Bitcoin Forum

Preface:

I've been thinking about this for a few months now (and please correct me if I'm wrong), but Lightning is absolutely bad for Bitcoin in my eyes.

I'm a person who always thinks far into the future, and doesn't like to discard things after 5 years because they turned out to be shit, so I want to raise my concerns here early to maybe spur one or the other not to rest on half-finished, possibly later useless soluions. Because as we know - innovation must not be slowed down by a "possible solution", we definitely have to continue working on a meaningful scaling for BTC.

Why?

First of all, why do we all love Bitcoin? Because it's brilliant, and totally secure!

Now let's think around the corner a bit. What if Bitcoin is really established in the world? And let us not talk about established as a sort of money / payment solution, but "only" as digital gold. Because the first one would be most worse.
 
Bitcoin is currently able to process around 600,000 transactions daily (this is a roughly rounded number. At a TPS average of 7), the actual number is slightly higher. Since I'm from Germany, I'll take this country as a reference with its nearly 80 million inhabitants.

In 2019, there were about 10.65 million children under the age of 14 living in the Federal Republic of Germany, which means I take them out of financial transactions (although they might also like to have a BTC savings account). Remains round 70 million people, If only 50% of them use bitcoin as a "Save Heaven", which is for me more than logical with a mass-adoption this technology definitely deserves, we are at 35 million people in the small country of Germany alone hold their reserves in Bitcoin. (in the rest of the world there are still 7.7 billion people!!).

It would take the equivalent of 58 days for each of those 35 million people to make a transaction with the mainlayer. If only ONE THIRD of the worldwide humans ever wanted to make a transaction with the mainlayer, this would take 4290 days! As an example, a person who pays into his pension every month could only do so every 4290 days! (earliest!)
 
So far to the problem, this is known to us, and why "we" research things like Lightning.

Unfortunately, we now realize that based on the above figures, not even so-called settlement transactions or individual transactions on my Mainnet wallet would be possible, unless I pay fees that are so high that they are no longer in any relation. EVERYTHING that will ever happen on BTC would only happen on the semi-secure second layer which is still in its infancy after 5 years. (Including all of my savings, which I may have set aside for my retirement, would exist for my lifetime only as LBTC, and possibly be managed by a custodial service).

Where is the advantage to the current system? We trade security for speed and scale (what many criticize about the so-called "altcoins" becomes mandatory for BTC).
Yes, there remains the security of the hard cap that protects us against inflation, but is this worth the insecurity of every individual who may have to lock up their life savings in a smart contract for 50 years because they cannot make a mainnet transaction? In such a case, will the main layer even be able to reliably map the values of LN?

How will the onboarding process look like? If a new person wants to buy BTC, they can't even send the BTC from the exchange to their own wallet because the mempool is always on his limit. Should exchanges also trade LBTC only in the future? In the long term, this will completely eliminate the "good" BTC for LBTC.

I believe that solutions have to scale the main layer at least a little more, we cannot sit back until the supposed hope carrier Lightning is "ready".
What would happen if bitcoin adoption comes in 2021? We would not be ready for it. Neither the Mainlayer, nor LN or Liquid would withstand such an amout of people and their needs.

REMEMBER: this is only the case if we have a truly adopted BTC! (Which most Bitcoiners aiming for ASAP.)

Please don´t give all your hopes only to Second layer solutions.

Let the technical discussions begin.

 

You're damn right but there is even a bigger problem. As the LN gets more popular there will be more and more fraudulent transactions using space on the main block chain and with a 1MB block size limit that could be problematic. BTC's creator talked about increasing the block size limit as the demand for space increases but he never talked about segwit or a L2 solution.. in my opinion BCH is the real Bitcoin and ETH is the future!  ??? :o 8)

So we raise the block size to 8mb and then what do we do whenever that isn't enough? I am not against reducing or limiting the scaling problem by increasing block size but it doesn't really solve anything, no matter what you do, you can never beat the ordinary system in terms of speed and cost, blockchain is slow and expensive, this isn't exactly an issue it's more like some of its main characteristics, Paypal payments that are done on one server or a few at most will always outperform blockchain at its main layer, this isn't my opinion it's just how things are, saving a transaction on tens of thousands of computers isn't suppose to be faster and cheaper than visa or PayPal.


