Bitcoin Forum

what do you think could blockstream gain with that move / BIP 100?

also it was "just a" recommendation and jeff is not working for blockstream.


@ArticMine

yes. but more than 1.04 MB in 2020 like someone proposed  :-X

Well, the cat is out of the bag:

https://twitter.com/jgarzik/status/637273041530044416

https://twitter.com/jgarzik/status/637273041530044416 http://s18.postimg.org/4brkp5jbd/zblockstream.png

Damn you Blockstream! I am sick of this company trying to influence Core development.

This is really unfortunate. There are other better options around, e.g. https://github.com/UpalChakraborty/bips/blob/master/BIP-DynamicMaxBlockSize.mediawiki, which is completely ignored.

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Now there is a legitimate and valuable use for the Bitcoin Lightning Network technology such providing security to Bitcoin exchanges for example, but it is not a replacement for on chain Bitcoin transactions.  
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I wish we could have VISA and beyond levels of transactions on-chain including micro and picotransactions, but can anyone explain me how this is done while keeping super low fees, while keeping nodes decentralized (size and bandwith being spread worldwide so most countries can run full nodes as a single individual)? How do you do this?

I wish we could have VISA and beyond levels of transactions on-chain including micro and picotransactions, but can anyone explain me how this is done while keeping super low fees, while keeping nodes decentralized (size and bandwith being spread worldwide so most countries can run full nodes as a single individual)? How do you do this?
This would be the perfect Bitcoin but a lot of people has questioned this and I never saw an answer that didn't present a compromise.

Who said they were?  Is there anything about LN which precludes people from using Bitcoin?

I, for one, welcome any option which allows me to use the strength of Bitcoin as a backing yet not spam the blockchain with my inconsequential activity.  99.99% of my activity simply does not need the extreme security offered (currently) by being a perminent fixture in the native Bitcoin blockchain.

Anyone who supports a Bitcoin blocksize protocol that does scale with technological change is saying that LN is a replacement. After all how many governments, let alone individuals, in 1959 could afford to pay for 1000 warehouses full of punched cards? Yet to day many individuals can afford a 4 TB hard drive.

I don't know how many times we have to go through this, but static storage space is simply one element of the transaction rate, and not a very significant one compared to bandwidth and other things.

Casual observers should be warned that anyone who focuses on the _static storage_ aspect of the blockchain is either to ignorant to pay much attention to, or is engaging in blatant propaganda.  Usually it's the latter.

I like the idea of the dynamic adaptable blocksize but you aren't considering the huge amount of exploits a dynamic blocksize could have. In my opinion that solution would need proper testing before even considering putting it into real world practice.

So we wish to compare the cost of sending say 1 MB of data today as an email attachment with the cost of sending an 1 MB telegram in 1959 instead?

So we wish to compare the cost of sending say 1 MB of data today as an email attachment with the cost of sending an 1 MB telegram in 1959 instead?

Edit: Or how about the cost of downloading 1GB of data from a sever in another part of the world with the cost of sending 1 GB of data over the telegraph network in 1959?

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Perhaps not. But I'd say it is quite naive to think that technological advancements will continue to exponentially grow to infinity, as many seem to believe around here. In fact, Moore's Law seems to be unraveling as we speak. Just ask Intel what just happened to their tick-tock model.....

Limitation of the twitter medium I assume there. I don't know why he's invoking "blockstream" there.

I asked Jeff on IRC what specifically the 75% that was in his document meant:

13:44 <gmaxwell> Technical question, it's unclear to the writeup how exactly you suggest miners signal their new size preference?  are you thinking that mine
rs express a preferred size in their blocks, and then the 75-th percentile size is used? (subject to the 2x limit) ?
 
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13:50 <gmaxwell> What made you go for 75%?

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13:52 <jgarzik> 75% = political science.  3/4 majority.

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14:09 <gmaxwell> as far as the actual mechenism (which I don't see in the BIP); what I'd guess is that each block would express a preferred limit in the coinbase, next to the height,  and then at the update period those limits would get processed? e.g. taking the n-th percentile?  

14:10 <gmaxwell> (if that detail is in the bip, I'm missing it)  

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14:14 <jgarzik> Anyway, on the BIP 100, basically the floor (least) of the range of most popular miner suggested sizes  

14:14 <jgarzik> "we all agree on this floor"  

14:15 <gmaxwell> jgarzik yea, if it took all the sizs, sorted, and then discarded 25% of the smallest ones, then took the smallest remaining size, it would accomplish that.

14:16 <jgarzik> size can decrease too, with 1MB absolute minimum.  

14:16 <gmaxwell> though maybe a number different than 75/25 would be good, I should talk to petertodd and see if his position would be changed if, say, it were 90%/10%.   Basically if you're below 5% hashpower you're not even getting a block per day on average, and so you couldn't even be doing much to prevent censorship.  

14:18 <gmaxwell> But e.g. should be we changing how the limit works slightly, e.g. making the 'size' include the change in the utxo size as I'd proposed before? so that the limit actually reflects the real costs in the network; .. absent something like that fees will never peanlize costly behavior there.

