Bitcoin Forum

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Black Text Is a Pro or Con related to a 2MB block limit.
Green Text  Is used to highlight key points which give the Pro or Con more validity  
Red Text Is used to highlight key points which debunk or lessen the validity of the Pro or Con



We are compiling a list of some basic pros and cons for a 2MB HF. please post below some Pros or Cons to a 2MB block limit, and discuss them. Feel free to try and debunk the pros / cons i will try and follow the discussion and summarize / post links to these posts with more information. Free feel to ask me to reword a Pro or Con listed in OP for added clarity, please provide full text as you believe it should appear.

OP will not include any reference to Core or Classic, only the pros and cons of a 2MB block limit increase, pure and simple.

This time next year Core will be looking for wide spread consensus before raising block limit to 2MB,  Its is my hope that this Pro & Con List will help users and miners understand all the specific issues related to block size limit. so they can be confident about their decision to vote for a limit increase or not.

Thank you for your input!

First things that come to my mind:
Pros (well, there's only 1): more transaction capacity (user/network growth whatever is the result of this and thus should be labeled as one).
Cons: Requires hard fork; increased resource usage (capacity, bandwidth, processing power); potentially unsafe (the possibility exists to construct a TX that takes too long to validate).

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Maybe one could consider experience in dealing with hard forks a pro (the whole ecosystem). I certainly wouldn't mind it much.

Pro: Better scaling for increasing transaction counts in the future.
Con: Most likely a hard fork to an alternative client or some changes in the current client.

Con: Neckbeards saying "I told you so" and measuring their dicks over the internet based on what block size is taken. /s

feel free to try and debunk the pors / cons i will try and follow the discussion and summarize / post links to these posts with more information.

Pro: Improved user experience, ( no more threads about TX taking a long time to get confirmations )

I think that the ones that I've posted can't be debunked as they are kind of "facts" (we are talking about a 2 MB block size limit; no added limitations of any sort). However, I'd like to see what others have to say as long as nobody starts promoting as kind of implementations. Let's see if it is actually possible to just have a discussion about a proposal without mentioning any 'sides' anymore.

I would still label that as the first one. This is because this is a temporary effect maybe add within brackets. It is quite possible for someone to spam at 2 MB block size limit to cause the same delays that we've had lately.

Pro:

Makes sustained spam attacks much more costly to accomplish.

(Basically, doubles the cost of an attack, or limits its duration to 1/2 as long)

We are still talking about very small amounts of money here and I don't see this as being effective at all regardless of what some may think. Even if the costs increased tenfold we are talking about small amounts of money. However, adamstgbit already added:
Which would be practically the same because the user experience was a bit lacking when the attack was going on (due to bad fee calculations).

Maybe put on Cons that it will increase the chance for orphan blocks?
1MB to 2MB the increase should be subtle, but it's a increase anyway.

assuming fees go down after 2MB is implemented, at 1cent pre TX and ~1500TX to fill a the 1MB of free space the 2MB block provides, we are looking at 10$ / 10mins , so i guess i have to agree with you, spamming the network is still cheap like dirt.

Free feel to ask me to reword a Pro or Con listed in OP for added clarity, please provide full text as you believe it should appear.

I dislike that you add a red text so quickly here. We do not have the data on how exactly this would impact orphan rates (at least I don't; and data not present in this thread). The orphan rates tend to change often (some days there are a lot of them, and some there are almost none). Just because the increase is by 2x that does not mean that the Orphan rates will necessarily rise by 2x (or stay the same). Somebody would have to provide data/do the calculations themselves.

agreed and edited

What about the idea that an actual hardfork would instantaneously create ClassicCoins and Bitcoins (or CoreCoins)? A big pro for certain parties, the biggest con on users.

we are not considering Classic vs Core here
only the pros and cons of a 2MB block limit increase, pure and simple.

again this, there is no double chain ever, because consensus it's not at 51%, it is at a much higher %, so there is no possibility to have this

if less miners are ming another chain then they are mining an altcoin sha256

again this has nothing to do with this thread persay.

all we are looking for is pros and cons a 2MB block limit increase would theoretically have

Pro: more fees collected by miners on each block

I don't think we can be sure of this (as we don't know how the fee is going to change; this moment the recommended is 30 satoshis/byte). What if the fees per TX drop by two and the amount of TX's increases by two? The amount of collected fees would remain the same in this case. What I'm saying is that we don't have enough experience nor are things as simple as people think (e.g. some think that a 2 MB block size limit == 1 line of code changed). Sounds simple, but the change isn't.

i think it's worth noting all of this in OP.

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Pro: lower TX Fees!  :D

Renewed trust in the development process and in the network scalability capacity, business can operate with less fear of being outed from the network because high fees or no transaction capacity, merchants can accept bitcoin knowing their transactions will confirm, at least for a while.

With the above scenario bitcoin value will probably rise and the halving/mining apocalypse scenario does not happen.

you can add that as a consequence of the capacity increase, more merchants will be willing to accept bitcoin, like amazon

Pro : Business can operate with less fear of being outed from the network because high fees 
Pro : Renewed trust in the development process and in the network scalability capacity
Pro : More adoption
Pro : BTC value will rise



i will try to consolidate and/or add these points to OP ASAP.

I don't think it would have any effect on threads about a TX taking a long time to confirm.

That is caused by small fees, not a lack of room with the current blocksize.

That can be fixed by clients intelligently choosing a TX fee, it seems many clients do not do so. Core does but it seems many other clients do not.

This is all directly or indirectly a result from (or is related to) pro #1 or pro #2. Listing these separately does not make sense (this is why I grouped the resource usage).

i'm going to try to break it all down to single point items with some red or green text below each highlighting  poeple thoughts on each item.
for example Con #2 ( processing power ) i do believe there is some software improvments which will mitigate this.
OP needs to reflect all of these little details.

Pro: Maintain the positive correlation between price and volume, now if you suddenly cap the volume, that relationship is unknown

"The Bitcoin experiment, as invented by Satoshi, has been running successfully for 7 years now - and may also be showing a strong correlation between price and volume, as suggested by this graph:

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/img/mempool/how-we-know-bitcoin-is-not-a-bubble/MetcalfeGraph.png

Any scientist, economist (or investor!) would simply favor continuing to let the experiment run unchanged."

Anyone change that radically change the experiment (by constraining block size to a long-term artificial limit of a 1 MB, against Satoshi's plan) is actually proposing a "side fork" - and will result in much higher risk"

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/49kazc/a_scientist_or_economist_who_sees_satoshis/

2) Improved user experience,
( no more threads about a TX taking a long time to get confirmations )
temporary effect, when usages increases we will eventually be back to full blocks faced with this same issue

Yeah, eventually we will be back to full blocks.
Maybe we could be ready to hard fork again by then.
Maybe it would be more comfortable 2nd time.

The filling of blocks has been a nice steady climb.
First full 1mb block I saw yesterday.
Now they 998.8 a lot.
Its been smooth and steady.

2 mb hard limit, fuck segwit. It don't really care who implements it. I trust none of them anymore.


Let the miners slowly, or quickly raise their block sizes to 2 mb, as has happened so far at 1mb.
Perfect.

updated OP and added a new Con


"2MB is still not nearly enough block space to compete with other payment processors like VISA"

Hark fork is not a con. bitcoin has hard forked several times. Many altcoins have hard forked to change features. If you give a few months notic, there is no problem.

what about the bloat cost - 2mb will be full of spam anyway from the start. so chain will grow 2x faster and the bloat need to be archived forever

catch up cost - an independent remote, home or mobile user trying to catch up will need 2x faster connection and download 2x more data to catch up from the same time.

AFTER:  users having internet slower than 2MB / 10 minutes (27.9 kbps) will never catch up
BEFORE: users having < 13.9 kbps will never catch up. At 1MB blocks slow dial up users have no problem!

this is very important because dialup (similiar situation for sattelite interntets) speeds are   24 ~ 48 Kbps. With large blocks, slow dialup will never catch up anymore.

Imagine a remote mining or retail facility. It's trivial to bring there usb disk with blockchain, but the node must keep up-to-date via the slow dialup only, nobody will waste their time by bringing new blockchain all the time.

altcoin hostility. altcoins existed since litecoin, and are the original scaling mechanism envisioned by Satoshi. Simply start 2000 Bitcoin clones with 1MB blocks each and you have 2GB worth of blocks (visa scale) - instantly!  limited bitcoin capacity allows altcoins to innovate, experiment and explore novel concepts. If Bitcoin actually becomes challenged by an alt (it won't), it can adopt

Doubling bloc size to 2mb?
And your listing that as a con, cos it's not better than visa?
FFS.

I believe the point is that it wouldn't be a final solution and more work and optimisation would still need to be done in order to achieve similar scalability to other payment methods.  Otherwise we're just going to have the same issues later down the line.

Pro.   Shows that devs DO sth for the commons
Pro.   Is a step closer to Satoshis initial no limit design

Cons. Has the risk any change has.

visa's capacity is only based on 60 years of slow growth to 800million users.
why does there have to be equal capacity by 2017??
bitcoin doesnt have 800 million users. i dont think it will get 800million users in 16 months or less

so lets base it on bitcoin users (2mill) and make rational judgement of perceived growth slowly

at the moment visa stats say that their users do approximately 40 transactions a year (some daily some only monthly) per user
http://www.statista.com/statistics/279275/average-credit-card-transaction-volume-per-card-worldwide/

so bitcoin has 2million users. making it 80mill transactions buffer needed as a minimum
bitcoin does ~2000tx a block, 144 blocks, 365 days a year = 105,120,000tx a year

so 1mb can handle 2million people doing an average 50 transactions.
or reworded
bitcoin at 1mb can handle 2.5million people doing similar transactions as on visa

which means 2mb can handle 2mill people doing 100tx each or 5million people doing similar visa card uses.

now lets think about 2mb+segwit (2million people 200tx or 10million people doing similar visa trend transactions.)

and thats probably going to be available in 2017

then we can calmdown and know over 15 years we can slow grow more (it doesnt need to be visa comparable by 2017)

to put it into prospective by 2017 (2mb+segwit) we will be at 10% of paypal or 10% of visa US or 1.25% of visa world wide.

which if we had lets say 4mb+segwit in 2020 20%paypal, 20%visa US, 2.5% visa worldwide.

then we can look at LN which meant to be 15x more possibilitys (take that number loosly as its based on lauda's numbers)

meaning
2mb+segwit+LN = 150% paypal, 150% visa USA and 18.75% visa world wide.
4mb+segwit+LN = 300% paypal, 300% visa USA and 37.5% visa world wide.
8mb+segwit+LN = 600% paypal, 600% visa USA and 75% visa world wide.

so atmost
12mb+segwit+LN = 900% paypal, 900%visa USA and 112.5% visa world wide.

now we all know 12mb+segwit is actually more like 24mb real data so dont expect to grow to that by 2018-2020. but i can see it easily happening before 2030.. very easily

"spam is OK"  Wut?
"Business can operate with less fear of being outed" Wut?
"More adoption" Wut?
"BTC value will rise" Wut?
"We maintain the positive correlation between price and volume" Wut?


Your clearly padding the pros column with unfounded speculation and whimsical fantasies.  Daydream on your own time.

It would be lovely if we avoid hardfork altogether and do simple Segwit, make the signatures to not count towards limit and put on some LN.
At this point Bitcoin can pretty much stop evolving, having unlimited transactions due LN, decent capacity for settlement.
Extra settlement capacity (like during crisis), going to the moon, marketing, hype, decrease of shitcoin value to stimulate spending can be covered by altcoins.

same way Bitcoin = digital gold
altcoin = digital fiat

Con: network latency will increase, potentially forcing some full node clients with high latency or low bandwidth connections from participating. (think small African village in bum fuck nowhere for instance)
Con "less adoption" <--see what I did there?

excellent

i'll add that SPV clients mitigate this issue.

yes this is what i was trying to express, i'll reword it.

