Reality check. Seriously.
You know what, talk is fucking cheap. You can bitch all day, or you can put some resources into pushing forward this little experiment of ours. You think the code sucks, or that there are painfully obvious flaws like unencrypted wallet files that go unaddressed for way too long? Fix it. It's completely open. Stop bitching, and fix it. |
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So if I may say something... I learned about this glitch fairly early on and immediately hopped into the bitcoin-dev IRC room. The impression I got was one of many brilliant, professional, dedicated bitcoin developers working together to resolve the issue. I was immensely impressed with them.
Even people like Luke-Jr and myself, who seem to be mortal enemies, worked politely together and did what was needed to contain the situation and fix things. Most of the people in the room stayed respectfully quiet and let the important work occur.
To all the amazingly intelligent devs who make this crazy shit actually work, my hat is off to you (even you, Luke-Jr!). Eternally impressed with your work, coordination, and skill. And this all being done for the simple passion of Bitcoin. Quite inspiring, really.
anyway that chat log can be shared? I know a lot of people would love to read it. |
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why the hell is Deepbit only on 0.3.21 Tycho has been very resistent to any change. ... and Luke on 0.6.0? Eligius is actually running both 0.6.0 and 0.8.0 concurrently, but has 0.6.0 prioritized so it trumps 0.8.0 when there's a conflict. It noticed and began reporting the problem immediately, but I guess wizkid057 was busy with something at the time. Its awesome how fast you caught this issue because of your setup. |
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man, I am thankful everyday for Gavin. |
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Mine/verify what you like, but I think the number of nodes on a BBCcoin, or should we say FoundationCoin network is going to keep decreasing because the blockchain size is literally too damn high.
Chicken little, YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE NEW LIMITS ARE GOING TO BE. It could be increased 10x, today, then maxed out, with no new optimizations AT ALL, and I can still run a full node for $20 a year in storage costs (and decreasing). what if they are increased 10x every year for 3 years? For 20 years? As long as the limit increase mimics the cost decrease in storage / bandwidth it isn't a problem for anyone. As long as the limit increase does not prevent profitability for miners, it isn't a problem for them. And guess who gets to decide which transactions to include in their blocks? You saying, what if they are increased 10x every year, is that same as you saying, what if we have no limit at all. We do, and we will, and even if it is adjustable its not going parabolic. |
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Mine/verify what you like, but I think the number of nodes on a BBCcoin, or should we say FoundationCoin network is going to keep decreasing because the blockchain size is literally too damn high.
Chicken little, YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE NEW LIMITS ARE GOING TO BE. It could be increased 10x, today, then maxed out, with no new optimizations AT ALL, and I can still run a full node for $20 a year in storage costs (and decreasing). That would represent 40x the transactional capacity we are using right now, while transactional fees are already rising. |
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Honestly, I'm just sick of people saying it is feasible to have a 2000tps distributed protocol, where everyone is downloading and storing half-gig blocks every 10 minutes so. (see the wiki) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Current_bottlenecksDon't people understand that this would mean thousands of GB each year in blockchain size? How do you think this is reasonable? There are limits to data storage, and thats just one of the economic constraints that have to be faced. That is completely feasible to do TODAY. Would it ultimately be as distributed as you or I want it to be? Nope. Is there a big difference between 7tps and 2000tps? Yup. Would it require investments in bandwidth and storage to be a participant as a full node? Yup. Is storage and bandwidth going to get cheaper over time? Ab-so-fucking-lutely Should we forever cripple Bitcoin because of a failure to allow for reasonable scaling capacity? Sure if you hate Bitcoin and want it to fail. Do you have any idea how valuable a single bitcoin would be if we were able to get the network to 2000tps while maintaining transaction fees in the 10ths of cents to single cents range? They would be worth thousands. I don't need to run a full node on my watch. What I do need to do is use disruptive technology to unseat Paypal, Western Union, ACH, SWIFT, Visa, and the FED. We don't have to get there overnight. We do have to get there. |
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SatoshiDice is a spark which is driving interest from the entire gambling industry into Bitcoin. Certainly it puts stress on the system, but a system that's used is a system that's stressed, and the Bitcoin economy is far healthier for it.
I'm 100% positive that the value of my bitcoins has gone up because of SD's success and interest from the gambling industry that has come from that. So you've made myself, and everyone else who has bitcoins, money. And you've helped us to understand issues that need to be dealt with in the protocol. Thank you for that. |
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This kind of reminds me of the "hard fork" we had in US currency by leaving the gold standard. Gold was a limited, scarce, and unwieldy currency, considered by many to be old-fashioned. Eventually it was abandoned in favor of unrestricted fiat currency which was more flexible and much more practical than the old-fashioned gold.
Nevertheless, people who stuck with the gold rather than greenbacks did pretty well for themselves, even though it is barely used as a transactional currency.
Bitcoin's value comes from its function. It functions as an inexpensive way to transfer value across the world, almost instantly. Anything that limits its function in that capacity, damages its value. By the way, I can trade gold for free. It has no "transactional fee". |
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Inevitably, the original bitcoin miners are less centralized, due to the smaller, spam-free blockchain. The added security makes bitcoins more valuable than the BBCcoins, and people start selling their BBCcoins.
