Bitcoin Forum

We are reaching the blocksize limit fast and delays in confirming transactions with standards fees is becoming noticeable. A consensus needs to be found quickly otherwise Bitcoin is going to choke in unconfirmed transactions soon.

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&timespan=all&scale=1&address=

It does not look so scary in linear scale, does it?  :)

Well I guess that if you look at that graph on a linear scale it looks like there is still some more "free space" below the 1 MB ceiling. But the point I'm trying to make here is that a linear trend in log scale means exponential growth. A solution needs to be found unless we want to see longer confirmation times and higher fees none of which will help in advancing Bitcoin usage.

Well , aren't the developers planning to do a debate about this on December ? or it's already done and decided ? If not .. hopefully they will agree on something this time .

If nothing happens all transactions will take much longer which isn't good at all!

There was a workshop last weekend on this topic but I'm not sure if there was much progress. At least I haven't been able to find any indication that a consensus was found but I really hope I'm wrong.

Dude they presented signature witness and it was pretty huge, look it up it's a pretty cool feature that will give us time to scale it a bit while LN cooks up. I think there is nothing to fear for now. I have no idea when sigwit will be operative tho, but I think it should be rather soon, maybe in 0.12.

Segregated witness

It can be worse.  If attempted usage continues to increase, some transactions will never complete at all.

Is there a formal paper regarding "segregated witness"? Sounds like something new. If a new crypto construction is going to be implemented we better make sure it is thoroughly tested and reviewed because we are betting the present and future value of all our bitcoins in that there will be no serious holes.

Some info is here:

http://gavinandresen.ninja/segregated-witness-is-cool
https://news.bitcoin.com/segregated-witness-concept-turning-point-bitcoin/

More links:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1210235.msg13016760#msg13016760

Segregated non solution bandaid solution is not solution developer overhead.

How long would it take for something like that to be implemented and decided upon?
I've recently noticed quite a significant delay in confirmation time, sometimes so bad that it's messing up purchases.

Here is the link to the presentation of this idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fst1IK_mrng#t=36m

The basic idea is to make a more efficient use of the blockchain and based on the sponsor himself be able to pack 4X transactions in the same amount of blockchain space. That makes sense as long as security is not weakened. How long will it take to properly test this innovation? From the presentation at 59'55'' "All of what I've been talking about is implemented as a prototype is not quite ready for production right now." When will it be ready?

I would personally feel more comfortable with a small blocksize increase that will buy more time for new ideas to be properly researched and tested. Bitcoin is probably one of the most scrutinized systems for security holes and one major security hole is all it would take to bring down market capitalization to 0.

Makes sense.

In either case, searching up and down in the forum about the issue I found a very interesting discussion about blocksize which dates back to 2010. I personally found the blocksize automatic adjustment quite good. I don't know how it will work today though.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1865.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1865.0)

Me too. I'm not happy with solutions that try to create limits for the next 20 years and I don't like complicated solutions with miners adapting the limits dynamically. The miners already decide about the soft limit. This is good enough - we don't need to provide more capabilities to those 5-10 miners.

This is totally right, this kind of change should be research and tested properly.

try this
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size

looks less scary and only averages 62.5% full.. still plenty of room for a little while

Are you guys stupid or what?

I saw plenty of arguments that its only half full and bla bla.

But why wait? Why risk bitcoin being sabotaged because of this? When your car is heading towards the edge of the cliff you wait for the last second to press the breaks or you do it 1 hour earlier?

Fuck it guys, blocksize should be at least 8 MB now, you guys are big risk takers that go for last second uppgrade.

Bitcoin should be planned ahead, and if this pace continues we will be at full by January, so there is not time to discuss this, we had already 6 years to prepare for it.

Are you aware of your contradictions? Just increasing the blocksize is nothing more than kicking down the can. Now that the topic is discussed it makes sense to find a long term solution (if possible) instead of rushing head first in the next best thing.

Well the blocksize will always have to be increased, probably an automatic blocksize increase should be implemented in the protocol, say double every 4 years.

Either way if bitcoin adoption kicks in, a 1 MB size will be unfeasable, and even the current solution to make blocksize more efficient is also kickiing the can down the road.

The same with the lightning network and the other stuff, we all know block size has to be bigger, either by conserving space or raising the limit.

That makes a lot of sense sense. There must be a hard limit in the amount of efficiency you can achieve particularly when it gets to packing information into the blockchain.
The best solution  probably is to chase both bigger space and efficiency. In other words moderately and gently increase block size to allow all network nodes to adapts while looking for protocol improvements like segregated witness to achieve better information storing and transmission efficiency.

Well the hard limit is the average internet bandwidth around the world *10 minutes.

Which is alot. Even if you have a shitty 1 mb/s modem you can carry 600 mb /10 min.

Now maybe that info needs to propagate through the network so give it like 9 min to do so. Even then you can easily put 60 mb under current internet.

And in the future you will see an increase in internet. Cable internet is not needed anymore, so even from africa with good wifi you can use bitcoin.

I have 100mb/s internet, so for me the 1 mb/s block seems ridiculous :D

http://i63.tinypic.com/2qisiky.png

it looks like the Bitcoin is rising in every chart ;) I dont think this will do so far pressure on the  BTC

regards
BTC LOVER

Your connection is not actually average. As shown by the picture, its not even average for your area. Also keep in mind that if you estimate 1mb/s you can not look at only blocks. I had days with ~23GiB traffic per day on my node, thats (23*1024)/144 ~ 163 MiB per 10 minutes. You are not part of the network if you only receive blocks you also have to relay transactions as well as blocks.

I still agree that we need bigger blocks or more efficient ways to store transactions. Im just against rushing to hard fork solution. As it currently looks segwit could increase size in blocks without a hard fork, by introducing a new transaction/address type. This can be done by soft fork, which is a known process and does not require everyone on the planet to update at the same time.

Because raising the blocksize to 8MB out of nowhere is way more risky than staying with 1 while we search for ways to scale Bitcoin properly (raising the blocksize will never properly scale Bitcoin, not without something like LN). We don't want datacenters running nodes, we want to be able to run nodes on a single computer, what's so hard to get about this? That's the real sabotage, centralized nodes.

We need more nodes, and larger blocks. But not one without the other.

Dude, the 8 MB limit is not each and ever block. If the cap is 8mb, and the current block size is 0.5 mb , then 0.5 mb blocks will circulate. The 8mb block is only the cap limit, not the default size.


Therefore the block structure won't really be destroyed, it's not like you have to reformat earlier blocks to all have the identical size. Even now block sizes vary so that's not an issue.


But what you are doing here is artificially not letting the block size go up, and when the limit is hit, then people will compete for the empty space, so the TX fee will massively go up, and most people cannot transact and the TX confirm time will go up.

That is the real sabotage.

The blocksize will go up anyway, the question is, will you let it go up naturally, or you plan to make bitcoin a communist centrally planned currency. I hope not.

There's no problem with 8MB blocks but do you have a way to deal with stress testers? Do you know how make their tests more expensive? Higher dust limit and Higher fees?

Maybe we should go to 2MB first which is a 100% increase.

Stress testers?  Disable 0 bitcoin fees. If they want to test, pay for it.

A stress test is the same as regular transaction. Pay and then they can send as many TX they want.

0 bitcoin fee should be disabled at protocol level. Minimum should be at least 1000 satoshi.

There is a minimum, not at protocol level but at the node level which is set by default to 0.00005. Any fee under that is not relayed by the node.

Also, the stress tests do not send transactions with 0 fees. They always send with enough fees.

This is an important point - they are paying fees for the majority of the stress tests.  Eventually they will run out of bitcoins to use for the stress test and will have to buy on the open market.   The so-called stress tests are not costless so can't continue indefinitely without driving up the fiat value of bitcoin.

