https://youtu.be/9sHPjhfBRwI?t=50s 

How would this work if you issue (say) one txn per day on average?  I mean, wouldn't it take a month or even a year before the SPV client summed up enough use to make it worth committing the txn?  Are there risks to having a payment channel or LN connection open for these durations?

One great feature of bitcoin is that the payment network IS the settlement network.  To see this feature be deliberately broken is disheartening esp. Since the argument is so weak.  The author of that long post does not seem to understand this.

Centralization fears apply equally to LN. Worse, LN services are probably money transmitters from a legal perspective.

Nodes have no power.  We've already lost the centralization battle to the extent that mining pools are centralized. No govt is gping to pressure full nodes.  They will pressure miners.  So its ok to have full nodes in data centers.

You are correct to question whether the incentives for miners coincides with what is optimal for the rest of the network.  As we see with empty blocks and non-validated blocks these can differ.  However, your assumption that these do not coincide whatsoever is unsupported.  And with Bitcoin it is all we have, barring some centralized committee making arbitrary decisions like we have today with the core devs.  Personally, I believe that miner incentive is a reflection of optimal network use, if not 100% the same.  For example, a miner who mines a bunch of "spam" txns knows that he must store it for eternity, just like all the other nodes.

A better example is the worry that a miner will include a txn that takes 10+ minutes to validate.  It is dangerous to build on a block that can't be readily validated.  So a miner that includes one could expect that the majority hashing power would NOT move to that block, even though it may be the longest in the chain.  The "fittest" miner will mine 2 blocks in the time it takes others to validate this one and mine the next.  That need only happen once or twice to teach the rest of the network a valuable lesson.  

So miners will evolve to be tweaking their algorithms to eliminate "crazy junk" (unless that junk is sufficiently incentivized with a large txn fee -- and if someone is willing to pay a lot for it, who are we to decide that its not important... that's the free market at work) and even include "human assist" systems to optimize decisions like these.  We may get a few "natural" forks longer than just one or 2 blocks as miners choose different strategies but that is just part of the natural behavior of the core consensus algorithm.  All of this can be done without changing consensus.

anyone concerned about the BTC lower high?

Yes all dev decisions are essentially centralized, including the decision to NOT do something.  Since that is trivially true, I am talking about the effect of the decision.  And in one case miners can optimize their profitability by choosing to include transactions while in another case they are artificially limited.

Brg444 asked if I was for completely lifting the limit.  I would be from a theoretical perspective but from practical engineering experience its makes sense to have what is called a "sanity check".  This is a limit that you expect to never be reached.  If it is, something is very wrong with the system.  Therefore if it was up to me, I would choose a bump to (say) 4 MB and then a periodic increase that mirrors txn adoption curves. 

If we were creating a more complex solution in a less constrained environment, I would let miners expand the block with high fee txns (which I described previously) and I would implement something that puts the limit at (say) 10x the average of last month's fee paying txns.  The problem with the latter though is that a miner could artificially expand the block size by including a bunch of fake txns is his own blocks.  This can be solved with a payout pool (half the txn value goes into the pool) rather than a direct payout.




IDK about this out of context quote but Tanenbaum's approach is to put every feature in isolation so if one has an issue the whole system does not go down.  Linux, Windows, etc instead take the philosophy that essential features should be placed together to increase performance and decrease overall complexity.  It does not matter if the whole fails when one does because every feature is essential. Ofc, things have gotten pretty lenient WRT "essential" features in Linux/Windows lately...


By unique I was referring to people's inability to create new elements.  You can't just brew up gold 2.0 in the lab.  In that context silver is unique also.


Bitcoin and FinTech is invading the banker's space because of inefficiency.  Technology in all domains replaces low-tech solutions due to inefficiency.  Deliberately introducing inefficiency into the system (forcing a fee where one is not needed -- from the user's perspective efficiency is fee/amount transferred) is basically asking for new technology to replace bitcoin. 

The first apps to go will be colored coins (smart contracts) and immutable ledgers.  If these become useful, the money function of the chain that hosts them will have a much better operational efficiency (you don't have to move bitcoins into these coins, trade a stock, and then move them back).  If this coin/chain delivers similarly to Bitcoin on basic premises (scarce, decentralized, no premine etc) Bitcoin will be replaced.  In that case the BEST outcome for Bitcoin will be a gold analogy (store of value only).  However I have serious doubts about that because Bitcoin does not have gold's history, intrinsic value, etc.