Oh really, people are going to sell their "BBCoins" for other coins that are now less useful, more expensive to spend, artificially restricted, impossible to scale as computing resources do, and don't have the backing of any of the major parties working on or investing in Bitcoin? Yea good luck with that. |
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This is there to create demand/limit supply, and to allow miners to collect fees for securing transactions in the network.
Where did Satoshi mention coding the 1MB limit so that miners can collect more fees? does it matter? My point is that a sensible version of Bitcoin will have a limit on how much data is put into the blockchain, i.e. that scarce resources (disk space and network bandwidth) are allocated in an optimal way. The optimal way will be determined by what transactions miners voluntarily include and which blocks the market considers valid bitcoin transactions. Think about this scenario. A hard fork is created with a self-adjusting block size limit. All users have a balance of original, authentic 1Mb-limit bitcoins, and also, a balance of 1+XMb limit, bigblockchaincoins (BBCcoins). Exchanges will be created that allow people to exchange these two types of coins between forks. As the two forks compete, the BBCcoins will see their blockchain keep getting larger at an exponential rate, while the bitcoin blockchain is pinned to linear growth at 1MB/10mins. People will start realizing that the vast size of the BBCblockchain is leading to lots of centralization (only few nodes verifying everything, only large mining ops able to compete). Now they are wondering whether the original bitcoin blockchain is preferable to mine/verify due to its smaller data size, and the presence of less spam, and higher fees/MB mined. Inevitably, the original bitcoin miners are less centralized, due to the smaller, spam-free blockchain. The added security makes bitcoins more valuable than the BBCcoins, and people start selling their BBCcoins. The lower fees/Mb in mining BBCcoins also makes people want to mine bitcoins for the higher fees, and over time, BBCcoins become worth a lot less, having a 4TB blockchain, while bitcoins are worth a lot more, having a 500GB blockchain. The smart investors win, the free market wins, BBCcoin holders lose, SD bots lose. Ok, now lets talk about what's actually going to happen. 1. A new client is released and blocks are compatible between the two for months / years in advance because new clients maintain the block restriction until a specified date or event has occurred. 2. During this time, the vast majority of bitcoin users, miners, merchants, integrators, etc, upgrade their clients to support the newer block rules 3. Eventually only a small portion of the network is running old and outdated software, perhaps that even has security issues that were not patched. 4. As the "cut over" date is approaching, messages are sent to the old clients to indicate that they are out of date and require upgrades 5. The small portion of the network running old and outdated software is reduced in size further as more users upgrade. 6. The block change deadline happens and the hard fork turns out to be 95%+ already migrated 7. A portion of the remaining 5% DO start an alternative chain, without the backing of bitcoin.org or the Bitcoin foundation. However the value of the coins in the alternative chain drop rapidly as its clear that almost all of "Bitcoin" has long since migrated to newer clients and the newer chain. 8. The value of any remaining coins on the smaller older chain drops further to nearing 0. 9. The developers put in reasonable blocksize limits on the "new chain" that prevented the exponential growth you are so worried about. 10. "Bitcoin" learns how to handle a necessary hard fork. |
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RE transactions fees making bitcoin less competitive,
You can make bitcoin transactions of $10 million dollars with a 1 cent fee right now. That's pretty competitive to me.
You're ignoring that you have to pay 2 currency conversion fees because the $10 million in bitcoins is less useful (prior to and following the transaction) than the $10 million in cash. The only way to fix that is make it so bitcoins are more useful so that you don't want to / need to convert them into cash. That only happens if they are inexpensive to spend and and as a consequence are widely adopted. Do you people genuinely not understand this? |
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the point is that I doubt people are going to altruistically DL 56Gigs of half-cent gambling transactions every year (see user Psy's posts), when they could instead process a smaller, and more secure fork of bitcoin that has a realistic outlook on transaction rate limitations.
