Bitcoin Forum

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I think we should do it the same way we did it the last 2 times we had to change the blocksize. People seem to forget we changed this before and it wasn't nearly as controversial of a change.

Bitcoin XT is a patch set on top of Bitcoin Core, with a focus on upgrades to the peer to peer protocol. By running it you can opt in to providing the Bitcoin network with additional services beyond what Bitcoin Core provides.

Currently it contains the following additional changes:

+Support for larger blocks. XT has support for BIP 101 by Gavin Andresen, which schedules an increase from the one megabyte limit Bitcoin is now hitting.

+Relaying of double spends. Bitcoin Core will simply drop unconfirmed transactions that double spend other unconfirmed transactions, forcing merchants who want to know about them to connect to thousands of nodes in the hope of spotting them. This is unreliable, wastes resources and isn't feasible on mobile devices. Bitcoin XT incorporates work by Tom Harding and Gavin Andresen that relays the first observed double spend of a transaction. Additionally, it will highlight it in red in the user interface. Other wallets also have the opportunity to use the new information to alert the user that there is a fraud attempt against them.

+Support for querying the UTXO set given an outpoint. This is useful for apps that use partial transactions, such as the Lighthouse crowdfunding app. The feature allows a client to check that a partial SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY transaction is correctly signed and by querying multiple nodes, build up some confidence that the output is not already spent.

+DNS seed changes: bitseed.xf2.org is removed as it no longer works, and seeds from Addy Yeow and Mike Hearn are (re)added to increase seed diversity and redundancy.


tl;dr it's just Bitcoin Core but with ability to have larger blocks, a bug fix, and two minor things that are useful for app developers.

The second time it was changed it was done under Gavin, Satoshi wasn't around. Gavin just picked 1MB blocks and nobody complained. Nobody really cared, I remember when it happened clearly.

Yes of course Satoshi didn't just give him the alert keys, Gavin was appointed lead developer of Bitcoin Core by Satoshi - he gave him commit access to the Bitcoin Core source code repository,

The good news is everyone knows drama is like rocket fuel for Bitcoin so hopefully we have enough fuel to hit the moon :D

the 1 MB blocksize was a temporary fix and now 3 devs are holding bitcoin back  :D


Should Bitcoin grow, even if the network changes its structure as a result?

   The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users.

    — Satoshi Nakamoto, July 2010

Great quote. I had not noticed it before. It sums up the whole blocksize issue really, it needs to be changed. The whole XT situation is now a different problem to the blocksize situation IMO. I want the blocksize increased, but I am totally against this incredibly dangerous way to try and change Bitcoins design.

Please back up your claim with evidence about gavin being the culprit behind the recent spam attack on the bitcoin network.

Otherwise please STFU  ;D

thanks

Except that it can only perfectly function at the rate of 3tx per second.

wtf? you're the one that dont understand shit and spread BS.

lol why did you open your mouth to remove all doubt?

Oh yeah i'm also waiting for this, Mr. NOT SPREAD MISLEADING INFORMATION!


What a piece of shit.

So in summary:

" i pulled shit out of my ass, put it in my mouth, then spit it out on screen for you guys to see ..."

The only reputation being destroyed is yours,... if its actually worth anything.

What can i expect from a guy who just pass opinions as facts Then got a nerve to keep repeating it when asked for proof?


Keep repeating shit does not make it truth. Got that?

You can assume i have dozen accounts all you want, only admins here can know the truth. Retard.

Yes, we will clearly continue to be able to fit 10 minutes worth of transactions from a global populace into two-thirds of a floppy disk for the rest of forever.   ::)

Fees alone will not solve scalability.  If you honestly believe that then you don't understand this system as well as you claim to. 

Here's an honest question to those who advocate keeping a 1MB block:  how long would the backlog of transactions have to get before increasing the blocksize would become a viable option in your opinion?  I genuinely want to know just how far you're prepared to cripple the network to justify your agenda.

Perhaps there was some ambiguity in my post.  That's not what I asked.  Those recent transactions may well have been spam, but if the network did grow to a point where it was filled by legitimate transactions, what figure in MB would you be willing to see the backlog reach before supporting larger blocks?

Please explain how increasing fees will allow the network to scale beyond 7 transactions per second?

(For the sake of argument I'm assuming that the current capacity limit is 7 TPS which seems to be a widely accepted number.)

