Bitcoin Forum

https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/btc-developer-causes-controversy-suggesting-300kb-new-block-size-fork-for-lightning-network/

A bitcoin developer actually wants to LOWER !!!!  ??? >:( the blocksize to under a third its current size in order to try to artificially force people to adopt the still not yet ready LN by making bitcoin worse.


Seriously, what the hell is wrong with people in the crypto world?!?

Discuss.

Nothing. People are free to discuss things and free to have ideas. If the consensus will accept them... that's a more complicated story.

However, it's an old idea that came now back to life and it has another form now, not 300k. More exactly:


From what I see, there will be no consensus for that, but it is, however an interesting read. Just go to that thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5109169) (but please let the devs discuss, since it's a Dev & Tech thread).

well, it makes sense from a decentralization perspective.... not from user perspective though

It's not as bad as what you think it is.

Luke DashJr pretty much prefers to prioritize decentralization(people running full nodes instead of your typical software wallets) over transaction speed/cost. With lower blocksizes, transaction fees on the main chain can potentially go higher, while running a full node would cost you significantly less memory. The goal is pretty much to push low-cost transactions to layer 2 solutions like LN.

Is this a good choice? Maybe, maybe not. It's heavily heavily debatable.

Discussion of sort here too - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5109169.0

This has long been a pet of his.

What's more comical is that it's now been appropriated by people who've projectile shat their credibility out the window on the Bcashes and others and see it as a way to upend BTC in the opposite direction this time - https://twitter.com/VinnyLingham/status/1095058871788261377

We're all big blockers now and it's BAD.

Well if the idea is to force people to adopt to the Lightning Network then I would say that the idea is not bad but since the Lightning network is not ready yet, I wouldn't consider to implement this idea.
The Lightning network  should be ready to implement to the real world. If it would be so beneficial then people would adopt it anyway to lower their transaction fees and paying for micro transactions.
But if the LN is not so beneficial then even lowering the block size wouldn't make people to adopt it. They would rather move to an altcoin.
We will get to know how things turn out to be for the Lightning network once it is fully established.

Well then in the goal of decentralization they should just let only one transaction occur every block. Then it could be soooo decentralized right!?

Seriously the logic doesn't make sense: let's hurt bitcoin scaling in order to force people to adopt LN, when the whole point of LN is to help Bitcoin scale. To artificially make bitcoin WORSE in order to force a solution that isn't ready, and will naturally be adopted when its ready and bitcoin can no longer scale to meet demand, is about the dumbest thing I can imagine. If anything the blocksize/blockweight should be increased so that MORE people can join the LN before bitcoin starts shuddering to a halt again on the next bitcoin boom in a couple years.

Decreasing blocksize not only hurts bitcoin, it hurts LN as well! It makes LN less usable because the ability to use the LN (open up channels, close channels, add funds to channels) still relies on bitcoins on-chain tx capacity! Decreasing blocksize hobbles both bitcoin and LN in an effort to force people to use a technology that isn't ready yet and isn't needed yet.

LN is a separat network for multiple coins.
it is not a bitcoin feature.
the secret is in what does N stand for.
its not an exclusive feature to make bitcoin more unique than other coins. its something other coins will have access to aswell

LN was not created to fit bitcoin needs
bitcoin was altered to fit LN's needs.(so was litecoin, vertcoin and others)

as analogies go LN is better to be called thunderdome(mad max)
'2 may enter 1 may leave'
(funds are locked into counterparty controled multisigs(2 may enter))
(channels only really close when one counterparty has run out of funds(1 may leave))

bitcoiners lock up their bitcoins. other users lock up their litecoins, vertcoins.
people transact using unconfirmed 12 decimal tokens with other people that need to be online to accept payment(2flaws)

and in the end if bitcoins network is bottlenecked due to lack of blockspace. and also fee's are high.
those that want to exit the 12 decimal token payment system and try to unlock independent 8 decimal true value, end up choosing the cheaper fee, faster confirm, more accessible altcoins. or staying in the vaulted system(research factories)

meanwhile LN is not a blockchain, not as decentralised, not immutable, no guarantee of confirmation at settle. and other flaws that devs happily admit to
https://youtu.be/8lMLo-7yF5k?t=570