The second point which I feel the need to explain since you mentioned that you are from Germany which also goes to folks in the U.S and the other first-world countries, the internet is decades behind in most other places, where I live even with the current block size only a few people can run a full node or directly mine to their own node, 1MB of bandwidth is a big deal here, it's hard to believe because you just pay a fraction of your salary for a 100mbps or even 500mbps connection with unlimited quota, but elsewhere, you can hardly get a 1mbps line with very limited monthly quota, as it stands now, I can't even propagate a 1MB block in a timely manner. By increasing the block size you simply send many players out of the game.

Another point is the fact that your transaction will be saved on tens of thousands of computers and it would take years and billions of dollars to re-do the blockchain, it really has to come at a cost, getting your transaction on the blockchain is more secured than saving your money in the safety deposit boxes at your local bank, it is worth a lot, and someone has got to pay for it,  and at the end of the day, why would you want your 1$ transaction to be saved on the main layer?

One last thing, let's assume we solved the issue of block size, what about confirmation time? say the transaction fee is zero due to unlimited block size, will you be able to pay for coffee when relying only on the main layer? will the shop wait for 10 or 20 minutes until the transaction is confrimed before serving you coffee?

At this point in time how many people who do not have good fast internet are really mining to a local node?
Coming from a 1st world county as you put it, I could be seeing this wrong but...
If you are running a mining farm that has enough power to realistically find a block, between the hardware and the cooling and everything else is good bandwidth that much more? I am not being snarky, I just don't know.

If you are running a small home miner as a "lottery" miner. You really should be mining to a solo pool out there. Between hardware issues, network issues, etc. It's probably not worth doing it yourself. Hell, I can barely keep a small server up for 2 minor scrypt coins. And it's on a real (if old) Dell server in a real data center.

-Dave

Lightning isn't meant to solve Bitcoin's scaling issues and neither are sidechains. They are only protocols that extend Bitcoin's functionality while maintaining the base layer secure and decentralized. If we throw that out the window in favor of putting a band-aid on the problem then Bitcoin is no different than any altcoin.

Plus the big blockers have lost the idea of Bitcoin's main value proposition, not speed, but Censorship-resistance. Which requires the network to scale out to be more secure. And it is better to go for more security than less security.

You guys got me wrong. I´m NOT talking about simply increasing the block size, this would not be work in the long therm. If its not the bandwith who limit this, the disc space will do so definitelly earlyer or later. I also didnt want a discussion between big and small blockers here. Its a fundamental problem a lot of people misunderstand and need to be solved in a rational way, ahead of everyones personal financial interests here!



you absolutelly missed my point. You can´t even use the base layer as you can read in my first post! THIS IS SOMETHING NEED TO BE SOLVED! simply to say this has to be limited, is in the worst case a death for bitcoin at a mass adoption!

and again: to solve the problem isn´t simply increasing a blocksize or anything, its a complex dilemma that needs a lot of research!

think logically!
 

People who learn technical side of Bitcoin (or P2P system in general) already know there's no single solution for scaling problem, even LN have 2 main disadvantage,
1. LN is only meant for micro-transaction
2. LN only useful if you make transaction regularly (at least more than 2 transaction within channel duration)

As for solution on base-layer, there are few option,
1. Schnorr signature
2. Using different number representation on transaction/block (e.g. Increase block size (5%) by using CompactSize instead of UInt (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1700405.0))
3. Just increase block size based on lowest growth of computer hardware and internet speed on 3rd/developing world country.


It's naive question, but how limited is the monthly quota? 100GB? 10GB? or just 1GB?


Actual block propagation uses compact block (where it's size only few KB) though

Most of us here are on CGNAT networks and that means we don't get the privilege of getting static IP addresses unless we buy an expensive fiber line which itself isn't as fast as you think, they can transmit data across the internet at ~50mbps instead of gigabit speeds that would be expected from fiber. And fiber is really only available st universities and large institutions/companies.

