Bitcoin Forum

In case somebody have missed it. He nailed it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/495866/the_rbtc_china_dispatch_11_summary_selected/

source: http://8btc.com/thread-30195-1-1.html

I think he made a couple of very good points:

1) Logically the devs should have very little power over the direction of BItcoin, and the users (as a whole) should have a lot of power over the direction of Bitcoin

2) The maximum block size needs to be increased immediately

3) Major Bitcoin related companies (AntPool included) need to carefully consider their position and cannot make any rash decisions

4) That the blockstream core devs seems to have a severe bias when looking at evidence and information

5) The the moderation policies of r/bitcoin and bitcointalk do not reflect the ideals of freedom of expression and the free flow of information that is believed in by much of the bitcoin related community

Thank you Jihan Wu :) (and KoKansei for the summary)

I'm inviting 80 of my friends to a secret Club Med location so to have a discussion and reach consensus that the three different classes of participants outlined is indeed correct. BTW, are we talking about Core Meltdown Users or Classic Coke Users?

Didn't know you think so too. You did not take part in any of these discussions. Though I have to say they are pretty tiring and mostly fruitless. It's better to avoid as long as you don't see someone is really interested into getting informations.

This seems to be yet another attempt to create disruption in the Bitcoin community. He states that there are 3 classes of people/organisations in the Bitcoin world, and then he states that one influential group is the service providers ( a fourth group). These are People who have invested their money because they believe in Bitcoin. He states that most people believe that block size should be increased. I don't think this is true. Most people don't care, and don't understand. It is my impression that more people think that empty/part filled block are more of an issue. Increasing the blocksize will just make matters worse. The path to scalability has many steps, and blocksize is just one of the minor ones. Of course it is a simple concept, and the Bitcoin anarchists can latch onto that to try to pull Bitcoin apart. I start to wonder if they are funded by the banks. :)

He also states that users don't have a voice, well they do - it's called market forces, and the rise in the price of Bitcoin means they approve of the system.

Remember that I'm a newbie to the world of Bitcoin, so my opinions are almost those of an observer rather than a technician

Its just artificial choosing size limits thus regulation, and whenever this regulation is implemented it looses over free market which finds perfectly economic based solutions to block sizes (not limits) dynamically and naturally based how the system evolve.

To just show how any arbitrary artifically choosen size limits to keep block filled all the time is flawed, let choose new limit to 10 KB. Our genial regulators now shrinked the Bitcoin userbase to probably thousands instead of current about million - thats what you get with artifically choosen size limit, cap how many users can conveniently use Bitcoin. Increasing the blocksize will make more adoption possible, there is currently no other provably working solution to allow more people to use Bitcoin in decentralized way.



Sure, banks have interest for not capping user capacity so Bitcoin can be used by more people in decentralized way ::)
The other blockstream alternative is capped and always filled blocksize acting as just settlement layer for centralized offchain layer 2 solutions as payment metods that can be instaneous like current exchange trading (though provably fair), but easily regulated. Seems more likely as bank/gov plan to me...

Some things you correct I can agree, but not all.

Why should empty or partly filled blocks be an issue? They only are an issue when there is a backlog of transactions that is not worked on because of such a block.

If there would be an issue then something bad should have happened when bitcoin implemented 1mb blocksize. Or way more dangerous, the uncapped version of bitcoin before.

Blocksize raise is a simple concept because it is an abitrarely chosen amount that now is raised high as an important setting like 21 mio coins cap and 10 minute blocks. It's simply not.

The rise in the bitcoin price only means that it is the only bitcoin we have. There is not even a choice in switching to a fork of bitcoin or something like that.

It's like giving inmates bad food and say to an observer... see, they eat it... it must be good food. Well... sure, maybe it is not yet as bad but cockroaches are often enough in the bitcoin meal. Surely bitcoiners would like to use a system without regular backlogs.

I concur. However, when deciding between proposals developers should have more 'power' (because let's face it, the average human is pretty stupid/ignorant). I hope that you understand what I mean by this.

No. Segwit will be enough for now.

Indeed.

False. There isn't much evidence of this.

There is more than enough freedom on BTCT (can't say anything about reddit).

wrong. when the code is easy to program. the things like bloat have been debunked, the things like 16month implementation have been debunked then there ultimately leaves nothing else for the developers to have power over. and then it should be the users (people, miners and retailers) that then decide if they want it.

developers should add the code now, and if people dont want it. they wont download it and if its not downloaded it wont get activated thus no issue.

but if people want it but developers refuse to code it. then by not coding it they are causing the contention. like a self fullfilling prophecy.
if the code is available and enough people use it there wont be no contention because the threshold is high enough to poke the laggers to move over too or be left behind. which is much safer then just not having a implementation for the laggers if the signs of movement did appear. meaning its guaranteed contention because core refuses to give the devoted laggers the update to be part of the majority

He is welcome to do that, but will discover it is impossible.  Bitcoin will split immediately, and he will mine worthless coins.

There are other ways to scale.  E.g. if Coinbase could stop making two transactions (https://medium.com/@laurentmt/doing-nothing-is-a-choice-2c26376358a2#.y4n8whafw) on the blockchain for every withdrawal a user makes.  Other exchanges on the other hand joins many withdrawals into one transaction, spending a fraction of the blockspace for each withdrawal.  Coinbase have been very vocal on the capacity issue, and instead of taking very simple measures to increase the capacity, they try to take control over Bitcoin to change it for their own purposes.  Coinbase plays very dirty, and I don't think Coinbase should be rewarded for blocking normal transactions by spamming the blockchain, delaying other transactions on purpose.

The elephant in the room is the fact that 75% of all mining is currently controlled by just 4 pools: F2Pool, AntPool, BTCCPool, and BitFury.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93165275/miners.png

So a small number of large mining pools can dictate by consensus among themselves which version is used to mine, and therefore which version is carried forward. The devs, merchants, users, and investors have little to say in this. The pools are only answerable to their clients, who can only vote with their feet and move to another pool. Bottom line: the large mining pools will do what is in their best interest to maintain the status quo and market share.

I think this is a great point. There's a hell of a lot people can do with their normal behavior to clean up transactions. Sadly I don't think the human race is disciplined enough to keep doing it. I guess a lot of people think higher fees will enforce that.

No, miners have no word in this.  It is what users use and merchants accept that matters.  If those pools decide to use a different consensus, they will just mine invalid blocks, and invalid coins.  The miners can choose to ignore blocks produced by other miners, of course, but stick to the consensus rules.  This is called a 51% attack, and is a real danger.

Thank you sturle. I am just studying and learning about the ecosystem. But mining pools themselves act as users and merchants in terms of creating a very large number of transactions themselves (between the pool and their clients as they claim their share of rewards). I think you are right though, that even if they spam the system with micro transactions, it would be tough to generate a 51% attack.

The Chines government could easy take over the mining pools inside China and force them to mine empty blocks, they could also force this Jihan Wu to release long winded statements to help direct Bitcoin development in a direction of their choosing. *adjusts tin foil hat* Jihan Wu is ripe for manipulation. If he has not already been turned into a puppet he will be.

