If you are a new user, you won't be able to mine any block in any meaningful time, so your only choice is to connect to any of the mining pools, and this is already the case today, mining has been separated from the full nodes client since years ago. You need some extra knowledge to setup mining pools, all the mining pools today have certain degree of customization of their code and they understand the block size limit issue much better than average people on this forum. They have overwhelming support for BIP100 since that gives them the right to decide the block size limit based on their calculation

Even if you are a new mining farm with enough R&D resources, you won't be able to construct 100MB block since there is usually only 1MB transaction every 10 minutes, maybe 5MB during peak. Unless you are an attacker intentionally construct huge blocks with lots of spamming transactions, you won't be able to construct a large block. But in that case the rest of the miners are rejecting such attacking blocks

What prevents most of the miners reject such a block? Nothing. You took have an hour to verify this block, only to find out that the main chain already extended by 3 blocks and this block is orphaned, what is the point?


The global average does not make any sense. You need only 7000 enterprise level 1Gbps full nodes and mining nodes to keep the system decentralized, and rest of the slow internet user can just use SPV nodes. And you can already do it today. In 5 years, those full nodes can be upgraded to 10Gbps

The block size limit is not the same as real block size. Even if you remove the limit, it does not mean miners will mine 100MB blocks, there will not be so many transactions with fee in 10 minutes. Attackers can send 100MB blocks but that will be rejected by miners immediately

I don't think we have ever reached the network bandwidth bottleneck. With an average 70% increase in transaction volume per year, the network will be fine at least for another 5 years, and by that time, 4K/8K TV rolling out will make the average home bandwidth jump to 1Gbps to be able to get 8K live broadcast

And the transaction volume can not keep growing like that forever. Once you reached hundred TPS, then the growth will be significantly slower due to market saturation (Many people would never use bitcoin, even if they are IT experts, they just had a holy view for fiat money)

"A Swiss bank account in your pocket" is the latest ad words

With this clearing oriented development (payment channels and large discount for institution type N-N transactions), it is encouraging the centralization of transaction processing to wallet services and exchanges. And that is exactly what bitcoin do not want to do

In this ecosystem, there is no FDIC or FED to be the lender of last resort, if there are many large institutions similar to banks, and they will start to form an alliance, loan to each other to deal with the short term liquidity problem and doing FRB to gamble with customer money. And when they blow up, the whole system will just collapse, millions of users will lose their money and no one is responsible for that, like MTGOX

Payment channel itself is coming from traditional finance practice, so it will also make bitcoin works more like a traditional financial system. I don't think this is what bitcoin should become. It is a challenge to scale bitcoin on-chain, but that technical difficulty should not change your course to transform bitcoin into something else

Lightning Network is the old idea of per-paid card/payment channel, giving it a new name does not give it new life

Micro transaction model (charge by minute/byte) has mostly been abandoned by large telecom operators world wide due to the R&D resource spent on those tiny transactions does not worth the effort, they fired engineers doing micro transaction models and use fixed charge regardless usage model in the end. By doing this they dramatically reduced the amount of accounting on their network and saved lots of money

The only one benefiting from payment channel are large institutions, but since those institutions are very large and have enough resource, they would rather setup their own clearing channel instead of relying on a third party solution

I don't see how is that video has anything to do with segwit. Segwit is 10x more complex than that video, and it has changed incentive mechanism to benefit transactions with many outputs (centralized pools/web wallets etc...), and LN is another thing pushing for mass adoption of those centralized services since it does not benefit average users doing casual spending, but greatly benefit repeated transactions between institutions

The purpose of Segwit's 1/4 discount for witness data is mainly for online wallet companies: They have many small outputs from customers, and when those outputs need to be swept together, they must pay fee for all those signatures. Give a 1/4 discount will make Segwit more attractive for online wallet providers like BTCC, save them a couple of hundred dollars daily, and no doubt so many wallet companies are supporting segwit