The rest of us chaps are stuck with either buying ADSL broadband or a wireless 3G or 4G/LTE data plan. The wireless plans as you'd expect from a third-world country have high latency (because all the remote servers are on some other continent) and have speeds that aren't really suitable for mining or running a full node. We're talking around 10mbps here which is barely enough to push a 1MB block out in a second.

The ADSL lines in my country of residence are actually quite bad and do at most 512kbps up and 4mbps down, but I expect some other third-world countries to have slightly better speeds than this. But even those are still around the speed you get from LTE so you still have all of those lagging connection problems as you do with a data plan. And this is to say nothing about how you are supposed to broadcast your node when your IP is dynamic.

Power isn't a problem though, private generators are readily available here and it isn't too difficult to hire electricians to set up a building's electrical systems for one.

Replying to all without quoting:

Even here in the US (NY) you don't get static IP unless you pay for it usually along with other "required" upgrades.
Most providers classify it as a business class service which is a lot more. But in reality you don't need static for anything BTC related.

But, outside of the initial download you really don't need that much up or down.

As ETFbitcoin said with compact blocks it's actually a small propagation. You still have to have a copy of the mempool on your node so that is where the bandwidth is needed. \
Block size really does not matter at that point (much) 1M, 2M, 4M if you are running a node you still have to have the full current mempool if you are really mining.

For some reason people have gotten it into their heads that running a node requires a stupid amount of power all the time.
Yeah, for the initial sync more ram more CPU is better but a RPi4 does a fine job of it.

Using Amazon US store:
RPi4 with metal case for cooling and power supply $85: https://amzn.to/3hyi2H2
1TB USB SSD $100: https://amzn.to/3hyznzv

All you need after that is a micoSD card so for under $200 you have a fulling running node.

And here is the fun kicker. You can be running you own lightning node too.
There are at least 2 "nodes in a box" that you can install that do all the work for you.

mynodebtc: https://www.mynodebtc.com/ bitcoin / lightning and some other stuff all ready to go. You can pay $99 to unlock more features if you want but its 100% functional without doing that. AND it allows you to use both your BTC & Lightning node on TOR out of the box.

raspiblitz: https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz A bit better setup, not as user friendly, does a bit less BUT I have had one up close to a year now with no issues that I did not create myself

Not I know in many parts of the world where $200 is a ton of money. I don't have a good answer for that. Yes, you can probably put together a used PC system for a lot less, but other then that I have no good idea.

-Dave

I will start with criticizing some of your examples. And it won't be that much technical, sorry.
If your BTC savings will be handled by a custodian service, then it will be able to optimize the transactions, making some of them off-chain or grouping (many) more of them in one transaction.

From my understanding on LN, settlements should not be necessary after some time, since the transactions would flow in both directions between nodes, and the nodes that needs settlements often (or at all) will become unproductive and will be shutdown.

Since Bitcoin is meant to become at some point a coin for every day use, LN (or something like that) is necessary in order to avoid the need for waiting at the grocery store many long minutes for blockchain confirmations.
So it has its own use, not necessarily for your problem.

For your problem I think that "the world" will auto-adjust. Your numbers (I'm in criticizing mode, remember? :)) forget that if that many people will have Bitcoin, most probably the amounts owned by the most would be under network dust amount, hence cannot be transacted on-chain (and no, it's not simply 21M/3B)

All in all:
1. normal people will use a few Satoshi at the grocery store on LN or similar
2. normal people will probably use custodian service for Bitcoin-as-digital-gold, hence there the number of transaction I expect to be far less than what you predict
3. the few lucky ones with coins in their own wallet will be rich enough to not mind the high network fees for fast processing in case of occasional spend

I think that this kind of problems have to be cleared up before doing research in the direction of changing Bitcoin at its core.

Increasing the block has nothing to do with resistance to censorship. This is another misconception that occurs in the Bitcoin community.