Well i`m sure one of the previosu stress test were done with 0 fees and have flooded the mempool almost making the bitcoin network crash.

It was a quick fix of it, but it was concerning since the transaction didnt even took place, it was the miners memory that was targeted.

It was more like a DDOS against bitcoin.

It would be nice to find a measure to make those "tests" more expensive without affecting normal transactions.

8MB would never work:

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


Even the Fedwire system that responsible for all the large transactions between FED and thousands of member banks do 4tps only. It all depends on how you use the system. I think it is a huge waste of resource to let thousands of expensive nodes to relay transactions of coffee purchase

Bitcoin gaining popularity not because its payment function, and it will never be. There are plenty of statistics showing that people are not interested in using bitcoin to purchase coffee, they are more interested in use bitcoin to hedge against inflation and make money

Well then bitcoin will have a much higher fee, and will lose most of it's appeal in the long run.

I already have problems sending transactions at 0.0001 BTC fee, so now I use 0.00025 BTC/kb as set in electrum.

Soon that will double of triple, and bitcoin will lose its fast & cheap transaction appeals. It will be a huge marketing blowback.

Agreed. There is exponential growth looming in front of us, and if we wait too long, bitcoin will miss it's chance to start booming. If we keep having this 1 MB ceiling, TXs will either take much longer, or the average TX fee will have to rise, as people fight each other for the fastest transaction.

We need this change soon, lest we all drown in slow transactions. We don't want that, do we?

Bitcoin might get a higher fee, but it will never lose its most significant appeal in the long run: Long term saving and international remittance

Let's be honest: Bitcoin will never be able to compete with those fast&cheap mobile/3rd party payment solutions that charges 0 transaction fee and instant confirmation (you even get some bonus when using them), and the possibility of refund

For example, Sweden has already over 50% of population use mobile payment. So all of these users will feel angry when they need to pay a fee  to use bitcoin to spend, besides all the hassles about exchange into and out of bitcoin

So, even if you make bitcoin 0 transaction fee + instant confirmation + refund, people would still not use bitcoin to spend, because they gain nothing from switching from existing mobile payment solutions to bitcoin. People who care about bitcoin mostly attracted by its deflative nature for value storage, and they usually buy large amount of coins, so the fee is the least concern for them (I have seen these people paying 5-10% above market price to get 1-2 bitcoin, do you think they really care about the current level of fee?)

If you consider its major advantage against existing financial system, it is clear that the best marketing for bitcoin is either its exchange rate rises (for long term saving), or more and more exchanges are available in each country (for international remittance)

I think getting standard fee in 10k is ok, the problem is the ludicrously low 1mb block size each 10 minutes,  if they dont agree to up the size block soon we can see transactions being confirmed in 24 hours in the next months

Average blocksize is already growing exponentially. You can see that quite clearly from the linear trend in this log chart.
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&timespan=all&scale=1&address=

Another important point most people are missing is the fact that the average block size will not peak at 1MB. At least not in the foreseeable future. And the reason for this is quite simple. Miners get almost all of their income from block reward rather than from fees so their main goal is to find a valid block asap. Filling it with transactions is only a secondary goal. If you check the blockchain you'll find many blocks like this one:
https://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000000a680d0736b971c40243dcab764ba7dc4a591b900e9c5a70
There is only the coinbase transaction. The chances of the mempool being empty when this block was mined are virtually 0. And there are many others.

Miners incentive to include transactions in blocks will grow as block rewards drops significantly but this will happen in the distant future. Average fees per block is around 0.25 BTC while block rewards is 25 BTC. That's x100. 

So even if the block size limit is 1MB we will start to see confirmation delays and fee inflation with average block size well below 1MB.

True, as long as miners get block subsidy, they will only include transactions if those transactions do not increase their chance of being orphaned. And this will be the case for decades to come, thus make the fee income always small comparing to block subsidy (fee per block = block subsidy x orphan risk)  Is there any chance the fee will rise to replace block subsidy? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1285315.0)

I just read a good opinion: Someone pointed out that miners have their own economy wisdom, so when they do the planning, they will calculate the reduce of block subsidy in their business model, thus either deploy more efficient miners (which helps short term wise), or seeking ways to cut maintenance/electricity cost (long term wise). In fact, even without block subsidy reduce, a 50% of jump in difficulty gives exactly the same impact, and I think they are all used to this kind of impact from time to time, so they are very well prepared. This is not something core devs should worry about

The ultimate question is: If blocksize does not increase, will bitcoin die?

I think the answer is a definite NO

The spam attack during October was a good test. It almost filled every block as much as it can, but we just heard little complains from people sending small amount of bitcoins, majority of the users are not affected. This showed how flexible people are when blocks are full. Most important: The exchange rate of bitcoin was not affected by this kind of full blocks

Unlike normal IT business that striving for reaching 100% customer satisfaction, bitcoin is a monetary system. It is no way that FED is striving for average people's satisfaction for their monetary system. In fact, they sacrificed the benefit for almost every one but everyone in the society still adapt to their system and be happy

It is similar here, you should let people to adapt to bitcoin instead of letting bitcoin adapt to people, because bitcoin is money. Service oriented mindset of programmers comes from that they are typically an employee servicing a large enterprise, which in turn provide service for consumers. While the view from FED is different, they create money, every one else beg them for money, so their task is not to make customer happy, but make their money as trustworthy as possible

From this point of view, if something reduce the trustworthy of bitcoin, then it is negative. For example a security hole, an uncertain architecture, or split core devs, these all have negative impact. As long as bitcoin is as robust as gold, I think people will always be attracted and find solutions to solve the capacity problem. The motivation of using bitcoin definitely not comes from its cheap and fast transaction capacity

Imagine that every one uses bitcoin as their retirement fund, how frequent they are going to use bitcoin network? once a month for purchasing, and after decades, once a month for withdraw

Yea but thats not really why users use bitcoin now.

I get that bitcoin has like 10 features that are appealing but most people use bitcoin only for 2 things:  get money online, send money online.

You can already earn fiat money on various sites, and if banks really make TX instant, it will be a big blowback to bitcoin.


I think it will be a big blowback, most people dont care about financial privacy, and control over money anyway :(

Having a bunch of "free space" that's unused due the cap being too big brings a lot of problems and possible exploits. What centralizes Bitcoin is not being able to run a node in your computer, not the nonsense you are talking about. Bitcoin will never scale to worldwide levels by raising blocksize.

I just wish the developers can increase the block size to 2MB or 4MB for now. Further increase can be discussed later.

There is no free space. Damnit you guys really have no clue about the blocksize debate and comment on it.

The cap limit is not a default setting.


Blocks wont become 8mb size, and 7.5 mb will become empty.

Blocks will remain the same 0.5mb, but it just lets the maxium reach 8mb if it needs to.


Now i dont think 8mb should be increased immediately, but it should be written into the protocol to increase at some point.

I dont like the command & control aspect of the development. There should not be a need for development anymore. Add a final BIP into it, and then its over.

Developing it further just gives more power to the developers and it creates a centrally planned currency, that is nothing better than fiat.

Do you have any data backing your claim?