do you really think bitcoin would retain its few $k market price if people are selling them for altcoins.
do you really think bitcoin would retain its few $k market price if no one is retaining bitcoin but prefering altcoins

taking the "burden" off the network.. is a lame excuse for LN. a "burden" created by devs by halting BITCOIN scaling

and for those that want to continue to think LN payments are true bitcoin payments.
write someone a cheque. sign it and hand it to them. let them hold it for a month and pretend you paid them and its all job done.
then watch when they try to settle the cheque and it does not clear(bitcoin doesnt confirm to a blockchain).. i guarantee you that you still owe that person money.. you cannot say that you dont owe that person anything.
LN is an IOU system until the funds are confirmed.
much like zero confirms. its not a real payment until its confirmed

Luke has been pushing the idea of lowering the block size limit for years and years. He's never been able to garner much support from anyone -- other Core developers, the community, or anyone else. Nothing has changed this time. The articles cite two supporters of the idea: BitcoinErrorLog, a social media personality, and Vinny Lingham, who doesn't really support the idea at all and was just joking.

I would expect this discussion to quickly fade away just like it did last time.

it's not "bitcoin developers" plural, but singular.

this proposal isn't gonna gain any traction within bitcoin core. here's greg maxwell earlier today putting that idea to rest:


this is just luke jr being a wingnut---not the first time and not the last time.

yeah i mean its not like i thought it would ever gain traction, since its the opposite of the direction bitcoin needs to be moving. I'm just shocked that someone could even come up with that stupid of an idea and actually promote it.

I hated the idea of not doubling the block size in 2017 which is why I have sympathy for the cash fork.
But now that there are two clearly defined competing visions for the protocol, 300k is a necessary step towards the BTC vision. The actual GOAL is high fees and everyone using LN instead - dropping block size will definitely speed up the process. There's no time to waste in crypto.
And although I disagreed in 2017 I wish LN and its supporters best of luck, I hope they succeed.

I think fees should rise over time given Bitcoin's incentive design, but I don't see any good reasons to lower the block weight limit. The fee market is working fine and fees will rise when usage starts spiking again.

We wouldn't gain much by lowering the limit. Block propagation delays aren't a major problem right now. Things like FIBRE have resulted in minimal orphan rates. As for initial sync time, it's too late for a size reduction to do much at this point. It would be many years too late to have much effect.

Aye. If you halved or more the rate at which the chain is growing it's still going to be a 99% turn off to most. You'd have to be a very specific person to find 350gb fine and 500gb not. At present it would probably take my connection about 60-70 hours to download it. No idea about syncing but that seems to be the one that bothers more people.

uhh you don't understand what the goal is at all. Or I guess more likely you are just trolling. God I hope you are trolling.

In no world is the goal to have high fees. The goal is to handle lots of transactions and have the mining incentive profitable enough to secure the network. There is no goal of high fees, that is absurd. There WILL be VERY high fees on any decentralized blockchain that sees even a hint of mass adoption, because decentralized blockchains can't handle anything near mass adoption. Which is why LN is needed. LN is not needed so that we can artificially create high fees by making bitcoin LESS capable that it currently is (and has always been) thus making LN be needed earlier. That's like saying: "Electric cars are the future, let's start intentionally making gas cars much worse than they are in order to force people to buy electric cars even though they aren't ready at mass market prices".

The goal is scalability and that will take the LN in conjunction with on-chain scaling to be achieved. On-chain shrinking is the opposite of the goal.

Is pruning a viable option in the future? I mean eventually the blockchain is gonna be multiple terabytes and continuing to grow. At some point its gonna need to start pruning old transactions. Even with increased network speeds and cheaper and larger hard drives pruning is gonna be needed at some point. There's no reason to keep decades of transaction data when 95+% of it isn't needed.

As I understand, the biggest hurdle for most people with bootstrapping a node isn't download bandwidth but hardware/computing limitations for verifying blocks and updating the UTXO set.

That's why things like Libsecp256k1 seem so important, and why this soft limit idea just seems like a kludge by comparison. Optimizing bootstrapping inefficiency seems like a better route than arbitrarily adding new throughput limits that will just slow down the damage slightly and linearly.

Like I said, this is a hugely debatable topic. I myself haven't decided if I am really for this or not, but I'm leaning significantly more against the "no" side.