In order to introduce censorship in the Bitcoin system, it is necessary to introduce censorship for all mining pools. But the resistance of mining pools to censorship does not depend on the block size.
If the main goal is to increase security, and the rest does not matter, then there is a great way to achieve this. Let's make the block size equal to zero. Then all bitcoins will never be lost. :)

It depends on what you can afford, but I'd say the average packages that the average can buy would be anywhere between 20GB to 30GB monthly quota and at a download speed of 1-2 Mbps and an upload of 0.2-0.4 Mbps.

Due to the nature of my job I can afford a 5Mbps up and 1Mbps down with above 100GB of quota and free download at certain periods, but I pay a little bit more than 20% of the average salary for a nurse, school teacher, or a police officers, but eventually when this package doesn't make economical sense (if I lose my job :o), I will have to go back to those limited and slow packages.

And if you think that is bad, I have seen worse elsewhere. :-[



There are at least a few countries where the average wage is below $50 a month, there are a few tens of other countries with monthly wages of below $200 and perhaps only 50 countries or so with wages of above $500 a month, so $200 is a lot of money for the majority of people given that most populated countries have low wages, it has been a while since I looked at the numbers but I can safely bet that at least 8 out of 10 human beings on this planet earth have wages that are below $300.

This isn't exactly bitcoin-related, but the majority of wealth sits in the hands of a minority of other people who are mainly located in EU and USA, it is just the way it is, and for those who can afford a full node with 5-10 hours of a moderate job, I do understand if you find it difficult to believe that others have to work for 2-3 months to afford an SSD that can accumulate the current blockchain size, and as hard as it is now, it will only get worse when the blocksize is increased.

With that being said, not all "poor" people will want to run a bitcoin node since even the current 300GB and the 1MB size is way too huge for them, but when we make suggestions of increasing block size to 16MB or lift the cap altogether, we have to evaluate the technology capabilities worldwide and not just within 5-10 developed countries, just my 2 bytes on the subject.

Schnorr signatures will give a theoretical 20%, and in practice 10% increase, block optimization will give 5%. Together, this will give a 25-15% increase. To the existing 10 million users per month, this will add 1.5 -2.5 million. It's a drop in the bucket . I wouldn't use the word "scaling" for this. :)
For scaling Bitcoin at the moment, there is no alternative but to increase the block.
Increasing the block by 2 times will give 100%, and increasing it by 10 times will give 1000% scaling. At the same time, this does not require any special sacrifices for full-node holders.
According to my calculations, it is enough for me to buy a 2TB hard drive to easily keep a full node with an enlarged block for 5 years. In fact, a increased by 10 times block and a fees worth cents will be more profitable for me than a 1MB block and a fees of 5-10$ for each transaction.

I'm not even sure whether to focus on the 3rd countries. There's something wrong with that. Let's assume that in developed countries we now have 1 billion potential users, of which 10 million can hold a full node with a 10MB block. That is, increasing the block by 10 times can increase the number of users up to 100 million.
But we look at the 3rd countries and decide not to increase, because they will not be able to.. And what it will give us. As there were 10 million users, so there will remain 10 million. Question: What do we get from not increasing it? Who did we do better for?

p/s/ In order to understand that LN will not be able to scale Bitcoin even to 50 million users, it is enough to be able to use a calculator.
And then there are amazing things:
1) The Core team claims otherwise.
2) The Bitcoin community mostly believes them.

What, both of them do not know how to use a calculator?:)

My mechanic likes to say "you can pay me now, or you can pay me later, either way to fix the problem I am getting paid."

If we increase the block size then yes, running a node will be more money as you will need more drive space and more ram. (pay me now)

If we just use sidechains, (lightning, liquid, etc.) then the data size is still there BUT it's just in another database.
And you have the added complexity of running another app / database / whatever. (pay me later)

And if you and I are not connected that way (I am using lightning you are using liquid) then we are back to settling on the main chain.

It's not that any particular way is inherently better or worse, it's just that there is not a one size fits all solution so they all have their give and take.

-Dave

I don't think I can agree with this analogy, you see, your mechanic makes sense, if your car has a problem - it must be fixed, you can't ignore it, and delying it can only cause more harm, even if you were to sell the car without fixing it, it will be worth its price minus the fix.