You can look at my signature, there were two polls I did years ago towards the users of this forum, you can see clearly majority of the people hold their coins for a long time and they spend a little later on

And I have been working as a bitcoin broker for years, I clearly notice that over 90% of my customers never do more than 1 transaction per week, and a large part of them do one purchase per month, after the salary day. It is also possible those transactions are for international remittance, e.g. people sending money to their family once a month

The people who are interested in high frequency trading are those trading on exchanges, but that does not require the bitcoin traffic. Gamblers are also heavy users since they frequently sending small amount of bitcoin for gambling, but I think it is easy to communicate with those sites and let them change their deposit policy

Exchanges, wallet providers and gambling sites indeed have the requirement to do lots of bitcoin transaction, but since they are a few, they can easily establish their own clearing channel to dramatically reduce the traffic on bitcoin network. That's why Lightning Network seems to be a future direction, but anyway its implementation is very complex thus does not show the benefit over traditional clearing channel. It would require years of review and test before commercial use. And maybe by that time off-chain clearing is already the norm so there is no need for on-chain clearing

Simply : NO !  If the block is full , just increasing the mining fees .

have an exaggerated opinion that you can substitute bitcoin to altcoins that don't have this problem or already solved this problem, eventually bitcoin as a platform for consensus-building and testing scenarios of justified and I think , though, that bitcoin has run its course and at this stage it is necessary to concentrate on the more advanced features in this area, but also active implementation at all levels

After those who complain about the high fee left, the bitcoin network will be as good as before, so eventually all the poor people leave for alt-coins and rich people stay at bitcoin, which coin will be more valuable?  ;)

The one with more utility.

How raspnode? How we fit into the block chain USB flash drive ?  ???

Looks like the core-devs are hell bent in increasing the blocksize so are pushing through a "backdoor" alternative method of avoiding staying at 1MB maxBlockSize stall if a hardfork fails to increase the blocksize --

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-January/012188.html

If 100% consensus is never achieved, then the options are:
1. Never upgrade and keep the blocksize limit unchanged forever.
2. Use a firm softfork to resolve the deadlock.
3. Hardfork anyway and split the network.

My argument is simply that 2 is better than 3 and possibly 1.

 https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-January/012191.html

Looks like the new proposal will be create a soft hardfork or softserve hardfork with the express intentions of preventing a deadlock and increasing the blocksize.

The core devs are all big blockers and will stop at nothing to increase capacity!

P.S... In all seriousness , I owe an apology to luke-jr who I assumed from everyone's claims wanted the blocklimit to remain at 1MB or decrease . Apparently, you make an ass out of yourself by assuming and spreading gossip.

That guy in the email isn't a core dev. He is just proposing something, which in all likelihood is probably going to be rejected.

Did you read the 2nd link and other discussions from last year ?


Not only are multiple core devs interested , but Luke-Jr out of all people is prioritizing this to insure that a hardfork to increase blocksize is pushed through in a crisis.

I suppose this information doesn't follow the standard political narrative but facts are facts.

Being discussed as a nuclear or last resort option , but the code is going to be prioritized to have as a ready tool which may come in handy with a deadlock.

2015 called.  It wants you to give back its clever strategy to sell XT using fear/panic about Bitcoin's impending D000M.

If you "Bitcoin is going to choke S000N" types were serious, XT would change to a different/modified PoW at the same time it attempts (via contentious hard fork) to impose blocks >1MB on the (demonstrably unwilling) rest of the system.

Why not just do an extra round of SHA256?  Existing ASICs could do that with firmware/driver tweak.

The reason you don't do that is you want to hijack Bitcoin and destroy its interesting property of being diverse/diffuse/defensible/resilient.

The sooner you fork off and stop trying to attach GavinCoin to Satoshi's coattails, the better.

Are you out of your mind? So you think that pointing out the FACT that blocks are fuller and consequently the backlog of unconfirmed transactions will grow and that the only available solution right now is to change that bloody parameter equals a "clever strategy to sell XT using fear/panic about Bitcoin's impending D000M."? Dude I'm not selling anything. Not even the ideology of a European far right party like you do.  As a matter of fact I cannot care less about which side gets to win this battle as long as Bitcoin continues to live and grow. I'm just a bitcoin enthusiast and investor concerned about egomaniacs and fanatics like you bringing down the most exciting libertarian financial innovation the world has seen in modern times. When I come across characters like you I realize that the possibility of Bitcoin splitting into 2 or more stable blockchains is more probable than I would like it to be.

Your lack of faith in Bitcoin's antifragility (as evidenced by your concern about it being brought down by "egomaniacs and fanatics") is duly noted.

You are yet another n000b who thinks BTC will face certain d000m (and s000n) if we don't act in haste to change a key control variable in the middle of Satoshi's experiment.

https://i.imgur.com/TrBxwlz.png

I know there's no "default setting" and free space is just a way so say it, but yes having that "extra space" brings some problems.

In any case 8mb or 20 solves nothing in the long term. Right now those values are absurd, in the future, we'll see how the average internet connection/hardware deals with those, but the main point is, Bitcoin will never scale to worldwide levels without something like the Lightning Network.
At some point software solidifies, protocols need to stop being exposed to hard forks, and 1mb seem to be enough (+ sigwit) until we get LN. Only people clueless in scaling software of this nature would claim that doing hard forks periodically is a good idea. TCP/IP solidified and then we developed layers on top, the same will happen with Bitcoin. I don't care if it happens with 1mb or 2 or 8, in the long run we will encounter the same problem and only LN can save our asses if we want to go global, something big block guys don't seem to get (unless they are ok with the nightmare of huge datacenters running nodes + the aforementioned problem of periodic hard forks).

I agree.  At some point, bitcoin will be too entrenched to do hard forks unless absolutely necessary - e.g. some huge break in ECDSA, perhaps proving P=NP would make things absolutely necessary.

LN, sidechains, segwit and similar proposals are ways to alleviate the pressure on block sizes and accomplish a lot of experiments without having to change the core protocol regularly.  As above, I'd think about it like TCP/IP vs SMTP/DNS/FTP/IMAP/NNTP/SSH/DHCP/HTTP and the like.  Much will be built with bitcoin's blockchain and on top of it due to the security that the value of the bitcoin ecosystem provides.

That's exactly what 21 inc's computer is about: Trying to have as much utility as possible, do all the things in one package  ;)

i was wishing to keep the blockchain size remains, however, we would need to transfer a lot of stuff and assets and bitcoin-based markets. moreover, more people would like to have verification without trust, blockchain could be increased but not that much.  :)

This is goods news -> https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/segregated-witness-deployed-on-new-bitcoin-testnet-segnet-1452277172

How long will it be on the testnet before it is implemented in the mainnet. Softfork is quite good for the block size increase.

Yes, I do agree on that.

I hope we reach the 1MB limit soon I'm sick of all this fear mongering. Nothing will happen other then threw natural selection the micro transactions will be pushed out of the blockchain.

Why not just soft fork it down to 0.5MB to clear up some of this cruft sooner than later? Bitcoin is a value storage and transfer tool of the wealthy elite, poors may use doge and litecoin.

We should never have gone above 0.5mb

Blocksize increae is absolutely necessary now and it will be done immediately. There are occasions where we have seen unconfimed transactions for days and even a week or two. The strongly accept the debate over blocksize increase. However, we need more nodes and high performing machines to handle the increase in size.

Because once you allow max block size change there will be endless arguments about which exact size is the right one (0.5 MB, 2 MB, 100 kB, 16 MB, 1 kB, ...)??? For every size you can find group that would benefit from it.
Only neutral interest-group-free solution is to keep constants fixed. Status quo.
Change is possible, but with much, much higher consensus. 75% is not enough, only miners, only large business, only small merchants, only startups, only investors, only full-noders ... this is not consensus at all. All of them should agree, No one of them should veto. (Every one of them should have right to veto.) Until we find broadly acceptable solution, status quo is the best one.

The problem with that though is that quite a lot of people are currently depending on it for it's use a a currency or payment method. Not increasing the block size would just be a slap in the face to those people :-/

I myself am very confused about what would be the best blocksize and how should this be incremented. A lot have suggested initially at least increasing it to 2MB and increment it over the years, but I don't really understand what would be the aftereffects of this. Would Bitcoin nodes be downloading and upload a lot more? Would we lose a lot of full nodes because of the higher BW and memory requirements? Also because of this would there be more control over hash-power which could lead to centralization - need for attaining equilibrium?