Based on the past tweets of Luke DashJr, he's always been a person that heavily prefers decentralization than scalability. Just like some bitcoin devs, he's leaning a lot more on the "big transactions on layer 1, smaller transactions on layer 2". I would somewhat agree on that, if only LN was ready. And yes like you said, it isn't really ready yet. His proposed solution is a temporary blocksize decrease by the way; but yea, I'm still not 100% decided.

Is it debated?? This is the first time I've ever heard of this idea of decreasing the blocksize. Sounds like its just this one guy who happens to be a bitcoin dev who has this absurd idea. Pretty sure its not close to a hugely debated topic outside of this one guy's mind.

Anyway it doesn't really matter. Nobody would accept this and other bitcoin devs have already called the idea lunacy essentially, which is what it is.

What I meant by saying the topic being debatable is that the topic is very arguable; because though I'm for this blocksize decrease like I said(because I don't think a blocksize decrease is going to get people to run full nodes anyway), the sort of proposal is not 100% nonsense. I wasn't saying that it was literally debated. Focusing on decentralization is good, but this decrease is a little bit too much that could hurdle adoption.

haha, i was wondering when someone is going to post this here ever since the drama began :D


the discussions will remain for much longer as they have been around for a long time before this. it is just that there was some drama on Twitter recently which these shitty news sites are picking up and turning it into a big deal just because they are desperate for traffic.

#10kPost

It absolutely is 100% nonsense. Proposing to do the opposite of what bitcoin needs is nonsense. Period.

it seems to me like you have just heard about Luke for the first time!
he has been around for a long time and as far as i can remember majority of his ideas are nonsensical. if you found this little one strange then you should never check out his other stuff or your head would explode ;)
the last biggest one was BIP148 in my opinion which he was pushing for while misleading people into believing forking bitcoin with no hashrate support is ok and is not going to split bitcoin.
fortunately the decentralized bitcoin system has always rejected silly ideas no matter who proposes them.

actually luke JR in late 2015 proposed segwit2mb could activate without splitting the network.
Luke then backed out and pretended he was nothing more than a insignificant janitor/chimnet swep very early 2016 and could not possible code segwit2mb into core.

then came the segwit1x and they tried that in november 2016 hoping to activate by christmas 2016.. yet by spring 2017 it only got 35%, because it was only segwit1x. not the segwit2mb(2015 agreement)

what came next was to ensight some social discord with a 3 card shuffle trick.
the bip148 did actually occur on august first. the blockchain itself can attest to that.
but your explanation of it is wrong.
bip148 is about mandating that hashrate flag approval for segwit1x or find themselves thrown off the network on august first.
meaning 148 was a AT REAL CODE LEVEL a controversial hardfork(pre activation mandated approval or else) to fake approval for segwit1x (but social dramatised as a 'user assisted soft fork'... they even made hats to hide the real controversy it caused)

another of the card tricks was the investors paying luke and samson mow and others to get segwit active. falsely offered a segwit2x(not segwit2mb). this was the NYA where they employed BLOQ devs to write a client.. but this was not a real proposal to get 2x active, but a ploy to get 1x active by saying 2x would only activate later if 1x gets activation first.

the other card trick was bitcoin cash. as the alternative choice network to funnel x1 opposers off the network, making 1x opposers feel they had somewhere to go to rather than fight off 1x.

if you follow the portfolio of DCG and see blockstream, bloq, NYA agreed parties, and yes even ver, were all tied togther.. youll see the 3 card shuffle that got 1x activated ven though there was 35%-65% controversy over it.

anyway. moving on. years later bitcoin scaling hasnt really happened we are stil below the 600k transactions a day threshold(7tx/s) and it seems all the devs and the DCG portfolio care about now is the commercialisation of LN to give investors returns on investment. while trying to 'deburden' bitcoin of utility.

anyway, i think that this social drama of lukes this week is just a psy-op of reverse psychology to later say that onchain scaling cant happen because luke proved that devs have no power.. yet. we all know that now core is in power. that if devs were serious about something they could easily pull the pin and activate whatever they like.. as shown august 2017

If you can spend millions for purchasing the mining machines in a farm do you really think they do have money to accommodate a terabyte hard disk for the whole process, what is the big deal about it, in the initial phase there were not much transaction and hence we did not need to have a bigger block size and that does not mean that they should not increase when the transaction increases in the future.
I only have one doubt regarding the LN, how can you trust the people behind those network, we have seen exchanges functioning for a while and running off with the money, how can we be certain that nothing like that happens in those nodes.

