Bitcoin Forum

Hi Folks,

I hear more and more that if the blocksize debate is not coming to an agreement until the halving in summer Bitcoin will die, blow up, whatever. I dont understand the depdency between reward halving and the blocksize debate.

Thanks to everyone in advance for a short Explanation

why it should die? at worst bitcoin will remain "crippled" due to the fact that real adoption will not take place which such a limitation, if they do not come up with anything else

Here is the scenario:

It is assumed that the halving will create a steep rise in the price of a bitcoin, and this will cause a huge increase in the movement of bitcoins in and out of exchanges. The transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network is limited by the maximum block size. Some people are afraid that the increased exchange traffic will far exceed the network capacity to the point where most transactions cannot be confirmed. The appearance of a frozen network will cause panic. Everyone will dump their bitcoins and leave. Bitcoin will die.

I think it is safe to say that the above scenario will not happen. Every event in the scenario, from the steep rise in price to the abandoning of Bitcoin, is very unlikely to happen.

you don't understand the depdency because there is none between these two!

the block size debate is argument about increasing the size of each block from 1MB to something else because blocks are full and more users means more tx and more unconfirmed tx,...

the halving is the reward that miners get for mining a block which will go from 25 to 12.5

i don't see why bitcoin should die when these two come together!

here is a summary of some numpty's prophecies

"bitcoin needs to double capacity and increase the fee to cover the miner income loss, meaning 4000tx needs to be $1.25 each to cover the $5k loss"
(i know facepalm right)

"miners will die off after the blockreward halving. its going to happen and no one can forsee it because its never happened before"
(i know facepalm right)

"the hard drive costs for miners would be billions of dollars, which miners cannot afford after the reward halving"
(i know facepalm right)

so lets clear this up
1. the bitcoin fiat price will rise to cover sotoshi losses
2. there are more miners AND pools then there were in 2012. the last time the reward halved.
3. lets say we have the max filled blocks of 5.7mb (2mb+segwit+payment codes). thats 300gb a year. or 1.5tb for 5 years.. basically $100 for a 2tb hard drive can hold that. and it wont be full in under 5 years because even with 5.7mb max potential. the reality will be a slower usage of that capacity growing slowly over time. secondly unscrew an ASIC and you wont see a hard drive. miners do not need hard drives(just pools) and so its not going to increase the cost of mining

I agree with OP.
At least insofar as price increase. The block size needs to be resolved now, a month of security, and then the hype of the halving, if we hope to get the most out of this once-in-a-four-year event.

Otherwise nothing will happen except the shutting down of some of these mining farms.

If the block sized still no resolve i think bitcoin will not die and the price still the same as today price..
Bitcoin will not die and we are uses it as payment or money here online. also in any company online...
So its impossible...

segwit or 2MB will come very soon.

everything will be fine.

segwit AND 2mb combined will be coming soon.. but not soon enough,
nothing bad will happen. but instead of stagnating (staying the same) for a year, if done sooner then bitcoin can grow and expand unhindered.

Blocks aren't full, well some are, but there is still surplus capacity. So there is no crisis. If people stopped spamming transactions, and distorting the traffic flow, then we could come to a decent planned growth. Not fasll for some bid by miners to try to centralise mining.

I share your frustration with how long its taking to get some kind of capacity increase...
1 year ago chinese miners were ready to agree to 8MB max block limit  after much consideration, and here we are, made to wait another 2 months probably more, for a tiny increase to "effective" block size....
but once segwit is released and widely adopted ( fingers crossed! ) we'll get nearly double capacity, which should be good enough for now.

short term looks good to me.
long term, i strongly disagree with Core devs. i believe there plan makes very little sense economically, and will cost bitcoin its spot as #1 crypto.

agreed they want their side chains.
its people in the blockstream camp hoping NXT or monero will be a sidechain.. (fools),
hoping that they get to be billionaires by hoarding worthless alts.

what you're not understanding? by having a limit on how many transactions you can have per second, big adoption increase thanks to big merchants like amazon will never come into play

That is a point I understand that during halving, Right before and right after the volumes could increase very strong.

After halving, the supply of new coins will be reduced. So I think the trading volume of bitcoin will reduce.