If the new maximum block size was reached, then yes, nodes would be downloading and uploading more. The blockchain's size would grow faster and it would require even more disk space.

Probably.

Probably not. Since most miners already mine at one of 10 or so mining pools, only the pools have to maintain nodes that can handle the larger blockchain and bandwidth requirements. I'm fairly certain that the pool operators have the money to be able to upgrade, although if the block size limit grows even larger, there are concerns that it would take a while for blocks to reach pools in China due to the Great Firewall of China.

After reading the 0.12 patch notes I see no higher memory requirements. The memory imprint is already small, the biggest part are the transactions, which will be less with bigger blocks as more get confirmed. At least for a while. IF memory was meant as = disk space, then yes.

Consensus is soon, I just wish there were more details as to what Bitcoin Classic represents as I cannot give my opinion on the matters until there is.

My best guess is that it is a 2 -4 plan with Segwit hardforked???
https://bitcoinclassic.consider.it/merge-3-v0112-2mb-4mb?results=true

Miners supporting Classic

    Bitmain/Antpool - 27%
    BitFury - 13%
    BW.COM - 4%
    HAOBTC.com -
    KnCMiner - 5%
    Genesis Mining

= over 49%

Companies supporting Classic

    Coinbase
    OKCoin
    Bitstamp
    Foldapp
    Bitcoin.com
    Bread Wallet
    Snapcard.io
    Cubits


Developers

    Jonathan Toomim
    Gavin Andresen
    Ahmed Bodiwala
    Jeff Garzik
    Peter Rizun



Hopefully there will be some reconciliation between Core and Classic and the can find consensus together as there is a lot of support and talent within both groups.

What about an dynamic size?
So I would recommend something like the average of the past 50 blocks . With an maximum of 10 MB , to prevent spam or dos,...

I'm not an developer so I'm sure there are a lot of more things thing about it.

I can empathize with Core not wanted to do 2 hard forks and simply preferring to perfect flexcap.... but despite it being a pain in the ass, there needs to be some reconciliation where all parties feel they win and lose equally to move forward.

The Big Blockers have already gone from 20MB to 8MB to 2MB .... and Core has already gone from 1 to ~1.75MB with segwitt for capacity.
I'm sure with some reasoned discussion there could be reconciliation between Classic and Core where SegWit is soft forked in ASAP, and a planned and controlled hardfork of 2-4 MB BIP is rolled out later this year to give a little breathing room to properly test flexcap , and most importantly stop all the politicking so everyone can focus on code and testing.

I applaud your efforts towards harmony and union.  There are dscussions going on now, but its not looking good for your hopes re: segwit. Maybe at a more realistic timeframe.

source? From the Classic developers statements on slack and elsewhere I see them favorable to segwit(but perhaps more in favor of a hardfork rollout instead which is fine to do in conjunction of a blocksize increase because most of the problem with hardfork is coordinating everyone ) Cores main problems with a hardfork is the difficulty in coordinating this responsibly. If one is going to perform a hardfork you may as well do 2MB+ Segwit and the appropriate sigop protections being adjusted.

source? re-read the slack and you will see that segwit is also-ran for now.  What ill be developed will not necessarily reflect whats in core right now.

Yes, I now see the new Proposal is simply BIP 102
So looks like Bitcoin classic will be a fallback for miners if Segwit on core doesn't roll out quick enough.

Segwit softfork = 1.75-2MB capacity with many additional benefits
Bitcoin Classic hardfork= 2MB capacity

I understand why they prefer the simplicity with a hard fork , but there really isn't much reason to choose classic above core without more of a differentiation in benefits; 0 to .25 isn't going to be overly motivating IMHO.

Sorry to bring this up , and no disrespect to Gavin as I respect his contributions, but when I saw this on slack it freaked me out--

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYy7wiCUAAA3zOt.png

None of the other devs even acknowledged it either. Was this some sort of Joke Gavin was making?

I wish there was more transparency over the consensus forming process, I can't see any clear way to make a meaningful contribution to the discussion.

No, Classic is the choice. There is no fallback, if you want to stay relevant.

Can you clarify a technical advantage of classic above core with segwit ?

As Far as I am aware Cores proposal comes with 45 developers, proposal is already further along, written and being tested right now, comes with many other improvements, and has practically the same capacity advantages as Bitcoin Classic/BIP102.

I really don't understand why people would pick Classic unless Segwit is delayed for some reason or for political reasons which I am not interested in as I want to judge each proposal by their technical considerations.

If classic was a 2+4 BIP + Segwit that may be interesting because it would contain all the advantages of segwit and have an effective 3-4MB capacity and than 6-8MB effective capacity with plenty of headroom to put off future forks for a couple years. It may have some centralization tradeoffs , but at least it is different enough to consider and make interesting. I know why Jonathan Toomim is so dissapointed that his proposal was vetoed for such a conservative one now.

Credit card companies charge merchant for credit card using. Normal charge is about 2%,I believe. So there is a a clear incentive for merchant to accept bitcoin payments over VISA or Master Card for instance. I'm not sure, but I believe accepting mobile payments is not free either for merchant.

Honest newbie question: how rising block size prevents from running a node on regular PC?

2% is the Interchange fee so cc fees are only that lot if the business is large enough and own the bank/processor or can negotiate a volume discount 2.1-2.2%. Most merchants pay 2.9-5% in the US and more elsewhere.

core with segwit is still fantasyware - they are testing it, yes, but there is a long way to go before even the most reckless development manager would consider it production ready.  The market wants commitment on capacity now, not a vague, ever shifting promise of it in the future.

That is the essential difference between classic and core ( + whatever dream additions you like)

I can see you are trying to sow the seeds of doubt regarding Classic, but really, its a little pointless considering the insane complications that core needed to introduce to get aound the need to HF. A lot of the capacity gains you constantly claim for segwit are little more than cheap accounting tricks. segwit has important features for bitcoin - but scaling is not one of them. To try and push segregated witness as such is either deliberately disingenuous or simply a misunderstanding on your part.

And how much testing was done with classic?  Think before you post.

I am completely fine with classic /BIP102 which will be avalaible at the earliet on march 1st and probably take 1-2 more months to reach a super-majority.

Segwit has already been in testnet so Core has been testing it for 6+months in sidechains alpha and plan on up to 4 months testing in the maintestnet for a similar April release.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those miners simply went with segwit + core if the softfork rolls out in time as they simply want concensus.  


Classic is now BIP 102 so doesn't need a whitepaper , but needs to be written first , than a testnet created to begin testing. So you are correct segwit has a head start with testing an peer review. To be fair , segwit is more complicated so needs more testing , which is why core has tested it in sidechains alpha for 6+months and is giving it 4months in the main test net.

How is it possible that segwit is being tested if it is "fantasyware?"

Oh I see, you are defining anything not yet in production as "fantasyware."

How typically dishonest of you.

When _Classic launches 2MB blocks, the "fantasyware" now being tested will come in handy, as _Classic is immediately softforked with 2MB+8MB segwit blocks (which will create a support/logistical nightmare for anyone brave enough to be among the first defectors from Core's socioeconomic majority.

Speaking of Brian Armstrong, his latest tweet is comedy gold.  He's as valuable to Team _Classic as their conveniently memory-holed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1318519.msg13564346#msg13564346) Cryptsy scammer!

https://i.imgur.com/98Iq2o7.png (https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/688398372521168896)

Sorry, took me a minute to cut through your #CORERAGE to find the half arsed point you were half way making.