I would never use bitcoin if I couldn't run a full node.

agreed, i will addendum Con #1

lucky for you, you dont live in bum fuck nowhere  :D

Bump to 2MB could signalize: raising cap forever is okay. Changing hard rules anytime is fine.

Getting on a slippery slope. With large enough blocks, only high-end  datacenter servers could participate in Bitcoin.

Con: HF potentially goes bad and the mother of all DDos wars breaks out between two distinct camps/chains/networks.

sets a bad precedent for changing consensus rules, and can lead down a slippery slope, which eventually lead to: only high-end  datacenter servers could participate in Bitcoin.

I like this one.

but i'll add the the change wasn't done lightly it tooks years of debate.



this would be the "marginal risk" the addendum on Con#1 is talking about, i'll try to squeeze that in there.

This I agree with, the only problem is that so many altcoins are scams that there is little trust in altcoins.

I won't go near them because every single one I have looked at either has a huge premine or other shady aspect to it, or doesn't keep up with changes in core that we know are necessary fixes.

But in the future I believe there will be region specific altcoins that work (region specific meaning businesses in a certain geographic region are more likely to accept them) and that bitcoin will largely be the mechanism by which people exchange from one altcoin to another when they travel or do business outside their region.

i've summarized and added


bitcoin doesn't have 800 million users. bitcoin has ~2 million users 2MB will satisfy the current number of users  and allow for some growth
2MB might not be the ultimate scaling solution, but alongside segwit and Lighting Network we can scale bitcoin beyond VISA like capacity.

to Con #6

No... I honestly "hand of god" don't think its a marginal risk at all, I think its a certainty.  If 10% of our current user base refuse to upgrade to 2mb they could keep the 1mb chain alive. Yes it would be stalled for many weeks and then attacked on and off for potentially years, we would have to wait for 100 or 200 confirmations or more for each transaction but it could be done. And if the original chain survives.. well you should know what that means.

all this talk reminds me that bitcoin has seen a lose in market share, poeple appear to be moving to ETH as a safe haven to bitcoin's scaling crisis

with only 10% backing it, it's likely the remaining 90% will want to sell the coins they have on this chain completely destroying its value.

if you consider that 75% was a "vote" and then the grace period allows the losing side to comply with supermajority rule, its likely the other chain will be DOA if it is attempted.

here's a terrible analogy:
When an election wins with a minority (winning with less the 51%, they win because they have the highest percentage ) you dont see everyone leaving the country. And we are talking about winning with a supermajority, risk of war civil war over this is marginal...

I'm not saying it would be logical or suggesting the 1mb chain would be particularly useful, you know... given the huge drop in price and usability; do to the loss of the network effect. But again it could be done regardless of motive. A very small number of nutters could keep the old chain alive for whatever ideological reasons. And we can't crown a new king until the last one is dead.

I'd be interested to know how you came to the conclusion that altcoins were ever a part of Satoshi's vision for scaling. The white paper?

The hardware requirements aren't that prohibitive.
A midway could be Electrum style wallets and honorable public full nodes.

Oh, err, Hi :) just seen after my posting that you are inside my Signature. Congratulations!

I'm truly humbled and honoured, sir. :)

You say the chances of a contentious hard fork is a marginal risk (insinuating it not worth talking about!) but when that "marginal risk" results in a religious war and that's what it would be a god dam holy war, I can't imagine a adequately informed person would be willing to take that risk. We Must wait until we have overwhelming consensus!

so please...
 Con: potential HOLY WAR resulting in catastrophic network failure.

after the 75% trigger plus a grace period, your "holy war" wouldn't go very far.
it would be like a cult declaring war on christianity
it would be so lame it wouldn't make the newspapers.

*sigh* Fine whatever, may the DDos be with you sir.

lol sorry...

ill try to reword a little, and make it less.... absolute.

this now highlights the seriousness / extreme consequence of forking while leaving a group behind

I don't know why people are moving to Eth, it looks dangerous to me.

I think the reason why a good alt-coin hasn't arisen yet is because it is expensive to properly maintain a code branch and the demand just isn't there yet for serious continued funding of an alt-coin.

Ethereum seems to be spending a lot of money on marketing even though it isn't being used for anything novel, only the promise that it someday will be used for something novel, but I just do not see a market demand for what it is promising.

A lot of people make speculative buys into something they do not believe in simply because they predict a pump they can profit from before the dump, and that's unfortunately I think why people are buying Eth.

Bitcoin does not yet have a scalability problem. It can handle the transactions it gets right now just fine. With SegWit it will handle an increased TX rate. The point will come where it needs something else - whether that is sidechains, alt-coins, or a block size increase remains to be seen.

That being said, I am not opposed to 2MB blocks - we can get the code for it now, to trigger if the last 1000 blocks used 950 MB or something (filtering out empty blocks). That way it is only implemented if the 1 MB blocks are not big enough with SegWit.

you're underestimate Ethereum. maybe you should watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C3jCV-JxYk
you're right about it being very dangerous, I wouldn't feel comfortable with serious money in ETH, but having SOME is probably not the worst idea. At this time ETH does seem to be in a bubble, and thats definitely being fueled by bitcoins scaling crisis. when the hype about bitcoin "dying" or "unable to scale" dies down, ETH price might take a nosedive, hell it not unlikely it'll take a nosedive regardless, it's gone up to high too fast at this point...

But it's a fairly strong reminder that Bitcoin isn't the only game in town, bitcoin's network effect can only carry it so far, at the end of the day bitcoin NEEDS to be better than the alternatives if it is to remain #1.

Holy war sounds better but thank you, you have been very accommodating and fair.
Lets pray Segregated witness can deliver on that 50 to 60% increase in block space and fix the unintentional malleability issues in a soft fork. It would be a huge morale boost.

When the day dose come to ramp up to 2MB I hope we have 95%+ agreement but even if we don't I have some faith the community will come together to prevent network Armageddon. But if we can't I trust the core developers will be yelling from the roof tops for everyone to roll back to the last mutually accepted valid transaction checkpoint before the Hard fork and save the day.

Might a higher b size lead to a better miner distribution ? (Firewall issue,...)

I don't think BTC scaling is behind it, I really don't. Most alt-coins go through periods where they bubble and I don't think it has anything to do with bitcoin.

Most people I know who have taken money out of bitcoin because of fears of the future don't limit themselves to crypto as options for where to invest what they took out of BTC and it would be dumb to limit oneself to crypto. There are lots of markets that experience growth.

A lot of ETH startup is in bitcoin, so if bitcoin drops in value, so does the amount of funds ETH has for development...

You make a point here. This could signalize that anything could be changed (e.g. supply), which I'm certain almost nobody wants.

Stop talking about BIP109. If we are talking about a 2 MB block size limit then we are talking about the pure limit (i.e. no additions). We do not know what the consensus threshold is, so this is irrelevant.

Please don't talk about shitcoins here. ETH realistically has a value lower than Doge (can be used for more things right now).

No. If anything it could lead to more centralization.

I'd say it's a particularly bad point. We've been soft forking in changes left, right and center. Is the BIP process a slippery slope, too?

This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fear mongering, in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience ... in that it ignores the possibility of middle ground and assumes a discrete transition from category A to category B.

Hard froks aren't necessarily bad. There's even a school of thought that suggests we ought to be doing them at regular intervals.








@Lauda please respond to my post in context. It's clearly not the same thought after you cut it up like that and totally miss the point?

We have been soft forking features and developing Bitcoin further. I don't think that we could see a possible threat in this.

Because it is not safe to do; look at the list of cons. Resource usage would be even greater, the problem with a dangerous TX would also be expanded and such. Even a 2 MB block size limit is possibly unsafe without constraining limits.

One of the useful OP out there unlike the price will hit xxxx USD in year xxxx. With this blockchain issue though which will occur again after few more years, some of the altcoins will be looked at by business organizations. Stability is needed and issues like these (uncertainty in the solution) will only hurt bitcoin if not now, in the future.

Look at what a segwit soft fork can do: It can change the max effective block size to 4MB WITHOUT any nodes' permission (except miners), this is even  more slippery slope, anything can be changed via a soft fork without user even notice it

If you want to change some hard rules, you can only do it through a hard fork, since that requires a major consensus. That is to make sure everyone get informed, it is the benefit of a hard fork

By the way, you won't get large enough blocks, because majority of miners will simply orphan them

Regarding this statement:

"4) More fees collected by miners on each block
unknown effect, What if the fees per TX half and the amount of TX's doubles? The amount of collected fees would remain the same in this case. "

If blocks stayed under 1MB there would be no change in fees even with 2MB block support. The statement makes it sounds like changing the system to support 2MB blocks would cause miner transaction fees to increase regardless of the actual size of the block.

More clever (and there are those suggestions) is a trailing max size adjustment to some moving hist average. I'd prefer that.

Untrue. This is off-topic.

No.

With or without a 2 MB block size limit, these "blockchain issues" will happen. This is because there are people who are willing to and are able to attack the network with spam. During the spam last week I had no trouble transacting at all because I've used proper fees. The network was designed as such.

Exactly. We can't really know that the amount of fees will get increased. It is just an assumption I guess.

Perhaps the wording should read:
"4)  More fees potentially collected by miners on each block"

I'd also suggest a similar tweak for number 7, but then it ends up sounding the same as #1:
"7)  More capacity to accommodate potential wider adoption"

Not sure that even is true, as smaller block can result in higher fees.

I actually want the fees to remain high enough to make spamming the blockchain expensive. And I want the block small enough that if someone is willing to pay to spam the blockchain, it won't grow fast enough to reduce what decentralization there is.

E.g. could a corporate interest pay to spam the block such that it consistently has 16 MB blocks knocking a lot of miners out so that the corporate interest can seize control of the blockchain in their data center ?

With 2 MB blocks I don't think that specific fear exists, but at some point it does exist.

It all depends on the traffic we're getting at any given moment.  Any time that transactions would currently be left in the mempool queue waiting for a non-full block, those transactions and their fees could then be processed, so, in theory at least, the fees collected in that block will then be higher.  More traffic equals more fees in total.

You can't have micro transactions and good spam protection at the same time. You have to pick one.

As for sigwit causing 4mb blocks that's not true they will be adding limiters into the code to prevent that.  

Con: less spam protection.

Yes you can - LighteningNetwork.

The LN may get spammed but the blockchain won't be spammed.

Fair point but were suppose to be talking about 2mb blocks not the LN; they are fine for micro transactions but I won't be using them anytime soon.

You may not be, but people who want to make micropayments likely will be.

If you don't want LN and don't want fees that keep spammers out, there's always Doge...

Yawn.  It's been stated enough times by now that everyone's bizarre fixation over microtransactions is just deflecting the issue:


Please.  Stop.  Whining.  About.  Microtransactions.

Please stop insinuating you can predict the future; Bitcoin may become unpopular we could lose a huge chunk of our user base; what then? With all that free unused block space just sitting around spam attacks will put a unneeded burden on a smaller community that no longer need large blocks.

they way i see it. bitcoin can be analogicaly like Iphone.

softforks are like random OS updates, where somepeople get great new apps to use if they update
hardforks are like new generation iphones. and if you dont upgrade every two years you are no longer in fashion and ridiculed because your hanging on for life to outdadted crap.

if we were to make it a regular thing. like the date of it happening linked to the reward halving or every 110,000 blocks. then people can be aware and prepare for it.

even now just 1 month before april we still dont know if segwit is going to be ready and if blockstream will include the buffer or not.. even after a couple roundtables there is still uncertainty. so making it planned an organised.helps.. instead of delayed then suddenly rushed.

after all, if apple can release a new product every couple years without worrying about the old one, knowing milions of people will use it.. i certainly think 6000 people using bitcoin out of 2million shouldnt be much different. . aslong as its not delayed or not made official until the last minute

CON: if the user base ever shrinks it will put a unnecessary burden on a smaller user base.

franky your analogies are the worst.
DooMAD unless your fucking Psychic stop trying to predict the future.

