers. This gets even worse as we shift from block subsidy to fee based reward :

    http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg08161.html

4) Other point(s):

If there is no blocksize cap, a miner should simply snipe the fees from the latest block and try to stale that block by mining their own replacement. You get all the fees plus any more from new transactions. Full blocks gives less reward for doing so, since you have to choose which transactions to include. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fpuld/a_transaction_fee_market_exists_without_a_block/ctqxkq6 (https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ggggo/im_lost_in_the_blocksize_limit_debate/ctyhcj7?context=3)

no bandwidth problem. no storage problem.

i would like to see mass adoption. i would like to follow satoshis view of big blocks. i would like to have a permission less and cheap blockchain (cheap transactions) for everybody in the world.


look at Nielsen's Law:

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/

we dont talk about 100 MB blocks tomorrow - we talk about 6, 8 or 16 MB blocks in a few years (and it takes time to even fill them).
hundreds of millions of people can support such nodes today. no problem.

Nielsen's (Folk) Law is bounded by Gibson's Razor:

"The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed."

See my lengthy, well-researched response to you here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1150481.msg12144001#msg12144001) for Important Details.   :)

Some idiots are still running nodes on Raspberry Pis or Beagle Bones.

Exactly what is so idiotic about supporting the Bitcoin network by running dedicated devices as nodes (like Raspberry Pis) ?

they will soon run out of disk space and I don't think raspeberries are supposed to handle so much disk accesses, so it might reduce the life of the device

Miners cant wait 10 minutes to have their newly mined block trasfered to the next node.

The biggest downside is basically the fact that the blocksize will be bigger, therefore limiting the amount of people that can access to it, or they could still access to it but it will be slower to download it.

How is that? What prevents anyone from sending 8 times (or 100 times) as much spam as what we've seen recently?

What we need is a slight change in the default fee setting for Bitcoin nodes, that still allow very cheap payments (also micropayments) but helps against mass spam / dust transactions. Something similar to what Litecoin does, by requiring an additional small fee for each small output in a tx (and perhaps for each small input as well, while we're at it).

There are some problems with bigger blocks, as far as I can understand bigger blocks means:

1. You need to have more HDD place to store bigger blockchain.

2. Transactions fees will be actually higher, RIP bitcoin microtransactions.

3. Higher blocks also requires higher internet bandwidth.

they will soon run out of disk space and I don't think raspeberries are supposed to handle so much disk accesses, so it might reduce the life of the device

There are some problems with bigger blocks, as far as I can understand bigger blocks means:

1. You need to have more HDD place to store bigger blockchain.
2. Transactions fees will be actually higher, RIP bitcoin microtransactions.
3. Higher blocks also requires higher internet bandwidth.

Exactly what is so idiotic about supporting the Bitcoin network by running dedicated devices as nodes (like Raspberry Pis) ?

i have had trouble trying to get a node up and running as it is.

Yeah, why don't you buy 2 TB SSD to everybody in Bitcoin community Mr. Donator Legendary rich fella? Almost everybody in this community wants to run Bitcoin Core as node.
Or you want to limit node usage to some secret elite society? More centralization is definitely a good idea, huh?

Why would you need 2 TB SSD to store 512 MB of data? (we are talking about running a node here, right?) Even if you wanted to store the full blockchain 2 TB HDDs are cheap and would be enough for long time to the future.

How do you maintain all blockchain when block size limit will be 8 MB? Blockchain is almost 50 GB already. It'll be 63 GB before new year. Imagine we see 8 MB blocks every 10 minutes. Even 2 TB would be obsolete in 5 years.
If you don't want any problems you don't store your blockchain in HDD. You need a good SSD. Running Bitcoin Core is very expensive even right now.

If you don't want any problems you don't store your blockchain in HDD. You need a good SSD. Running Bitcoin Core is very expensive even right now.

afaik some bandwidth problem for miners(chinese) and probably the fact that 8MB is not a final solution, because you need to fork again in the future, that will arise all the same problems, that we are facing right now, for this size increase

How do you maintain all blockchain when block size limit will be 8 MB? Blockchain is almost 50 GB already. It'll be 63 GB before new year. Imagine we see 8 MB blocks every 10 minutes. Even 2 TB would be obsolete in 5 years.
If you don't want any problems you don't store your blockchain in HDD. You need a good SSD. Running Bitcoin Core is very expensive even right now.