I'm assuming your distress is from coming out of your local PC World and not having found a shrink wrapped, shiny boxed copy of Bitcoin Classic? Oh dear, I am sorry. But you see in grown up OS world, things work a little differently. I could explain that to you, but we both know that would be a waste of time.

So, instead, please accept this picture of a kitten. Ive dressed it up a bit, coz I know what you like....

https://45.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5t3g2IVs01rnhvwho1_1280.gif

It doesn't, hard-disk size is scaling much faster than bitcoin. You can already buy 5 Tb hard disks, by the time BTC gets 5 TB there will be like 1000 exabyte speed hard disks.

Shit learn to quote folks.  The answer is yes, everything is evolving ,so should those guys too.

Even the Operating systems require a better and better PC, not to mention video games and applications.

You need to keep up with technology, plus those hard disks will become so cheap that it wont matter.


 I remember buying my first USB stick for 60$, now I can get one for 5$.

If the blocksize is too big, you can't host the blockchain in your computer. Right now for example myself, if the blocks x2 by increasing to 2MB, im done with it, im not running a node, because I will run out of space. Like me, a lot of casual people running nodes will give up. This is why raising the block size right now is an act of stupidity, when we have segwit to deal with it, not to mention the actual risk of a hardfork. Anyone supporting bigger blocks now doesn't get it or has a certain agenda.

Yes i get it now, although not because of that argument, because a harddisksize argument is not good, you can get a new HDD for 20$.

What the real problem is the spam transactions and the hard fork risks of splitting the bitcoin, because divide and conquer is how the enemy operates.

Unfortunately regular users doesn't have much say on the matter as it will be decided by big companies with significant share in the bitcoin world.

Regular users can refuse (do not accept) forked bitcoins as payment. Or they can migrate to services which stay on consensus path.
Big mining pools are composed of many small miners (hashers). Big companies would not find their BTC as valuable if common people (and/or significant players) won't accept them as payment or as wage or as collateral or whatever.

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions -- it must be extended fast (now). it should have been extended the day before yesterday.

Nobody should neither impose hard fork nor soft fork without consensus IMHO, not even on core.

Although I believe that with a soft fork, everything keeps working for everyone and with a hard fork there are users who can't see some transactions, and think they haven't gotten paid when they have.
But with soft forks, the protocol in 10 or 20 years is going to be a horrible and confusing mess.

TL;DR soft forks are grotesque. Hard forks are violent.

Ha the irony:
http://i.snag.gy/ACedC.jpg
In case someone hasn't seen it yet, this (https://bitcointalk.org/dec/p1.html) is where it redirects.

Average confirmation time hasn't changed

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

It's not that bad as it looks. The fee will just increase by 5-10% that is nothing.

If we do something without research, then it could cause far bigger damage than that 5% extra you pay.

Consider that extra 5% a sacrifice for bitcoin's wellbeing in the long term. We must never rush decisions without real evidence.

If that small increase in fees shall produce that so much relief in transfer volumes (which I do not know) then it will be a nice temporary solution. However I think that one of the good things about Bitcoin is the possibility of transferring small amounts of money, which allows for microearnings. If that is going to be a problem due to transaction fees rising, I think that it will be a loss for Bitcoin.

I honestly fail to see the problem. Why is it important that there be only -one- true coin?
Bitcoin blocks are getting full. so what? fees will drive up. It's survival of the fittest.
Scalability problem was solved with altcoins, 5 years ago when litecoin launched. Those who cannot afford the bitcoin fee, always have the option to move to an alternative, cheaper blockchain.

Look at the real world history. People used to trade gold as a currency hundreds of years ago. When It became to scarce and hard to find, it's value raised dramatically.
So poorer people started using cheaper metals i.e. silver, copper to do their daily business and gold became a high value currency that only those who could really afford it would use.
Nowadays we use paper cash because it's the cheapest method.

The same principle should apply to crypto currencies.. Bitcoin is the gold. litecoin is the silver, [insert random non scam coin] is the copper, etc.
Those who want to make small transactions, can use the cheaper coin, so (1) they can move money for less fees and (2) remove the unnecessary clutter from bitcoin blockchain.
And there is nothing to limit the scalability. once litecoin blocks get full, bring on the next coin, Dark coin maybe? when that's full, move on to the next
Increasing the blocksize limit DOES have a scalability issue. You force everyone to use a big blockchain. but by splitting the blockchain into multiple coins, the rich will use the bitcoin(gold), middle class would use the litecoin(silver) and the poor would use the feathercoin (shit). they don't spam each others' coins, and they use the blockchain they can afford.

You don't have to deal with hardforking issues either. it's a win win win for everybody.

It's like this, you go to a doctor, and he says your arm has to be amputated.

You either wait a little bit more until he runs a few more tests to make sure that your arm really needs to be amputated, or he amputates it right now.

If you amputate it right now and he is wrong, then you are fucked. If you wait more and it turns out that your arm doesnt need to be amputated, then you will have avoided this tragedy.



The same goes with bitcoin, wait more for better research , or do a foolish thing now like increasing block size and later regret it.

Y'all need to bring beer over to my place right now, because the supply is getting low. 

12, 24, 48, I don't care.  Just bring it over ASAP because I'm thirsty. 

If the fee is too high, it will hinder the adoption of bitcoin in daily usage. If there is no use, there will be no value in bitcoin.

It's the opposite, the soft fork is much more violent  than a hard fork, because it kills any mining nodes that do not comply with the new rule. A hard fork does not kill those nodes, just let those nodes become minority fork thus quickly lose support of users

In fact, the soft fork concept is deadly dangerous because it grant miners who have 51% mining hash power not only the ability to double spend or cancel transactions, but essentially change every rules of bitcoin and force it upon rest of the nodes, thus kill bitcoin

I will write a detailed analysis in a separate post

Yes that unfortunately will consolidate, and I expect services like Faucetbox or Xapo to become a side-chain payment processor for that.

There are always drawbacks and we have to be reasonable, we cant just spam the network with 100 satoshi payments, so that aspect will be taken out slowly.


And let's be reasonable, for micropayments like that it's ok to leave it at a centralized service, it doesnt pose a lot of financial risk.


Bigger transactions will be free to be sent over the blockchain itself for fee. That is how it shall be :)

Exactly, there are different user group, each give different weight for being able to do transaction on-chain. Treat every user the same way is very low efficiency, unless everyone have unlimited bandwidth and CPU power

Yep the same way as you cant give the same salary to a janitor as to a nuclear physicist.

Everyone gets as much as they contribute, and so far the micropayments are not entirely beneficial because they use up too much space.

However if there is still demand for faucets, then the faucet wallets can easily integrate a method of transfering IOU BTC between eachother.

Today I had a idear:

Why not to set down the difficulty?
So if we half it, or set the time between 2 blocks to 5 mins, we could handel more transactions.
So we dont need 2 MB blocks.

Not sure if there is any way to do it out of an hard fork.


Greetings

I had a lot of trouble understanding the ramifications of SEgWit, but doubling blocksize is a simple concept to comprehend. Do people choose a block size increase because they don't understand SegWit, or is it me that has misunderstood it? As I see it, blocksize is like patching your kids clothes with duct tape because she has outgrown them, and they have split. SegWit is like buying her stretch lycra so that she can use and expand her agility for a number of years to come

This is a nice analogy and yes the only reason we have people ranting and raving that we need to increase the block size now is politics (which have all originated from Gavin - the now "poisonous" developer trying his hardest to destroy the Bitcoin project).