*complains about people trying to predict the future*

*proceeds to immediately make a negative prediction about the future in the very next sentence*

Seriously?   ::)

I'll stop being worried about the future when I see a scalability roadmap I agree with.  You just worry about the code you're choosing to run and not forcing your opinion on everyone.

I'm suggesting possibilities you on the other hand "Larger blocks will become a necessity" are making statements as if they are fact immutable forever.

every point i make include something like "if" "may" or "could".

Shrinking user base... I understand thats the plan of small blockers, or at least dont allow increase Bitcoin user base.

But it is just limit, not actual block sizes. Few years ago block size limit was 1 MB and miners created small blocks like 100 KB. Now if there was 5 MB limit instead of 1 MB since 2011, guess what? The Bitcoin blockchain size would be the same as today, around 60 GB.

Most people still dont get it is just limit, which by definition can only limit the number of people which can use Bitcoin.

You joined 6 months ago Welcome to the pit :)

I'm worried about network latency, future users and holy wars, I'll agree I'm a tin foil hat nutter but I want to grow the Bitcoin user base just as much as everyone else here. 

Except that one, right?  


About the future, which involves making predictions.  Stop playing semantics.


And I'm allowed to think and say it's a certainty, just like you did earlier.  That's why the OP is frequently updated to include only the most neutral wording, so everyone can have their say without any one opinion drowning out the others.  Can we get back on topic now, please?

He was blowing me off so I pushed the point I think its a certainty but I only wanted him to consider the possibility. I will consider larger blocks becoming one day a necessity but its not a certainty.
If were going to make a list of pros and cons that have to be certainties then it would be a very short list.
We should consider the possibility the user base might shrink.

Okay let me try to play devil's advocate and give a pro.

Pro: less reliance on side chains to handle micro transactions.

I think this is a pro because I don't trust side chains to much, I just don't trust them. I don't know a whole lot about them but I fear if just a few of them are successfully attacked that the trust in all of them could be lost and it would reflect back on Bitcoin poorly.  I think average users will wrongly assume side chains will be just as safe as the main chain and this could cause a great deal of confusion if side chains start dropping like flys.

There seems to be an unhealthy amount of confusion over the implications of a hard fork, particularly one that is controversial.

There has never been a planned hard fork in bitcoin. The 2013 hard fork was a crisis situation with unanimous consent and agreement on how to move forward. That is very, very different from the current situation, where the community is divided against itself.

Any speculation on how it will play out is just that -- pure speculation. The success of a hard fork is primarily dependent on network nodes upgrading, not hashpower, as the issue is "validity" and not "the longest chain."

And any data we have in that regard is extremely opaque. Reachable nodes =/= all nodes. Many people run in listen-only mode; they are not reachable, but they do depend on their node to validate transactions. This incomplete information is made further incomplete when we consider that a proportion of Classic and XT nodes are pseudonodes that do not support a future hard fork's consensus rules.

The biggest problem is that users will lose money if there is any hashpower left on the original chain. That includes the situation where the hashpower went to zero at one point, and therefore an attack scenario where a miner exploits "old" nodes who cannot see the new, invalid fork that most miners are building on. One might expect those nodes to see no new blocks, a dead chain. Since there was never an upgrade to their software (because the fork was contentious), they are in the dark. Even if all honest miners left the minority chain, an attacker could (particularly after difficulty readjustment) build a fake chain confirming payments several blocks deep to a user, merchant, etc. This could work particularly well against an automated system in the latter situation. Since the payment is confirmed below significant proof-of-work, the merchant releases the goods, only to have the the inputs he received double-spent shortly after, since most or all of the hashpower on the network is owned by the attacker.

That's if all miners move to the new chain. What if they don't? The less hashpower left on either chain, the more at risk users of either chain are to double-spend attacks. This problem is compounded by the game theory proposition that a miner stands to increase his relative hashpower on the minority chain by a function of the hashpower that is mining on the majority chain. A miner may take a calculated risk to do so, based on his information about which chain most nodes recognize as valid and therefore which chain most users are using. I.e. if most miners temporarily point their hashpower at the new fork, then realize that most nodes did not change their consensus rules, what do you think they will do? Many will return to the original chain.

As I've said in the past:


Consider a situation where the majority of hashpower is mining under the new consensus rules, while the majority of nodes are enforcing the old consensus rules. Before immediately shooting that down with "but economic majority!" I think there has been very little evidence offered that miners temporarily pointing their hashpower at another chain will force all or even most network nodes to "upgrade" to the new rules. Many operators of "old" nodes won't even notice that a fork occurred -- the only reason they might notice (if unaware of all the reddit/bitcointalk drama) is that confirmation times will take longer than usual until the next difficulty readjustment (due to reduced hashpower on their chain), at which point everything returns to normal. The invalid chain goes unnoticed because it is invalid.

The result? Mass confusion. Users making irreversible payments to other peers, merchants, etc. who may not receive said payments on what they consider to be the "valid" blockchain. Once newly minted coins on the respective chains are circulated into their networks and are sufficiently mixed with old inputs, this would become the everyday expectation. Exchanges and brokers that allow the sale of bitcoin may be open to fraud lawsuits if they deliver "invalid" coins to customers on an "invalid" blockchain. Incompatibility across the entire network(s) and the lack of wallet software that can distinguish for users which blockchain their inputs are valid on, will lead to chaos. In the end, all versions of bitcoin will probably plummet in value, given the difficulty in using it, the lack of clarity of what bitcoin even "is" anymore, and the corresponding erosion of all trust in the protocol. I doubt bitcoin could ever recover from this basic failure of its reason for existing (the decentralized enforcement of rules to trustlessly store and transfer value)

The biggest losers, of course, will be SPV users. SPV protocols are so lacking that users have no way of knowing which chain and rule set the nodes they connect to are following. One time, they may be connecting to an "old" bitcoin node. The next time, they may be connecting to a forked node. An SPV user does not know the difference; he will simply send his transaction to anybody that will accept it. But that transaction may be valid on one, but not the other chain. The question then becomes, which chain was the recipient expecting payment on? The SPV user has no control over that.

Consider these dangers, and then compare to a soft fork:

In a soft fork, partitioning will only happen if miners supporting the new rules drops below 50% (hence activation at 95%). Non-mining nodes (most of the network, particularly when extended to all the SPV nodes that connect to them) need not upgrade, since the new, more restrictive rules are backwards compatible with the old, less restrictive rules. As long as > 50% of miners are supporting the new rules, no one gets forked off.

A minority miner could include invalid transactions based on the new rules, but as long as a majority of hashpower agrees on the new rules, it won't be confirmed and the block will be rejected. So non-upgraded (and therefore SPV nodes, depending who they connect to) could be at risk of seeing invalid transactions that will not confirm. Of course, no one should ever trust an unconfirmed transaction to begin with (we have short chain forks on a regular basis) even without considering possible attacks.

Fear not madjules007 I will copy and paste your post into ever block size debate thread going forward followed by "TLDR- holy war" :)

I agree with points. Quite of those 'pros' are directly or indirectly related to the first one. It does not make sense to list them all separately.

It won't.

This is not a pro and not related to OP.

Elaborate?

Well if we have more room in blocks won't fees be lower? Lower minimum fees means spam attacks are cheaper no?

Regarding HF, there is talk on the dev list about making the network adapt faster to a sudden drop in mining nodes, I believe related to the upcoming halving.

I haven't read all the posts because I don't believe it will happen, but if the network does auto-adjust difficulty more quickly when there is a sudden drop in hash power, that could makes hard forks even more dangerous because both forks could continue to grow at near same rate even if one has much more consensus.

Maybe they are addressing that, I don't know, I don't like the dev list posting policies so I won't ask.

But that means a 2 MB fork should happen sooner rather than later if they are thinking about difficulty adjustment, the fork should happen before it becomes even more dangerous to fork.

Sorry I need to understand something here... as a noob :)

2mb blocks at current difficulty... takes twice as long to process = more energy, more cost, angry miners... wouldnt the bitcoin network adjust the difficulty accordingly. i.e 1mb with 160 difficulty(didnt feel like typing the rest of the numbers) would be the same as 2mb with 80...

Resource usage would stay the same in terms of electricity. transaction fees stay the same per transaction yet miners would get a little more... i.e you not charging the client more just the same...but the batch done at a time is more so hence you get more.

Now about the nodes... someone using dial up connection as a node is already obsolete... and yes usually they in the bum fuck of no where
BUT the guys in the bum fuck of nowhere use cell phones usually with 3G... and if its really remote gsm.... but then again how many transaction are happening in gsm only areas???.... realistically speaking.

Maybe cell phones can be adopted as node (just a thought)....

no need to fork.. fork for what... just because you have increased demand for a product or service you dont go start a whole new company... you increase production capacity... plain stupid idea to run two seperate entities for the same thing and compete against one another???...

Will groups be left behind.. YES... it happens in business... we see it happen with miners... the main worry is with nodes.. and the reasn that would happen is simple... nodes arent getting paid... if there was remuneration for nodes I think you would get a spike in just nodes another thought...

just my useless 5c

sweet

No, finding a hash that meets the difficulty has nothing to do with the size of the block.


Sure, if you have a >200GiB/month data plan and >70GB free disk space. Not sure about the battery, but it would probably only last a few hours.

Well technically yes, but still no. If the fees drop by half, and the amount of empty block space is 50% then such attacks would be as expensive as they are now. There are just a lot of variables and factors to consider.

Segwit comes first though. I'd say a 2 MB block size limit would be easier to deploy after IBLT and Weak blocks.

You could use a big microSD card and keep it charging constantly, however I don't see why one would want to do this.

I added a fun little poll, make sure you read the pros and cons before voting.

I will now try to catch up on the discussion and add some pros, cons, and comments to OP.

Pro: Not bumping limit to 2MB could cause a fork.

it's no secret poeple want 2MB, we've seen open letters signed by many many top bitcoin businesses stating they want bigger blocks, we've also see the same thing coming from the a huge % of hashrate, it's not unreasonable to assume, inaction on this issue will cause a fork.

I kind of doubt it.

What is happening is certain people want to take over development. The TX capacity of Bitcoin is what they saw as a way to socially engineer the public into believing there is a problem the core developers are not addressing.

It's an easy target for that. For most people, doubling the block size means doubling the TX rate. That makes sense. Reality is it is *one* way to increase the TX rate.

The core developers have to look at other ways, and determine which method has the least negative side effects.

While the core developers do this, it gives opportunity for those who wish to take over to point a finger and cry that core devs aren't acting on this problem. That however is deception, core is addressing the issue.

You could also just start using Classic.

http://nodecounter.com/

The thread was solely designed to not mentioned any implementation. It seems that the 'forkers' are unable to follow simple rules. Why am I not surprised?

Exactly. People are obsessed with the 2 MB block size limit.

I really doubt it. People who are really working for the best of Bitcoin would never risk this.

lol will you look at this http://nodecounter.com/


i guess this kinda thing is to be expected from nodecounter.com.....

but.... they are risking it, right now.

gavin left core and created XT and now helping Classic and Unlimited, in an attempt at forking bitcoin.
did you miss the part when like 20 of the top bitcoin businesses sign a document that explained why they wanted bigger blocks?
the bitcoin market has drop several times because this kind of fork was seen as a credible threat.

sure this it's unlikely bitcoin will fork over this in the near future, but should core refuse to comply with >80% of hashing power, that's not only risking it, thats asking for it.