On the other hand, the block size isn't really a problem, and even if it was a problem then delaying the fix works, in other words, the longer we stick to 1MB the less the size can get, and then eventually, the equipment needed to run a full node will become cheaper as we move forward, and the internet technology is going to improve (regardless of how fast that may happen).

Now back to why do I think the block size isn't a problem, people are still using bitcoin, they have not abandoned it, bitcoin still works just fine and has more transactions than most other coins combined.

What's even more important than all of this, is what do you expect from increasing the block size? most people I discussed this matter with think that when bitcoin becomes cheaper to transact, more people will use it, and adoption will go to the moon, but I don't see that happening for a few reasons.

1- Other coins with instant confirmation and almost zero fees are not being accepted everywhere and don't have a fraction of bitcoin adoption.
2- The main layer isn't suitable for micropayments and every day's transactions,  you are always subject to wait for hours until your transaction is confirmed, and if confirmation isn't important then people can still do with 1MB blocksize and pay the lowest fees possible.

There are many other reasons why blockchain as-is isn't fit to do the kind of things some people expect, increasing the block size could "solve" some "issues" but it can create worse issues.

LN channels are opened and closed frequently today because many people are testing and experimenting with LN, and because the number of financial transactions that can be conducted via LN is limited. As LN becomes more established, it will become less common for LN channels to be closed, and there is no technical reason for a LN channel to need to be closed.

Bitcoin adoption is not going to go to 100% of the world's population tomorrow. It likely will be decades before any substantial portion of the world's population is using bitcoin to conduct financial transactions on a regular basis. There are limitations to Moore's law, and it is slowing, however, in the future, the cost of RAM, CPU processing power, and network capacity will decline. My prediction is in the future the maximum block size for bitcoin will be increased in order to allow for more LN channels to be opened/closed.

With LN, you do not need an on-chain transaction every time you receive money or move money to some kind of savings. If you were paying into a pension every month, you would not need to open an additional channel every month if your channels have sufficient inbound capacity (which they should).

LN is also not custodial. If you have an LN channel, you control the private keys that can spend the coin in your open channels.

LN can facilitate and is useful for micro-transactions, but this is not the only use case for LN. LN can be used for transactions of any size, provided there is sufficient LN network capacity.

OP, you are not talking about increasing the block size, and you are saying that off-chain payment channels are useless BECAUSE "you can't even use the base layer". Then what is YOUR solution?

it shouldn't be based on developed world standards. i think that much is clear.


at large enough block sizes, very few people will be able to run full nodes, and orphaning rates will cause a high level of mining concentration---both factors that weaken bitcoin's censorship resistance.

so in an indirect way, it does depend on block size.

bitcoin's security model depends on full node security, not mere mining security. it is full nodes who keep miners honest. without a vigorous network of full nodes, bitcoin's security would essentially be downgraded to SPV---the blockchain's history would just be whatever miners decide it is.

If you're willing to take Mike Hearn's word for it, satoshi did have some ideas around payment channels, which are effectively the progenitor for the Lightning Network:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2013-April/002417.html

It is truly sad, watching this thread being saturated by the same material rehashed again and again about block size even though poor op has explicitly expressed his concern about on-chain scaling as a general requirement and not the old debunked block-size debate.

It is more than obvious that block-size increase worsens  centralization because of propagation delay consequences, it has been discussed over and over and people who are not convinced about the path bitcoin core has taken can stick with BCH and put their money and hopes there, period.

But OP has brought up a legitimate concern here: LN is not an ultimate scaling solution while bitcoin adoption is an emerging situation and scaling is needed asap, as a person who has newly joined this community, OP has every right to ask whether there is such a vision at all or not.

@ETFbitcoin has made the best contribution so far but his classification of minor improvements like Schnorr as a scaling solution or proposing "mild" and conservative block size increase as such, is not satisfying enough, imo.

OP,
What you need to know about the situation with the most critical problems in the bitcoin sphere, topics like scaling and centralization and privacy is the fact that we suffer from a conservatist mindset that is only concerned about the security of bitcoin whales. It is an obvious divergence from the original revolutionary spirit that bitcoin was born with. Where there is no spirit, talent is a rare resource.