You are not answering the question - how does increasing transaction fees increase the capacity for legitimate transactions?

the panic seems to begin. We have seen the price drop and we see more in the next days. This move from Gavin is very stupid and not necessary atm. In my opinion is suspicious to do this in this period of time when bitcoin  seems to stabilize almost one year after the mtgox problem and crash.

Which is not increasing capacity is it?  Merely prioritising the capacity we have.  And when the block is full of legitimate transactions, all paying a fair fee, what then?

But the exchange rate is even more important, at least until the reward drops to zero. So if the goal is to keep the network as secure as possible over the next ten or fifteen years, we should be focusing on doing things that are likely to increase the exchange rate. All of the things that come to my mind that make Bitcoin more valuable (like increasing the number of people using Bitcoin, increasing security using multisig wallets, allowing people to innovate and leverage the security of the blockchain for things other than payments) will benefit from a larger maximum block size.

http://gavinandresen.ninja/block-size-and-miner-fees-again


an artificial 1 MB block is the worst outcome. let us increase it to 8 MB so that Bitcoin can live up to its full potential  :)

we need fees to increase up to 0.50 $ , 1 $ - the poor people on the planet can use something else!

 :P
/s

No, your first response does not cover that.  We still have a hard capacity limit, all increasing fees will do is prioritise transactions, it does not increase capacity one iota. 

Again, once the network capacity is full of legitimate fee paying transactions how will increasing the fees increase that capacity - to put it another way how will increased fees allow say 14 TPS instead of the current 7 TPS?

We've considered that just fine, thanks.  What you're not considering is the following:

Assume Network 'A' can process a maximum of 2000 transactions per block and the average fee is .0001

Assume Network 'B' can process a maximum of 10000 transactions per block and the average fee is .00005

Which network can potentially generate a higher amount in fees?  That's right, the one that can support more transactions.  Raising fees is not the most efficient way to increase mining revenue.



And also this.  There's a moral argument to go along with the one where small-blockians aren't very good as simple math (more transactions equals more fees, not less, it isn't rocket science).  The more people who are able to use Bitcoin, the stronger it becomes.  What some people think of as a "lesser" transaction could mean a not-insignificant amount of money for those in other parts of the world.




Still waiting for an answer on this one.  Be honest.

yes but bitcoin can't grow if this issue isn't resolved, we can't wait forever for it, the deadline is approaching fast, something must be done now, i see this tx cap increase as a good thing for delaying the issue momentarily, afterward we study further ways to resolve it without increase it again in the future, like sidechain or something else

Well it's only 300+ until now, but how long is this going on, a bit more than 2 days. People do need time to update and to decide.

When will we see the real decision? How long should we wait, is it 2 weeks or a month to see how many nodes are on the XT and how many nodes are with the core? This I would like to know!

Opinions everybody!

Man this is pure FUD! Either you can prove that Gavin was behind those spam attacks, which highly doubt you can, or this whole statement is not more than just bs.
Furthermore as far as I know it's only the blockstream guys who are against an blocksize increase.

Do you mean these guys?

 - https://www.blockstream.com/team/

 No Designated Driver too this Massive 'BitCoin Bus". With Several hands fighting over the Steering Wheel is it wise too stay on the Bus?  ???

OK, so you agree that increased fees do not increase the capacity of the network? Good let's put that to bed and not use it as an argument again.

Instead you are now arguing that some future technical development - not yet defined or specified I guess? -  will allow the current network to carry more transactions?  Further you suggest that it will be "decades" before this is needed - can you show how you came to this estimate?

There are so many people with the resources, ability and motive to execute those mass spam attacks. I don't see any reason to suspect the XT developers were behind it, honestly could've been anyone, the cost wasn't extraordinarily high.

Think at this scenario :


After the next bitcoin halving the block reward will be 12,5 BTC , so 1/2 . Add to the halving a spam TX attack made by someone who have a lot or (don't have) of btc.



A catastrophe or what?

Well this is a pretty bold statement to make without any proofs. I honestly don't see Gavin being behind the spam attacks, he just doesn't seem as a man capable of doing that. Also, he has smarter things to do than to be dealing with these nonsense spam attacks.

Spam attacks might be the product of some people that do support bigger blocks and tbey were also doing this just to prove their point.

Number of transactions seems to be about double from last year.   "decades away" is hogwash afaic. We will be hitting the limit soon and it seems foolish to wait till we hit the limit.   Better to expand the capacity now by simply raising the blocksize.