However, driving users to centralized offline service providers means that majority of users will face a risk like MTGOX, where centralized service providers work like a bank. Those service providers are already running on a fractioanl reserve basis, they take customer deposit and invest them into mining infrastructure. So if there is a hard fork and people withdraw coins to be spent on another chain, they will go bankrupt, that's also the reason BTCC strongly against a hard fork

But we all know that fractional reserve banking is against the very principle of bitcoin: Being your own bank. The purpose of being your own bank is just to prevent fractional reserve banking from creating more and more money flow into the economy, thus bring inflation

And now Segwit and LN especially encourage this kind of practice, so they are indirectly increase the money supply of bitcoin monetary system. No one can increase the base money supply of 21 million bitcoins, but by doing fractional reserve banking, they use the money multiplier to effectively create many times more money flow than 21 million bitcoins, thus dramatically increase the inflation

Ether looks good right now, start small, average down. Bitcoin is kind of risky right now, wait until the block size debate is over

I heard that over 90% of USD cash is used in illegal activities, guess bitcoin is almost in the same ball park

The world will not collapse because of a bitcoin hard fork, and since it has been advertised as an experiment, everyone knows it can have many disruptions, they all play with risk capitals and will tighten their security belt if well-informed. By successfully doing a hard fork, you cleared the way to many difficult changes in future. You can't spell a new soft fork trick every time when you want a backward-incompatible change. If you have to do a hard fork anyway in future, the earlier the better

If you are aiming for million dollars per bitcoin, it is still very early stage of the development

This is a networked society, I don't think a hard fork is that difficult as you said. Ethereum just had one and no one complains

Just like a soft fork, you have a long period to inform all the users to upgrade, those who don't care, their software will just not be able to talk to the network and the transactions will be dropped. Anyone can make a hard fork right away, but if major exchanges, major service providers/merchants are not accepting his coins, there is no point of that minority coin

When a large bank upgrading their system, all the users of that bank can not access the banking service for at least hours or whole night/weekend, no one complains. And sometimes when they have an incident, that could happen during middle of the day and suddenly all the payment can not be done in the whole country, still no one cares, only a piece of news appear on the newspaper

Of course banks can always reverse transaction so it's a bit different than bitcoin. However, bitcoin is use at your own risk, no one will compensate anyone's bitcoin loss due to incompetent devs or forks, so it is the user's responsibility to keep himself updated with the latest change in bitcoin

https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/segregated-witness-and-its-impact-on-scalability/


IMO, segwit is a clean up of the transaction format, but in order to do that without a hard fork, it uses a strange way of twin-block structure, which cause unnecessary complexity. Raised level of complexity typically open many new attack vectors, so far this has not been fully analyzed

And the 75% discount of witness data also change the economy of the blockchain space, so that it specially designed to benefit lightning network and other stuffs

In fact, if you do it in a hard fork, you can redesign the whole transaction format at will, no need to do so many different hacks everywhere to make old nodes unaware of the change (these nodes can work against upgraded nodes in certain cases, especially when some of the upgraded hashing power do a roll back)

Bitcoin's rule is not enforced through software, but the community consensus. Anyone with a little bit IT expertise can hard fork bitcoin and create 1 billion bitcoin at will on his fork, but that fork will become his own pet and I guess no one will be interested in it

For example, when we had the first reward halving, there was a fork with 50 bitcoin forever block reward, but since no one really interested in running that version with unlimited coin supply, it just died

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

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:



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/

Everything belongs to core! 

Everyone that is against core's road map is wrong, including Satoshi

Very true, unless you can fix this decision making process nightmare and back to the original vision of Satoshi

Bitcoin's idea is not created by computer scientists, and Satoshi was known to be not fluent in programming, that's the reason it shines. Those so called computer scientists ruined it because they lack of the basic economy and financial knowledge, fortunately I have managed thousands of such guys and I am not so impressed by any of their tricks