A programmer's view  |
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consider this, if you set the bar for minimal hashing at 95% a large miner or pool can single handedly veto the change and ruin it for everyone else, in which case it's likely that the network would simply go ahead with the change anyway. 95% is ideal but not a good minimal limit.
75% is best because:
1) winning all the votes isnt easy.
2) 75% indicates that the BIP is somehow superior, to the other perfectly valid BIPs.
3) what individual miners want doesn't matter. in the end miners will mine the most popular chain, because $_$
4) 25% wouldn't be able to do any serious damage to new chain even if they ALL worked together to try and break BTC ( this highly unlikely, most will just accept the new chain and be thankful they got a chance to vote )
5) 75% is high enough to make sure the BIP by and large addresses most people's concerns, it wouldn't be easy to get 75%, its likely the BIP would have the make some changes along the way to TRY and accommodate everyone.
6) Assuming the other BIPs have merit too, and it's not that the other miners necessarily disagree with that BIP but would rather another BIP win all the votes. >75% all agreeing to one thing is hard! and its unlikely all losing miners would turn on the network in anger... I don't go causing a riot when a gov election wins with a minority vote.
if all BIPs were all equally good you'd expect the voting to reflect that.
having 75% pretty much guarantees that that BIP is some how superior
that's why everyone needs to agree, 75% is pretty damn good. 80% is good, 90%+ is a no brainer implement the change right away! 100% = the change has been fully accepted by the network.
If a BIP is going to create a fork, then you need much more than 75% to be on the safe side, since those who commands 25% of the hash power might control much more resources than those who have 75% of hash power IMO, hash power is just a too simplified indicator, the weight of the vote should be based on a weighted index of many different aspects of the whole ecosystem There are many important actors in bitcoin ecosystem: devs, full nodes, miners, pools, exchanges, payment processor, wallet providers, and many companies trying to build service upon bitcoins, and investors who have bought lots of coins. Many of them don't have hash power thus can not vote in a hash power way, but they will all be affected by the change in the protocol By default the current situation is always 100% consensus, because every participant are using it right now. If you want to move away from it, you really need strong motivations from every one. Only when majority of people think that current situation is unbearable, a change will become consensus |
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The difficult part is how to count the opinion voting. I think currently it is enough that core devs use this model to build consensus, Gavin can be a little bit forgiving when it comes to the size of increase, and others can at least cope with a relatively small first time change. Anything beyond 4 years should not be discussed at this stage, a plan of increase xxx every xxx years is just a blind guess
The real and only power is hash power, that why proof of work. Imagine that Chinese government took over most of the mining farms in china and controlled 75% of network hash power, made their fork and created client bitcoin BJ (BJ stands for BeiJing), with their party leader deciding the future coin generation scheme. What will happen? No one will use their fork, no merchant will accept that client, no exchange will provide exchange, coins on that chain would worth nothing, those hash power working on that chain would just be wasted electricity The soul of bitcoin network is not maintained by physical hash power(In this case you can't fight against BJ coin fork since it has majority of hash power), but through a consensus. Anything that brake this consensus automatically becomes an altcoin and will be excluded out of the current bitcoin ecosystem Of course those hash power are strong enough to do double spending and harm the network, but they must stay in the original chain to carry out the attack. And while they are attacking, reserve hash power from everywhere of the world will fire up to regain the ground, and they better play by the rules instead of go against the system |
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So a consensus is reached by poor kids in africa?  |
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Don't forget that markets like predictability. A "kick the can down the road" solution offers none. I wouldn't mind if forking bitcoin was fairly easy but as far as I know, it is not.
The smaller the change, the higher the predictability. A drastic change in any aspects of the bitcoin protocol will cause many unpredictable behavior from various participants and the future becomes very risky |
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The interesting thing is that the only pool that originally support BIP101 (slush pool) dropped their support code in the block and now no one is supporting BIP 101 anymore. BTCchina pool, once support BIP 100, also dropped their code and back to core
This is exactly how a consensus building process looks like: Each participants continuously evaluating the current poll of the opinion and adjust their view in the process. When you see that your decision is against majority of the participants' consensus, it is always favorable to re-check your calculation and try to reach consensus if possible
But there is still 50/50 split between change and no change, I guess mostly because there is really no convincing evidence that current block size is not big enough
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This is a good direction in materialize the basic principles of bitcoin governance. At least I think there is a common sense that consensus is the most important thing and it has highest priority above anything else
If one of the devs block a solution then it means there is no full consensus, so the rest of the devs should take more time to gain his support instead of trying to change the rules and exclude him
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They must be paying employees out of their equity capital.
It is not uncommon for businesses to take a long time before they break even.
Exactly, in today's business environment where everything is over-produced, if you can't afford to continuously lose money for 5 years, you won't be able to get enough large market share so that you can have a chance to take customer from those established ones |
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Miners who don't vote means they'd rather keep the current limit. Currently they are the majority, either not have implemented the vote or don't want to change anything at all
If you have worked for 3000+ developer enterprise level IT systems for over 10 years, you will understand how much wisdom in this saying: "As long as it works, don't fix it"
what if leaving it alone will leads to 1-10$ fee pre TX + slow confirmation times? There will be signs that showing a system is approaching its design limit, when you have more and more frequent complain from different users, its time to plan an upgrade Humans are adaptive, when banks are closed during weekends, they don't dispute the way that bank works, they just patiently wait until Monday. Same, if bitcoin network is experiencing traffic jam, they will take temporary measure to reduce the transaction frequency and increase the amount transferred each time, to make it more competitive fee wise So, this ability of adapt to change will give people enough time to implement a new solution |
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Miners who don't vote means they'd rather keep the current limit. Currently they are the majority, either not have implemented the vote or don't want to change anything at all
If you have worked for 3000+ developer enterprise level IT systems for over 10 years, you will understand how much wisdom in this saying: "As long as it works, don't fix it" And I suppose that many of the IT veterans here hold the same view
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Yes, you can't have both global clearing system and super fast payment system in the same network
The banks' global clearing system do 1tpd (1 transaction per day) between two member bank, and they don't have any problem with that
Fast payment system like visa or paypal can do thousands of transactions per second but they are just like exchanges, all transactions happens between the user accounts, in fact the money clearing behind that takes almost 30 days
Bitcoin is already the fastest clearing system in the world
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Blash! (Buy low and sell high) A wisdom that stands the test of several thousand years  |
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I think your thinking in wrong direction, if more and more businesses accept bitcoins and create a natural demand for coins then we may need to mine more to meet the demand right? Also as of now lot of coins are with traders hand hence they will trade every day to make some profit with those coins, it makes it more unstable. When more businesses and normal people holds these coins then it will appreciate and it will more more stable price.
