The point is to threaten/injure the miners.

Technically, it could have.

In truth, the block size limit was 700-1000 times the size of blocks that were being mined at the time so it was not an issue.

Bags of time

I could certainly see not storing blocks locally but retrieving them from the network as-needed.

The empty blocks is an entirely separate issue also. I believe there have been *some* empty blocks mined when transactions could have been included but the vast majority are mined because the miners are mining before they know which pending transactions are valid (and hence include none).

I did explain it at one point but it probably does need to go in the explanation link, probably with an explanation diagram.

I invite you to run the numbers yourself. If you'll notice the times when the red line agrees with the solid green level, those are times when there have not been empty blocks and they do not affect it at all.

Let me turn it around a bit. One of the complaints the small blockers have with BIP101 is that despite there being a 75% of 1000 requirement for BIP101 to activate, random chance would mean that that could be achieved with much less than 75% of the hashrate. This is true. Likewise, even if on daily average, blocks appear to be much less than 100% full, random chance can (and has started to) mean that at random times, the blocks *are* full and users experience congestion. One full block is not really all that big a deal but we are starting to see, two, three and even four full blocks in a row. That's potentially a confidence destroying poor user experience. This is happening now.

Bear in mind, we *don't* have RBF, we *don't* have Lightning Network and we *don't* have segwit. What we do have is a fairly straight-line log plot that showed this was coming and warnings from several people, ranging from 2-5 years ago that this would have to be addressed.

Watch out everyone, Oscar Wilde in the house...

Think of it this way. Rather than that weird parcel analogy alexGR is using, 1mb blocks are like the traditional taxi system. Prices are regulated and supply is limited by a restrictive and expensive badge system. When you're wanting to get home and it's a big night out like new years eve, you can't get a taxi because everyone else wants one. A sane, free market system would bring more taxis out but you can't because the supply is limited and there is no way to adjust the supply.

Removing the block size limit is like Uber.


Yes. This is exactly what drew me to it.

No. I'm saying that with limited size blocks, there is no fee which guarantees you a place in the next block since others may be bidding higher than you. Even you have a fee of $5, if everyone else is at $5.01, you're out of luck, even if a miner really wanted your $5.


Wait, I thought we were comparing to parcel delivery services. Which one does that?

Guess what, there's no kind of requirement of that for miners either. Even with no block size limit at all. So moot point.


Unless the block is full and yours happens to be amongst the lower fees *no matter what fee you actually attached* and *no matter what miners would be willing to include your transaction for*.

Go down the post office, pay first class for a parcel to your mother to arrive in time for her birthday then watch in amazement as she doesn't get her present and the post office guy explains "The guy over there wanted to pay more so we threw your parcel in the back of the storage room, LOL"


OK, what is "the fee"? I want numbers.

This is faulty thinking. We will start to experience serious issues well before 100% and user experience issues even before that. Already several times we have had two full blocks in a row and possibly other times more that I don't recall.

It is not enough that transactions occur eventually, they should also happen in a timely manner.

So you're calling me a liar. Either

1)Prove it

2)Apologize.

3)Show the world that you're a man of no honor.

Note that I still include the empty blocks for the red-line indicator so it's easy to see with and without that calculation.

The block fullness is actually fairly variable so the averages you get depend very much on your sampling time. Plus the number of blocks in an hour is also somewhat variable. You can have 4 blocks one hour for 98% full and then maybe 10 blocks another hour for an average of 40% full. The problem is, those 10 blocks at 40% don't really help the person who couldn't get their transaction on the chain in the 4-blocks-per-hour time period.

As always, the question has to be, "what am I looking to represent". A daily average might not present a useful number if you're wanting to know about user experience whereas an hourly can give a better insight as that's closer to the timescale for a typical Bitcoin transaction. It doesn't help that the daily average interstate speed was 50mph when an accident means you're stuck in non-moving traffic for an hour.

I haven't looked but transactions may be on a 24 hour cycle also. Low transaction volumes at certain times of the day would contribute to a low daily averages while high volume times may still be having problems that would indicate a need for remediation.

In summary, averages are tricky when it comes to interpretation and divining meaning. Which is why I included the per-block indicator dots.

I can give you the code and you can run this shit yourself. It's all really trivial calls and standard "how to calculate averages" stuff.

Correct. Entirely a typo and fixed now.

AWS has bandwidth and connections out the wazoo. You pay for it though but my quick calculations put it pretty low. It could get pricey if someone tried to get the whole blockchain from you but I understand that has been somewhat fixed. In theory, I could make an image of my node and put it out in the marketplace so anyone could use it but there would be a few things I'd have to do before I was comfortable doing that.

I should have written 8333 BTW. I'll go back and correct it.

It's pretty straightforward. Just fire up a t2.micro with enough disk space, create a security group that allows port 22 and 8333 and run the node software.

It's fairly similar between windows and linux but I'd recommend linux because it's cheaper and because you don't really need all the things windows does. I'm thinking I may make a video on how to do it.

Some of us remember 8 bit CPUs running at 4Mhz with 1k of RAM and software stored on audio cassettes. Hard drives were just something you read about. The first one I actually had (nearly 10 years later) was 40MB

In the past 10 years, I have seen 10 racks of servers in a server room disappear into a handful of Virtual hosts. I'm currently running a full node on Amazon's smallest, weakest instance type. Their cost for storing the blockchain as it currently stands is on the order of $5/month.

These are issues we should not be worrying about until they are measurably becoming an issue. Like regularly full blocks already *are*

Power grab? If there is any power to grab, that is a problem in and of itself.