How do you maintain all blockchain when block size limit will be 8 MB? Blockchain is almost 50 GB already. It'll be 63 GB before new year. Imagine we see 8 MB blocks every 10 minutes. Even 2 TB would be obsolete in 5 years.
If you don't want any problems you don't store your blockchain in HDD. You need a good SSD. Running Bitcoin Core is very expensive even right now.

This chart says it all

http://photo.mystisland.org/propagation.png

For broadcasting large blocks, it will take 0.25 second for each KB to reach every nodes. So 1MB blocks would take 250 seconds e.g. more than 4 minutes to reach all the network, or 80 seconds to reach majority of the network

It is easy to calculate, for 8MB blocks, it will take 32 minutes to reach all the nodes, or 10.6 minutes to reach majority of nodes, it is obviously too slow, the next block is already mined before the previous one arrived, so the previous one is always orphaned, the network will be segmented

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~rich/class/cs290-cloud/papers/bitcoin-delay.pdf

Of course there will be workarounds to broadcast only the block header first then followed by the block, but that function is not implemented yet and have its own weakness. Currently some chinese miners try to include as little transaction as possible to increase the speed of their block's broadcasting

it will take a lot of time until the bitcoin network will have enough adoption to fill 8 MB Blocks.

for now this is a non existing problem.

Miners are struggling with blocks far smaller than 750KB blocks and resorting to SPV mining
http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/010283.html

Why would you need 2 TB SSD to store 512 MB of data? (we are talking about running a node here, right?) Even if you wanted to store the full blockchain 2 TB HDDs are cheap and would be enough for long time to the future.

The block chain size alone is 40 GB> right now. Where'd you get those 512 MB of data? o.o You need to have the full copy of the block chain since the genesis block to become a full node.

A good argument against the bitcoiners that demand 1MB blocksize because "Miners have to be rewarded" is the electricity that goes away with that. I recently read an article about a study saying that currently 1! bitcoin transaction costs so much electricity like 1.75 normal US households use in a day.

We can't let all these miners survive artificially by raising the fees. The amount of miners need to be trimmed down and the bitcoin security be more power efficient. That was always happening and it should and can't be held up artificially. The bitcoin network would be still very very secure with less miners.

Unfortunately miners are the mighty ones in the game. We only can hope that the sane one are the biggest ones. And that they see the need of bitcoin adoption for getting future profits.

That is a sick amount of power... So mining one block consumes the power of a full city? That is insane and not sustainable, especially if it keeps rising...

I do agree that's a lot to secure this level of Bitcoin transactions as of today. But I also read that current amount of hashing power is enough to secure even a 100 fold increase in the transaction number and user number. So to say, if we would have 100 million users, the network would be secured with today's hash rate.

That's why I don't understand the opponents of the block size increase. Bitcoin has to scale in order to be sustainable in the long run! For that we need bigger blocks!

but WHO will ever be able to download 8MB

8 FUCKING MASSIVE MEGA BYTES

this will surely make minning WAY more centralized

but WHO will ever be able to download 8MB

8 FUCKING MASSIVE MEGA BYTES

this will surely make minning WAY more centralized

It won't take a lot of time until DoS 'stress tests' fill up 8 MB blocks.

 ::)

The existing problem is that you don't know WTF you're talking about. 

but WHO will ever be able to download 8MB

8 FUCKING MASSIVE MEGA BYTES

this will surely make minning WAY more centralized

On top... you know that the current blocks are not even filled full. They only are full when these spammers act. And there is no reason to assume that suddenly, with 8 Megabyte Blocks, these blocks will be full. Where should all these transactions come from?

8 Megabytes per 10 Minutes and you think we will get in problems with that? What kind of internet connection do you have in order to fear that?

Sure. And will you pay that? You realize the cost of the recent spam attacks? And those were only some KB. You speak about filling up a lot MB with spam. I wonder if you will find someone who will do the spamming.

And of course i referred to the natural adoption of bitcoin that will fill the blocks. Spamming won't happen since it does not make sense then anymore in any way for the spammer.

Linuld, really... you are asking the same questions that have been answered like a thousand times, and making arguments that have been countered a thousand times...