I'll share more on this thread soon. ;)

Bottom line:  Individuals can be as revolutionary as they like, but aren't in a position to force their ideas on others.  The onus is on those with new ideas to make a compelling case and convince a sufficient proportion of those securing the network to implement any new proposals.

Some would say it's only a "problem" for those who want to implement half-baked ideas.

Lightning Network's specification (https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc) is not finished yet so if people want to they can go about proposing their modifications to the relevant mailing lists and make a reference client and those ideas that get enough support will also be added to it's specification. We aren't stuck with however LN has been defined now.

In fact the authors even say themselves that this is a work in progress:


You're welcome to go to that mailing list and propose what you feel like should be changed (bringing code with you always makes you more welcomed in a room full of programmers).

FYI:

While I don't doubt that your belief in that nonsense probably helps soothe your own glaring inadequacies and astounding lack of success in this field, the point remains that however talented someone might be, they still can't force a change in Bitcoin that other participants aren't willing to accept.

All I have to say is this: Developer explains why the Lighting Network does scale BTC - Rene Pickhardt  (https://youtu.be/MZKc58F2mTw)

What limit is that?


What they should do is support customer LN deposits and withdrawals. And more importantly, exchanges should open payment channels with one another since customers withdrawing from exchange to exchange is a huge source of network congestion. Take it all off chain!


I fail to see the urgency. Many people will complain that Bitcoin is somewhat inefficient and expensive to use -- but that's by design.


It's not about protecting Bitcoin whales. It's about exercising duty of care.

OP criticizes LN. Fair. But doesn't bring on a debate about on-chain scaling/block size increase. What is his solution.


Or Dogecoin. 8)


Would you want Bitcoin to, be secure and robust, and to run as a multi-generational protocol without downtime for many years, OR, let the Core developers take risks to increase transaction throughput amd accept the security tradeoffs?

I think it is an artificial trade-off made-up by PoS advocates for denouncing bitcoin scalability potentials the infamous Trilemma suggested by Vitalik Buterin is an example of such false claims. There is no reason to give-up with bitcoin as a promising technology for the future of monetary systems.

Some people try to make it look better by suggesting weird ideas such as "bitcoin as the world reserve currency" which is the worst stupid claim ever. It is not even a technical term, reserve currency! Absolute BS!

Bitcoin is designed to be a "p2p electronic cash", anybody who claims otherwise does not belong to this movement. Holding bitcoin or not, having contributed to bitcoin development or not, being old hand or brand new, ... people have no right to redefine bitcoin, it has been defined already by its founder as a p2p electronic cash system.

I've been working on it for a long time and I think before any further technical debates we need hope and commitment to the cause (check my signature). Once there is enough spirit, I assure you, there are lots of ideas and proposals to start with, I got a few myself, others may have more and better proposals to put forward, but as long as there are negative attitude and reckless accusations in favor of blind conservatism, I personally prefer to do it privately on my own budget rather than putting myself in the risk of being smeared or even accused of committing fraud, etc. by people who feel no responsibility other than covering up for fringe ideas and interpretations of bitcoin: World reserve currency! Digital gold! blah, blah, blah

Once we are strong enough to overcome this smear campaigns, proving our legitimacy and power bitcoin will find its way out of this stall situation and it will be crystal clear that PoW and bitcoin are far beyond a simple technology for producing and storing some kind of digital asset! The cheapest interpretation of bitcoin ever.

Today it is unusual for large amounts of coin to be locked up in LN channels. I don't think this will be true forever, especially as more merchants/businesses start to accept payments via LN.

I would also hope that in the future, payments can be split up via multiple routes if there was insufficient capacity via any one route.

I'm confused. You're not in agreement with the idea that larger blocks will centralize the validators? Using that question as the premise, so an unlimited block size, and leaving the decision of "how large" to the miners, would be OK?

It is generally true that any scaling solution eventually needs the network to be capable of processing orders of magnitude more transactions, hence a larger block capacity, but it doesn't mean that a simple block size increase should be counted as such a solution, actually it is not for the same reason that putting a "trusted" entity in charge of validating blocks is not a scaling solution for bitcoin although both could help with throughput.