Personal attacks dont really add much to your credibility. In fact the entire point you just made comes across as a bit of a rant, with nothing to substantiate it.

ps Good luck getting your daughter into her segwit lycra.

http://media.peopleofwalmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/2562.jpg

And look at that picture and your comment. :D

(some forum members are so stupid that they basically troll themselves)

I think I will call you @autotroll from now on. :D

 ;D ;D ;D ;D

Just quoting it to see it again.  segwit hides such a multitude of sins...

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQbEIN4SJPs_kLNRMPh7pT9USXuG32mlpuA_OW4XsIV-z6WH6j790xyX_E

I didn't think I attacked anybody. I merely stated that I had a lot of trouble understanding SegWit, and the future benefits to Bitcoin. I understyood, the bloc k doubling concept pretty instantly, but I still don't understand full thedamage such a shortterm solution can do tyo Bitcoin. Perhaps the advocates can explain it.

Re: your picture, I may be old, but I'm not old enough to have that granny as a kid. Also I suspect that her size might be attributed to an increase in the blocksize of her food.

Do you understand how a B+Tree works?

(I guess not)

but does that stop you from using RDBMS engines? (of course not as everything you search upon uses them).

You don't need to understand the tech and no-one is blaming you for not - but don't try and ask for the tech to be explained to you unless you want to bother to learn how to understand it.

I would love to have a "time machine" but such a thing is not possible - so you might want a crypto-currency that cannot be implemented as well - just accept that it is not possible and try and be happy with what we have.

Nah, there was nothing wrong with your post. It was the other fool's rant I was aiming at.

Since its scaling linear i think we still have some time.. but still.. it should be raised pretty soon

2015 called.  It wants you to give back its clever strategy to sell XT using fear/panic about Bitcoin's impending D000M.

If you "Bitcoin is going to choke S000N" types were serious, XT would change to a different/modified PoW at the same time it attempts (via contentious hard fork) to impose blocks >1MB on the (demonstrably unwilling) rest of the system.

Why not just do an extra round of SHA256?  Existing ASICs could do that with firmware/driver tweak.

The reason you don't do that is you want to hijack Bitcoin and destroy its interesting property of being diverse/diffuse/defensible/resilient.

The sooner you fork off and stop trying to attach GavinCoin to Satoshi's coattails, the better.

Well I did write several binary search routines in my day as a mainframe assembler programmer. My post wasn't a request for information, but to point out that block size doubling is a simple concept on the face of it, but the ramifications are fairly difficult to understand. In a situation where most people don't seem to understand the difference between Bitcoin and the blockchain, there is a danger that many people won't delve past the title.

Using the simple idea of demand (in this case, of speed of transaction), the TX fees will go up. Especially with the upcoming halving, this will make up for some of the lowered profitability in the future. Maybe not all, but some. Miners will definitely want to keep it that way.

Some calculation indicates the block will be full in 9 months. But I think we should raise the limit in 3-5 months.

Blockchain.info is posting > 36 MB of unconfirmed transactions right now.

I am quite worried about the situation. Is there some kinds of stress test going on?

We need the block rise sooner rather than later.

I am not worried in any sense.  Nice to see business as usual.  Perhaps we will start to see some progress in evolution of bitcoin soon. 

It has halved since yesterday, and I hope the attacker runs out of funds soon.

It is a very nice stress Test and shows the limit of the actual tech is very close.

How would you chose your CPU for a risk sensitive machine? Sure at some level where you normally use only a small fraction and for a standard stress tests it should still work fine ....

U think this is funny dude?  ???

What it shows is that any system that has a low cost to be abused, can get abused.

Near-zero cost txs = near-zero cost abuse.

If the fees were higher, the cost of attacking the system would have been higher and the risk of attacks much lower.

I'd rather say the system is so close to it's Limit that makes it attractive for attackers.
Just for the social freedom you claim there should be always a way (some Space) for near zero cost txs .

https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FQoTEOO2.gif&t=562&c=qkq8igmgx20Yqw

Just found... No Space left for the poor or any safety...

they should have integrated BIP 101 months ago. Missing this will have bad results on the project BTC. But it will anyway succeed.. I hope the responsible "guys" get banned one day from this project. There was always conflict of interests.. They work for companies which don't want BTC block size to be increased. Sad but true...

I can't believe it hasn't been raised to at least 2MB yet.  I thought all the miners and everyone was okay with 8MB, and we haven't even reached 2MB.  This last week with all the stuck/slow transactions was ridiculous.  I don't even want to recommend bitcoin to anyone because of it.

This is a very insightful graph!
And it is done solely based upon the current situation of transactions vs blockchain limit.

If that is the case then I can highly presume that, Bitcoin might decline its glory when it either reaches to the PayPal level transaction processing or the Visa level transaction processing.

But one thing for sure is shown wrongly on the graph is that failure will not be from 2016. Although this is based on probability but this is for sure it wont.

Very nice and informal graph, hopefully an agreement is reached soon to increase the blocksize limit. It's
not good for the health of the Bitcoin that everybody keeps fighting over it and nothing is being done at
the ever increasing confirmation times when normal fees are being used.

Best would be to have a moving agerage + 50% or so  size limit, than its dynamic.

I've been noticing these slow transactions as well. It will affect the price of bitcoin is they don't increase the memory pool. We've seen the price drop over Bitcoin XT before.  I would say that graph predicts the future quite accurately. It worth investing in Bitcoin now.

because of the limit, there will be so many unconfirmed transactions. it's not good. hope there'll be solution soon

I wonder how they created that chart. Given the reports of empty blocks, and blocks with under 512k, to get to that final figure, I would expect some blocks to be over 1.5Mb. I understand that this is not possible atm. :)

Switch to linear scale instead of logarithmic (button on the lower right).

And no Space left for any potential next Level adoption jump as well , so stay nichy for any sake.

Hi guys!
I'm new to the blocksize debate. I have one question though (please excuse me if it is stupid or if it was already ecplained).
Why is there only blockSIZE debate and not a blockTIME debate? If I understand the concept correctly, time can be manipulated without any hardforks.
Thanks for your answer(s)!

That's nothing.  Blockchain.info must do some kind of filtering.  I have 437 MB of unconfirmed transactions in my mempool.  Average fee is 1.05 satoshi/byte, i.e. nothing to worry about.  Keeping the mempool artificially large by spamming free transactions is free, and doesn't impact conformation time of any normal transactions.  Keeping blocks full is free as well.  This is a non-issue.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates

Blocksize will be increased eventually.  But sorry, Not Tonight Dear.

Didn't you know? Being expensive is your greatest advantage against budding competitors...

People will pay more for the sanctity of decentralization embodied by four giant chinese chicken coops.

Bitfury?  Not Chinese.
KnC?  Not Chinese either.
21e6?  Again, not Chinese.
Spondoolies?  Chinese!  Oh wait no, still not Chinese.

Why don't you wait until we get to an AMD/Intel/Nvidia type oligopoly before you starting fretting about  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril)Yellow Peril.

Bitfury 9.74%
KnC 3.8% mining classic blocks exclusively
21 Don't even register... solved a block days ago?
Spoondoolies  That Guy who wants to change the PoW? do they have a pool?

Don't worry, the Evil Chinese aren't going to kill Honey Badger.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-details-100-million-georgia-data-center/
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kncminer/funding-rounds
http://www.coindesk.com/21-record-116-million-funding-all-star-investors/
http://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/spondoolies-tech-gets-5-million-in-series-b-funding-aiming-for-16-nm-asic-in-2015/

Only 700 unconfirmed transaction now.

I feel like every day its getting smaller and smaller, I dont see any evidence that its getting too big.

Just many shills thats all.