Yes poeple are "obsessed", many are willing to fork over this issue.

It's not the idea of 2MB that poeple are obsessed about, it's about cores vision for bitcoin's future. not everyone agrees we should consider the specs of a 60$ raspberry pi when designing the world's financial settlement layer.

OP has not at made any guidelines regarding this.
I do agree it's a good idea to not mention  "Core or Classic" in OP, but for the purpose of the discussion, i believe its OK to ref. Core or Classic in the explanations.
When you're trying to prove a point like i just did about, it helps to be able to point to real world events surrounding the block limit debate.

I feel the Cons side is a bit thin and has to much red.
I do believe there are more CONS.
I will want to expand on this point "Increased resource usage (capacity, bandwidth, processing power)"

If you manage not to fall into asleep you ll get some pros here after 15 min

http://youtu.be/i93dNBW4NEM

Fee market yet is totally crap guys...

1MB Bitcoin + 1MB Ethereum

problem solved

Hmm, could also be the fork had already happened when blockstream came into the game and we already are on BSC = Blockstreamcoins ....

So its the try to get old BTC back

you know, it's sad how true this rings.

the project has been lead with a certain vision of how it would scale, that vision had not changed up until they took over the project.

I wish that finally the gentlemen get together and formulate a compromise, shake hands and work on true BTC together. It does not seam fully impossible to me!

KINDERGARDEN

voted.

Same

So what is your vision? I remember when I got on board in early 2013, there was so much talk of "the unbanked." Have people given up on that? With 0.12 in pruned mode (and with 3g/4g bandwidth limitations in mind), people in Africa could conceivably actually validate their own transactions now (instead of depending on Bitpesa).

A lot of the world has pretty shitty internet. Is bitcoin a global currency? Or coffee money for Starbucks customers in US/Europe?

I believe in the original vision of bitcoin, ie "being your own bank." And I don't think I should have to run an SPV node (which trusts anyone it connects to) in order to do that.

You'll have to wait. Adam has been silenced banned.

With wallet pruning it can get down to 2gb which makes it possible. As long as it's still possible to sync on 3G or 4G. Not sure it's really possible to run a full-time node that way though, maybe just to run your own wallet. But maybe.

The R-Pi is basically a cellphone but missing some of the radio stuff. I'm not sure why you would want to do things that way though. It's going to be a battery killer.

There's no reason not to run a full node with proper hardware and a low-cost network connection and access the wallet using RPC calls if you want to be using your own node.

Exactly

Some people only have mobile to connect to the internet. No PCs, 3G. Lot of people actually. This way they can validate transactions for themselves. Could just sync for personal transactions and run in listen-only for minimum impact. I think it is great that this is now possible -- kudos to Core.

Well to be honest, I would rather see an effort to get better Internet access and stable electrical power to those people.

The next Satoshi could be a young girl living in poverty in Chad, maybe if she had Internet access she could have a future we all benefit from instead of growing up to do manual labor.

Yes let us try to keep the blocks small, but lets treat the disease and not just accommodate the symptom.

Feel free to donate. :D Rolling out fiber optic infrastructure is insanely expensive, one of the reasons why its not very widespread yet. Bitcoin is limited to the private/govt internet infrastructure (one of its weakenesses) so it makes sense to aim to accomomdate high latency/low bandwidth situations, rather than aiming to eventually be ahead of the tech curve. What Id like to see are real scaling solutions for bitcoin that mean you can run a node on a phone AND we can see continued adoption.

What I'd like to know is how much spam can be squeezed out of the system. People say "spam" is subjective but it (and "dust") have pretty specific definitions in bitcoins history -- uneconomic transactions. There is still a lot of dust tx being pushed around (that's why the threshold went up recently to 2730 from 546 satoshis). A fee market should help squeeze some of that traffic out.

We gonna need a fee market sooner than later. Going on 16 million out 21 million coins already mined. That means we are on the tail end. When that reward dwindles, fees need to be there to incentivize miners to secure the system.

OP was banned today. So I suppose we shouldn't expect any updates for a while.

Decentralization at work. If you can snuff out all opposing viewpoints... you have uncontentious consensus! Next, mewn!

And when fees are high enough that they are a days wages for some people, what would be the incentive for them to want to validate Bitcoin transactions? For the two transactions per year they do to put funds on the lightning network?

If bitcoin transactions become too expensive for some people, an altcoin will pop up to fill the need.

Yes, indeed.

Any evidence of this, or just more FUD? And with the Lightning Network, fees would necessarily be much cheaper than on-chain because there is much less cost (propagation/bandwidth) required. One would of course want to be able to validate the settlement transactions on-chain.

When the block size is not increased to higher value, people will have to compete to have their transactions confirmed. The price will be high.

What's worse compete with paid bitcoin shills or with paid spam transactions.

To be honestly i dont think this would happen.
I cant think of an Altcoin which would be established enough to fill the gap.
Any special altcoin you're thinkin about?

It is not the feautre of the coin that fail the bitcoin. It is the power sturggle within the developers and the community.

Hey I have an idea, let's take over bitcoin development and then permanently limit the blocksize (which was always meant by Satoshi to be increased) and force everyone onto off-chain solutions for our personal profit!

I'm sure it will succeed. Or maybe, everyone will just jump ship onto altcoins. Oh well fuck it, I guess we'll just take the chance.

-Blockstream logic

He was too close to penetrating the matrix. Some agents had to come and take him away to some underground dungeon.

Poll should include another option: "I want a blocksize limit increase ASAP, but not from Core".

Anyone who still respects and follows Blockstream/Core should leave the theymos owned, manipulated forums and seek unbiased information.

Definitely paid shills.

Wrong. The ban was suggested by a moderator that is neutral to the debate (has not voiced his opinion; few have actually) and it was ACK'd by several others. Stop this useless propaganda and ad hominem. The ban was well deserved.

These forums are neither manipulated nor biased. Theymos does not moderate (almost never). Please stop with the pointless FUD. This is why the 'forkers' are 'very evil' and wasting everyone's time acting like this (i.e. it is time to stop).

Will the nature of the offense be shared with the forum's user base?

It can be, I guess. It seems rather quite obvious and long overdue. However, I don't feel like we should be derailing the thread like this. OP will be back after his ban, if he chooses to come back that is.

Just came over that here

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/segregated-witness-sotf-fork-segwit-pros-and-cons.986

Why is that not to stay here?

You're better of being fed information directly into your brain from Trump than reading a forum like that one. Those people there are really horrible and I don't tend to say such things without a basis. I'm talking out of experience as somebody that I know tried to clarify something on that forum. It is just a waste of time.
Who came up with this nonsense? I've never heard of this before. Segwit is far superior than a 2 MB block size limit in all aspects aside from complexity. People are really being hyperbolic about this complexity though, mostly because their knowledge is lacking; quite unfortunate.

I was just wondering why this thread here is now sw else. Feels like some bad politics happened and moved things into some 'illegal' underground and failed to better discussed it on facts...

 ???

lauda still blindly wants to assume its a power grab that only one codebase should win.. leading him to want blockstream to be the supreme leader and central powerhouse.

which goes against bitcoins whole premiss..
he doesnt even realise that defending blockstream by talking about the corporate arguments of classic. is him blindly hiding the corporate arguments of blockstream.

NEITHER corporation should have control.

once he puts down his paycheck and uses his mind in the best scenario of the community he will see that all 12 implementations having 2mb PLUS segwit, together is best for everyone.

then he might stop banning people because they are not blockstream fanboys.

i really wish he would open his mind instead of his wallet when new proposals are launched. especially when its been proven he lacks real research and is just reiterating a script someone told him.

poors and cons.

:D

Hope that very soon some real intelligent species here or there will realize that all that poor fighting leads only to lose base and only makes strong some alts... Signs for that just cannot be hidden away.

OP was banned due to repeatedly breaking the rules (in addition to being in a signature campaign). He must have re-created his thread on that forum. Additionally, they apparently blame theymos for this ban. He had nothing to do with it.

Not if one is being paid to do so. All would be fine if people agreed with Segwit now and some increase via a HF later (2017 maybe?). A 2MB block size proposal has no benefits aside from increased TPS.

Its not clear to me that raising the blocksize wouldn't cause massive amounts of node centralization. If right now running a node can be a problem for a lot of people, if you make the blockchain grow at twice the speed, I think it's going to be really hard to run a node. We need data before doing this, and the research done so far points at centralization of nodes.

IMO all will agree to this IF

1. It is the ONLY quick straight fwd solution
2. there is enough proof due to testing incl all preripheric appl
3. nobody is left out / no ugly side affects come up with

bitcoin can work on a raspberry Pi.. meaning even a 2005 (11 year old) computer is atleast 2 times more powerful. and so a 5 year old computer or a 6 month old computer can handle alot more.

i do agree we need real data to back up this because all i hear currently is Laudas un-researched but scripted doomsdays. which is scaring people..

oh and by the way if laudas data on segwit is to be believed (190% capacity) and also blindly following blockstream rooadmap of making confidential payment codes by default.

then a 1mb maxblocksize+segwit+confidential payment codes = 2.85mb of real data for 3800* transaction capacity
as opposed to 2mb maxblocksize with tradition transactions =4000 capacity for 2mb real data amount

as oppose to 1mb+segwit(no confidential payment code) = 3800* tx capacity with 1.9mb real data amount

*(only if people switch to different types of private/public key signature types and do segwit transactions, expect less than 3800 due to not everyone doing segwit)

basically we should not force people to do segwit transactions to gain capacity. we need both 2mb+segwit to allow freedom of choice, zero control.

also if node distribution is the thing you care most about. also look into how many of the 6000 true nodes will blindly think pruned/no witness mode is ok.
also look into how blockstream think that the softfork is so safe people dont have to upgrade. meaning not only will it make old nodes not be full nodes because they cant verify transactions fully. but also that by not upgrading people cannot make segwit transactions so the capacity growth will not be the full 190% that lauda proclaims..

lastly. knowing that it does require people to upgrade to utilise. it is a sly way of making people upgrade. so essentially is not as risk free as you may think

As far as a 2 MB block size proposal is concerned:
1) It isn't a quick solution as HF's were never meant to be deployed as proposed recently by Gavin (grace period & consensus threshold are too low).
2) Adequate testing in some areas (maybe somebody has a source)
3) They are left out if they don't upgrade in time.

Exactly. We need much more data in this case. A lot of people tend to say that it won't happen because storage is cheap and internet is fast already, but I tend to disagree because there aren't even that many people who run nodes these days.

Just to show how silly this argument is, right now you can buy a 6 TB hard disk for 270 euros, any computer you buy comes with at least 1 TB hard disk, 10 years of 2 MB blocks are approximately 1 TB, I think, right now, at least when it comes to storage we can afford 8 MB blocks...

Imagine how cheap storage will be in 5 years, in 10 years, plus optimizations made to the protocol.

People bitching about block chain size and delaying adoption because of this is just silly.

Keeping small max block size doesn't solve the decentralisation issue (decline in node count). At very best it only slows it down.

People who run nodes don't get any direct incentive + most newcomers will go straight to lightweight clients or online wallets for convenience, so here's the real problem.


Yes. But to be fair, the main concern in blocksize debate is network bandwidth capacity rather than just storage.

It always amuses me when the youngsters have no scope of the march of technology. From my associate Tom Coughlin:


These hyperscale datacenters are leading the charge to cheap mass bandwidth for us all.