Without hash power (the cost of mining) any coin's price that merchants and users use will drop like a waterfall until it reaches the production cost, it is called arbitraging: You can always borrow coin and sell and mine it back if the exchange rate is much higher than production cost

This will make sure that any attempt to move away from the major hash power will cause the biggest financial loss. And that's the reason Satoshi said the major CPU vote is the only consensus

In my understanding and also history records, scientists and programmers are very bad at making economics and financial decisions, because they lack of the overview of how human and society works and they all focus on small details while ignoring the most important things

There is no lack of examples: Isaac Newton went flat broke chasing a stock bubble, and a group of Nobel price winners made a hedge fund LTCM, using sophisticated mathematical model to forecast the market, its collapse almost dragged US into recession

Currency's value is all about trust and stability, and so far many things core devs do (like segwit and artificially limiting capacity) are making bitcoin worse in these two aspects. I usually see this kind of stupidity from many developers so I'm not surprised. Maybe in 10 years they will learn

Thought experiment.  Miners with the major hash power (over 51%, let us even say 75%) have consensus on one fork with 2MB blocks with some arbitrary low fee, however, users and merchants only accept transactions using the other fork, with 1MB blocks and a high enough fee to change the profitability of the mining. Wouldn't this result in the users and merchants in the 25% fork to force the miners in the 75% fork to change, since the miner's clients will demand the higher block rewards?

Actually the better part is that if the big miners like AntPool start accepting Classic blocks for now then I find no reason for everyone to accept the hard fork rather than going into a deeper controversy.

Well, this will very much happen after the next block halving when there will be a scarcity of miners due to lack of interest in mining.

Correct. And if you boil it down, what he is really saying is that the miners should have the power to determine what changes to make to the protocol and when to make them. He talks about "the users", but the users have no control over anything.

Any user and any merchant can conduct a transaction, but as far as accepting the transaction and broadcasting the next block: only the miner can do that. The only controversy is if there are various groups of miners with difference versions/consensus on the protocol. If a substantial majority of miner have agreed on a version, that is the version. No amount of lobbying by developers changes that.

Didn't SegWit just fork on the testnet? Is there even enough support for SegWit for it to get implemented now that much of the chinese have for all intensive purposes withdrawn from the "consensus document"? If you assume that SegWit does get implemented, and that everyone starts using it (unlikely), what growth rate are you assuming will take place in order to make this statement? 

I disagree.
Except when it comes to discussing something that, if implemented would be harmful to blockstream.

It is my understanding that the transactions that coinbase broadcast are a very small percentage of the network. Additionally batching withdrawals like this is severely detrimental to user privacy.

Additionally, I think your proposal is akin to saying that Bitcoin can be scaled if people just make less transactions :D

In my experience the relationship is opposite.  Back in 2011 the price rised quickly, and people bought large farms of graphics cards to mine coins.  When the price fell back, and FPGAs came to market, people sold their GPUs to gamers.  The hashrate even went down a while after the 32 USD price peak, since the GPUs weren't profitable any more.  If you compare price and hashrate graphs, it is very clear that hashrate lagged the price.

If a lot of hashrate forks out, other people will come in and replace it.  The cost per hashrate hasn't changed.

Them asking to immediately increase the blocksize is completely hypocrytical for a mining pool that mines empty blocks frequently.

It is not like they have no influence over what is happening, and one thing they can do is to start include transactions again in all their mined blocks.

Their hypocracy aside, I tend to agree with their points.

The minority chain will be attacked anytime by major hash power and all the transactions on it will be cancelled after being confirmed, no one will risk real money on that, the amount of cash flow on the minority chain will be minimal

The price bubble of course is pushed up by whales, most notably from China (Their whales has pushed up the price of everything that is scarce by at least 100x , from some special kind of wood to some special kind of dog)

But without a healthy fundamental, they can't cash out after the rally, and they risk of helping early adopters to cash out during the rally, so when facing uncertainty, they will stay out until dust is settled. From long term view, the bitcoin will not succeed if it can't prove itself as not controlled by any single entity or a group of powerful players

I wasn't talking about financial decisions.

It did and that is a good thing because it happened on the testnet (it seems to have been caused due to some users running an older version, so you can disregard this already). If anything, there is much more support for Segwit than for a 'fork'. If everyone starts using it we are looking at about 180-190% transaction capacity (I forgot the exact number).

You're talking about consensus breaking implementations (i.e. altcoins); they have their own section.

Imagine how foolish these guys will look, after screaming " Increase the Block size now, the sky is falling!!! " and then the new increased Blocks after SegWit will only be 40% full.  ;D I think I will be one of the first people who will be screaming, " I told you so "
I guess a lot of them will be be running anonymous stress test for a while after the upgrade, to prevent people like myself of showing them up as fools and panic nanny's. That is until their money runs out, because a stress test after the block size increase are going to cost them a little more than what it is costing them now. ^smile^

This is correct, and for that reason Bitcoin should avoid a hard fork at all cost.  Most users and miners know it.  If the hard consensus rules in Bitcoin change, a hostile takeover by a single entity or group of powerful players already happened.

A hard fork is totally harmless if there is no major merchant and user support, someone in china is talking about making a hard fork first to prove that it is harmless

Only a 50-50 divide between users and miners and merchants will be a disaster, and that's why you need at least 75% hash power and major user support

And by not making a hard fork to raise the block size limit (which majority of people want), you also risk heavily affecting fundamentals: 1. people will realize that bitcoin is not capable of doing lots of transactions without third party solutions 2. people will realize that bitcoin programmers can be controlled by enterprises and totally changed to something else. As a result they vote with their feet, and without new buyers every day to absorb those 5000 coins sell pressure, exchange rate will only go down long term wise

You are contradicting yourself.  Bitcoin is built on consensus.  If a group controlling 75% of hashpower, i.e. four miners, break lose and force a consensus change to Bitcoin, then it shows Bitcoin is under control by a very small group.  Both user support, and the need for a fork, can be faked like Coinbase does.

If Bitcoin has to be scaled via hard forks pushed by a small group, or if a small group (i.e. 2 miners) can block scaling by blocking a size change, then Bitcoin has to fall under control of a very few number of players to succeed.  This contradicts your previous stance.

Bitcoin programmers don't have powers.  They can not change the consensus rules without making an altcoin.  This is the primary security mechanism in Bitcoin.  If this wasn't true, Bitcoin would be just as worthless as fiat in a bank on Cyprus.  Just see how the Coinbasecoin known as "Classic" works out.  They have almost no user support, except for sockpuppets on Reddit, and even fakes node support through an attack on the bitcoin P2P insfrastructure (https://classic-cloud.net/), and try to provoke user support by spamming the blockchain (https://medium.com/@laurentmt/doing-nothing-is-a-choice-2c26376358a2#.y4n8whafw) with unnecessary transactions.  (The Amazon nodes are an attack due to the built-in sybil-resistance in Bitcoin nodes.  Home nodes will create a connection to at most one of those nodes, since it avoids connecting to more than one node per netblock.  The attack nodes will however make 8 outbound connections to people's home nodes, download blocks and transactions, and use a disproportionate amount of their bandwidth.  I had to throttle my outgoing bandwidth to the attack nodes ("Classic" nodes on Amazon servers) because they were consuming all my outgoing bandwidth, and hitting my incoming transactions limit.  To help the network, nodes must be spread out to all corners of the internet.)