I've been insisting on it for a long time: scaling bitcoin and decentralization of mining are different presentations of a same problem. To have a more convincing picture of my reasoning behind this claim, just take another look at what you wrote above: In the same sentence that you are legitimately expressing doubts about block size increase as a scaling solution, you raise alarms about putting miners in charge of the bitcoin. But why should anybody be concerned about it? As of the original design principles of bitcoin, miners are the ones that should be in charge, aren't they?  

Isn't it all about the current situation with pools and the infamous centralized mining scene of bitcoin that boosts this (legitimate) concern about putting miners in charge?
Sure it is.
Suppose, in a hypothetical parallel world we have bitcoin being directly mined by tens of thousands of people with a flat pyramid of distribution of power, now imagine that we have a mysterious solution for increasing the throughput without disrupting such a mining scene (i.e. not sharpening the pyramid), now would there be any concern about whether miners are in charge or not? Sure not.

So, a true solution for the scaling problem in bitcoin is/should-be a decentralization of mining solution at the same time and vice versa.

Just all those claims stay unproven

Regulation helps to stay secure over long time

not try to hide - that is proven

Yes, we're familiar with your elaborate and well-devised solution of closing the gate after the horse has bolted.  You've mentioned it enough times already.  I assume the reason you keep bringing it up is due to the part where you're still no closer to making it happen?  How long do you envision it will take before you actually manage to get the ball rolling on this distant pipe dream?

This is not a recent occurrence.  It didn't suddenly sneak up on us over the last couple of weeks.  The reliance on full non-mining nodes to offset mining centralisation happened years ago.  This is simply how the network evolved to deal with the circumstances of the introduction of pools, GPU mining, ASICs, etc.  A vast majority of the people involved in Bitcoin today joined long after all this was set in motion.  Whether you're happy with the level of mining centralisation or not, this is the value proposition lots of people have signed up for.  Which would appear to indicate that people are generally satisfied with the "current situation".  To believe you can just step in and course-correct at such a fundamental level (while also assuming that everyone who is currently involved in Bitcoin will trust such an enormous shift in network governance and happily go along with it when no one can make any guarantees about the outcome) is just blind egotism on your part.  

You talk about it as though it's such a simple and minor tweak.  It just sounds delusional.  Not to mention the part where the fact that the network did evolve this way should serve as proof enough that economic pressures dictate equal distribution of mining in PoW doesn't work.  It was a reasonable assumption at the time the whitepaper was written.  But we now know the theory was flawed.  We tried it already.  It failed.  The subsequent adaptation proved more resilient.  Nothing since then, in any coin, has come close to matching the level of resilience Bitcoin has achieved.  Why do you enjoy pretending you know better and that jeopardising it all by reverting back to that flawed assumption about the security model would somehow prove to be resilient if we just slap a fresh coat of paint on it? 

Get real.

@DooMAD,
With all due respects, I don't think you are in the position required for denouncing PoW as being doomed to centralization, nobody is, and more importantly, it is a false assertion.

Firstly, your assessment of both the cause of the problem and the way bitcoin network has adopted, is wrong and misleading:
Unlike what you claim it isn't "economic pressure" that made pools inevitable, it is a vague and fruitless expression, "economic pressure" doesn't say a word about the technical and real factors behind the phenomenon, you use this expression deliberately to deny the technical nature of the flaw and the same nature of any hypothetical cure. I've published a thorough technical analysis of pooling pressure in bitcoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4687032.0) in this forum, it has very limited mathematical prerequisites to read and understand, check it out, and you'll realize that pooling pressure in bitcoin is a technical problem.

As of your understanding of the current situation as the network is considered to be in equilibrium because of "full nodes", although this idea is not totally false or irrelevant but is not accurate and descriptive enough because the mere existence of full nodes do not help bitcoin as long as they are not economically important, and it is an open question that how many of such full nodes are active right now? Remember: economically important nodes.
It is why putting all the burden of keeping the network secure and balanced on the shoulders of full-nodes is not a reasonable argument and one should consider other factors as well, most importantly the role of game theoretical factors such as the incentives and rational cost/benefit analysis from the pool operators perspective.