Correct. I never implied that it does solve it. However, an increased block size limit could only make it worse.

Well, I don't think that the majority needs to bother with using non lightweight clients. However, they should have the option to easily use one if they wanted to.

Both are a concern.

I think thats the idea + eventually more security features like fraud proofs to make lite nodes safer. Bandwidth-saving features in 0.12 also help to address the issue.

i think its worth noting segwit will have the same effect on node count as 2MB, it will increase requirement to nodes in more or less the same way.

and i think we can all agree maximizing node count shouldn't be a major concern, classic nodes are popping up left and right on AWS. keeping full node requirements very low, only opens the door to a sybil attack, and makes it easy to drown out the voices of real participants dependent on the system.

if anything the barrier to entry on running a full node should be raised to make it easier to hear the voice of Serious participants, participants that matter like bitpay, bitfinex, or tiger direct.

As far as validation time is concerned, it doesn't. Additionally, a 2 MB block size limit is unsafe without additional limitations placed upon it.

Those nodes are useless due to their concentration.

Do you even realize what you're saying? Were you already corrupted by the people on that other (horrible) forum? The option to run a node should always remain as cheap as possible.

Indeed.  I'm not sure how you thought such a view would be received, adamstgBit, but even as someone who supports a larger blocksize, that's just plain wrong in my view.  "Participants that matter"?  That sounds equally as horrid as the elite-chain fans who think that only the whales and early adopters matter.  The voice that should carry the most weight is the one talking the most sense, not just whoever happens to be a big company.

well the main pros for me is that the problem of block size would be solved and there would be no need to pay higher fees

i cant find any cons of that though i heard something that if the hard fork happened there is a possibility to create two bitcoins

this is not somthing new i picked up from the other forum
i never expected that devs would make such an effort to keep node requirements low enough to run on a raspberry pi.
in fact i was lead to believe that full node centralization was natural evolution
this was the creator's vision as well.


some node centralization Vs settlement layer prohibitively to expensive to use by everyone
i'll pick full node centralization....

its not like not running a node will prevent anyone from participating in the development or discussion
i'm just point out that by keeping requirements low, makes node count MEANINGLESS
just look at classic nodes, if we go by that metric classic is the favored implementation.
if it cost 1000$ a year to run a node, node count would actually mean somthing.

clearly there is a balance to be stuck between keeping node requirements low and allowing the main chain to grow.

1MB isn't it.

segwit + 1MB is a good start but I want MORE!

also i want to feel as tho the devs are on the same page, they will do everything they can to allow mainchain to grow.

you need to seek someone intelligent who can explain these things to you. clearly you have failed at educating yourself properly. now everytime you open your mouth you look like an idiot.

This max block size is still a hot discussion but I think we also need to talk about min block size. We see a lot of blocks found with only 1 transaction in it, mostly these are coming from Chinese pools.
+1 for 2 MB or even more block size and we should do something for empty blocks.

Just throwing this out there: Empty blocks aren't going away with Classic. Gavin actually wrote SPV mining into the software, to make all miners engage in non-validating mining, rather than just the [Chinese] pools we know about. He tried to code in some node-enforced 30-second time limit on it, but current miner code is already patched to ignore such limits, and they can just patch it again to maximize their chances of finding a block without validating the prior.

I wonder if there could be some incentive to empty the mempool ... does that make sense?

Yeah..... it's called..... FEES! ;D

Unfortunately blocks are only 70% full and fees are something like 1% of block reward (99% being the 25btc subsidy). So for instance SPV miners don't give a shit about fees, they only want the subsidy.

for now...

Yes were negatively influenced by those people.

Stop with the appeal to authority bullshit.

Then you're an idiot. Bitcoin would be worth nothing if it was centralized. You'd just be left with a inefficient network.

Redundant at best.

Not really, no. If you are too cheap to include the adequate fee, the miners shouldn't bother with your TX.

Why does it have to be either/or?  Why not aim for a balance where the costs for the settlement layer will increase slightly and the resources required to run a node increase slightly.  Sacrificing one to bolster the other will always leave someone at a disadvantage, so if the costs have to go up, it should be spread as equally as possible between the two.

those people, were once valued members of this community

I can't help but point out we are going against the "classical road map"

if 1000's of poeple run nodes, and 10,000's connect to pools to mine coins, that is hardly centralized...
I Imagine a future where individual states, universities, governments, corporations, banks are the ones running bitcoin nodes.
China and USA may not agree on a lot of thing, but they will be made to participate in nakamoto consensus!!
I simply do not care if there individual citizens can't run a full node without a 10,000$ investment.
Welcome to the future of money, its a BIG DEAL.

does peter todd speak for them?
does blockstream?  :D



this is a sensible compromises i can go along with happily.

i guess segwit is such a compromises, but if thats are far as they are willing to go, and attempt to force me off chain in the name of "raspberry pie standards" i will fork off.

"Valued" is subjective in this case. Besides, their past is irrelevant.

Doesn't matter. Satoshi's words should not be quoted into arguments of today. Everything was very different back then and he had very limited data to go from.

Again, either very foolish or stupid. Bitcoin was always about individual sovereignty and now you're talking about turning it into a government/corporation coin. Nice viewpoint.  ::)

No and no.

You aren't being forced to go off-chain. People don't know the definition of the word 'forced' apparently. The only way in which that word could apply is if there are no way of transacting on the main chain (which isn't the case). Additionally, there's nothing wrong with using a secondary layer. There would be no internet of today if it weren't for the 7 layers that it uses.

you understand the distinction between controlled by 1 cooperation Vs decentralized amongst all cooperations. right?

the idea of bitcoin running on home computers while its only use is as a settlement layer only large corporations can afford to transact on is either very foolish or stupid.

maybe my point of view isn't "Nice" but at least its realistic.

lets not forget large corporations and banks have already said PASS on the bitcoin bandwagon, and they are on the Bitcoin bandwagon. weather you like it or not the idea of a decentralized "datacentercoin" as some like to call it, is coming. IMO, bitcoin will NOT be able to compete if it hodls desperately to maximal decentralization idealistic roadmap.

So fork off and create your datacentercoin. Just stop calling it bitcoin and go back to pumping DASH.

i mention dash once and suddenly i'm pumping it.
does le bitcoin feel threatened?
it should!
it is!

Seems a theme among bitco.in crowd. VS loves to pump DASH in here while trashing bitcoin. Fortunately I saw that he recently has given up on bitcoin, as well as some others in frapdoc's cult. Don't worry: you guys always have DASH to fall back on. Satoshi's true vision:

he's not the only "retard" pushing buttons...
i would guesstimate the "retard" out number the "geniuses" 10,000/1
its worth keeping that in mind as you watch core cling to their principals 

A quick search of the page shows no one called VeritasSapere a "retard" but you. Happy to support Core as long as they are supporting my principles and bitcoin's principles.

'principles' have cost us 10% market share in 3 months!

Prove it. What have alt pumps got to do with bitcoin? The only thing that matters is making bitcoin as viable and robust as possible. It doesn't matter what alts are doing. Go buy alts if getting rich quick is your intention here. But you may find that doing that right now will be a bad decision in hindsight. 8)

its a doge eat doge world out there buddy  :D

Yes let the forks and alts cannibalize one another as they all try in disagreement to fix bitcoin's problems. 8)

yes of course, they dont posse a threat, there silly competition with no merit

they'll never crack the >1MB "problem"

Nobody said alts have no merit (although most of them don't on their face)......what I said was do what is best for bitcoin regardless of them. Competition from alts is not a legitimate reason to force hasty/untested software changes that much of community does not support

And whether they crack the problem of scalability is years off. Easy to claim scalability when a network is barely used by anybody (whether ethereum or whatever else)......some eth devs have said that they are already realizing that eth is not more scalable than btc

a self imposed limits ( like 1 block every 10mins or 1MB max per block) is not a problem other alt are subject to.

i hope we dont actually have an alt PROVE it can handle more TX than bitcoin.

We're working on it, thanks.


You misunderstand the situation entirely. We believe in the original Bitcoin vision. We feel you have lost your way.


No. It is Bitcoin. It adheres much closer to the existing principles than does BlockstreamCoin.


WTF are you on about?

Apparently sky was supposed to fall a year ago. What the hell are you waiting for? People are continuing to realize that the fearmongering around "overcapacity" and "fee events" were bullshit.


That's cute. Unfortunately if you do so in a contentious manner (i.e. with 75% miner agreement and no consideration for nodes/users) you will split the network. Only the fork that is not compatible with the original network can be considered an altcoin, by definition.


How so? Blockstream doesn't control anything. They aren't pushing a contentious hard fork on the community. If adam's datacentercoin is a problem for you, stick with CoinbaseCoin.


The bitco.in crew's tendency to come here to trash bitcoin's future while glorifying shitcoins like DASH.

Here's a con. A simple 2 Mb hard fork does not solve the O(n^2) hashing problem. For those of you who have no idea what that means, it means that as the number of hashes required to verify a transaction increases linearly, the time required to hash all of it increases quadratically. This means that a transaction could theoretically be produced that causes nodes to have to spend a significant amount of time (several seconds to a few minutes, depending on the transaction) verifying the transaction. Such a thing was seen in the past when a miner (f2pool I think) created a 1 Mb transaction to clean up spam that went to wee brainwallets. The transaction took about 30 seconds to verify. With 2 Mb, a 2 Mb theoretical transaction could take 2 minutes or more to verify.

the con in OP that refers to this:


its a dumbed down version of what you are talking about, if you think i could reword it for more clarity let me know.

Why "off-chain scaling" cannot eliminate the need for main-chain scaling

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4btwa9/why_offchain_scaling_cannot_eliminate_the_need/

Oh, whoops, I missed that.

couldn't agree more!

but this doesn't really belong in this thread.

we need a new thread On-Chain Vs Off-Chain scaling Pros, Cons and tragedies

i would be with bells on to within 2017, suppose you have a SSD/HDD of 4TB (4096*10⁹) each block comes with 2MB, you can hold ~2 million blocks including the previous, which is almost 8~9 years.
anyway, i hope people won't be in problem of this, such as synchronising speed.
FYI price of SSD decreases by at least 10% per annum AFAIK.

Merely to amass 75% hashing power. Yes, it's a long way from here. But the trend is positive. As I said, we're working on it, thanks.


Is there something in your reply that you believe is a stunning revelation?


Oh - there it is. Though it is merely a stunning misunderstanding of the way Nakamoto Consensus works. The blockchain that emerges with the majority of the hashing power (e.g. economic majority) ends up being The One True Bitcoin. FWIW, The SegWit Omnibus Changeset, as proposed, is also not compatible with the original network. We need some way forward. I have cast my lot with bigger blocks for the time being.

How sure are you that you'll end up on the winning side of this trade? I'm working towards my side being the victor. You doing anything other than waiting for Blockstream to pull through for you?


You're right - they're pushing a contentious soft fork on the community. Yawn.


Yikes! I have no idea what 'adam's datacentercoin' is. I assume by 'CoinbaseCoin', you mean Classic? Or do you mean Unlimited? XT? Or maybe you mean the source tree that Coinbase's engineers forked? You're gonna have to specify.

I've made my choice for the moment, thank you. Interestingly, any of the above are compatible with any of the others. So when another incorporates features I value higher, I can simply switch. Oh yeah - you can throw Satoshi 0.12 in that pile too. At least for now. Next Core rev... err ... not so much.


Can you name more than five people that you consider to be 'the bitco.in crew'? How many of them are pumping DASH here?

Here's a con. SegWit does not solve the O(n^2) hashing problem. Other fixes in the The SegWit Omnibus Changeset do. As do other changes in those other forks you so love to deride.

