People, in the vast majority, are sheep and can only zig when others zig.

It's not dead. Only sleeping. Pining for the fjords.

I'm not going to hang on about it but I do think it's relevant when it does something like negatively affect a valid strategy for dollar cost averaging

Plans for volcano base on hold.

Please show your working. Also please explain how "necessarily small" has been updated to include up to 4MB of segwit data (while only apparently managing 0.3).


People with weak arguments tend not to want to have to justify them.

I said that fees were artificially high and I've justified my position. I'm happy to leave it there if others are.

Yep. The part which was cut off for Segwit transactions is charged at 1/4 the rate of other bytes (this is also something not set by the miners by the way) but separating the signature like that costs some extra bytes.

If miners set the fee, we wouldn't be having this discussion. If miners "set" a $200 fee and 10,000 people were willing to pay that fee, they would not all get into the block. Thus that fee could not have been said to be set at all. It is only the artificial scarcity of the artificially limited block space that forces fees high for those that want to participate.

The blockchain is currently 320GB. Take your $100 and buy yourself a 4tb hard drive and store some porn on the free space.

Bear in mind that many, many bitcoin users do not verify their blocks themselves (including myself. I powered down my full node a couple of years ago). you are asking them to support your need. Do you actually run a full node yourself BTW? I found it was providing no benefit and simply the fact that I *could* if I wanted to was good enough for me.

Either way, fees are artificially high. Which is what I'm saying.

If I wanted gold, I'd load my pockets with gold. Yeah, I like my mad gainz too but I never lose sight of what made scramble and take mad risks to get hold of Bitcoin way back when and high fees weren't it.

Mark you, I'm in no way against fees completely. I'll even say that I don't know where they should be. I'm saying that they are not currently being set by free market forces.

Note that there are a number of measures that could improve block storage (some of them mentioned in the whitepaper) and reduce spam. Relying on an artificially low block size limit has meant that the incentive to solve these issues correctly has been blunted.

A valid position and one I have held in the past (and had quite the discussion with Stolfi about at the time). However, it becomes ever more clear that Bitcoin is the way it is because it solves the problems that Bitcoin is designed to solve. Any second layer solution is not Bitcoin and will thus not solve the same problems. Hence the ever increasing complexity of LN and the ever extending time required. To be clear, I am not against LN and think it can be very useful in the problem domains it was originally envisioned to solve. However, it has had its scope increased as a way to put off increasing the blocksize which has done a disservice to not only those who had bold visions for Bitcoin but also the LN project itself.


The last block (at current time) was 1.16M with a rolling average looking more like 1.3. Disregarding the other arguments against segwit (and the fact that segwit transactions are, in fact, larger than legacy transactions, given that people are stuffing transactions into blocks as hard as they can right now with simple transaction fees in the 20-30 dollar range, that's paltry. Especially given it was clear we were soon to hit the block size limit regularly end 2015/beginning 2016.


Maybe. Less so. A simple doubling would have best been done in 2016 with a roadmap to other options down the line. LN should never have been something that everything was depending on. It wasn't fair to Bitcoin and it wasn't fair to the LN project.

When Satoshi added the block size limit, blocks were 1/100 of the size of that limit. That's huge headroom. The *natural* fee for a block would be the resource cost for validating and storing a transaction and the resources for hashing a block (which *does not* depend on block size) plus a small amount of profit multiplied over a number of miners. We're talking around 200 bytes. That's trivial and the block reward is still in play and arguably more valuable than ever. Meanwhile, improvements in technology have made this process ever cheaper. Fees should be marginal, Certainly nowhere near the 20-30 dollars currently required. This indicates an imbalance in incentives. This is why I say fees are artificially high. They are not what would be being set in a truly competitive free market.

With that said, it seems that a contentious fork has not provided an answer (for a variety of reasons) so I am curious to see how things play out.

Indeed there are. That doesn't really impact the fact of the fees being artificially high.

A better argument is that the the 21 million coins limit is artificial too. Solid fact but that's part of the design where the link provided indicates that the block size limit was intended to only be temporary. Make of that what you will. It doesn't seem to have damaged Bitcoin so far but it has definitely limited use cases and cause disadoption in some cases.

I still think the way forward is through increased on-chain capacity. I'm deeply skeptical of second-layer solutions, particularly LN. In fact, if LN is actually a success in 18 months, I'll eat my (xhomerx10 provided) hat.

I know you're being cute but for the benefit of anyone not aware...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366

It that's the issue probably better to keep coins on the exchange until you have enough to make the (artificially high) fees worthwhile

Yup. Cashed out, bought a cardboard box to live in.

Yes, makes no sense. What is there already makes sense for what the government(s) want to do with it. A few bits and pieces could be tidied up a bit but implementing something Bitcoin-like does nothing for them (and probably quite a lot against - losing a billion dollars on a pallet in Iraq is probably regarded as a feature).

ftfy.

Texas has entered the chat.

I guess no one liked my animation

So... much... Bitcoin...

I just poked around in Mycelium and found I have $9k of p2pool dust. Should have left that miner switched on, I guess.

Hah. I don't care what you say, fees are so jacked up right now.

So now we're going to play tease with 55 for a while I guess.