Also .4 may be average, but that doesn't mean we won't increasingly see spikes toward 1 mb.  shouldn't the idea be to have excess bandwidth, not frequently have backlogs needing to be cleared because we spiked above the limit?  

Bitcoins need to rise in value to incentivize miners as block rewards dwindle. Those dust transactions today can be worth much more in the future and pricing them out of the market is capping the utility of BTC. Artificially raising tx fees by limiting the amount of transactions does nothing to add value to Bitcoin, it only limits it's potential. If Bitcoin rises dramatically in value, those artificially high tx fees will limit use of the blockchain to only when absolutely necessary and for high value transactions. I've also read quotes from Satoshi that the size of the blockchain would have to rise in the future, so there was never any plan to stay at 1mb blocks indefinitely to incentivize miners as block rewards drop.

That said XT is the wrong way to go about it, and only causes confusion for average joe public users that don't know or care how it works not to mention scaring off newbies from getting involved in and trusting BTC. 

So now we need an authority to designate which transactions are legitimate  ::)

At the end of the day all of this will not matter in 10 years when people are using Bitcoin, no one will know what the hell happened back then, this is like in the early days of TCP/IP the mega geeks and mega early enthusiasts having battles over what is the best thing to do to scale it up.

There is so much misinformation or baseless assumptions in this thread it difficult where to start, but I think this would be a good place.





No, the number 1 suspects is not Gavin but rather the miners themselves (mining pools). What better way to increase revenue than to create an artificial catastrophe, forcing everyone from developers to the users and everyone in between to re-evaluate the fee structure to put higher fee's in place.


I dont know that you know this (based on another post of yours), but miners can be selective what gets propagated and what does not. It's "encouraged" by the devs (Luke Jr's words) for them to do this.

Stop spreading misinformation. Let me show you what that "bug fix" is and those two minor things are:

Cleaner and simplified version:

• Automatic blacklisting controlled by the Tor project (AFAIK without their consent).
• Buggy block size validation.
• Lighthouse slave support.
• Incomplete/buggy double spend detection.

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Conclusion: the block size has to be increased and XT has to be stopped.  

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Update:
Yes. While I do support a block size increase (to what limit, is debatable), I am completely against XT.

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Update 2:
Yes, I'm aware of both BIP 100 and 102. The problem is that many users are not aware of BIP 100 or do not understand it.

Is this your personal opinion?

http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/BIP100-blocksizechangeproposal.pdf

So your solution to allowing for Bitcoin to support a larger number of transactions per second is for users to send a smaller number of transactions per second?

I really don't think this is s a very solid argument.

The current TPS limit is somewhere between 2-3 with a  1 MB max block size. Unless you have a way to make transactions smaller while still keeping the same level of security, then the only way for the Bitcoin network to process more then 3 TPS over the long run is to increase the maximum block size to be above 1 MB.

Just because the maximum block size is 8 MB (for example), that does not mean that miners will fill their blocks with 8 MB worth of free transactions.

I don't know if it was already posted, but this is the maaku7 opinion :



https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h7eei/greg_luke_adam_if_xt_takes_over_and_wins_the/cu53eq3

Maybe I'm wrong but you sound like you are either a bigshot miner or you're a blockstream guy.

I'm not sure where you're getting that average block size of less than 0.4 MB from, but from what I've seen most blocks are between 0.5 and 0.85 MB in size, so the block size limit of 1MB isn't going to cut it forever. Even though a decent portion of the transactions are gambling, faucets, etc the network is growing, and in turn, there are more transactions per second. With a larger block size limit, the network will be able to accommodate growth in the future. I'm supportive of 8MB blocks because the network will need larger blocks eventually, and like Quickseller said, just because there's an 8MB limit doesn't mean every block will be 8MB in size.

It should be the contrary, if the fee will raise the people will move on and search another thing. For a real 'sustainability" (not really the correct word) the fee should rest low  and the value (usd) grow.

Fees work to eliminate spam. But when we have a large quantity of genuine users making genuine transactions, what are fees going to do then? When you are paying 0.1 BTC fees and still can't get your transaction accepted from sheer volume, you will quickly see that fees don't fix the problem, they just aggravate it.