The sophisticated balance of divergent factors is exactly what that needs to be addressed, leaving issues unresolved because people say there are full-nodes that fork-off in critical situations, is the most naive technical choice because most of these nodes have no role in the socioeconomic equations and nobody cares about their choice of the branch and to count too much on the reputation and similar psychological factors is not how a bitcoiner takes care of jobs.

Now, we come to the most disappointing part of your discourse where you announce the problem as being incurable and asking me and other people like me to be humble and understand if there was a cure, GM and others have already adopted it!

The maximum credit I would give to such claims is admitting that there are some technical complexities and additionally the general atmosphere in the community is not encouraging enough, but good news is that I've managed to figure out a technical framework for the problem that does not disrupt bitcoin radically, and I don't expect to raise too much negative reactions. The negativity thing is improving with bitcoin community becoming more and more confident after bch proved itself as a weak project and Faketoshi propaganda machine failed to do any harm to bitcoin.

I think we are in a good shape, fortunately the strong incentive mechanism behind bitcoin has done well, keeping bitcoin safe and secure and everybody is happy in-spite of flaws and shortcomings, now it is time to be back behind our keyboards and do something appropriate for crucial problems like scaling and centralization of mining. For it to happen we need to go beyond extreme conservatism and pacifism by supporting out-of-the-box thinking and giving a chance for new voices to be heared.

I second your optimism. I agree that resigning a problem to being unsolvable is unhelpful and unnecessarily negative. Adoption will hopefully bring talent.

Fermat’s Last Theorem was unsolved for 350 years. Bitcoin hasn't been around that long. I'm sure with enough brain power focused on scalability we will succeed without compromise.

I believe you are dodging the question, by making a post that's deliberately hard-to-understand/confusing, but to look like you also answered the question.


Your Bitcoin perhaps, not mine.


Are the miners in charge? I believe the UASF showed that they are not, the security thanks to the design-desicions made by the Core developers.

Bitcoin has been infiltrated a long time ago and the plan was to cripple it. BCH is what bitcoin was meant to be.
BTC is disgusting to me at this point, blockstream wanting people to use their centralized solutions. You actually have retards like Luke Jr saying the block size should be smaller. Its insane that people here are saying block size need to be small for people in 3rd world countries that cant afford hardware...Well I'm sure people in 3rd world countries like paying $10 for a transaction which is more than they make in a day. At this point btc is a cult and bitcoin subreddit is extremely censored.

I sold all my bitcoin awhile back and I am only holding bch and eth.

Keep dreaming ;)
At the end of the day bcash remains the same shitcoin that nobody cares about and that is evident from its blocks that have always been 0.1 bitcoin block size due to lack of transactions to put into them!
It is also centralized and mutable, 2 big principles that nobody interested in cryptocurrencies would ever want.

This is how useless bcash has been:
https://i.imgur.com/UuEYJWm.jpg

Now that explains your initial statement, you are a bag holder of shitcoins :D

The future is not written - but args that LN solves anything except increase complexity / attack vectors (also for regulators) .... rare as true Bitcoin

The big blockers also ran a narrative that said, "But but the community wants bigger blocks to scale/increase transactions per block".

Where's your "community" now? ::)


He's missing a golden opportunity.


BUT Bitcoin Cash is still a shitcoin.

BCH is adding / forking lots of crappy stuff into their base protocol as well - non of such really helps and all such is not true compliant stable Bitcoin what industry needs.

I think I'm done with this topic.  We've got Apollo with one forkcoin, hv_ with another and aliashraf discussing his plans to launch a third with a minuscule fraction of the hashrate because he doesn't understand the meaning of the word "consequence".  He thinks that a network with individuals mining from home could match the hashpower of farms full of specialist hardware or people pooling their resources.  Let me know when any of you hopeless fools are ready to discuss Bitcoin.

Specialization is especially underrated, ignored even, by some people. I believe another part of Bitcoin that will be specialized next, but underrated, are Lightning routing nodes for fees.