This will limit the value of BTC as expressed in other currencies. As that value drops, resources invested in mining will decline, and so will the total hash rate, leaving that "fork" less secure. Read this and understand, if bitcoins cost more to spend, they are worth less relative to other currencies. |
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Any transaction network is going to need some kind of transaction fees. Why? To prevent spam. If transactions can be spammed by bots on the network, you end up with a whole load of pointless data, that will still need to be verified, and reverified for all eternity. The 1Mb hard limit is designed to create a LIMIT on the amount of transactions on the blockchain per unit time. This is there to create demand/limit supply, and to allow miners to collect fees for securing transactions in the network. The transactions with the highest fees (which are presumably either the largest or most important transactions) will make it into blocks, NOT the free/tiny transactions. Eventually the block rewards will go to zero, and miners WILL NOT ACCEPT transactions that do not pay fees. Like it or not, this is the long-term prediction for bitcoin mining. As business owners they will be interested in maximizing profits (on average, and in the long run). If the 1Mb limit (keep in mind 1Mb/block means a max size of 52.6GB/year for the blockchain, which is a ridiculous quantity) is raised, then the potential FUTURE mining revenues, namely transaction fees, are being diluted. Gavin calculates that RIGHT NOW there is only a small cost to blocks being orphaned ( https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/5044482see his back-of-the-envelope calculation). But in the future, when transaction fees are far larger than the block rewards, and bitcoins are at $1000/each, an orphaned block will represent a much larger cost to miners. A bitcoin fork with 1Mb hard limit will attract more miners, and will thus be more secure than a fork with larger blocks. For this reason it is likely that the 1Mb hard limit (similar to the 21million bitcoin cap) will not be raised in the MAIN fork of bitcoin. The beauty of bitcoin is that it allows the free market to decide. Sure, some altruistic miners could raise their blocksize in a hard fork of bitcoin, and this can be used to sling change around the internet and max out some hard drives. But the main fork will stay at 1MB, will be the most secure network, and will have large transaction fees, that are dwarfed by the monetary value of transactions being much higher than they are today. TLDR Any fork with a larger hard block size limit will be less secure, and therefore less valuable, than the fork with the hard limit in place. A bitcoin will never be worth $1000 if the Bitcoin network cannot handle more than 7 transactions per second or if the fee to send a portion of a bitcoin is high enough for most general use cases of bitcoin to no longer be competitive. The only way that a bitcoin will be worth $1000 each is if the use of bitcoins represent significant economic activity. And that only way for that to happen is if transaction fees remain low enough for Bitcoin itself to be competitive. We are going to run out of transactional space 120 years before we run out of the block reward incentive. Potential future mining revenues WILL NOT be diluted because revenue equals the number of transactions times the transactional rate. A supply ceiling however will limit maximum transactional revenue. In other worlds, its better to sell 10,000 apples at $0.75 each, instead of 5 at $1.25 each, especially when the variable cost of additional apples is almost zero. |
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You don't understand, the Bitcoin protocol isn't designed for massive amount of transactions, because all transaction has to be stored, the blockchain will grow exponentially in size. If we have 10X more transactions now, the chain size will be nearly a terabyte next year. Also, huge block size makes it difficult for miners to download, because all miners have to download the new block, before they could continue to mine.
No, you don't understand. The blockchain can only grow exponentially if the block size limit is completely removed (which it doesn't have to be). As long as a balance is maintained which allows for reasonable and competitive transaction fees, ideally on the order of a few cents in USD, we don't have to worry about high frequencey trade spamming. And oh my god, nearly a whole TB in another year? Shit I only have 10 of those free at my house right now. Did you know that storage actually gets cheaper over time? Some Moore guy's rule or something. Too bad I can't run a full node on my phone, probably should constrain Bitcoin over it. The block size limit doesn't have to be larger than what most miners can download with reasonable bandwidth. It just has to scale at some rate. All computing resources scale, our transactional capacity HAS TO as well. |
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If there is no transaction limit, the majority of transactions will be generated by automated trading program, not human user. If there is a limit, the price of each transaction will go higher so that each one will plan their transaction more carefully, or create off chain transaction (which is the best solution IMO)
There is a difference between a flexible and growing transaction limit (that scales with computing resources), and no limit (that leaves it completely up to the miners whether to include free transactions or not). A growing limit is not the same as no limit. If you want a hard permanent transaction limit then you also want a permanent limit in the number of transactions that Bitcoin can EVER process, which will cripple it. So why do you want to cripple Bitcoin? bitcoins are divisible (so they can "scale"). Transactions aren't (so they can't). They are completely different "resources". |
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You should also abolish the 21 million coin limit, so that you can get more coin  Transaction processing is a service whose value is proportional to it's speed, low cost, and Metcalfe's law. Bitcoins are virtual objects whose value is depends on the inability of any entity to create more of them arbitrarily. You can create more Bitcoin with a hard fork, just like you can increase the block size limit with a hard fork. Once a hard fork happens in Bitcoin, I'm out, there's no guarantee Bitcoin's 21M limit won't be lifted with another hard fork. So why wouldn't you wait until the 21M limit fork was proposed to leave? Let me make it really simple for you. Increasing the block size increases the maximum number of transactions that Bitcoin can support, which increases the amount of economic activity that can be conducted in bitcoins, which increases the value of a bitcoin. Increasing the 21M limit decreases the value of a bitcoin. One decision helps Bitcoin, the other undermines it. All "forks" are not equal. |
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Yup, that's how Bitcoin works. So what? SD paid a transaction fee to do that. No, it's not how Bitcoin works. When you send an ordinary transaction, it's outputs only need to stay in the block chain while they are unspent. After someone spends the entire output, it can be pruned (removed from disk). Until that point it needs to stay in long term storage. Single-satoshi outputs would cost more in fees to send than the amount of the output, which is why no sane person would ever spend such an amount. For this reason they effectively can never be pruned. Yea, it is how Bitcoin works. That's exactly WHY it works. Bitcoin is a protocol. Pruning is a client implementation. Does this make pruning techniques less efficient, yup sure does. |
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