First, this has to do with _transaction_ size, not _block_ size. Sure, you can fit a larger than 1MB transaction in a larger than 1MB block. Yawn.

But even if the other forks had nothing in place to deal with this issue, you still need to explain to me why a miner would not stop validating a malformed block, rather than getting back to earning revenue*. If this sort of technical detail is what Bitcoin's continued success depends upon, rather than an alignment of economic incentive for being 'a good neighbor', we're all doomed anyway.

*For those of you who don't know what this is, it consists of being the first miner to find a nonce that brings the hash of a block to a result lower than that determined by the current difficulty.**

** Yes, I know you know this. Well, most of you, anyway. Think the incentives through.

No, segwit requires that those changes be made to be compliant with the segwit fork. A simple 2 hard fork to a block size limit of 2 MB will not fix that. Yes, I know that a specific implementation of a 2 MB hard fork has a solution for that problem, but that is not the topic of this thread. This thread specifically talks about a generic 2 Mb hard fork which does not include such changes whereas segwit must include that change.

You're right, there is nothing stopping a miner from not validating the block, and you know what, that is exactly what miners do now. It's called SPV mining, they don't verify the blocks that they receive, they just start mining on the block even before verifying it. Even before they have received anything about the block except for the header.

Obviously there are solutions such as running validating in another thread, but that is off topic.

The problem with blocks having large transactions that have this problem is the potential attack vector on full nodes which do actually verify all blocks and transactions. Say you run a full node. Then I decide to start sending you blocks with transactions that take minutes to verify. Suddenly your node pretty much grinds to a halt as it attempts to verify all of those maliciously crafted blocks. Right now I could do that with a 1 Mb transaction. If the block size limit was 2 Mb, I could send you a 2 Mb transaction (assuming it is strictly just an increase to 2Mb only and nothing else) which would take you 4 times as long to validate.

Apparently you don't know how hard forks work. Miner agreement says fuck all about what users are doing. 8)


Hahaha. Another clown that thinks *hashpower* defines the consensus rules. Explain to us all how that works. Does ___ PH hash = 21 million coin limit? ;D

How's it going to work if 75% of miners fork to another network, and the majority of nodes do not follow? Miners don't make the rules. Nodes do. 8)


Is there a reason you always refer to it as "SegWit Omnibus Changeset?" Does that make you feel important, or just being obnoxious?


It's not about winning or losing. It's about forking attackers off my network. Why would I need Blockstream to do anything?


That's not a very good comparison. A soft fork won't split the network. Backward compatibility really puts a damper on your non-arguments, doesn't it? Anyone who doesn't want to update need not. 8)


I guess you should specify what you meant by BlockstreamCoin. Because there is only one global ledger: bitcoin. Classic (heavily backed by Coinbase), XT and Unlimited seek to split that ledger into multiple ledgers. Again, this is the definition of an altcoin.


LOL, and we can release a billion more versions that no one uses, too. That means your altcoins are "bitcoin"...why?


LOL, this guy is willing to break consensus every time someone codes in a feature he likes. Like I always say, it's great that there are these new implementations now -- you forkers are cannibalizing each other.


I dunno, five people would be nearly counting their whole userbase. But theres VS, frapdoc, adam... the others, not sure. I certainly don't make any effort to follow these people; they are like insects to be squashed.

No. But nice try at reductio al stupido. Hashpower is a pretty good measure of economic resources. In this world where chicken littles are cluck-clucking about how expensive a 2MB node is to run, a mid-size miner can spin up any number of nodes. To such a miner, the cost of operating nodes is less than chickenfeed. For a mere two chicks. The non-mining nodes have cluck-all to do with consensus. But they do make the impotent feel good about their 'power'.


Even if miners were somehow magically prevented from operating nodes, if the miners build a chain with whatever rules they care to, and the transactionators keep transactionating upon that blockchain, that chain defines Bitcoin. The nodes have fuck-all to say about it. What are they gonna do, just drop all the incoming transactions on the floor? Miners unaffected - they'll just reach down and pick up the dropped transactions, and mine 'em in the next block. Or the next...

Now you can argue that the node instances are a reflection of the transactionators' will. But that is a different conversation altogether. Is that your claim? If so, well then let's discuss this real issue rather than imbuing 'nodes' with some magical power that they do not in reality possess.

Though to answer your question directly, the miners are interested in what 75% of those making transactions will choose. As those making transactions are the power that keep miners in check. They have no need to worry about amassing 75% of nodes. Nodes are powerless.


Yes. The reason is that there are many changes other than SegWit in The SegWit Omnibus Changeset.


In my book, any change that changes the protocol so significantly that formerly fully validating nodes become nodes incapable of validating all transactions is something other than 'backwards compatible'. But you can live in that fantasy land if you want to.


First, I'll grant you one fair point. I used the term 'BlockstreamCoin' merely in snark, based upon the similar derision cast upon the other forks. However, you knew exactly what implementation I was speaking of, didn't you? Your other terms? Not so much.

But more germane, neither Classic (which, by the way, is NOT the fork published by Coinbase), XT, nor Unlimited seek to split the chain. If they did, their activation threshold would be somewhat south of 75%.


Nope - you're still not getting it. We do not seek a version that no one uses. We seek multiple interoperating versions, all adherent to the same protocol based upon emergent consensus. We seek a coin guided by Nakamoto Consensus, rather than one restricted by the few. We seek these principles to be eventually adopted by the overwhelming majority of Bitcoiners. And at the moment, our trajectory is positive. Cheers!


Using a different implementation is not 'breaking consensus'. As long as a shared protocol (i.e. a protocol that has achieved consensus) is employed, it matters not what implementation each user chooses.


But you make claims about them that you cannot verify. The integrity of your statements is duly noted.

If they didn't seek to split the chain, their activation threshold would be north of 90%. You can make such claims all day long. If their intentions were truly pure and for the sake of Bitcoin, they would never risk the negative effects of a network split (e.g. 3/4 and 1/4).

Introducing competition in a consensus based algorithm; interesting proposal.  ::)

LOL. Pretty good? How about all the wealth stored on the network? Miners cannot alone dictate the rules; they merely order transactions. Miners are meaningless on a dead network.  


How do you not understand that a miner (or Coinbase or Roger Ver) spinning up a bunch of nodes has absolutely nothing to do with the software users are running? How useful are miners communicating with themselves + a bunch of datacenter nodes with no economic activity behind them? Miners need people to sell their coins to..... so if you think they can ignore the network of users by spinning up nodes...... LOL.


That's only true if they are merely concerned with communicating amongst themselves, as opposed to the network of users, who may have forked them off.


Still pushing this disinformation that spinning up nodes forces the rest of the network to install some foreign software? Shame on you.


Why would you assume that? If miners violate the inflation controls that prevent > 21 million coins from being produced (these are consensus rules) why would anyone be transacting on their blockchain? No one would accept payment on that chain as legitimate.


What the hell are you talking about? "Drop all the incoming transactions on the floor?" Do you even bitcoin? No one accepts confirmed payments on that chain if they break the rules they enforce. That goes for any node on the network.


And no one will necessarily care about the blockchain those miners are mining on....


Node software is the only aspect of the bitcoin system that enforces rules. Try all you want to ignore that fact, but it is not merely an indication of will. If 75% of miners are mining on another chain, and 75% of users exist on the original chain, 75% of users simply ignore the invalid chain. It's very simple.


How the hell does 75% miner agreement equate to "75% of those making transactions?" What connection do they have at all?


Indeed. And they will fork off miners who publish invalid blocks.  


Then why did Gavin solicit pledges for people to spin up thousands of nodes? Why are services like classic-cloud spinning up nodes? The simple answer is to try to indicate that there is a network of users behind these nodes. (Of course, we know that is largely untrue simply based on the facts) Why is that necessary? Because miners are meaningless on a dead network with no users.


Segwit nodes are fully compatible with nodes that haven't updated. So apparently you are the one living in a "fantasy land" where you have redefined the meaning of "backwards compatible."


Any statistics, risk and game theory analysis to support the contention that 75% is remotely safe to ensure not only that miners, but network nodes upgrade? "Somewhat south?" What the hell does that mean? Please supply more than "who would want to stay on a dead chain?" as this is not evidence that 75% miner agreement would result in a dead chain rather than 2+ surviving chains.


Cool story. What you seek =/= what will happen. If you contend that 75% miner agreement will not break the consensus that defines what bitcoin is, then provide evidence rather than passing it off as truth.


Nakamoto Consensus says nodes can and will simply fork off such a "75% miner attack" on the network. Because hashpower has fuck all to do with the rules. Again, please respond to this, specifically, with regard to miner's ability to force users to install adversarial software:


Miners don't have power to define the rules. Stop suggesting that they do. Node software is the only thing that enforces rules on the bitcoin network. Miners can spin up all the nodes they want -- that won't make the rest of the network install different software to accept their blocks.


Good luck with that. I just see great opportunity for forkers to cannibalize each other. :)


LOL. Really? Trying to push the disinformation that running software that will break consensus rules =/= breaking consensus? :D

So now BTCD = Bitcoin Classic? How can that be, when BTCD will reject 2MB blocks as invalid, and Classic will accept them?


Of course I've verified them. In this case, adam deleted his post after he was called out on it. Icebreaker has quoted some great posts from frapdoc et al, feel free to peruse them; this is not an issue for me, I'm not going to waste time to search through post histories. Consider the point moot, since it was directed at adam, not you.

ok exstasie you need to explain to us, the means by which you believe bitcoin can change its protocol rules

i was told 51% of hashing power was all that was really NEEDED.

75% trigger + 90% activation is merely a "polite" way of doing it AFAI

what post did i delete? are you talking about another adam?

Overwhelming community consensus. See 2013 hard fork for reference. Much of the community clearly rejects these attempts to change the consensus rules at the present time.


That's all that is needed for a majority miner attack. That's all that's needed for miners to add restrictions to the protocol (soft fork) -- with or without community input (ie we have no power over that).

But 51% hashing power has nothing to do with forcing node operators to uninstall their software and install some incompatible software. If you remove consensus rules, that is what must happen. Otherwise those nodes will ignore the new network.

No I went back to the find the post in question and couldn't find it. Could be my mistake. Anyway, this is all irrelevant to the subject at hand, so if jbreher feels the need to keep focusing on it, it would just show that he's not particularly interested in the real issues. :)

i think this is not what the white paper seemed to indicate. ( " bitcoin is whatever the longest chain happens to be " or somthing to that effect )

altho i must agree with your assessment as a better description of what it takes to change the rules.

i simply believe >75% hashing power = Overwhelming community consensus ( clearly node count isn't a good gauge as we see with classic nodes its more representative of economy marjory then anything else )

and its not fair to say that pools command to much hashing power they are known to let their user base vote individuality ( altho they do seem to reserve the right to vote on the behalf of non-voters )

i think a lot of the problem comes from the idea that individuals have a say, they dont. if we have 10 loud poeple on bitcointalk.org pushing for 1MB blocks forever, this should have no bearing on gauging " community consensus ", this is mearly political white noise.

You can't ignore the word "valid" in the whitepaper. There is confusion around this subject because Satoshi conflated miners and nodes in the whitepaper, which makes sense as it was in the context of CPU mining. That doesn't change the fact that nodes enforce the rules, not hashpower.


What if 75% is used as a majority miner (51%) double spend attack? Is that "community consensus?" Miners do not have the same interests as users; we can't assume that they speak for them.


I didn't really mention miner centralization. Pools should consider non-votes as votes for status quo, as that is how consensus works. Anyone running old software is enforcing the old consensus rules. Until they flag agreement with new consensus rules, and/or enforce new consensus rules.......status quo.


How is this any different than a few pseudonymous people parroting support for Classic here or on Reddit?