There are plenty of altcoins out there, and very easy to vote by your feet now.  Even Coinbase could be honest about it, and fork off their own Coinbasecoin, or "Classic" as they call it, today.  Yet, I can't see Coinbase following that path.  They want to destroy Bitcoin instead, by showing that a small group of people can take control over it.

Of course any small group of people do not represent the consensus, that's why we need a large scale vote and count everyone's opinion through miners vote with their hash power, and service providers asking their customers (you can not fake hash power, and you can not fake long term users on platforms)

Currently for those who voted with their hash power, classic has the majority hash power, and even user number is several times more than core users. And for those who don't vote (currently over 90% of mining hash power has not voted yet) it means they don't care, we can assume that they want bitcoin to run on its historical trajectory (non-full blocks and low fee), so they can also be assumed to support classic. Or, we can assume that they don't command enough knowledge to do the vote, so their vote can not be counted. But since in bitcoin's world no one is responsible for your financial loss, I think everyone who is enough serious about his investment should participate in the vote

http://photo.mystisland.org/2016/slush_vote.png

Both charts are misleading at best. Even if you consider nodes that haven't updated to 0.12.0 yet as in "don't care", the vote stands at almost 45-55 (I didn't run the numbers; it is an estimation after looking at the image below).
Additionally you have to consider that Classic is basically running a Sybil attack with its Amazon nodes service.

Correct. More than half their nodes are on Amazon  (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/499bai/51_of_bitcoin_classic_nodes_hosted_on_aws/)apparently.

Well, considering that they're the ones that were most likely behind the recent attack, I don't think that they're going to give up just yet. Even if Core agreed to 2 MB block size limit, we would hear the same story some time after its activation asking e.g. for 3-4 MB block size limit (maybe it would be "Bitcoin Reloaded"?).

so is core running a sybil aswell, ill even spoon feed you examples and leave you to look at the rest

here is a majority of core using node hosting services
https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/?q=OVH%20SAS
https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/?q=Hetzner%20Online%20GmbH
https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/?q=Hetzner%20Online%20AG%20RZ
https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/?q=MCI%20Communications%20Services,%20Inc.%20d/b/a%20Verizon%20Business

and yes core shills also uses amazon.

enjoy counting how many nodes are core

thats because core started the delay and fud to avoid upgrading even from 2015. and wanted the increase to happen in 2017-18.(2-3 years)
if core implemented the change in summer 2015 with a 6 month grace there would be peace for a couple years.

core wants and loves the endless debate because it makes them feel powerful having people under their thumb pleading for them to do something.

they love and want contention, because it gives them power
they dont like it when we are not asking them to do anything as it makes them feel useless. so ofcourse they want the debate to continue endlessly

Lauda



I wonde actually in which type of country you live in. A democracy it surely isn't or you are the type that thinks "the guys at the top will do the right thing, they probably know better than me". Which lets me ask what kind of government you would chose.

Core fans always tell everyone that bitcoin is no democracy, well, it should. It has proven way too often that democracy is the best choice of governments. Even though our current democratic countries only have a homeopatic democracy. The democracy is so thin that it is practically not existing anymore. What is it worth when the citicens (demo-cracy = ruling of the citicens) has the right to make a single choice once every couple of years and the rest of the time they have to delegate their voice to others?

Anyway... you surely should have realized that most bitcoiners are not the kind of subservient and obedient citizens you might be.

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arcticlava and sturle




These miners are pools too. So the question is what happens when the miners that mine on that pool direct their hashpower elsewhere, if they can? Would that have an effect?

I agree that the users have the power at the end. Though I fear most users are ignorant and would simply use whatever client they get handed out with an update.

Miners mining worthless blocks... well, that would only be true if the price of the bitcoins on that chain is falling down. That only happens by selling. Who will sell? Will the rich guys on one side sell their coins on the other side to bring the chain down? Or the other way? Worthless is only that is not wanted anymore.

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Quantus



I think if the chinese government probably would simply take them out of the game. That would be not a big problem since the only harm that could do would be bigger timeframes between confirmations. It would be a hassle for up to two weeks minimum. The remaining miners would still earn the same that they earned before the pools were taken out. Though with the next diff update they would earn alot more than before. It would mean a new goldrush with miners prices rising very high.

It could not harm bitcoin at all. Only maybe some other forms of attack might be.

If they actually would force them to mine empty blocks then this reminds me of something. Wasn't there a rule of some kind that asic producers would implement a slightly different form of calculation into their miners? That was a precaution in case the algo had to be changed to keep some asics out of the game. I think at the asic goldrush times there was something like that. I'm not sure who dealt with that. The core devs probably.

So it might be possible to keep miners from these producers out.

False interpretation of my words. Look at how wonderful the democracies of today are. Seems to be a system that is working very well (a lot of countries being highly corrupted as a example). My wording may not be the best here as I'm not into politics.

So instead of reading, listening and learning the users should complain, spread misinformation and FUD since their technical expertise are severely lacking or non existent? Surely this will be beneficial to the system. I never said that Core should be blindly followed. Nobody should.

Democracy is not yet strong, I know. But still it has proven as a way better way for now. And the people don't agree to corruption so even lobbyist influence on politicians is a real point of critics nowadays. It goes in the right direction at least.


It's good to read that you say no one should follow blindly. Though what you should see is that many people that are screaming on one side or the other actually miss knowledge. I switched sides one time, well, maybe I switch more often on subtopics too. The point is that this happens when my knowledge is rising. So discussing the topics is very important.

But even when all facts are on the table, especially the topic at hand is a topic that leaves ALOT room for interpretation and guessing of the future. So what sounds logical on the one side sounds illogical on the other and vice versa. That surely does not mean that misinformations and FUD are spread out of bad habit but because it is the stand of knowledge or/and because you can ask both sides to the same points and both sides can show that they are right. So it's not really bringing anything forward claiming it is FUD.

wow

can you post the source of this graph please.

Who cares what the miners think?  Miners can't change the consensus.  To change consensus, you must update every bitcoin node on the network.  Otherwise you get what is known as an altcoin.

A falsum.  If this pie was true, "Classic" would have forked their altcoin already.  And they may already have.  I don't think many people would notice, except for the handful of people who actually use "Classic".

It's a scammer trick. That's the vote distribution on the tiny little baby pool that Slush still runs. That stupid graph only represents 3% of the hash rate. There is so much misinformation being thrown around here it's a wonder anyone can make a decision on whether their own bladder is full enough to take a piss.

Ant pool mentioned was implementing some kind of voting mechanism, any follow up on this?
I do think some voting mechanism is needed, anybody with Bitcoin can vote.

I've called them out on misleading charts before, but they always try using some straw-man arguments to get away with it. There is clearly a very low amount of supporters for Classic. Additionally, if you have read a recent article called "A date with Sybil" then you would know that the nodes are run by less than 300 people (according to the analysis).

Well it could work without a mechanism. Miners could easily show support (or "vote") by changing their pool.

Wow, I didn't realise it was that concentrated. And most of that is in China too. What if the Chinese govt went full retard like the Venezuelan govt and arrested all the miners. Mining really needs to be spread out evenly across the globe so there is no single point of failure.