(My emphasis) Are you sure? Because I'd be willing to bet that there a lot more Forex traders trading non-BTC USD currency pairs than are trading BTC/USD. If I had to guess I'd say USD/EUR, GBP/USD, GBP/EUR and USD/JPY dwarf most other currency pairs. I seriously doubt BTC/USD is even in the top 50 currency pairs at this stage (I'd be very happy to be proven wrong). In general people assume that the more actively traded a currency pair (or stock, commodity, etc), then the more stable it'll be. I agree that mining follows price, however. Because the other currency markets are very bigger than bitcoin market size hence by daily trading other currencies demand and supply will not change so faster compared to very tiny bitcoin market. So... if the BTC/USD market grew - i.e. there were more traders - it would become more stable? (Rhetorical question - obviously I believe it would). Even a currency as large as Ruble can lose majority of its value against USD in a couple of years. Currency exchange rate is a highly guarded secret since the forex interbank market are decentralized and not regulated, I guess there are large whales behind the scene and manipulate the prices. Soros is just one small freelancer, but already enough to cause large damage to small countries |
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This is a good place to look, it seems I can point my hash power to those pools that support BIP 100, currently btcchina and f2pool are supporting it |
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"surpass Visa" is the most irrelevant claim I have ever heard, it is like a cruiser that carries 3000 person are trying to challenge the speed of a F35 jet plane
Centralized clearing system like Visa or Mastercard can do several thousand transactions per second, because they do not move any money at all, all it did is adjusting the numbers of each account so that they match the transaction, and the numbers of all those accounts are located in the same database server with multi Gigabytes/second of data trasfer rate
In fact, any centralized bitcoin service like exchanges and online wallets can already achieve similar transaction speed like Visa. What bitcoin blockchain is doing is like bank's settlement network, and 2 banks only do ONE TRANSACTION PER DAY (not including weekends and holidays) to settle the difference between debit and credit against each other
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No, hash power is not the one that decide where bitcoin will go, consensus is
You might have missed my earlier post - but if the requirements (such as bandwidth) for running a full-node become too much then no-one is going to run one other than a miner. Thus the consensus will be according to the miners as the SPV nodes (everyone else) will simply accept that. So a vote for "huge blocks" is basically a vote to reduce the consensus decision to a very small group of miners. If you have a consensus, you don't need to vote. If you vote, you have not reach a consensus. It is consensus that matters. Suppose that 75% miners are confiscated by chinese government and fork into a BJ chain, that would still not make it bitcoin, but an altcoin People tends to rely on authorities, when they find that human are unreliable, they turn to bitcoin, thinking that machine will be reliable. But they forget that machines are also operated by human. So rely on machine is just rely on the person that maintain the machine, even worse. They have to learn to rely on their own judgement, not blindly listening to anyone else |
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In regards to this whole blocksize debate I think one further thing needs to be stated and that is "what are the Chinese miners going to do?".
The Chinese miners account for more than 50% of the hashpower so in effect it is really up to them what will happen (as much as that probably galls all westerners).
My guess is that they'll remain silent about the issue but will decide one way or the other and we'll find out about that early next year (so all the grandstanding going on now will actually amount to nothing).
(by "miners" I am meaning "mining pools" of course)
No, hash power is not the one that decide where bitcoin will go, consensus is Imagine that Chinese government took over most of the mining farms in china and controlled 70% of network hash power, made their fork and created client bitcoin BJ (BJ stands for BeiJing), with their party leader deciding the future coin generation scheme. What will happen? No one will use their fork, no merchant will accept that client, coins on that chain would worth nothing, those hash power working on that chain would just be wasted electricity The censorship resistance is not achieved through physical hash power(In this case you can't fight against BJ coin fork since it has majority of hash power), but through a consensus. Anything that brake this consensus is automatically excluded out of the current bitcoin ecosystem. Of course those hash power could harm the network if they attack, but the damage is limited: Anyone who hold his coin will not be affected by the attack |
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Anything beyond 2020 is a best effort guess
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I guess if there is any problem this time, it will be only XT clients, since they eagerly want to prove that a block size increase is necessary For rest of the nodes, just add one line in bitcoin.conf minrelaytxfee=0.00011 This will drop all the spaming transactions, of course also those transactions that attach any fee less than this threshold. But the benefit is that the mempool will remain small. Last time I tried this, the mempool did not get over 2MB at all, while other nodes had a mempool size over 100MB |
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And this has been discussed hundreds of times, even bitcoin can process millions of transactions per second, people would still spend inflative fiat money and save deflative bitcoin, this is a no-brainer: you always first spend something that drops in value long term wise.
There might be a day that fiat money totally disappeared and only bitcoin is used for transaction, but that is highly unlikely because majority of human are getting used to trusting authorities, the existence of authorities makes them feel safe
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