So you believe you know more about my motivations than I do myself. Interesting god complex you have there.


I dunno. Seems to work for TCP/IP.

wow this was fun to read  ;D

you have a talent for clarity

Um, only if you think one of the stated purposes of bitcoin--to prevent double spending-- is nutty. The brute force double spend attack is the basis for the feared "51% attack," although a miner (or cartel of miners) wouldn't really need a majority of hashpower to attack the network in this way. It would simply guarantee the success of the attack.

Do I trust all miners? Certainly not! Do I trust 95% or more? Probably, depending on input from the user and development communities. Do I trust 75%? Absolutely not, particularly when the user and developer communities don't unite behind them.


That means protocol consensus rules are difficult to change. This immutability is a great thing. It means the rules--including the 21 million coin cap--won't be lifted from under us based on the voice of some majority. This is good for trust in bitcoin. If proposed changes see widespread disagreement, they should not be implemented, period.


The beauty of Segwit and soft forks is that node operators don't need to upgrade. History says most of them will upgrade in due time, but nobody needs to.

Miners do need to upgrade, and 95% will have agreed before proceeding with rules activation.

If Classic were willing to increase their threshold to 95%, I would step back and let the market make their choice. I think we both know Classic (or XT, etc) wouldn't have a chance in hell of doing that.... so what is your argument here?

i think its worth noting that, Classic could fork off with 51% and they would Technically be bitcoin ( according to nakamoto "conusues" )
lets leave node count out of this ( we both agree its to easy to fake nodecount )

having said that.

Classic IS using  95% as the threshold!
75% trigger, 95% activation
its 75% trigger a "warning we are about to fork",  95% "ok sorry the remaining 5% activation starts NOW"

personally i like nakamoto conusues

at 51% i feel the remaining 49% should just get thrown under the buss. ( hey more coins for the rest of us at least for a short while...)

but i'm nuts  :D.

Sorry but you are very confused about what Nakamoto Consensus means. Your logic says that 51% of miners can force the entire network to download new software--for example, to remove the 21 million coin cap. Sorry, not gonna happen.

Feel free to try, though. I would love for Classic to fork at 51%. That's what I'm getting at--lower it to 51% and accept that it's an attack and an altcoin, or increase it to 95% and claim ownership of bitcoin. But don't try to claim ownership at 75%; that's a bloody war and we won't "upgrade" to your adversarial client. The biggest losers will be lite nodes and miners who make the wrong decision.


Source? I can't find anything that says that. Everything I see says 75% activation, 28-days to upgrade, fork. I don't see any mention of 95% agreement for anything.

i think i'm wrong
75% "warning we are about to fork"
28 days later
we fork with >75%

but this all just for show/politeness

@50%+1vote you're go to go.

hey numbskull. its not a 75:25 split.

its a 75:25 "heads up guys something is changing soon. upgrade or be left with clams"
where the grace period wont stick to 75:25 but allows time for people to be prompted to upgrade and make it a higher amount of people moving across.

put short. if 90% have already moved across then it does need a whole year to move 10%.(eg 600 nodes) after all with all the bug fixes and emergency upgrades of the past we have had more then 7000 nodes upgrade in hours-days.. not months-years.
same can be said at 75% too!!!

the only reason for the year delay is to stay with blockstreams original agenda of increasing capacity just to offset the tx:mb ratio that would become bloated due to confidential payment codes. so they have to add more real capacity just so that people are not crying about only getting
3800tx for 2.85mb(750byte/tx) rather than
4000tx for 2mb(500byte/tx) or
7600tx for 5.7mb(750byte/tx)

so try to think outside the blockstream mantra box, and think for yourself about reality, not the glossy images hand delivered to you. spoonfeeding you half truths

ahhh much better

i know i should be more tactfull. but when he thinks he knows everything, but proves he has never read a line of code, thinking its wrote in java... and doesnt even know how long it takes to sync bitcoin. it makes me wonder where he is getting spoonfed his info

he's here to spread blockstream's catch phrases and arguments
if it wasn't for him and his army of sock puppets

we'd all be like:

 :D lol just kidding Lauda.

we dont all need to get along but fuck let's try and be more tactful, every other thread someone is blasting one another, before or after making point.

As are anybody else. Miners, nodes, users, … all adrift on a dead network. You’re not supporting your point that nodes determine consensus.


I fail to detect a point here. Correct, miners spinning up nodes does not directly impact users. I was pointing how silly your claim was that miners have to abide by what nodes want. Again, even if miners were somehow magically barred from spinning up their own nodes, nodes are powerless.


Yes, the network of users may have forked off the non-mining nodes. Agreed. You’re not supporting your point very well.

The network of users may also fork off the miners. This is not in the interests of the miners. Which is why adhering to a single codebase is not important for maintaining consensus. Economic interest is what is important for maintaining consensus.


Absolutely false. The only entities that control the rules by which the miners operate are the miners themselves. Just as the only entities that control the rules to which the nodes adhere are the nodes, and the only entities that control the rules to which the users adhere those very same users.

Further, the rules the miners adhere to, and the rules the users adhere to, actually mean something. They determine whether the blockchain is extended by any given block, and they determine whether or not economic transactions will be carried out upon that blockchain. The rules that any given node adheres to, OTOH, has essentially zero impact upon the network.


I never made any such claim.


Shame on _you_ for attributing to me a false quote.


Because I would assume that miners would only build a chain adhering to rules that users would accept. It is against their economic interest to do otherwise.


Duh. Going for the reductio al stupido card again?


Let me refresh your memory. Upon receiving a transaction, a node has exactly two options to it:
1) Forward the transaction
2) Not forward the transaction

Other than “dropping the transaction on the floor” (i.e. not forwarding the transaction), the node has no ability to influence the outcome of the network.


Do you even bitcoin? If any given node does not forward a given transaction, it matters not to the network. As long as the transaction finds its way from the creator of that transaction to a miner that mines it into a block that is subsequently accepted by the bulk of the miners, then that is a valid transaction, and any number of nodes can stamp their metaphorical feet, but that transaction has been conducted.

Yes, this all presumes that this transaction adheres to the rules set by the miners that accept it. But if so, it will be included in the blockchain. Users that do not agree with these rules are free to abandon the chain as well. So what?

Nodes remain absolutely powerless.


Not necessarily. Agreed. Which is why miners are incentivised to implement rules that will be accepted by the majority. Of other miners, and of users. Again, nodes have no power here.


Bullshit. Miners enforce rules as well. Any miner that mines on a block that contains transactions that are invalid will eventually go broke.


Thanks for the tautology. If those users accept that chain however…


I did not say that it equates. I stated that the miners are incentivized to follow the will of the majority of users. Again, no mention of nodes in this calculus, as nodes are powerless.


While I’d like to inquire what it means for ‘users to fork off miners’, I think I agree with your implied statement. Although I would phrase it somewhat more precisely. Maybe ‘users will not transact upon a blockchain that contains transactions that violate rules that those users accept’. I don’t see what point you’re making by this though.


I would suggest that if you are seeking insight as to Gavin’s motives, you might want to ask Gavin. Anything I could provide would be speculation. Though maybe if I read his words, I might infer something. Care to provide a link?


Again, you’d have to ask ‘classic-cloud’. Actually, I am unaware of any entity called ‘classic-cloud’. Is there one? Or are you just making stuff up in order to have a false talking point?


What is untrue? That there is a network of Classic nodes? Objectively, I know that there is a network of Classic nodes. I have at times run a Classic node. It has connected to at least one other Classic node. The existence of more than one Classic node is a priori evidence of a Classic node network.

Are you ignorant to the fact that there are at least two Classic nodes? Or are you intentionally misusing language in order to build another false talking point?



Great! Orwellian doublespeak! The SegWit Omnibus Changeset purports to make all current full nodes incapable of validating all transactions. This is the very antithesis of ‘compatible’.


If that’s the way you see it.


Any statistics, risk and game theory analysis to support the contention that 75% is unsafe? Put up or shut up.

You are right. We do not have hard evidence that 75% agreement will necessarily result in essentially all economic value on a single chain. Indeed the only way to prove that proposition, even with 99%, is to run the experiment. I feel confident that 75% is sufficient. Which is why I am working towards that goal.


Cool retort. What I seek is also =/= what will not happen.

No I’m done with evidence. Or more precisely, this entire discussion - all three and a half or so years of it - has been completely bereft of evidence. There are plausible inferences on both sides, and each side is assigning different probabilities to the various possible outcomes. Your group have not provided any evidence not only that 75% is insufficient, but neither any evidence that Core’s scaling path is free of fatal flaws.

Nope, I’ve been told repeatedly to fork off. Which is one reason why I am working towards that goal. With 75% hashpower, and what we believe will be correspondingly high user support. Cheers!


There is no “75% miner attack”. We measure miners, as hash power cannot be faked. We believe that 75% of all hash power is as good a proxy as can be measured for majority user support. 75% of the hash power plus the majority of users is not an attack - it is consensus.


Again, my response is that I have no idea what you're talking about when you say “miner's ability to force users to install adversarial software”. I have certainly made no such claim.


Again, Miners determine what rules they will follow. Just as nodes determine what rules they will follow, and users determine what rules they will follow.


And again - utter twaddle. See above.


“There you go again”
   - RR


We shall see.


LOL. Really.


I have no idea what you’re talking about here. AFAIK, BTCD = the symbol used to refer to BitcoinDark. What the heck does BitcoinDark have to do with anything? As BitcoinDark is a completely separate blockchain, Classic will not accept BitcoinDark blocks.


Nice demurrance, given that you have been exposed down thread as making this up from whole cloth.

Interesting ad hominem you have there.

Apples and oranges. It just doesn't work that way.

Nonsense. I have no relationship with any developer nor anyone related to Blockstream. I've been attacked in several various ways for pointing on the flaws in Classic. These attacks have been useless though. I try my best to avoid attacking people directly and usually put ridiculous people who have no real arguments (but chose to use ad hominem) to ignore. If more people were being reasonable in discussions, open to being wrong and compromise, in addition to avoiding ad hominem, maybe we could have avoided this whole 'mess'.

(core) devs cannot enforce any (commercial) HF upon the bitcoin network.

if not for imminent security issues, there is just no way anyone could successfully (ie. consensually) HF the bitcoin network because of its decentralized nature (ie. trustless ie. permissionless ie. secured)

everybody with a decent comprehension of the matter acknowledges it, bitcoin is apolitical and antifragile.

BITCOIN AINT NO FRIGGIN STARTUP.

so its time you wipe the shit blurring your sight or fork off once and for all and see how the mass follows your Nth shitcoin

just enough with the constant bitching. fucking helpless parasites.

jbreher, you make the best argument for the hardfork camp, so I'm wondering how you see Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and decentralization. I'm guessing you trade (as a bear?), so obviously profit is one motivation, but do you perceive a problem with the existing centralized financial system which b/c/d addresses? Or do you think of Bitcoin as a superior Visa/Paypal whose most important property is short-term scalability?

Thanks for asking. Despite my avatar, I am a bull. Albeit a scared bull, as I feel the maxblocksize limit is serving to stifle adoption. However, a non-negligible portion of my net worth is tied up in Bitcoin.

eta: I am not an active trader. I used to be, but learned the hard way that such requires split-second vigilance, lest one be left bereft of bitcoin and holding a big pile of stinky fiat when the price moons overnight.

I also believe that Bitcoin needs to be The One True Blockchain To Rule Them All. If the community is allowed to create coins willy-nilly, and have those coins capture anything other than minuscule investment, then what is perhaps the most important aspect of cryptocurrencies -- the ability to have a non-inflationary currency -- is a mere lie. This lie in and of itself would likely keep the masses away.