I would not go as far as to say it is a scammer trick, although it is a bit misleading considering slush's share of the total network hashrate. AFAIK most other pools do not allow for such voting, so it would not be accurate to say that the entire 97% of the miners that do not mine on slush are against classic, nor are they for core, it is that they do not have a mechanism to vote. Another pool that (somewhat) allows miners to vote is f2pool and roughly 4.5% of miners there are "voting" for classic, although miners there need to change the settings on their miners which is a more complex process then changing settings on an account, and voting for core is essentially the default setting for people who were mining prior to this option being enabled.

The evidence and information says that increasing the blocksize now is a bad idea, and potentially ever. We can't live off constant hard forks to temporarily pay less fees for onchain transactions because that's as stupid as it gets, that's why we must focus on additional layers to scale a protocol just like it has always been done.

Bitcoin is not a democracy, thats why it has survived this long. Idiots that have no deep knowledge in how to scale a protocol have 0 say on this.
In any case, run nodes for whatever you want to support (as long as they aren't fake nodes like most of the Classic ones).

BIP 101 would have increased the maximum block size "today" and then subsequently increased maximum block sizes in the future at a sustainable rate.

There is little reason why someone would want to use Bitcoin as a settlement layer, and for the most part, this is not how Bitcoin has ever been used.

There is not any evidence that suggests increasing the maximum block size today is a bad idea. Even if such an increase is "not needed" then there will be no harm in increasing the maximum block size because current modern computers and current modern broadband connections would be able to handle 2MB blocks. BTW, if you are against increasing the maximum block size today, then you should also be against SegWit because SegWit will increase the amount of data transmitted each time a block is found.

The idiots that you describe are the ones that give Bitcoin it's value because they are the ones who are using it. If you go against the wishes of these idiots for too long then there will be no reason why Bitcoin will have any value.

There is no such thing as a fake node, just because a node is run off of a VPS does not make it "fake", it means that the owner of such node is using the resources of a data center to run a node for one of potentially many reasons. It is probably a bad idea to run a classic node from your home because if you do, there is a decent chance that your ISP will get DDOS'ed and everyone in your area will potentially lose internet access (this actually happened to someone running an XT node).

It is not so bad, to the 4 pools are connected many individul miners who can change the pool if some pool misbehave. Im not fammiliar with the 4 pools, but Slush pool (about 3% of Bitcoin hashpower) have about 5000 active users (15000 mining worker units) working at any time...

 then we need a bladder piss test

Even though I agree with forwarding with things like segwit, you saying that increasing the blocksize should never happen is a plain stupid statement. You clearly see the amount of transactions are rising all the time. Still you await somehow that scaling will happen. Well, you might think of not using bitcoin, and pushing bitcoin "papers" around like it's planned with Lightning network. Though that is not scaling the bitcoin network. It is outsourcing.

There is no evidence at all that increasing the blocksize is a bad idea. Everything stated against is "believe". Though that is true for both sides of course. Well, the increase side has the past on his side. It clearly was never a problem having blocks that could be potentially way bigger. Now that the blocks are full, and the lightning network wants to get his place in the game, it is suddenly a big problem.

I hear this "bitcoin is not a democracy" so often. Well, guys that claim that sound like some persons back from middle age. "The king will rule, long life the king." As if the king can never take foolish decisions. In any way... it is a very backward directed view in sight of development of mankind.

Or maybe those stating this feel like some form of anarchists? We do what we want. If you don't comply then live with it since we rule. Which turns it to not being anarchistic anymore of course.

Regarding fake nodes. If someone wants to call them this way... I have read that there is a not small amount of such fake nodes sat up with core nodes. Guess those are legit then because... this is no democracy. Screw those damn rebels who copy core and spread an unlicenced wallet copy. :D

That BIP is horrible. Bitcoin can't support a doubling every two years.

There's that attack vector that a 2 MB block size limit opens up, but I guess that would be considered as "not evidence". Additionally, it gets worse the further up you go.

Not really, no.

Yes there is.

Considering these idiots are complaining that the sky is falling because they need to pay ~$.04 in fees per transaction, I'm guessing they aren't the ones using it. Further, I'd guess they don't hold very many bitcoins at all. But who's to say? Well, there's always Bitcoinocracy.... ;)

I think you never really gave it a thought what will happen when we would stay at having bitcoin reach a full block threshold and transaction amount still is rising. I guess you imagine something like slowly rising fees, right? In fact it will be exponentially rising fees because everyone has to compete against an always rising amount of transactions. Everyone does want to get his confirmation. You will have paypal fees in no time.

The attack vector against 2MB blocks, a transaction that possibly needs alot of time to get verified, has already been closed. There is a solution that only has to be included in core.

Your right about the exponentially rising fees only if there is no alternative to Bitcoin. In reality people will stop using Bitcoin before fees go to paypal levels. Theymos told it nicely, if ever fees go very high like over 1 USD, increasing blocksize limit can start to be discussed. The point is such high fees cannot happen because it is self regulating - Increased Bitcoin usage means increased fees which means some people stop using Bitcoin which decrease fees - some equilubrum has to be reached, fee size and number of Bitcoin users wanting to pay such fees. Thats why promoting artificially limited blocksize is direct attack to cripple Bitcoin.

Yes, it either stops adoption or kills bitcoin by making it unuseable.

I somewhat doubt that bitcoiners will jump on some altcoin, I would not count bitcoin forks to altcoins there, altcoins have not the best reputation with most bitcoiners so it probably won't happen.

And surely the lightning network won't take over. By now everyone knows the critics on LN and when bitcoin really becomes unuseable and everyone knows a fork would fix it then LN looks like the evil to even the rest in doubt.

Besides that... LN is not Bitcoin, it is another network which means new things to install and whatever. It won't happen. Things like that happened already alot and even when they were innovative, they don't really played a big role in the end. It's worse for LN when it really rides on the wave of dying bitcoin when it looks like it could have been avoided but wasn't for reasons.

Totally agreed. Core Devs are the ones brought us here and now, after Satoshi.


As long as now is now...and not in 6 months.

Bitcoin is a settlement layer by design.  If you use it for something else, you are doing it wrong.

I disagree. every bitcoin transaction will show up on the blockchain for anyone to see. If I were to send BTC to address "A" and then subsequently send BTC "from" address "A" to address "B" then even if both transactions are confirmed in the same block, then both of these transactions will be visible in the blockchain and the transactions will appear in a specific order. If I were to have a balance of 10 BTC in my coinbase account and then send 2 of those BTC to someone who also has a coinbase account via email transfer, then I never really had 10 BTC, I only had IOU's for 10 BTC, and transferred those IOUs, not actual bitcoin.

I would define a settlement layer as one that all transactions are not transparent. With a settlement layer, for example if coinbase customers were to send 150 BTC to bitpay customers, and bitpay customers were to send 53 BTC to coinbase customers then there would be a single transaction in the amount of 97 BTC from coinbase to bitpay, and not all individual transactions will be clear, nor will they show up on the blockchain.

The average transaction fee increased to something closer to $0.06 to $0.10 per transaction during what was alleged to be spam attacks on the blockchain/nodes. While this is still a nominal amount, both in absolute terms and when compared to the costs associated with using the likes of PayPal and credit cards, it is a significant increase when compared to what transactions have cost in the past. As Seb has pointed out, when blocks do become full and stay full for even the medium term (and possibly the short term), then transaction fees will increase at an exponential rate, and will continue to increase until transaction fees have increased so much so that users are discouraged from sending additional transactions (or until the maximum block size is increased).