I will only comment on some of them:
There's a perfect reason to assume that blocks are suddenly 8Mb -- if there's a specific attack vector linked to full 8Mb blocks, it will be used. It's not that expensive, especially when fees are gravitating towards infignificant amounts due to big blocks.
A decentralized network robustness depends not on an average throughput, but on the throughput of bottlenecks, namely network bottlenecks (China-ROW, e.g.), CPU bottlenecks and others.
CPU bottlenecks are currently being worked on by core devs.
Do you realize that yeaterday's attack created more than 35Mb transaction backlog -- enough to fill more than four 8Mb blocks.
The previous attack had much larger backlog.
"Sense"? What's the sense for an attacker currently? Do you realize that with this natural adoption even 8Mb blocks will get full at some point, and the closer they get to 8Mb, the less costly is a spam attack.
We can't solve the spam attack by allowing for more bloating, we can fight it only with fees, which are bound to go towards zero if we keep increasing blocksize limit beyond demand.

Most of your comments are bullshit which can be countered a thousand times too.

you are asking the same question that has been answered like a thousand times

Got it, another cheap-talker (unlike you, I have answered to Linuld in detail). Welcome to my ignore list.

Mr Moron, please read my full post. If you keep ignoring everybody that doesn't treat you like your mummy does, you'll be all alone in here.

Why can't you accept that some people like "big blocks" and some don't?

What if the blocksize could only contain 1 transaction costing 1 BTC, if we increase this to 2 transactions costing 0.5BTC each, the miners would make 1 BTC either way...

BUT

After our increase, we doubled the amount of users that can make transactions in 10min intervals.

What's the point of Bitcoin if you can only send money to a limited amount of people?

Well then we have a huge freaking problem! Then Bitcoin isn't ready for mass adoption and how will ever be ready? What solution is there besides sidechains, if the sidechains are even possible?

He's talking about blockchain pruning -- currently possible with Core client. Though it's not a full node really until UTXO commitments are in place. You still need full nodes to do initial sync and full validation, and someone must be running them.

I have a typical home connection downloading 8MB might take me anywhere from 2 to 6 seconds

if i'm streaming a movie it could take 12seconds i guess

so it clearly unacceptable to expect miners to download 8MB, so there can be no doubt 8MB WILL centralize bitcoin mining.

Are you being serious here Adam or ....?

I also have a typical home connection and 8MB would take me about 0.5-1 sec, if I would be a miner, I wouldn't stream a movie on the connection, but buy a second one.
If my current connection is to slow I still have the possibility to upgrade to a higher speed connection.

So if I can do it, surely a miner making millions should be able to figure it out.

if miners can't stream 3 HD pron movies all at once while mining on a typical home connections , mining will become centralized! simple as that.

If a bigger block affects microtransactions, that is really bad. I think that the ability of sending a fraction of a cent is one of the good things of Bitcoin (microearnings, crowdfunding by lots of people, etc). Is it really that so? Bigger blocks will hinder microtransactions?

No. It's the opposite.

When transaction volume bumps into blocksize limit, it causes increase in fees, which can make microtransactions unfeasible. (You might have to pay more in fees than your transaction is worth) Fees rise as people have to compete to get their transactions included to the block.

With bigger blocksize limit there's no or very little fee competition and thus microtransactions remain feasible.

Linuld, really... you are asking the same questions that have been answered like a thousand times, and making arguments that have been countered a thousand times...

I will only comment on some of them:
There's a perfect reason to assume that blocks are suddenly 8Mb -- if there's a specific attack vector linked to full 8Mb blocks, it will be used. It's not that expensive, especially when fees are gravitating towards infignificant amounts due to big blocks.
A decentralized network robustness depends not on an average throughput, but on the throughput of bottlenecks, namely network bottlenecks (China-ROW, e.g.), CPU bottlenecks and others.
CPU bottlenecks are currently being worked on by core devs.
Do you realize that yeaterday's attack created more than 35Mb transaction backlog -- enough to fill more than four 8Mb blocks.
The previous attack had much larger backlog.
"Sense"? What's the sense for an attacker currently? Do you realize that with this natural adoption even 8Mb blocks will get full at some point, and the closer they get to 8Mb, the less costly is a spam attack.
We can't solve the spam attack by allowing for more bloating, we can fight it only with fees, which are bound to go towards zero if we keep increasing blocksize limit beyond demand.

If we increase this to 2 txs, and the second tx doesn't appear (spare space), then the first tx will simply lower its fees (blocksize becomes non-scarce).