You are correct that this issue isn't nearly as pressing as supporters of immediate blocksize increases would suggest, but it is untrue that there is no backlog of unconfirmed transactions; any node running 0.12.0 should easily be able to max out its mempool with unconfirmed transactions, many of which will likely never confirm. This is true at 1MB blocks, would be true at 2MB blocks, and potentially at ANY block size because, as sturle stated, it is FREE to spam the network with free transactions (or transactions which will never confirm, as these are never actually spent). I run a Core node and have lowered my mempool limit to 100MB to just catch the, "upper crust", of transactions--there would be a lot more if I left the limit higher (300MB is the default). At the moment, this is the report of the getmempoolinfo call:

{
  "size": 4172,
  "bytes": 44798273,
  "usage": 96574336,
  "maxmempool": 100000000,
  "mempoolminfee": 0.00001183
}

The min fee under which my node will not relay transactions is 0.00001183BTC/kB; this is extremely close to the default required fee of 0.00001 and seriously a non-issue. I've seen my mempoolminfee hit about 0.00002, but that's about it. Granted, transactions still may not confirm at these fee rates, but that should be understandable considering how low these fees actually are. I tested sending a couple transactions at very low fees within the last couple weeks, one with a fee rate of ~0.00005BTC/kB, which took about 20 hours to confirm, and one at ~0.00007777BTC/kB, which confirmed in two blocks. Core's floating estimates generally suggest a minimum fee hovering around ~0.0002BTC/kB, so if you use anything that makes similar estimates (I know Mycelium also does something similar), there should be no issues getting your transactions to confirm.

EDIT: Just sent a tx at ~0.000051BTC/kB; it confirmed in the next block.

By the time the blocksizes becomes large like that the advance in technology would cause almost everyone to have internet speed and hard drive sizes that would make even 130Mb/s look like a joke.

We can't limit ourselves by worrying about the size of the blockchain in 5/10 years because by then the hard drives would be orders of magnitude cheaper than today anyway, and so would internet speed.

We need bigger blocks.

mempool it isn't full now. unfortunatelly bitcoin is under Blockstream hands.
bitcoinfork will happen lately.

The sheer amount of comments about this topic, from people who know little or nothing - gives me a headache.  Learn from the Ethereum hard fork please - that had more consensus than this does and observe what happened. Mainstream media don't even discuss Ethereum, the press Bitcoin would get - would set it back years in the minds of the tech scared.

Hello OP I would assume when you made this post a while ago that when you said to increase the block size limit you meant for the core development team to do a hard fork just like the proposal of the XT backers?

Fast forward to today and knowing what we know now, specifically with Ethereum's hard fork fiasco where the result was the original chain has become its own competitor, do still think the core developers should still hurry up and do the hard fork now? 

I hope it reach the 1MB limit . Nothing will happen other then threw natural selection the micro transactions will be pushed out of the blockchain.

https://blockchain.info/nl/block-height/431209
https://blockchain.info/nl/block-height/431108
https://blockchain.info/nl/block-height/431103
https://blockchain.info/nl/block-height/431033
https://blockchain.info/nl/block-height/430749

We are reaching 1MB blocks a lot.

Also more than half the blocks are at least 900 kB now.

Suppose I create a faucet.

I claim that I will give 1 satoshi for every request that is made through some web form. Meaning, any user who inserts his btc address will get 1 satoshi from me.

I place no limits on how many times users do that. A user may do it 100mn times and he'll get 1 BTC.

I am willing to pay 1 satoshi for fees per transaction (250 bytes).

So for every user who wants 1 satoshi, I pay 1 to him and 1 to fees.

What do you think will happen in terms of network demand?

Even if you have 10MB blocks, they'll be full.

My cost for doing that, and assuming nobody else transacted in the network, would be:

10mb per block / 250 bytes per tx = 40k txs per block x 144 blocks per day = 5.760.000 txs per day, moving 1 satoshi each and paying 1 satoshi in fees each = 11.52mn satoshi = 0.1152 btc per day.

So for 0.1152 btc per day, I can have 10mb blocks full by running a faucet that hands out money to everyone, no strings and no limits attached.

The number is 1.1152 btc per day for 100MB blocks, of which 0.576 btc will be donated to the users and the other 0.576 will go the network as fees.

For 11 btc per day, even 1 GB blocks can be full while users are scrambling to take the 5.76 BTCs that I'm donating (another 5.76 will go in fees).

As long as there are nodes relaying and miners mining my txs, this is quite achievable.

Do you understand why "blocks full" is irrelevant? The lower the cost of transacting, the bigger the demand for cheap txs, ensuring "blocks are full" for any capacity scenario (even 1gb blocks).

I'm seeing this right now: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

In the last 24 hours, 512 txs had zero fees. Another 36000 txs had fees ranging from 1 to 9 satoshi per byte. So ~36500 txs were in the range of 0$ to 0.01$ in fees.

If there was real congestion, you wouldn't see these kind of transactions getting processed. They'd need at least 5-10x in fees.

I believe they should just raise it 1mb more to allow the time to atleast talk it out and it won't dramatically cut the little guys out because of the cost. 

Is the little guy squeezed out?

I just made 4 transactions. Paid 0.001 each time. They all got confirmed in a block in ... I dunno 20 minutes. (I actually wanted to increase the tx fee, but the reference core client wouldn't let me.)

Each transaction except the last one was about 60kb. I tried to do a large transaction of 170kb but the reference core client wouldn't let me, said it was "too large". I looked up a few sites and found out that transactions above 100kb are not standard, so I broke up my thousands of inputs into 3 transactions. The 4th transaction was a consolidation of the previous three, to send to where I had intended to send originally.

So, I paid 0.004 total. Not so bad for 170kb total. This would only be a concern if the absolute total bitcoin amount was small. If you're moving 10 BTC or more, 0.001 isn't so bad, and you could get away with smaller, 0.0001.

^^^Link please

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/
Which fee should I use?
The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 60 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top.
For the median transaction size of 226 bytes, this results in a fee of 13,560 satoshis (0.07$).

Here are the first three transaction and ID hashes:




And the final transaction (which you can easily trace in any block explorer):



You should use what you see in that website, or what is "recommended" by your client if you are using Bitcoin Core.

Bitcoin fork is on the way. I preditc 2-3 months.

It's already been forked. I think. Or at least there are clients out there. I don't know who's using those other wallets, I'll stick to Core for now.

As a community member who has been here longer, what is your opinion on what will happen if a fork like Bitcoin Unlimited will gain enough support. Will it split the Bitcoin network in two just like what happened to Ethereum? The supporters of the fork all think it will be ok just like what Vitalik thought with the Ethereum hard fork.

Also if the hard fork does split the network in two, who is liable to be "hanged" by the community? Will Roger Ver step forward and own up to the mistake?

I think Ver has mentioned he doesn't mind if bitcoin splits into two chains. He has an article on coindesk or his own site (bitcoin.com)

The market will decide. The miners. The users. The nodes.

This usually means all the big players, the big exchanges, the big payment processors, and all the online web wallets.

One thing I know, if the price goes down, good time to buy cheap coins on your choice of fork. Also the fork will cause two blockchains to be maintained so you could have double your coins for a short term.

For someone that is so concerned with Capacity throughput Ver certainly doesn't mind mining half filled or empty blocks way below the average of other pools.

https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/block/0000000000000000022a9997ce4448d1ef5da66f4e93431d8366972a2e7fbd7a

https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pool/bitcoincom

Most other miners are mining around 1% empty blocks. Half of bitcoin.com blocks have not been full and over 10% of their blocks are almost empty. I would expect them to at least mimic other pools ratios. This doesn't look good, especially coming from people so concerned with capacity.
Empty blocks are very rare now a days . 2 large pools are even mining 0% empty blocks. And all others are below 1% , not higher than 10% like rogers pool. Look at the stats--


https://i.imgur.com/VYeimua.pngg

https://i.imgur.com/OlK8qfG.png

If you do that, the transaction won't get forwarded to any other nodes. You're under the threshold for "dust".