Maybe you're right about fees. Let's put it in perspective. California charges $0.10 for one plastic bag. Now nobody uses plastic bags anymore.
If BTC fees are forced to be high, nobody will use BTC anymore. They will look for an altcoin with lesser fees. So maybe the blockchain will not be used anymore. And as a consequence the value of BTC will tank.

I'm kind of hoping XT crashes and burns. If a wave occurs and the majority of us move to it, some people are going to be losing a serious amount of money. The current Bitcoin would be worthless once it gets to the 75% hashing power. I don't think it will happen anyway, everything is running smoothly at the moment (right?).

I know I lot of people will stop use bitcoin if the fee 'would raise' due sum circumstances, they will simple search another way to transfer value. I think you know than bitcoin is not even the unique cryptocurrency in the circulation and it is obvious that in the next 'years' it will be more & more...


more competition  = better service  (with lowest fee).

It wouldn't make sense for the miners to spend money to increase the small revenue they get from tx fees. The higher fees only lasted during the spam tx flood it wasn't a permanent increase in their revenue. Also the mining pools are the ones worried about increased orphan blocks with an increased block size, so hard to see the logic in doing the spam flood of tx during the block size debate.

The first "spam attack" was a stress test done by coinwallet.eu  http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-network-survives-stress-test/ (http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-network-survives-stress-test/)

So the first tx spam was a stress test, not sure who was behind the second wave of tx spam but I sincerely doubt it had anything to do with the miners.

I know that the first one was by coinwallet.eu, I thought we were discussing the second wave here (unidentified individuals)?


Fee structure =! block size increase is my point. turtlehurricane claims it was done in order to secretly lobby for increase block size, and I think its more to do with the fee structure (which really when you boil down to it, these two are not mutually exclusive by nature of the ecosystem and what is being discussed).


Regardless of who is behind it and the intentions, I can say with near 100% certainty that it was done in order to influence economic policy for the Bitcoin network in one way shape or form. I'm of the mindset that Blockchain technology implementations via code are all economic policy. All of Bitcoin is a vast ecosystem, and any changes to the ecosystem (especially code changes) ripples throughout that system.

I think BTC should be forked. It should be a whole new updated protocol that is future proof (see quantum proof) and resets the whole miner paradigm. ( back to decentralized mining and away from how it is going more and more centralized going towards those with the resources to take over and control the network.)

I don't see why we can't blend bigger block and bigger fees.

a 2mb block ------------- not an 8mb block-----------------  much harder stand here on 2mb


below a bit more fuzzy ---------------

a 0.00005 minimum fee  -----------  or a 0.0001 minimum fee. --------------- or a 0.0002

and if you go lower you wait and wait and wait and wait for confirms

If you upgrade to XT, then the risk of fork will become higher

Well once gambling/faucets/ect. are moved entirely off chain (I am not 100% sure this will be a good thing), then the average block size will be smaller, however it will still be growing, and it will eventually grow to close to the current 1 MB limit.

Even as the average block size approaches 1 MB, there will be periods of long delays when there are sudden spikes in traffic (similar to how rush hour works in many cities), which will cause confirmation times to sometimes be very long.

Overall transaction fees do need to increase over the long run. If Bitcoin is limited to 2 TPS, then over the long run, transactions on average, will need to include a tx fee of .0208BTC, which is roughly $5.41 at current exchange rates, and $24.96 at $1,200/btc. The later price is generally going to be more expensive then the likes of Western Union, Money Gram, and Walmart-2-Walmart, while the former would be competitive with W2W, but still very expensive. However if bitcoin is going to truly go mainstream, then it's price will need to dramatically increase (you can't use something to trade hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions per day on something that has a market cap of ~$3.7 billion), and once this were to happen, the necessary transaction fee to keep the network similarly secured as it is today would mean that it would be prohibitively expensive to send bitcoin unless you are sending on behalf of many people at the same time (e.g. many people are using off chain transactions).

It should be beyond obvious that the maximum block size needs to be increased. Over the long run it will need to be increased many thousands of times if Bitcoin is going to potentially replace the VISA (and/or MasterCard and/or AMEX) network(s), although this is a very long way away. For now the best course of action is to increase the max block size to 8MB (or some other amount based on consensus), and then continue to increase it over time as the actual average block size increase, as well as based on currently available technology and pricing (e.g. of network equipment, network services, HDD, and RAM).

is 51% of network votes to fork, its gonna be forked.
and loads of people will loose money on transfers then.