We doubled the amount of possible transactions, but we can't magically double the actual amount of them.

That's not my point. I want Bitcoin to scale while still retaining its unique characteristics.

I have a typical home connection downloading 8MB might take me anywhere from 2 to 6 seconds

if i'm streaming a movie it could take 12seconds i guess

so it clearly unacceptable to expect miners to download 8MB, so there can be no doubt 8MB WILL centralize bitcoin mining.

if miners can't stream 3 HD pron movies all at once while mining on a typical home connections , mining will become centralized! simple as that.

No worries. Hearn says that miners whose bandwidth is too limited can create their own altcoin and leave bitcoin.

Do you think we should address dust transactions which maximize output/transaction size (i.e. spam)? After all, competition for inclusion in blocks during stress tests is absolutely not a result of organic growth in transaction volume (adoption). This is obvious, since it diverges sharply from average transaction growth, then reverts to the mean following the stress test.

Perhaps increasing the block size is not the only way to address spam attacks.....

What do you write here? You assume they will be filled because you assume it will be so? You know, i know that the past has shown that you are not correct. So i'm fine with me being not convinced by your assumption. ::)

The bottlenecks you describe are nonsense too. The bitcoin network can't remain so lowtech that each and every modem user can use it. It only must be useable with the hardwar that is widely used. And that includes relatively old hardware too. But when someone uses tech from 10 years ago then he can't await that he can use every software running nowadays. I mean you set higher rules then they are usual in ever other area. And that makes no sense.

*lol* You argument with 35 MB backlog? And? Then will be four 8 MB blocks filled. Then the spook is over. ::)

And again... do you want to spam a network with 8 MB blocks? For what reason?

*lol* Again an argument that you use that will be solved with 8 MB blocks. You say if the blocks are nearly full attacks will cost more and that we should not upgrade to 8 MB because they eventually will be full too at some point. So let's keep 1MB? Surely that makes sense.

If we fight the spam with fees then bitcoin will lose one of it's rare advantages. But i guess you would be ok for that? Altcoin involved or so?

But maybe you don't want the blocksize rise because it is only a temporary fix. Then yes, i would prefer no limit at all. Past has shown that it was no problem to have enough free space in the blocks. They did not fill up because some ominous spammers with deep pockets filled them up.

That's again an assumption that was proven wrong long ago by reality. As long as the 1 MB blocks were not full the fees did not vanish like you make the story go. The bitcoiners still pay their fee. Might be because of the wrong assumption that it will go much faster or is needed. In fact it is a little bit faster and the feest are very small anyway. So no one cares really paying them.

Your assumption is already proven incorrect. There is no reason to assume that will change only because we have 50% free space in a 8 MB block instead in a 1MB block.

Yes, we doubled the amount of possible transactions. And that's something crucially needed. Imagine paypal having a max global allowed transaction amount per hour? That would be plain stupid and everyone would go away.

It's good that you want to keep bitcoins unique characteristics but surely higher fees are not the way. On top it would mean unreliablity since when you somehow end with a fee too low, you will not get it send. That is deadly for a payment system.

So sorry, your way will surely kill bitcoin in the long run.

Good engineering must take care of extremes -- if we can support 8MB, then let's make sure the systems stays robust.

Sure, because there is no way to specify the mining client to be prioritized. ::) I mean bitcoin must be so low tech that every porn streamer can mine and stream at the same time.

No worries. Hearn says that miners whose bandwidth is too limited can create their own altcoin and leave bitcoin.

why don't they just join a pool? better yet they can keep mining that wtv pool they are currently mining at.

No worries. Hearn says that miners whose bandwidth is too limited can create their own altcoin and leave bitcoin.

In the foreseeable future any occasional big blocks will likely get orphaned, so your concern is unfounded.
However, by the time the blocks are consistently big, the technology will already have improved to be able to handle them.
With static limit, big blocks now will become small blocks in the future and the process will have to repeat itself.

This is a good way to keep the system in check, allow it grow, while at the same time not let it spiral out of our hands.

In fact, the size of the block is not limited by either core devs or miners, but ISPs around the world. I believe without major upgrade of internet infrastructure, the bitcoin network can not handle 2MB blocks well, not even mention 8MB

Why exactly will they get orphaned? I consider this statement unfounded, because nowadays miners are able to propagate blocks between themselves in constant time (generally) with help of Matt Corallo's relay network. In turn, the nodes don't have this privilege, so we better have some testing, I guess.