Another outcome would be if a SC takes on the colored coins and immutable ledger function.  This would probably preserve Bitcoin's value since the SC is denominated in BTC.  Yet moving from SC to bitcoin chain is awkward so as Cypherdoc likes to argue all the coins might drain out of the bitcoin chain over to the SC.  I differ from him in my analysis because in this case at least BTC's value is preserved.  However, I find it hard to believe that a startup company would produce a SC with no advantage to themselves... they'll either produce a non-SC chain and out-mine other people in the early days or they'll be a per txn fee going to the startup.

Gold is unique and was the most efficient soln for thousands of years cementing its social perception of value.  Bitcoin at 1mb is more like the iphone.  It will be outcompeted in price (efficiency) before the majority of the world was even introduced to smartphones with the obvious result that the majority of phones are android.

Obviously I know you are not in a position to effect change.   But my point is that if you were your decision to force a fee market is a centralized solution.   Real markets evolve spontaneously and in a P2P manner to address real issues.

lets be honest the main problem with LN right now is that it does not exist and to make that happen it first needs to be built and then every wallet and service will need to be retooled to use it. 

But if the above was completed, its definitely worth using.  But does that mean we should also not scale the mainchain?  Absolutely not.  We need multiple options here.

There are secondary problems with LN which we'll only really start to understand as LN starts being used.

1.  Intermediary: If I understand it correctly, you open a payment channel with a LN node, and they open a payment channel with another LN node or with the ultimate destination.  So LN is an intermediary -- but one of Bitcoin's greatest strengths is its "disintermediation" for the many reasons I won't rehash now.  I've listened to well regarded entrepeneurs/technologists give speeches where this is one of their major talking points.  I guess they'll no longer be interested.

2. Fees:  IIRC, a LN payment requires the LN node contain as much working capital as outstanding payment channels.  So a bitcoin payment of quantity A will "utilize" N*A actual bitcoins during the duration of the payment channel(s), where N is the # of hops through the LN network (minimum 2).  LN nodes are GOING to charge a % for the privilege of using their $.  Lately in fiat currencies it costs 1-3% to make a payment.  It even costs that to get cash from an ATM and nowadays merchants just deposit that cash in the bank.  What an awesome racket to get 1% of every single transaction!  Bitcoin wiped away this scam because you could make a transfer for free or so close to free it did not matter (although you might have to wait).  Not going to happen with the LN.

3. No "Blockchain" applications.  Colored coins, etc won't work through LN (because you don't receive the exact coins that the sender sends into the network).  I suppose you could post a txn to the LN with additional data, but you can only post ONE chunk (because your LN payment channel transaction is repeatedly overwritten).  So I guess all the excitement right now around the blockchain as an immutable ledger (which TBH is the only exciting thing happening) will move to an altcoin...

Unfortunately for money to have store of value efficiency it must ultimately have value which with bitcoin rests again on its currency efficiency.

Miners could only store non dust UTXOs in easily accessible storage and ignore incoming txns that spend them unless the fee is worth the cost to look the UTXOs up. There are so many possibilities.   Your problem is that you are a central planner even tho you dont know it -- you are forcing a particular solution (expensive limited txns) onto the network as a whole.

PS: this hard fork "danger" overrated, like Y2K.  We'll have tested moving across the limit over and over.  And if for some reason TSHTF, the very centralized mining pools will simply get together and fall back to the old code (unwinding blocks > 1MB), just like they did during the accidental hard fork a few months ago.

This is one great property of Bitcoin, since every node validates (processes) every block, you can't have a bug lying latent in a block that's (say) 500 deep in the chain before someone suddenly triggers it.  Half of the nodes will reject the new block RIGHT NOW and the other half will accept it.

This is a perfect example of your flawed reasoning.  This comment is analogous to claiming that a sailboat is incredibly inefficient because its energy use is equal to the total wind power available in the ocean divided by the number of sailboats.

Instead the volume of wind power (energy spent mining) is present for a reason that is completely orthogonal to sailboats (transactions).  It is proportional to the amount of energy being input into the system.  In the Bitcoin world, the "energy input" is the conversion of value into bitcoin representation (i.e. long term purchases).  When the block subsidy dies down, this energy input will be reflected in coin appreciation.  When the block subsidy ultimately approaches a negligible quantity, boats will (finally) have to turn on their motors and pay their way across the bitcoin network.