Yes absolutely this is the first time I've ever heard of this guy. I don't like personally pay attention to bitcoin devs. I have no idea who any them are outside of seeing some of their names occasionally in articles about bitcoin's early days. I don't social media follow people. Never heard of this guy in my life before yesterday.

Don't worry I would have no intention of ever looking into what else he has said or have the slightest care about him. Clearly from this first time I've ever heard about it is obvious the guy is crazy.

That's not how lightning network works. If they run off with the money on their nodes, they are running off with THEIR OWN money.

Totally agree with your first statement. To anyone going through the expense of buying mining equipment, buying the storage for the blockchain is nothing. And yeah gradually bigger blocks will be needed and it makes perfect sense to increase it, but do it smartly over time as network speeds improve and whatnot so that it doesn't promote centralization. Last thing Bitcoin needs to do is become Bitcoin Cash (which is begging to be centralized if only anyone would ever adopt it).

I think it's a bad solution, lowering blocksize will only cause the network to be denser. maybe the impact will be like before, many transactions are delayed very long.

might be worth you checking on that, you'll be shocked by what you find. LN is multisig.
even devs themselves have admitted they lost funds, and their the ones coding it
there are many ways a user can lose value in LN due to others.

Many people are trying to make changes and help Bitcoin work to achieve new technologies that can compare to existing platforms. This caused everything to turned upside down, and the market was negatively affected.

i've done my research. thanks. LN does not run like an exchange, which is what this guy was implying, where at any time someone could just run off with your money. That's simply not true. Otherwise LN wouldn't be a solution to anything.

firstly
learn multisig, learn revoke codes/punishments. learn blackmail attempts learn co-signing.
there are multiple ways to run off with funds.

here ill even pre-empt you with an attack vector when schnorr is incorporated

imagine a multysig. person A and B
person A believes it to be a 2-2 multisig channel of duel/even control. which is the bases of LN's trust of mutual trust-mutual destruction.
2 parties have to agree else there is no agreement
both agree both win
both dont agree both lose

now. imagine its not an actual 2-2 but in reality is a 2-3.. where by person B has 2 keys and A only has 1
suddenly B has control. and guess what A wont even realise it. A wont even be able to tell who signed what.
whether it was a 2-2 where A got hacked and someone stole A's key or if B did make a 2-3 under schnorr and hid the 3rd key

.. there are other ways to mess and steal funds right now under LN. LN devs know about a few of them. and yes the LN devs themselves have mentioned how they (even while they are the devs) have been victims to thefts

secondly
LN is not a solution to anything. its just another network/service/choice. it should never b though of as a solution to bitcoin.
thos that call it a solution. or call it the only way forward are those that have already given up on bitcoin and think alt networks/centralised services/fiat-esq business models are superior than bitcoin

lastly
LN does/will function like an exchange. heck in 2012-13 i was arbitraging btc between 2 exchanges without the blockchain, by doing so with exchanges features using their locked reserves.(btc-e/mtgox/bitstamp codes)

locking funds up with others. (custodian)
using the confirmed 8 decimal blockchain UTXO, to then create lists of non-blockchain tx's(12 decimal) in some google/mysql database(exchanges have a separate 'blance/trade' database thats not blockchain)
atomic swaps(market orders)

The point of view of one developer though can't really change anything unless he convince a lot more.

I believe the question we should be asking is why exactly that developers wants to do that right now. Why not wait a bit more and then do a movement like that? When it could possibly be necessary, not right now.

I particularly agree that it might be needed in the future but not yet.

because there is a big conference/convention thing happening soon where all the devs and merchants and miners get together and they try to discuss possible movements forward.

the thing is if certain devs can distract the topics. and get merchants and miners only talking about staying as is or decreasing. .. the devs win the true desire of not increasing.

they tried it before by trying to turn a comfortable and acceptable growth(small regular increases like 2009-2015 had). but then exaggerated it into a myth of "gigabytes by midnight" to sway even topics of small comfortable SCALING to not get discussed.

now i believe they are gonna try the opposite try to make the options only stay same or drop down.. just to avoid any comfortable SCALING onchain..

and if that fails. the devs will just pretend that they are just mere chimney sweeps and have no coding talent to implement anything that opposes the core roadmap

We need another Bull run for people to see how ridiculous this suggestion is. During the last Bull run, the small Block size was one of the things that were hampering progress and adoption. I agree that spamming of the network to push for a fork, was also part of this problem at the time, but it might just happen again.