Ok, there are finally some good points here!
We definitely need some testing.

But if the "constant propagation time" for miners is true, why Chinese are then worried about the bandwidth with their 8MB figure?
What would prevent implementing the relay network for other full nodes and what was the rationale for not doing so in the first place?

The thing about the relay network is that it depends on miners behaving cooperatively. On the other hand, some game-theoretical research (e.g. selfish mining paper) suggests that this is not necessarily the most rational approach.
So, my point is that we must be very careful about changing these constants. I'd rather go with 2MB first, not 8MB, and then re-evaluate.

When there was a talk about 20MB blocks, people calculated that they would barely fit into the "total bandwidth per month cap" imposed by ISPs.
So, I assumed that 8MB should fit that situation better, provided that it is only a cap and not the actual block size for the next few years.

Yes, people also calculated that they can do space travel to another galaxy through a worm hole   ;)

Until you have done a stress test under the real traffic, you would never know what kind of problem can arise. A small increase in the amount of the transaction might cause a total change in system's behavior. You can test the technical aspect of the network in a test lab, but you can never anticipate what real people would do when they detected there is a chance to clog and crash the network and greatly profit from it

A possible failure scenario: After raising the block size to 8 MB, there is nothing wrong, people start to develop new solutions and new business around the new blockchain, but after another 5 years, there is a heavy increase of the network traffic but the internet infrastructure upgrading has totally stopped due to a new financial crisis and recession, ISPs start to cut off bandwidth and charge more on it, then at that stage, you can not reduce the block size to cope with the network change, the whole network are under traffic jam for another 5 years

A service oriented mindset might not suitable for a monetary system, you should let people adopt to bitcoin, not let bitcoin adopt to people. Banks never adopt to people, but people worship them

I also thought about more conservative approach first, but then quickly realized that being over-protective would necessitate having this discussion (about the limit increase) more often than we want it to be.

In the extreme case, we will be constantly debating the issue and not let the actual limit to solidify in order for it to have any effect, which at the same time would distract us from doing any other positive and creative things in the ecosystem.

If 8MB is considered unsafe, then we should look at how competition is currently surviving with higher limits (not blocks though). Of course, the counter argument in this case will be that their market cap and importance are less than that of Bitcoin and therefore there are no incentives to disturb the network by storming it with bigger blocks.

It's still somewhat uncertain, but if we demonstrate that we can agree on a single number and move forward, then the positive momentum in the ecosystem might encourage other players (like bandwidth-limited Chinese miners) to protect the network from bloating too fast by building on top of blocks that are not bigger than 2MB, for example.

That's the scenario I keep in mind when talking about 8MB limit.

I think if we succeed with 2MB, and it goes smoothly, the next time will be much easier, because it won't be uncharted territory.
If that's deemed too conservative, we could do 2-4-8 programmed instead with doubling every 2 years. After all, we can alwasy soft-fork to lower limit, though I think it's inelegant.

I think if we succeed with 2MB, and it goes smoothly, the next time will be much easier, because it won't be uncharted territory.
If that's deemed too conservative, we could do 2-4-8 programmed instead with doubling every 2 years. After all, we can alwasy soft-fork to lower limit, though I think it's inelegant.

We need no more than 2 years to solve the issue forever. By then hopefully payment channels should be integrated in most wallets and easily accessible. Their use will be a no-brainer for the user as they will be considerably faster, cheaper and generally more efficient.

All the noobs now are scared because there is no immediate and obvious alternative for them to use to buy candies.

When we feed these shiny new toys to the reddit crowd I expect they stop pouting and shut up.

The biggest problem of a drastic change in block size is its lacking of consistency. People trust banks because they are very consistent and stable over decades, they never make sudden moves. Money is all about trust, without time tested trust, the value of bitcoin will stay at game level

When you plan an IT infrastructure's capacity, you never use more than 30% of its planned capacity, because you must leave lots of room for emergencies. So if average home bandwidth limit allow you to run 8MB blocks, then 2MB blocks will leave you enough room to deal with emergency situation where bandwidth suddenly dropped due to unforeseeable events (I still remember that during 2007 under sea fiber optic cables incident, there was almost no way that you can connect to Taiwan and Chinese mainland network in any speed higher than 56k dial up)