Don't give any evidence, or make any kind of factual argument when refuting my points.

Roughly 20 years ago, it would cost a residential user roughly $45 per month for a 28.8 kbs internet connection (for both a dedicated phone line and the fee the ISP charges). Today, I can spend roughly the same amount of money for a 8 mbs internet connection. There are 10 two-year periods between this timeframe. This works out to available internet speeds to residential customers increasing by roughly 75% every two years for the same price, however it should be noted that the US (where I am located) is generally "behind the curve" in terms of broadband access so the increase would likely be greater for the rest of the world.

According to the lighting white paper (https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf), for Bitcoin to be able to handle as many transactions per second that Visa has ever had to handle per second, the maximum block size would need to increase to roughly 8 GB. It should be noted however that Visa has not had to handle that many transactions in roughly 2.5 years and usually handles much less transactions per second. If we were to increase the maximum block size to 2 MB today, and subsequently increase it by 75% every two years, then the maximum block size would increase to over 8 GB in 15 two-year periods, or in 30 years.

With my current internet connection of 8 mbs, I would be able to transmit an 8MB block to 10 peers in 10 seconds, and would be able to transmit a 2MB block to 40 peers in 10 seconds.

Don't give any kind of evidence, links or anything like that. I am not aware of any kind of attack vector that you are claiming.

What part of my statement do you disagree with? Do you not think that SegWit will increase the potential amount of data that will need to be transmitted with each block? Do you think that the maximum block size should decrease once SegWit is implemented?

How exactly do you define a fake node? How exactly are you able to claim that the nodes that are reporting as being classic are in fact "fake" by your definition?

That would be your personal definition, and not a general property of settlement layers.  Not all transactions are transparent in Bitcoin either, btw.  It has been shown how you could transact on the side, e.g. A->B->C->...->Z on a sidechain, and commit A->Z to the blockchain.  Coinjoins are commonly done to obfuscate the real partners in a transactions.

And why on Earth do you think a larger blocksize would solve the spam problem?  It will only make the consequenses worse.  Bitcoin clearly needs a way to transact unobstructed outside the blockchain, and only commit to the chain when needed.  If miners want to promote normal transactions over spam, they should use spam filters.  Some pools do, e.g. Eligius.  If spam is the problem, you should attack the spam, not allow more of it.  When my mail server got attacked by spammers, I didn't run to the shop to buy more disk.

There is an attack on non-segwit transactions where you can make a 2 MB transaction which take more than 10 minutes to validate.  "Classic" has "solved" this by introducing a new hard limit to Bitcoin ("Classic" likes to brag about a limit they lift, not so much about extra limits they add), where a transaction can't be larger than 100 KB.  The largest transaction mined to date was 1 MB, and it takes 20 seconds to validate on a modern fast CPU.

Pseudonode (https://github.com/basil00/PseudoNode) is an example of a fake node.  It can emulate all popular versions, and some unpopular like "Classic" and "BitcoinXP", using almost no resources.  It just acts as a relay to fetch the requested data from another node which (hopefully) stores it.  Unless it is another psaudonode, which fetch it from another node, etc.  Perhaps there are only a handful real "Classic" nodes on the network.  We will never know.  The operator who run hundreds of "Classic" nodes on Amazon to attack the Bitcoin P2P network probably want to do it as cheaply as possible, and Pseudonode is the obvious solution.

No evidence is needed in this case as you want to scale according to an observation (Nielsen's law). You are drawing to conclusions based on the "evidence" (from the past) gathered from a small region (?). Internet prices and speeds to to variate quite heavily depending on region and country. We need not be designing a system with a best-case scenario in our mind. Bitcoin needs to be scaled very cautiously and prepared for the worst, because as soon as something happens and one of those prediction fails for a period then you are spiraling into a 'doomsday scenario'. It is only a matter of time before things such as Nielsen's and Moore's law die. They are not laws in the traditional sense, they are observations.

Answered by sturle. This is the problem in the community. People are voicing strong support for something/someone when they lack a lot of knowledge/facts.

Neither. I'm disagreeing with the logic used to draw to a conclusion. You've picked out a single aspect that is 'shared' by both proposals. Segwit is superior as it carries many benefits with it which a 2 MB block size limit does not.

Answered by sturle.

The problem is how to define spam. There are enough people that claim transactions with a low fee are spam by default. With that attitude you have paypal fees in no time and 1 of the few bitcoin advantages is gone. Plus it being a big hit for adoption.

And bigger blocks are a solution to spam when it means you have to create way more transactions, including higher fees per block, just to spam these blocks. The recent spams only worked because the blocks reached their limit nearly. So a spammer would have deep pockets and a good reason to spam away his bitcoins to fill bigger blocks.


I always wondered about that point. Are these pseudonodes not detectable through some requests? Should be easy to find out.

And is it not possible to host real nodes on amazon? I mean if you do the work anyway then why not create a real node from the start. Why use a fake node?

By the way... that attack vector is already fixed. There is a BIP that only would need to be implemented in core. Developers didn't till now.

Who are those people?  I have only heard people claim that other people claim this.  I have never once heard anyone claim transacctions with low fee are spam by default.  Ever.  Your straw man doesn't exist.

Spam is pretty easy to spot.  The same coins moving in circles, usually using a fee adjusted just large enough to block a few percent of transactions from wallets paying a low fixed fee.  Then there is the gambling type of spam and the transactions which are pure data-storage, which aren't moving any coins.  Just a fee and an amount of data followed by OP_RETURN.

But why should I allow spammers to fill up my data storage and ADSL line in the first place?  This is the non-solution of trying to pay yourself out of the problem by buying more disk space.  This non-solution will only allow the spammer to pay lower fees.  The total amount of fees the spammer pay to fill a block will not increase, unless you suggest to enforce a minimum fee.

If I could make my transactions on a sidechain instead, however, I could avoid the problem completely.  If the "classic" supporters think large blocks is a good idea, why not create a sidechain using very large blocks, merge-mined with the bitcoin blockchain, and suggest everyone just move their economic activity over to the sidechain?  It will work with the same security as Bitcoin, they can hard-fork to a different block-size, lower transaction size limits, and support whatever features the community wants whenever they feel like it.  They can even fork to multiple sidechains.  Why isn't this even discussed in the "Classic" community?  Simple: The hard fork has nothing to do with block size.  It has everything to do with Coinbase wanting to gain control over Bitcoin to implement their KYC stuff.

A pseudonode is very hard to detect, unless you have a sybil attack running, and manage to get the suspected pseudonode to make an outbound connection to one of your nodes.  In that case you can make an inbound connection to it from another IP, ask for data from the suspected pseudonode, and check if it sends a request for the same data to one of the nodes it has outbound connections to.  If it does, it is probably a pseudonode.

Because it use a neglible amount of resources and no diskspace.  You can use the rest of the resources of your Amazon instance to mine for an altcoin or something.

Which means it isn't fixed.  Yes, segwit fixes it.

I never thought someone would doubt that so I don't have a clue who answered that to me but I heard that pretty often in discussions around this topic. :) Though I'm not sure if some bigger person claimed that. Like a pool owner or something.


If it is so easy then why didn't circulate a script around pool owners to block these transactions? It could have rendered the spam useless. But it didn't happen.

Gambling as spam? They are normal transactions or what makes them spam?