That said, I have started to look to alts, making a few hopefully thoughtful bets on a few. Very small amounts, though -- a mere hedge against an improbable but possible bitcoin value collapse.

I do have a problem with centralization. I do not however think the current level of non-mining node centralization is an issue. I also believe that the costs of operating a non-mining node are not a contributing factor to this ongoing non-mining node centralization. I further think that larger blocksizes will contribute very little to this centralization, and will be more than offset my new entrants in a larger economy -- that is if Bitcoin is allowed to grow.

I further believe that we can indeed scale to Visa levels. We don't need to do 11,000 tps tomorrow, or next year, or probably even in a decade to do this. All we need to do is keep block sizes growing ahead of the adoption curve. To me, that means 2MB now, 4 MB maybe this time next year, and approximate annual doublings. The precise need is unknowable however, which is but one reason why I think Bitcoin Unlimited's approach is the right one.

My day gig is as a senior technologist in the research division of one of the largest computing components manufacturers on the planet. While the picture a decade out is fuzzy, I know what advances we can expect in the next few years. And I can state unequivocally that those decrying the end of Moore's Hypothesis have not a clue about that of which they are speaking.

Not sure what you mean by 'b/c/d addresses'?

jbreher,


So you'd be happy with 1.5 mb for now maybe?
Then 2mb could be ready when 1.5mb blocks are nearly full.
Then fees may be more settled.
(as franky1 keeps saying, miners will probably set their own soft limits anyway, It wont go from 1mb to 1.5mb overnight)
It has taken 6 years to "nearly" fill the first 1mb!

I'd be happy with that.

It is a bit late now for an orderly increase, with segwit looming, but uncertain.
A HF may be consented upon sooner, if blocks become "full" before segwit.

Have you read my thread?
Your opinion on that subject would be welcome.

is this bull or bear shit?

ps: ah no "senior technologist in the research division of one of the largest computing components manufacturers on the planet" shit. you chief scientist much?

I thought that was a considered post by jbreher.

I don't care what his job is, though it may be relevant here.
I don't agree with his every word.

Thats life.

fully agree, some quick research about how the tech is getting pushed even further, you get the sense that there's no way in hell that progress will not continue at an astounding rate. we see tech in R&D mode that could potentially incress computers speeds by several orders of magnitude.

Maybe. i don't expect that limit to last more than a few months however.


Yeah, but we more than doubled average block size in the last year. The '6 years' is a poor metric when things are doubling annually.


Dunno. Link?

Nope. If I was chief scientist, I would not have indicated otherwise.

Believe, you do. Believe, you do not. Unaffected, the truth remains. Unaffected, Bitcoin user is.

In real life, I am a dog.

https://i.imgur.com/StavsKr.jpg

eta disclaimer: one of the above claims is false. Shouldn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out which one.

Actually, I did. In this example, miners who change the rules without node consensus are simply forked off the network. They can continue to build blocks on that dead network, but no one will accept payments on that chain as valid.


Nodes are only significant insofar as the economic activity they represent. 1000 nodes with no users transacting on them are insignificant--this is what "miners spinning up nodes" equates to. Miners need users and services to sell their coins to.

So again, miners can hard fork the rules and spin up thousands of nodes that enforce those rules, but how do they force users to reinstall their software to recognize this network as valid?

Consider the extreme example: 75% of miners quadruple the supply of coins to 84 million a la Litecoin with a hard fork. If those miners "spin up some nodes" that no users connect to, are those new coins spendable? Only amongst themselves--not among anyone who enforces the 21 million coin limit. This is true of any consensus rule, such as block size limit.


You seem very confused. How does the network of users fork off non-mining nodes? Non-mining nodes don't mine--so there is no block to fork. And if consensus rules are removed, the offending miners (e.g. >1MB block violation) are forked off, not the nodes on the original network. Users don't necessarily run a node; node software is the only mechanism by which rules are enforced (hence the only mechanism by which forks occur). So again..... miners can break the rules all they want, and they can spin up nodes to give the perception that a network exists. But you haven't proven the basic premise that these miners won't be mining on a dead network with no users.


The bolded does not follow from its premise. To your example: if users are split 50-50 enforcing a 1MB rule, and miners are split 50-50 enforcing a 2MB rule--how the hell are they going to maintain a single ledger? If the 2MB chain becomes the longest chain at any point, the networks would split. How does this achieve "consensus?"

How about if 75% of users are enforcing a 1MB rule, and 75% of miners are enforcing a 2MB rule? Once the 2MB chain becomes the longest chain, the networks would split. How does this achieve "consensus?"


Uh, okay. That's not actually meaningful. I too can enforce rules that the rest of the network ignores. So what? Makes no difference to anyone.

Your logic suggests that miners can quadruple the 21 million coin supply, and that the network will simply accept those new coins. Of course they won't. The network of nodes will fork off the offending miners.

You wrongly believe this consensus mechanism is a result of the idea that "miners always act not only rationally but correctly, because economics." The reality is that the protocol rules written into the node software prevent the possibility.


Nope. Miners have the power to order transactions. That is all. Again, apply your logic to the premise that miners could collude to quadruple the supply of bitcoins, and you will find that nodes have all the power over consensus rules. Those new "coins" are completely worthless and no node will accept them as valid payment.


Then if miners break consensus rules (e.g. quadrupling the 21 million coin supply), why would the network follow them? They wouldn't. Yet you claim that miners have power over the consensus rules. They don't.


I didn't quote you there. I pointed out that you imply that miners can force users to install foreign software simply by virtue of mining invalid blocks. You continue to do so. If that is not your implication, I suggest that you do not understand what a hard fork entails.


Ah, so you assume miners are correct in all their assumptions? What a dumb idea. Bitcoin depends on actors acting rationally; it does not depend on rational actors being correct in their assumptions.

It may be against their economic interests to fork the network. But they are working with incomplete information about user preferences, and they very well may be wrong.


No. Why don't you actually respond by applying this case to your own logic? You make all these baseless assumptions about what users would do (blindly follow 75% of miners who violate consensus rules) and yet you can't provide any evidence for it.


Yeah. So that's exactly what they do--don't forward invalid transactions........


If it breaks the consensus rules that the network enforces, of course it does. The transaction would be rejected by the network.


Sure, and that transaction could be conducted across many different incompatible forks with the same beginning UTXO set. So what? You haven't proven that these miners aren't mining on a dead network absent of the majority of economic activity. The only thing you can establish is that these miners "assume they are correct."


It will be included in a blockchain. This says nothing about which chain users and the majority of economic activity will remain on.


Sure, they are incentivized. And they can easily be wrong. No skin off my hide. They're the ones who will lose money, not me. As a user, I can sit back and let miners worry about how much money they may lose.

Nodes have the power to fork those miners off the network. Nodes have the power to ensure that those miners are mining on a dead network with no economic activity except the mining of invalid coins.


Yes. That's the point. If they enforce rules that are more relaxed than the rest of the network, the network will fork off their invalid chain.


Okay..... the whole point of my responses to you was to establish that 75% miner agreement says nothing about whether users will accept that chain. And yet you continue to suggest that 75% miner agreement is meaningful.


You certainly suggested they were equal--why else would you say that "miners are interested in what 75% of those making transactions will choose?"

Clearly nodes are not powerless, since you have conceded that they will fork off miners who break the rules. So, powerless in comparison to who? Miners? Clearly miners can't change the rules without node operators consenting and upgrading.

Users = nodes and connections to nodes (SPV users). And SPV users have no say over the rules; they accept whatever nodes tell them as truth. So how is it that users have power, but nodes don't?


Seriously? You don't see the point? You're suggesting that miners can remove a consensus rule from the protocol, which will result in previously invalid transactions becoming valid. But.....users can simply fork off those miners if they don't agree with the rule change (and without changing software, they will do so).


https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-February/012364.html


I'm talking about the service that has brought thousands of Classic nodes online and is being promoted by companies like Coinbase:

https://i.imgur.com/GQVeTAw.png
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/47rpdf/classiccloudnet_looks_great_run_your_own_classic/


That's adorable. The assertion was that the number of nodes vastly overstates the number of users on the network. That classic-cloud openly states that it is running over 800 nodes across six datacenters suggests this. So does this:

https://i.imgur.com/ykudEmT.png
https://i.imgur.com/MZZZygt.png


Sorry, but "incompatible" would imply a network split. Please explain how that would occur with Segwit.


Sorry, but you're the one suggesting that we fork the protocol. The burden is on you. There's been plenty of analysis done in this field, but I'm not really interested in wasting the time when you can't support your own arguments.

In other words, you are telling me "we can fork the protocol any way we want, and it's assumed safe unless someone can prove otherwise." Nice logic.


That's like constructing a building without blueprints. No, subjecting the system to your new rules based on an untested "consensus" mechanism is not the only way forward. One could begin by formulating economic and game theoretical arguments that support his case. Unfortunately this has been entirely neglected by Classic supporters, and XT supporters before them. They just took Gavin's word that "75% is good enough."


That just proves that "what you seek" = irrelevant. So, back to square one.


Yeah, that's what your endless repetition of refuted arguments amounts to. And at the end, you refuse to provide any evidence for your contentions or even establish a logical case for your beliefs.


The problem is that we don't know. Which means, err on the side of conservatism. 95% worked well several times to implement soft forks. The definition of "consensus" (from "consensus mechanism" in the whitepaper) is "general agreement"; not "75%/25% disagreement." In the words of Peter Todd:


To be frank, I suspect that Classic supporters generally do not hold very much bitcoin at all. Otherwise I suspect they would be much more conservative in their approach to consensus issues. As someone who has a significant amount of my net worth tied into bitcoin, I am just appalled at the "caution to the wind" attitude here.


So, you use "hash power" as a measure for "user support" even though it has absolutely no relationship to it? Great logic. 75% is "consensus?" I guess we're redefining dictionary definitions too!


We are talking about the removal of a consensus rule. That = hard fork. You claim that miner support = user support. Well, for users to actually support the new rules, they need to enforce them. They can only do that by uninstalling their node software and reinstalling new node software with a relaxed or removed limit. If no one besides miners updates their rules, and those miners violate the original rules, they are simply on a different network. In order for users to recognize those miners' network, they need to install compatible software that will stop rejecting their blocks....


"Users" have no say unless they run nodes. SPV users have no say since the nodes they connect to act as their proxy. Nodes are all that matter, whether run by miners or otherwise.


LOL. Still with this? What enforces the rules besides node software?


Since the context was "alternative compatible implementations" maybe don't assume we're talking about altcoins....

https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd

While bigger blocks obviously result in more resource usage, that effect doesn't have to be noticeable to most nodes.

For example, if an user is just running a node on his home computer while using the computer for personal use, an user might have a harddisk of several TB. The node is only using up spare room on the hard drive.   
Since the drive was most likely not full to begin with, an increased cap on the block size probably won't change anything. Some users who have a hard disk near full capacity might be affected, but even if they would be forced to buy a new hard disk, it's only a marginal cost.     

Similar reasoning applies to the bandwidth. I don't know anyone who uses 100% of their bandwidth all the time. Having a small increase in traffic will not be noticeable for 99%+ of the users.

The only problem would be processing power, as it might become more difficult for the processor to keep up while using the computer for other tasks. Worst case scenario you might need to use your old PC as a node (and nothing else that requires processing power) and just use your newer computer for gaming/other tasks instead of using your new pc for both tasks.   

lel. forkers. 1MB rock solid. silly capacity consumerist cant beat status quo.

You could have at least provided constructive input when replying to this thread. I'm not even sure what you're trying to say.


I truly have no idea who would notice 2x (or more) resource usage. This seems to be the definition of a 'marginal increase'! ::)