14:18 <jgarzik> nod - IMV tweaking those constants are easy while getting us past the 1MB hard fork

14:18 <jgarzik> & addressing governance are the hard parts

14:19 <jgarzik> agree RE UTXO - economically signaling those costs is important


I believe this is the entirety of my conversion with Jeff on the subject.  (I've removed many interspersed comments because IRC usually bifurcates into multiple threads of discussion due to latency; but I believe they are unrelated to this topic).  AFAICT, I never suggested 20%  but rather suggested a sensible meaning for what a 75% threshold might mean in his scheme, which to my eyes was under-defined but might have already meant that.

I don't think there is anything wrong with 20% as things go; though the main limitation in BIP100 (assuming any of the under-specified parts are filled in with things I find unobjectionable) is that it addresses only miner-vs-miner incentives issues, and even then only under assumptions about hashrate distribution which are currently untrue (e.g. right now less than one percent of the miners have >>50% of the hashrate, so BIP100 is basically a blank check to those few parties up to the 32MB limit).

Jeff's stated view is that users can be protected by exiting Bitcoin if miners are not acting perfectly, but there is incredible friction around markets (e.g. solution via exodus guarantees losers)-- "sell all your bitcoins and go use something else, is a really weak threat, in general. Because of the weakness of the threat I don't think this is a reasonable first-resort mechanism for assuring the security of the system-- I think we've already seen it disproved in practice, and under that argument, e.g. we could just give miners the ability to print infinite bitcoin, steal arbitrary coins, etc.

Perhaps not. But I'd say it is quite naive to think that technological advancements will continue to exponentially grow to infinity, as many seem to believe around here. In fact, Moore's Law seems to be unraveling as we speak. Just ask Intel what just happened to their tick-tock model.....

I really, really don't understand this attitude-- I woulda thunk you were old enough to be confident that technology DOES improve. In fits and starts, but over the long term it definitely gets better.

I'm confident that technology will improve. But it can improve nicely
but still be _utterly_ blown away by any particular pre-perscribed
growth formula (especially an exponential one). If the limit is some
multiple of what nodes can comfortably handle or real demand on the
network then its more or less equivalent to unlimited; so it doesn't
even have to be off by much.  I'm also experienced enough with large
scale systems to know that massive increases in scale expose new
behaviors and effects that were not visible in other regimes.  So, for
example in 1990 one might have correctly predicted the grown in raw
ALU throughput we've seen, but if you also assumed memory bandwidth
would have kept up you would be massively misplaced (factor of 100x+
off by now), and many problems become more memory bandwidth limited as
they scale.

This is especially a factor when you're talking about improvement of
the, say, 10th percentile rather than the best available technology--
which is very much a consideration.

There are also serious confounding trends. Computers are getting
better but more computing is moving onto battery powered tablet
devices which move backwards a decade in technology and on to cloud
hosted infrastructure which adds little decentralization in to
ecosystem. Sometimes the improvement in technology is rolled into
power, space, and cost savings and doesn't become readily available in
the forum of throughput. Sometimes the improvements show up in
specialized processors which may not be useful to us (e.g. most of the
multiply throughput and memory bandwidth in a high end desktop is in
the GPU right now). It wouldn't be an unreasonable guess that
computing power available at low cost to the general public may
increase slower even if raw technology improvement speeds up because
the improvements are going into other areas, esp. if applications
which need massive increases in local computing power don't
materialize.

So the solution is to hard code into the protocol no technological change? Or to only allow those who have a vested interest against the technological change to approve it, such as the "red flag laws" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws) in the 19th century? That is what is really naive.

A misunderstanding can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

When I expressed the same concern to Gavin,  his response to me was:


My response was:

Huh? This is more ridiculous polemics. Just because I am suggesting that Moore's Law (and its application in BIP 101) are unscientific and without basis in reality, that doesn't mean that I prefer "no technological change." This is called a strawman argument, and it's the same strawman that is being repeatedly employed around here against people who support solutions other than BIP 101.

Not supporting BIP 101 =/= not supporting progress, or larger blocks.....

I, for one, welcome any option which allows me to use the strength of Bitcoin as a backing yet not spam the blockchain with my inconsequential activity.  99.99% of my activity simply does not need the extreme security offered (currently) by being a perminent fixture in the native Bitcoin blockchain.

Well, the cat is out of the bag:

https://twitter.com/jgarzik/status/637273041530044416

http://s18.postimg.org/4brkp5jbd/zblockstream.png (https://twitter.com/jgarzik/status/637273041530044416)

Damn you Blockstream! I am sick of this company trying to influence Core development.

Actually I also do not support BIP 101 because it has a 8GB hard blocksize limit.

Dat no good. Everyone know 8 very very rucky number in China.

To understand the financial incentives that Blockstream has here and the corresponding conflict of interest it is very important to see the video and review the technical paper on the Bitcoin Lightning Network

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zVzw912wPo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zVzw912wPo)
Technical Paper: https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf (https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf)

Now there is a legitimate and valuable use for the Bitcoin Lightning Network technology such providing security to Bitcoin exchanges for example, but it is not a replacement for on chain Bitcoin transactions.  

Good man, I was thinking that casual racism was the one thing missing from this debate.  Thanks for stepping out of your trailer and contributing!!  :D

This company makes me sick.