Datastorage... don't you include thinks like colored coins into that too?


I'm not sure, isn't the minimum fee already reality?

Besides that, the spammer having a lower fee than the normal users with their transaction would not fill the blocks and block normal transactions.

Regarding your ADSL line... there are possibilities all the time. Doesn't matter how big of a block size.


A side chain would mean having another wallet and other coins, right? You have to exchange bitcoins and so on. I'm not fully sure but what is moved on the sidechain can be called a bitcoin IOU at max, right?

Coinbase and classic? I have read that some times now. Sounds like a conspiracy theory. I don't see anything pointing to classic getting something implemented that hurts anonymity and such.

Besides that... how should coinbase gain control at all.

Well, doesn't sound convincing. Care to give some details to convince me?


Hm, sounds like one would need a pretty big amount of time, work and money to do this. So the theories that practically all classic nodes are pseudonodes are nothing but a theory yet?


Ah that... though it is possible to run a full node or a normal one, right?

I wonder if it's worth at all anymore to use these hosts for mining. I doubt somewhat since it should be a VPS, so you will have not a lot of cpu power.


Well, if coredevs do not want to include a fix then yes, it is not fixed. But the fix exists and only need to be implemented so anyone bringing out 2mb blocks is safe. Not worth to mention a problem when the solution already exists.

I have heard it in discussions as well, but always as a straw man.  Never anyone actually making the claim, which I find interesting.  Eligius has the most aggressive spam filter among the pools, and Eligius mine free transactions with high enough priority.

Some pools block the spam, but if there was an official script it would be trivial for the spammers to avoid it.  The picture is quite complicated as well.  The hash spam, ending with OP_RETURN, can easily be camouflaged as financial transactions instead.  The OP-RETURN transactions are prunable, the fake financial transactions are not, and will make matters worse by adding unspendable transactions to the UTXO set.

There are right ways to do it, and there are wrong ways to do it.  Satoshidice did it wrong for a long time.  Making each bet a separate blockchain transaction.

I primarily include services like Proofofexistence (https://www.proofofexistence.com/about).  There are many other as well, as you can see here (http://coinsecrets.org/).

No, free transactions are still mined.  (Given enough priority, of course.)

Fees are calculated per kB.  Some stupid wallet implemetations use a fixed fee, which is either very high or very low depending on how the transaction ends up.  Blockchain.info used to be one of them, and may still be.  A 252 byte transaction and a 1000 byte transaction will pay the same fee of 0.0001 BTC.  If a spammer sets his fee per kB to 0.00011 BTC, she will  pay a higher fee than those wallets would calculate for a transaction of 910 to 1000 bytes.  Effectively blocking seemingly (to users of stupid wallets) random transactions for ever at a cost of maximum 0.11 BTC per block.  The real cost is lower, of course, unless all transactions in a block are from the spammer.

No, you can freely move bitcoins between the blockchain and a sidechain, and back.  No need to exchange.  With a little work on a client, you can plug in a sidechain and use them interchangeably.  If you have coins in the sidechain and want to send on the normal blockchain, it will be two transactions.  One on the sidechain and one on the normal blockchain.  If you have coins on the right chain, it will just be a single tx on the right chain.  Here (http://gendal.me/2014/10/26/a-simple-explanation-of-bitcoin-sidechains/) is a good explanation of how sidechains work.

Coinbase is the only noteworthy business supporting "Classic".  Coinbase makes much of their money by doing blockchain analysis and confiscating the funds of people using gambling services, etc.  Just google for "Coinbase froze my account", and see their terms of service.  Coinbase knows that segregated witness will destroy this business model by enabling technologies which make blockchain analysis much harder to impossible.  Instead Coinbase wants a larger blockchain, and they use all kinds of dirty tricks to make that happen.  There is evidence (https://medium.com/@laurentmt/doing-nothing-is-a-choice-2c26376358a2#.y4n8whafw) of Coinbase spamming the blockchain as well, to generate artificial need for larger blocks.

Gavin Andresen works for Coinbase (https://www.coinbase.com/about).

Of course.  It is supported by the fact that the "Classic" nodes on Amazon seem to use a disproportional amount of my outgoing bandwidth, but that is not proof.  I have worked around the problem by throttling my outgoing bandwidth to "Classic" nodes to make my ADSL line usable again.
If you buy enough storage, then yes.

The only other "fix" I know of is to impose a hard limit transaction size, which would take a hard fork to lift.  Considering the amount of noise the current hard fork attempt is making, why do you want to create reasons for more?  Segwit is a much better solution.  It allows for faster validation overall, and it doesn't add extra hard limits on transaction sizes.

Yeah, at least fees should be calculated by the size of transaction. Would be even better when taking the mempools into account.

Though I mentioned "Spamming would not be usefull with zero fee transactions" because 2mb blocks would not make it cheaper to spam. Assuming people would not suddenly lower their fees a lot then spammers would still have to pay the same fee as before too because otherwise the normal transactions would take priority.

So I think spamming should not really become considerably cheaper. I think it would become alot more expensive since the amount of space they would need to fill is way higher. It would cost less again when the 2mb blocks are nearly full.


Coinbase probably can't make money with the frozen accounts. That would be outright theft and they would face lawsuits. Or is the problem that US customers can't sue them because they would have to admit that they gambled on illegal websites?

If that is the case then they surely would be low.

Well, coinbase is creating two transactions per withdraw. I don't really see the need for the second one yet but to assume that they do this to raise the blocksize sounds a bit far fetched. They would have no advantage.

You mention that segwit makes blockchain analysis way harder. How can that be? All the details about every transaction still would be available to everyone wanting to do a blockchain analysis. Or what do you refer to?


Ok, and didn't some core dev lately switch to work for a bank? Besides that, one could see a conspiracy theory behind lightning network and the negation of a raise of the blocksize too. Since what will happen when a minimum transaction will cost $1, $10 or more at one time? I mean LN plans to make bitcon the settlement layer for LN. Which makes companies will decide the fees to be paid in the bitcoin network. The more transactions can be put into one single bitcoin transaction the higher the value of the bitcoin transaction and the higher the fees on the bitcoin network can rise.

So what will happen once the fees rise very high with bitcoin? Nearly no normal user will be able to afford it. Which means it won't take long until we see offers like offers from a bank offering to buy bitcoins directly in the lightning network. Only pushing bitcoins around on there, using a service connected to lightning network.

I mean how does this sound? Like bitcoin being practically in the hand of corporations and bank like businesses? At least it sounds like the very opposite of the initial plan for bitcoin.


Hm, that sounds like a hint at least. Did you check if the traffic is something like "loading blocks to build a blockchain" or does it only look like the behaviour you described for fake nodes? Otherwise it might be that they only were sat up lately and tried to get up to date. Though I guess you already checked.


Ah ok, I was of the impression that is somehow a free service that allows a full or normal node on that space.


Wasn't there a hard fork needed in the near future for classic too? Besides the soft fork for segwit?

Besides that... a fork only on core would surely not bring such uproar like having to go against core. The uproar only comes from people disagreeing with the way the things are handled. A fork for a fix that is not needed yet would be useless of course now. But when other important things would have to be implemented anyway then implementing that fix would be nothing that would bring up trouble.

Even if they did, it doesn't matter. Core consists out of a lot of contributors, employed by various companies.