He wanted to tell you that your answer had nothing to do with the question ;) He asked what the problem with the missing consensus and the halving is. It has less to do with adoption. Look at the answer of franky1 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1413141.msg14324110#msg14324110) to see what the OP wanted to know.

There seems to be different concerns, before or after the Halving happens...

~ The transactions will increase, as people hype the shit out of the Halving event and then the blocks will fill up and people will not be able to do these transactions. {New people will leave}
~ The miners rewards after the Halving will not be enough to cover their expenses and they will stop mining.
~ Transactions will go down after the Halving and would not be enough to supplement the miners income lost by the Halving event. {Miners Fee's}

Well, All of this is just speculation at this time.... I foresee a increase in transactions building up to the Halving and just there after, and then a drop in transactions... but still higher than today. The

unprofitable miners will leave and the difficulty will decrease, creating opportunities for other people to take those spots. The miners fee & transactions will climb slowly as adoption grows and will

eventually fill the income, lost by the Halving of the miners rewards.  ;)

the halving has nothing to do with the consensus about the block limit, i mean if there will be no consensus and we remain at 1mb, it's not like the miners will face any drop in their earning due to the block limit, but it will be due to the halving itself

their profit come only by the demand , and demand can increase only if there is an increase in transaction one day, so yes my snwer has everything to do with the OP, not directly, but you can see the whole picture now

many miners from outside of China will stop mining because the BTC will not cover their expenses. let's admit it that all the miners will lose half of their profits over night. the demand will be the same.

any raising of the block limit means an altcoin.

404512    12 minutes    1020    11,361.54 BTC    AntPool    561
404511    21 minutes    492    2,300.51 BTC    AntPool    258.23
404510    26 minutes    149    1,391.25 BTC    AntPool    120.73
404509    26 minutes    458    4,397.90 BTC    BTCC Pool    212.47
404508    30 minutes    840    8,244.73 BTC    F2Pool    546.94
404507    37 minutes    1295    7,773.54 BTC    AntPool    883.73

It's a good job that all you guys who say that blocks are full don't work in my local pub. :)

thanks for show us that block are not full,honestly i'm also dont understand aout block debate,i'm not bitcoin miner,and dont reall interesting to that,so can you explain me about your stats above? ;D

Blocks arn't full at the moment because the number of transactions has dropped. See

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc.html

They were 163,440 in the last 24 hours, compared to 270,000 on March 2nd.

You know that article last week from blockchain.info saying transactions were down - turns out they weren't just down for them.

Users are voting with their feet and using other alts to move money around.

If you mean moving money between exchanges with altcoins, then probably. There is no other use for such altcoins though, so voting is bad word. If you are not in Speculation/Trading then altcoins are just useless (maybe darknets and scammers appreciate usage of some anon coins, I have no experience with this though).

The halving will reduce the production of bitcoins by only about 1.5% of the BTC trading volume on exchanges -- hardly a significant change.

who cares about chinesse miners who already earned MANY millions? anyway, everybody wants cash. nobody cares anybody.

make cash now and don't care what it will be in August :)

I don't understand why bitcoin will not die if the block size has no resolve?
I think if there's no block size, game is over, right?
or am I wrong? CMIIW

if you have a doubt in that,  you make cash by your bitcoins... if you wish to earn in halving just hopld on some coins.. you can follow this if blocksize is not coming to a solution during halving...

That is a small sample of 6 blocks (out of ~144 that are found every day), and this small of a sample is not statically significant.

Ignoring the above, I would point out that, on average blocks are found once every 10 minutes, however in your sample, there were 6 blocks found in 37 minutes, which means those blocks were found at a rate that is almost double what is expected over the long term. When blocks are found more frequently, then there will be less transactions to be included in each block if you assume there is no present backlog. There will however be some periods when an entire hour (or longer) goes by when no blocks are found, and during that time transactions will continue to be broadcast that will need to be confirmed once the next block is found. You also fail to take into consideration that the number of transactions is not even throughout the day, as there will be spikes of transactions as people tend to spend money at specific times, for example 3PM eastern time (US) is probably a time when a lot of people are sending transactions because it is a period when many people throughout the US are potentially on their lunch break, and people in Europe are potentially just getting home from work, both would be when people will be more likely to be spending money for one reason or another.