The Lightning Network is not even close to readiness for mainstream adoption and smaller Block sizes will harm Bitcoin if the LN fails and small Block sizes were implemented.  :P

of course it'll happen again, since there are still big stakeholders interested in lowering fees on the network. just like we saw in 2016-17, they'll use high fees as a political ploy to fork bitcoin.

but are you sure that small blocks were hampering adoption? there were certainly some complaints---particularly from a small group of very loud big blockers---but i don't think there's evidence that small blocks ever caused adoption to slow down. i believe a great deal of bitcoin adoption is speculative (investment-based), and i don't think investors care much about fees. and among regular users, there's plenty of people who are willing to pay higher fees too. (especially if offchain solutions like LN exist)

anyone saying they would ever pay extra for something, has a motive.
would you ever go to a car dealership and see a car for $30k. and be like.. i dont like the price of the car. so can i have the exact same car but ill pay you $200k for it

would you ever go to a house landlord and see a house for $3k a month. and be like.. i dont like the price of the rent. so can i have the exact same house but ill pay you $20k for it

you can smell the alterier motive, especially if they then go on and say they will use another network to pay less.. and promote how other networks are cheaper and such.
if they wanna pay extra. then they should be the ones that dont use LN. they should put their fee's where their mouth is, stay on the bitcoin network and pay extra if they truly desire seeing fee's rise.

not fee war UP the bitcoin network for others. and then they themselves run off to other networks.

imagine an analogy of transport networks (trains and buses)

its like a bus network. and some train company comes along spouting how buses have issues. but the train driver will happily pay more for buses if buses just up their fee's..
so buses up their fee's and the train driver then just goes and drives a train around giving out cheap tickets telling people to get off the bus as its expensive and slow

then some numbskull bus driver thinks another way to raise up bus fee's is to turn a double decker bus into a single decker bus.. then if it all happens. he then goes and gets a job on the trainline AND gets a back hander from the companie investing in trainlines

I remember a plenty of posts from dabblers screaming about how a massive chunk of their dabble was lost in the sending so I think yes to an extent. If your first toe dip results in much of your play evaporating you're going to be turned off for quite some time, if not for good. Enough narked minnows is the same as one big swinging dick.

you also gotta think about the millions of people where an onchain fee is more than an hours wage.
even if they lock funds up to then play with LN.. they still gotta pay upfront just to get into LN

remember the good old days where even a homeless man could just random generate a keypair for free.. publicise it anywhere for free and hope to get paid day or night without authorisation.. needing to be online or having a partner involved in signing for payment.

LN's concept is people need to open channels pre-funded counterparty agreed, just to cover punishments and close session costs. thus LN is not a open system once fully conceptualised start to finish

you also then gotta think about those who wanna get out of LN and just sole-hold their own asset in their own privat key. if its gonna cost them XX to convert the 12decimal pegged LN token to a 8decimal bitcoin.. but far cheaper to convert it to say litecoin.. guess what

18th century banking. gold goes in.. play with unadited paper.. silver and copper come out

If you know so much about it and how to do a better job why don't you stop spreading FUD and show uss what you got at the Github?

The last time he encountered a real developer on here it was not a pretty sight. I'll leave it to your imagination as to who came off worse.

The design for Bitcoin was always dependent on users paying fees. Not to mention the fact that you need to buy (or mine) bitcoins first in order to use them. There have always been -- and will continue to be -- upfront costs just to use Bitcoin.

Once you've paid enough fees for two (or four or six) onchain transactions to open Lightning channels, you can make far more offchain transactions than that. Paying less fees for more transactions, with a security model that leverages Bitcoin's blockchain -- what's to complain about?

Smaller Blocks = Less SPAM. Less pollution.

or middle-out ...

- https://www.quora.com/Is-middle-out-compression-real   :D