This is just hyperbolic, fear-inducing, speculation. The thinking behind this is flawed. Why would anyone even consider using Bitcoin if a transaction costs $10 (i.e. when there are much cheaper options)? The Lightning Network is a amazing 'feat' when it comes to scaling Bitcoin. There is no mainstream adoption without it (or some other, yet to be discovered, features), regardless of whether you want to believe this or not. Bitcoin is not efficient and can not process a lot of transactions on the main chain unless you harm its decentralization.

Baseless propaganda. May I ask who slipped this nonsense into your mind?

To most people, especially foreign customers, the cost of a lawsuit will be far higher than the amount which Coinbase confiscated.

You are getting there!  Raising the block size limit has no real value for Coinbase.  Coinbase can easily make a lot more room in the blocks by e.g. batching withdrawals in one transaction a minute or so, like almost everyone else.  What Coinbase want is control over Bitcoin.  If they are able to force through a hard fork, they have succeeded in both taking control over Bitcoin.  They will have the power to stop improvements they don't like, e.g. confidential transactions which depend on segwit.

With segwit the malleability problem is solved.  This means people can move their transactions to side-chains, payment channels, lightning, etc.  Many individual transactions will then be hidden for people doing blockchain analysis.  They can see a coin was taken out by me at an ATM, then returned to the chain by a merchant six months later, but they have no idea where the coin has been in the meantime.  Same as cash.  Segwit makes confidential on-chain transactions possible as well, after a soft fork.  You can see that Alice moved a coin to Bob and Charlie, but you can't see how much went to Bob and how much went to Charlie, or how much Alice kept as change.

Mike Hearn?  He hardly contributed anything.  Even less than Gavin did the past couple of years.

People will use LN to get instant confirmation, not due to fees.  LN will benefit from larger blocks as well.  LN is free software, btw.  There is no company monopoly.  You have to explain how companies can decide the fees to be paid.  You mean miners are organizing in some way, and plan to decide a minimum fee?

If you scale by increasing the block size to accommodate all spam, only corporations will be able to run full nodes.  It is putting Bitcoin in the hands of corporations and bank like businesses.  If you read Satoshi's paper and old postings, this was in fact the initial plan for bitcoin.  He thought that most people would be satisfied by a less secure SPV wallet.

If you enable sidechains and lightning instead, anyone can opt out of high fees and corporations by transacting on a sidechain.  It will still be bitcoin.  100% convertible between bitcoin and sidechains.  You can even have different rules for the sidechain, to enable e.g. free microtransactions.  You can even add decimals on the sidechain, as long as the transactions back to the Bitcoin blockchain are compliant.  Which means the extra decimals will only exist on the sidechain.  And normal people can still have the security and privacy benefits of running a full node at home.  The fee will not increase more than people are willing to pay, of course.  When demand goes down, and the supply stays the same, price will go down as well.  The most fundamental of all economic theory.  If you agree with Satoshi's initial plan, you are free to transact on a sidechain controlled by a bank or corporation, but Bitcoin itself will be as uncontrollable as it is now.

Lightning isn't one network.  You can have as many lightning networks as you want.  I assume most of them will be among people and businesses who transact often with each other.

When you deploy a full node on Amazon, you will of course deploy it with the blockchain pre-loaded on disk to get it up quickly.  Still those nodes seem to ask for blocks quite often.  It makes sense if the nodes are downloading the blockchain, or if it is a request forwarded by a pseudonode.  I haven't done any deeper analysis.

Do you mean Core?  Yes, there is talk about a hard fork to fix a few things.  There is an old wishlist here (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist).  I doubt it will be successful unless it is entirely non-controversial or adds really useful stuff like Schnorr signatures.  Schnorr signatures are a way of combining many signatures into one, taking up much less block space for transactions using multiple inputs.  Why doesn't "Classic" do that instead in their hard fork?  It would be a real benefit, like cheap dust swiping, cheaper coinjoin transactions, and is less controversial.  Ah, of course..  Coinbase doesn't like Coinjoin.  It makes their chain analysis harder.

Since a hard fork will have to be deployed by 100% of users to be successful, I think it is obvious it won't happen as long as people disagree.

Lauda



Well, you really are onesided. The thing you claim an error on the classic side is... of course, fully normal on the core side.


And you spoke about the importance of having to refer to worst case scenarious. It amazes me more and more how onesided you can watch at things. :D

You even seem to advertise LN again only after pushing away potential future risks as hyperbolic and so on. Well, it seems I will stop answering you in this thread too. It simply leads to nothing.


:D What did I say? I'm amazed.

Anyway... you are a true believer and being that it is as hard as with discussing with islamists, hardcore christians or antigermans.

Good luck again...

---

sturle



So they really keep it? They don't hold it as escrow? Well, that is a unique business model when the money is not given to authorities or something. I did not know that company is on such a low level.


But how high is the amount of transactions per block in average that belongs to coinbase? Is it a really big chunk at all? Well, sure they could change it and it might be true that classic developers would do what they want when they pay them. Though corruption like that could easily happen on the core side too, I think. The community would stand against though, I guess.

I'm not sure but I think the usefullness of segwit is accepted more and more. I mean segwit will have a positive effect all the time, even when blocks are higher. Segwit is able to raise the blocksize space on an prozentual level. Which is worth much and way far in the future. Well, of course segwit has to show that the predictions of it's usefullness is true. There are opinions that the target levels are way overexxagerated. At least segwit will come too slow to prevent the blocks being full. Adoption will probably happen too slow.


Hm, that certainly is an advantage though I thought that is already possible now. I did not realize till now that no sidechains exist yet. I thought it should be no problem since there are altcoins that are bound to the bitcoins blockchain security so holding bitcoins in escrow and releasing them to another user after the altcoins were moved did not sound impossible to me. Guess I was wrong then.


Hearn was someone who should have gone since a long time. His intentions did not look pure when one saw what he wanted to implement. I already got the idea he might work for an agency because of his stupid suggestions. Disabling tor, I think tainting coins was from him too.

Anyway, he was not the best example and when Andresen works for coinbase then I see the conflict of interest you refer to.

Well, we might see. If classic agrees to segwit then the theory could break. There should be no real reason against it except maybe gavin's ego. At the moment both sides look not fully convincing for me.


I think if LN gets reality and really would be used a lot while 1mb blocks are still held then it would be obvious that the transactions on LN, merged into one big bitcoin transaction, could have a higher value. Paying $1 on the bitcoin network for one transaction would be expensive. Paying $2 on the bitcoin network for 10 transactions on LN would be cheap. But still those transactions will get the priority, they are more value for the miners and could, if the amount of those transactions rise, push out normal bitcoin users because their fees would be too low and the higher fees would be too expensive.

This only under the premise that the fees on the bitcoin blockchain will rise that high that business models come up that say "bitcoin fee too high? Buy and hold your bitcoins on LN only. Never deal with the bitcoin blockchain. And safe a lot of money." Which would mean we have a somewhat centralized service. Which might be used because it is cheap and could be safer than nowadays exchanges. This company could offer to send the bitcoins anywhere you want. Through payment channels to known services and sites or to other users using the same or a similar service. Transactions into the bitcoin network would still be expensive.