Additionally, you make the circular fallacy of defining the number of total boats allowed on the ocean, and therefore finding the ocean winds to be inefficient.

Ultimately there will be a fee market.  Miners will turn off hashing power until transactions appear that will make mining the block profitable.  We don't need to centrally force this to happen.  You are falling into the fallacy of thinking that others are forcing a lack of a fee market but in fact you are centrally forcing one to exist.  It is technically feasible to have larger blocks, and having them makes each transaction more efficient, so anything less than larger blocks is central planning and reduces efficiency.

And by forcing a fee market you are running the sails and the motors simultaneously, uselessly, and dangerously.

Why is it dangerous?

Money is defined as better by users fundamentally by its transfer efficiency.  This was hard to measure with fiat or PM currencies but it is simple with Bitcoin.  It is the ratio of the fee to the quantity transmitted.  Once the block subsidy diminishes this ratio will be nowhere near zero like it is today.  It is ironic that you ignore this because it is what fundamentally gave Bitcoin value in the early days while nobel laureate economists were insisting that Bitcoin would fail because it had "no intrinsic value".

Once the motor's (transaction's) true efficiency is not hidden by the wind (block subsidy), the most efficient (and accessible) cryptocurrency implementation will "win" just like gold "won" over silver.  Just like Apple is learning, getting a head start does not matter much when a huge percentage of the world simply cannot afford your product, so MUST choose a competitor.

The law is often misunderstood.  It only applies when the exchange rate does not float like when you have gold coins of the same denomination but different purity.

From reading TFA it seems to me that he was going to create an euro ewallet and issue "e-euros" in it.  If EU deal worked these could be backed with ECB issued euros.  If not, rename them drachmas.

I figure they know.  Its just that some CP members got caught long... the small bump needed to liquidate is now complete and so down we go.

Yes I exaggerated.  Its a good book.  But that quote probably directly refers to his infamous criticism of linux.

And now icebreaker is quoting a guy who's only contribution is a failed OS architecture, probably typing it from his incredibly successful linux android or windows monolithic kernel.  And yes I tried minix.  It crashed after a few hours.

And to add irony on top the argument actually adds ammo to block size increase crowd because lightning or sidechains will be an ESSENTIAL part of a 1MB chain.  There won't be any value to users if BTC is running if lightning or SC fails because there isn't space on the chain for users.

I'm guessing ice is still in school regurgitating here the garbage his professors (who likely never worked on a million+ LOC project in their lives) feed him.

Will it be a new face of anarchy?  Debt is not payable but can't be forgiven so the entire economy goes gray.  No money for any govt services (fire police roads etc) so all these services are privatized.

Woah.  QED.  Cypherdoc, your labor is complete.

But now we fear that the economy will be forced to because of a refusal to scale the main chain.  Given a choice between no business at all and a dangerous "idiots" move, companies will pick the "idiot" move and hope for the best.


OK now we are yelling.  The Bitcoin blockchain was never intended to permanently remain at a max size of 1MB.  Tons of historical posts show this and show that Satoshi and others of that time were fully cognizant of the partial centralization that might ensue (e.g. full nodes are not practical at home and must move to the cloud).  I do not need to repeat these. 

So if you want a small-sized chain, why don't you create a sidechain with a low block limit?


Is there ANYONE out there who is:
1. not a miner
2. does not have mining investments
3. is not affiliated with Blockstrem
And
4. wants to keep the block size at 1MB?

Did you read the posting right above mine?  Its completely clear that he supported the idea that as the network grows the full nodes would need to be dedicated servers and most users would use SPV.  This is what you guys are calling "centralization".   But its really not, because it remains permissionless.  That's the most important thing, because if you don't like the full node choices you could always get a few people together and rent your own.

Additionally, the node centralization fear is simply stupid because we've already lost the fight.  Miners have 99% of the power in the Bitcoin network and they are much more centralized than full nodes.  You're closing the barn door after the cows have already gotten out!

@odalv: AFAIK Satoshi didn't say anything about whether increases should be pre-baked in or not.  But regardless I think the blocksize increase crowd would compromise on a static but significant (8MB or greater) increase.