Obviously. But that's the bigblocker counterargument right there: "Who are you to tell me that my transaction is spam/dust/invalid/not worthy" etc etc... They continue by saying "if I pay fees, I must get included!!!". They could also say, in the above scenario, "I'm paying 100% fees over the transacted amount, while others are paying 0.x% in percentage... is this fair?" etc etc.

I don't really know. I don't make the rules. The fee rules are in the code and in the nodes that run on it, the miners, the whole network. The rules are based on the size of the transaction and the priority of the unspent inputs.

It used to be I could send small amounts with no fees. I'm not complaining now that I'm almost always required to spend more on fees. I understand how it works, maybe you do too. But according to the other devs there are all sorts of complications that arise if you change the one line of code that limits the block size.

The nodes just relay or forward your transaction. Anyone can change the logic of the nodes they control to forward or relay transactions with small or no fees.

The miners are the ones that actually confirm or include your transaction in a block.

I guess, the most apt saying is the one about "you get what you pay for"... You pay more, you get better chance (but no guarantee) of a confirmation. If you don't pay, you can always wait. I don't know if that's fair or not, although it looks fair to me.

Like you mentioned, if blocks become 1 GB in size, we'll eventually run into the same problem.

That's the other bigblocker counterargument: "Fuckin' blockstream, they have put limits on small txs, they want to make Bitcoin a settlement network and they are killing bitcoin for not including my 0.00x$ tx !!!" :'( :'( :'(

The devs probably did the math, saw that if small spammy transactions are in high demand, coupled with practically zero fees, then virtually any block size can be full.

Monero implemented an adaptive block size which increases as more demand is applied, and where did that lead? To a spamming of the network, to kill the blockchain through bloat... and devs running to patch it with high fees per tx to prevent the ongoing attack. What more can you do? It's either limited block size, or high fees.

I've seen a variation applied in STEEM, where they use rate limiting for spammy txs, avoiding the block size vs high fees tradeoff, but that's because txs are tied to an account, so this becomes more possible (in bitcoin it wouldn't be).

I think we all (devs and other users) saw when a popular on-chain dice site ... ... hehe ... I don't like "small spammy transactions" any more than you do.

I like bitcoin the way it is right now. If it does change, we'll see if the rest of the people follow. It'll be all over the news so I don't even really need to follow this.

Ok that makes sense. If he does not mind and he wants to make the market, miners, users and node maintainers decide then he should not criticize anybody if Bitcoin Unlimited or whatever fork he supports is discarded by the majority. He can campaign for his fork and try to take the power of development away from the core developers but first he should show that the developers of Bitcoin Unlimited is very competent.

Are the developers of Bitcoin Unlimited competent?

Every post here should cost some Satoshis - than we might get closer do define SPAM or not SPAM - correct?

Comments like that give me a headache, a flippant statement about not caring if Bitcoin splits into two chains... while investing heavily in Ethereum and Monero leave me completely disillusioned about Ver tbh.. All I have heard come from him is what is starting to feel like concern trolling. Sad that we got here, would like to see all of it stop.

Well, ... don't know if I'm talking out of nowhere or what, but I think Monero is having problems, and Ethereum ... now has two chains. He is just another user of bitcoin. If I had the money I might have invested in some altcoin too, I just wouldn't be vocal about it. Is he the Ether Jesus and Monero Jesus now too? Last I read, Jesus got nailed to a cross, but came back after 3 days.

I'm content as a normal "small" user of bitcoin to leave the blocksize at 1 MB right now. I'll let the core devs figure out a solution, we are not in a hurry and you can (and should) pay the relatively small tx fees. It's only big if you have lots of tiny transactions that need to be combined, but as I mentioned earlier, I had 3 large transactions (about 60 kb each) with about 200~300 inputs, and paid only 0.001 (which is the "standard" maximum fee, but you can override this) and they got confirmed rather quickly.

It can get frustrating when people have to pay $0.2 worth tx fee and still wait for like 1.5 hour to get a single BTC confirmation. This thing needs to be fixed asap.

What are you talking about? How about you stop making ridiculously big transactions and then blaming Bitcoin for having to pay a high fee?

Which is actually unusually high. I was expecting 60satoshis/byte when I started writing this post.

Potential (pretty much is) spam attack underway: http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions

That would be also reason for my transaction being stuck (in another thread about CEX.io, right now stuck over 6 hours) :/
From the graph you mention it seems like real "traffic jam" and what is more scary is it is getting bigger.
Would be interesting to see similar graph with avg/median transaction size as to have insight if increase is of real transactions or "dust"

I'm fine with paying higher fee. In fact i have it set high for the purpose that the tx will be confirmed fast. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. BTC txs are getting more and more expensive.

If you had it high, it would confirm.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

A modest amount of people keep claiming this, yet I don't see anything backing it up. Surely it is more expensive than it previously was (as you could even get zero-fee TXs to confirm), however it isn't getting "more and more expensive" (sounds like a generic statement that is used in political campaigns, where we're talking about non-marginal increases). I have not noticed any significant change in my transactions (fee-wise).

48K transactions (25MB) in the backlog as of this post. Never seen it get so bad.

Bitcoin is becoming useless as money.

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

What's your point? This is just the number of unconfirmed TXs on blockchain.info's node. My mempool is around 450 MB and ~60k unconfirmed transactions (at the time of writing this post). Someone turned up the spam today.

Yeah. Some philanthropist making contributions to miners welfare.

Spam up network -> complain about unconfirmed TXs -> blame Core -> blame Blockstream and so on. As you can see, a ton of posts suddenly appear on r/btc as soon as the mempool spikes. There's just a lot of ad hominem in there, supported by Ver of course.

---

Small bonus: 0.13.1 release is imminent, and is likely going to happen tomorrow.

This is good news indeed.

Sorry - why do you say 'spam' - how do you know ?

Why do you say 'someone' -  how do you know?


From you as a mod I'd expect a bit more quality here ...

A.K.A. Pay to win.
I dislike this model for bitcoin, orders of magnitude than than I do for games.

You can analyze the types of transactions, included fees and whatnot yourself.

That's not your concern.

That is irrelevant and a fallacy.

Thanks for answering on that.

You say 'spam' - > you or others (link?)  need to prove not me .

Same on 'someone' - have you indacation of a single one or a single Group spamming on purpose (that would imply your posting) ? - Clear that you do not Need to say a Name.

 

It was worse during the 2015 spam attack IIRC.

No, not really. How about you prove that they aren't spam? 30k unconfirmed transactions in the 1-10 satoshis/byte range (https://bitcoinfees.21.co/) says a lot.

Sorry I can't. I have no clear definition / qualifier to detect spam and separate from good txs.

All I know is that this type of definition / qualifier is constant over time.

Why do we have so much spam shouting just starting last few months ?

If we can identify a 'someone' or a group started this would really help here.

Although I believe that with a soft fork, everything keeps working for everyone and with a hard fork there are users who can't see some transactions, and think they haven't gotten paid when they have.
But with soft forks, the protocol in 10 or 20 years is going to be a horrible and confusing mess.

No, that's wrong. With a hard fork you either have to upgrade, or are unable to use the current network. You may end up on a minority chain or a dead chain (which isn't longer Bitcoin in either case).

30k unconfirmed transactions in the  41+ satoshis/byte range (https://bitcoinfees.21.co/) says a lot.


 :D

I don't get it. https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions shows close to 65k transactions

Why the blocksize does not need to be increased?
 >:( >:(

The node of Bitcoin may become less and less. So it is becoming Sth called centralized

To run a node now you need 100G in disk

The node count will drop anyway when adoption stops or altcoins hype.