At the end this scenario would mean that the free and anonymous money would not be for the average or poor man. It would be too expensive. Instead we would have companies on LN that could not offer any anonymity. Which would be no problem for most users since they do not do anything wrong. Which sounds like a bank. And the free internet money was taken away from the average people. Free the people from the banks power would have been a failed attempt.


But blocks were never as full as now. We did already raise the size of the blocks, not by changing the limit but because the amount of transactions grew. Iam not aware that we lost half of the nodes from the time where the blocks were only half as full until now.

There was a drop in full nodes. I think that might be normal after implementing the ability to host a normal node that does not store the full blockchain. People decided to safe on that point. If this development stops, then the blocksize is raised then another drop might happen. Though that would be only ideological since the blocks wouldn't be suddenly double that full. After that happened, when the average block size is double from now, then someone could say something about the effect on nodes.

Besides that. I think in the last years alot of bitcoiners left bitcoin. Disappointed about the price development. That might have lead to the node development too.

So there should be many things to consider.


Yeah, I think when segwit enables sidechains then that would be a great thing. Besides having to run another wallet. But it still would mean freedom.

Besides, wouldn't there be explorers about the connection from bitcoin to sidechain address as well as explorer about the sidechain transactions? Those infos should all be public, isn't it?


The hope of satoshi was to complement block halving with rising fees and that should only be achieved by rising the amount of transactions, as far as I know. So something in the plan already went wrong then.

I agree with the sidechain, that's a good thing. But demand going down for bitcoin sound sad. Bitcoin becoming too expensive to use so that demand even drops is not a nice vision.


Didn't know till now. I thought it will be a network that practically will eat bitcoin to use it as their backend database.

Well, let's see how usefull it will become.


Ok. Well, might be that uploading via disk would be the same for the vps's bandwith usage than downloading the blocks from the network. For the person installing it it would mean less work because the node would handle it on his own. Not using the installers home internet bandwith too.


You already got me doubting gavin. :D I think bigger blocks surely is not every nice thing that could get implemented. If I would create an alternative then I would try to add as many usefull features as possible. Well, he might not want it because supporters fear segwit partly and such.


I meant past hard forks were no problem though maybe people now learnt to doubt everything what the core devs do. :D

No, it is fundamentally different.  Bitcoin Core isn't trying to hard fork bitcoin.  If one of the many people who contribute to Bitcoin Core works for a bank, it simply doesn't matter.  He can't change the fundamental consensus, and even if he tries, such change would require support from 100% of nodes.  Hearn didn't contribute much in any case.  He didn't have commit access, and most of his ideas, like denying nodes to connect via Tor, were turned down.  Instead he forked off BitcoinXT before he left to work with some bank stuff.  Most of BitcoinXT has been merged with "Classic".

Yes, they keep it.  If the customer take a claim to the court, it can go either to the customer or to the state, but so far I haven't heard of a single case ending up in court.

Nobody have tried to calculate it as far as I know, but Coinbase is the third largest exchange by volume.  Due to their high fees, I doubt much of it is buying and selling within the exchange, like at BTC China or Bitfinex.  Both of them batch withdrawals, btw, so Coinbase may be the largest single source of transactions on the blockchain.

No.  Bitcoin Core isn't trying to hard fork bitcoin or take control over it.  They maintain Bitcoin within the original consensus.

I don't think adoption will be slow.  Adopters will have a strong economic incentive to do adopt segwit as soon as it has been accepted.  If it isn't, it just means fees are so low that people don't care.

There is at least one private sidechain enabling instant transfers between Kraken, Bitfinex, Xapo and more.  Two-way pegged sidechains are not exactly altcoins.

I think we will be deadlocked.  "Classic" demanding a hard fork berfore segwit (and probably won't implement segwit, or will implement some entirely different form of segwit), and we will have a deadlock where segwit can't gain the required 95%, and "Classic" can't get their ~72%.  Perhaps Classic can be thrown off by a coordinated effort where miners signal support for "Classic" for 1000 blocks, and then return to mine normal bitcoins.  Throwing off the fork without miner support will get rid of "Classic" for a while.

Define a "normal bitcoin user".  Transactions are mined by miners.  Users never had any other influence than trying to interest the miners with fees.  Anyone can be a miner.  Almost anyone can run a node (now).  If Bitcoin is going to scale by increasing the block size, running a full node will be off limits for more people.  Would that be pushing out normal bitcoin users as well, or not?

If we are going to increase the blocksize ten-fold to get the same capacity increase as LN with 10 transactions per block-chain transaction, with the same fee level as you suggest (average $2 per transaction), I won't be able to run a full node at home any more.  I would have to go with a less secure solution with less privacy.  Why is that better for normal users?

I think this is an irrational fear.  A scheme like this will not get much support.  LN is useful for fast transactions, not for holding bitcoins for a long time.  If average people feel cheated, they can make a two-way pegged sidechain, and transact there.  The sidechain used by Kraken, etc, support confidential transactions as well, iirc.

The information doesn't have to be public.  There can be private sidechains where outsiders have no access to the blockchain.  With CT (confidential transactions) the amounts aren't public, but the outputs can be proven to match the inputs.  You can see the transactions between sidechains and Bitcoin, but you won't know which seidechain it was sent to unless you can monitor the sidechain as well.

Hopefully someone will find a way to plug sidechains into Bitcoin Core, and let the user transact on multiple chains without even knowing which sidechain or payment channel a transaction is going to.

Where is "should only be achieved by rising the amount of transactions" from?  Many of Satoshi's plans have turned out differently than he expected.  E.g. GPU/FPGA/ASIC mining instead of every bitcoin user mining on their computer.

Demand for bitcoin is higher than ever.  My turnaround in bitcoin is setting new records every month.

The image will just be uploaded once, then deployed multiple times.

The core devs have done one hard fork in the past.  It was so successful, the chain didn't actually fork.  As far as I know not a single block has been produced on the other side of the fork.  It fixed an unintentional bug due to a quirk in a database library, and was as uncontroversial as a hard fork can be.

So when all we know is sum of Bob, Charlie and Alice change equeals to original Alice 1 BTC, how can we know how much Bob can spend? I assume we never know, but when I receive from Bob 0.8 BTC I get this info (how can I confirm he can spend 0.8 BTC?), and how can I confirm Charlie and Alice change can only spend the remaining 0.2 BTC and not more, like creating up to 3 BTC out of the initial 1 BTC ???

The exact details are over my head.  It is in some way possible to prove the sum of the outputs equal the sum of the inputs without revealing the amounts, and that's all you need to know the transaction is valid.  The amount can of course be decoded by the receiver's private key.

Thank you for your answer sturle... :)

I think satoshi someday mentioned that mining will be done by corporations at the end. It might be that he did not anticipate this becoming true that fast. :)

Sorry to interrupt all you "legendarys." But speaking as one who has to Google practically every post on this forum. Can us poor new era sops "since 2014" please get some definition of terms used here?
e.g. "Classic", "Sybil" etc...
Also, for my 2 cents, the real elephant in the room (and possibly silent partner to the gang of 3/4?) speaking as a Dev from the dark side (Microsoft) is the absolutely shockingly incomprehensible and ummaintainable code these "God like and secretive, ha!" core devs feel that they can get away with.
It is, to me, very excluding.

Please excuse the rant and the iPad keyboard syndrome but I have kept this frustration pent up for far too long.
Thanks for not flaming me in advance.