What is needed instead is to get rid of the protocol limit in practice (maybe keep a high water anti-spam limit which is what the 1MB was/is), while letting the market show it's preferences.

The belief itself may be a case of "everything appears a nail to the man holding a hammer", in the sense that people who have never interracted with any other aspect of economy besides the supermarket counter may genuinely imagine that's what economy is. Still, that makes no difference.

This situation probably leads to a loose and dynamic form of market consensus on sizes. Miners that decided to only accept blocks well below most other miners' preference risk being orphaned at a higher rate and so are forced to up the size they accept to better match other miners. At the same time miners that issue blocks larger than what most other miners are willing to build on also risk being orphaned at a higher rate. The result is miners are forced by market pressures to move towards a consensus.

what a laugh.

before Peter's paper, Cripplecoiner's were arguing how IBLT wasn't proven, practical, needed or likely to be accepted since we had SC's and LN on the horizon.

now that the argument has changed, they hold up IBLT as "inevitable" and destined to undermine the propagation latency of blocks that Peter's theory relies upon.

such duplicity.

I honestly don't know what you're asking me.  What you quoted seemed like substance-less hand-wavving to me.

All we're proposing is to return to the design proposed in the Bitcoin white paper where "nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spend" (#5):



Furthermore, I do not take Bitcoin's success as inevitable.  It may fail.  Right now, I see the biggest risk as developer centralization.  The risk of miner centralization due to adjusting an anti-spam measure seems minor in comparison.  

Bitcoin is already centralized. Do you realize that a cabal of a half-dozen people (I'm not talking about the developers) have the power, even if they have yet to exercise it, to arbitrarily control bitcoin? That this power also rests with anyone who controls the networks used by this cabal, which is presently confined to a small number of datacenters? That if they were in the US all it would take is a couple of national security letters for full control over the bitcoin network? I assure you the Chinese government has much stronger strings to pull.
The story of bitcoin over the last two years has been struggling hard to keep bitcoin decentralized in step with wider usage. In this effort we are floundering -- bitcoin scales far better today than it did in early 2013 (at which time it couldn't have even supported today's usage), but centralization pressures have been growing faster still.
That is a story that most people who work on bitcoin scalability can relate to, but which doesn't seem to be commonly understood among the casual userbase.

and this is precisely why big money outside of China interested in mining will support this proposal b/c it allows decentralization away from China as a result of the GFC.  specifically, the USA should want to see this.  the feedback effects to China will only further this dynamic as their gvt will relax GFC rules if they want to stay in the game.  all good for Bitcoin in general.

I think Erdogan's insight into the game theory behind the block size limit was correct.

But to recognize his insight, I think we need to stop thinking in terms of "valid blocks" and start thinking in terms of "valid transactions."  All blocks that are composed exclusively of valid transactions are valid. 

Now instead of thinking that only Core and XT exist, imagine that there are dozens (and in the future possibly hundreds) of competing implementations of Bitcoin.  Each implementation has its own rules for what block size it will build upon.  From this viewpoint, the "effective limit" is the size of the largest block that's ever been included in the Blockchain.  If a miner wants to create a larger block (e.g., to collect more fees), then he has to weigh the chances that his block is orphaned with his desire to create a larger block.  If we imagine that the block size limit across the network forms some distribution as shown in the chart labelled "NEW THINKING" below, then, since the miner can't be 100% sure what this distribution is, it is rational for him to use the tip-toe method to minimize risk.

cost of mining a larger block = self regulating block sizes

Some might still ask: why is that?


Except miners are not a person. They are multiple, geographically diverse groups of interests each bounded by different resources, costs and infrastructure. I kind of happen to think that this is what is broken with the "nodes and miners should be able to decide on whatever block size they like" proposition. I can also see clear as day through the attempt of many here at rationalizing this behavior as "free-market decides best, how dare you propose centrally designed SPAM CONTROL."

The assumption you seem to make is that miners & nodes (through the magic of the "invisible hand" I suppose) will arrive at an equilibrium of decentralization in some kind of benevolent act "because incentives & game theory". If we consider that the argument about cost of creating large block is moot, the rational then becomes: miners will act in an altruistic way to conserve trust of the network.

These points are not very clear to me. I don't imagine a scenario where several resourceful corporations do not turn this into an arms race that few will be able to keep up with. We are now only beginning to see mining and network infrastructure enter professional stage. If the incentive to mine Bitcoin increases the seemingly amateur and small scale set ups should soon be erased off the network and replaced by massive datacenters that should outnumber any of these small players so as to make their "voice" in the balance exercise of decentralization vs. block size worthless.

You might imagine that as "bitcoiners" realize this issue they will "protest" but I suggest that by this point A. you will not be able to actually become aware of the problem and B. there will be nothing to do about it as the network will have become "captured" because of "network ossification" and the general laziness of the herd which will prefer comfort and stability over change and doubt.

Probably one of your more stupid posts.

Well the block size issue has been a gift to me. Afaik, all crypto coins have this problem with a tradeoff choice between consensus decentralization and scalability. But I solved that problem, so it is just a matter of bringing the solution to market and watch what happens.

I think crypto coins need to be set on auto-pilot I think there needs to be built in some side-chain capability (assuming all bidirectional issues with that can be resolved, else some way to burn coins one-way to a new fork) so that HODLers can move their value out to a new fork gradually as a way to upgrade. This protects the value of the HODLers and allows for new technology. I don't agree with any changes made to the protocol of the coin after it has been stabilized.

Bitcoin was a first revision and the recent post from Satoshi on Aug 15, 2015, admits that Bitcoin needs to be fixed. I guess he has been reading my posts. How do you know I am not (the second reincarnation of) Satoshi? (of course not, lol)

The 1MB'ers are happy watching that adoption isn't growing anymore. Stupidity at its best.

Hi all,

I previously mentioned in a post that i believe that technically nodes are capable of handling blocks an order of magnitude larger than the current blocksize limit, the only missing thing was an incentive to run them. I have been monitoring the blockchain for the past couple of weeks and am seeing that even miners who have all the incentives are for whatever reason struggling to download and validate much smaller blocks.
The data actually paints a very grim picture of the current bandwidth/validating capacity of the global mining network.
See the following empty blocks mined despite a non-trivial elapsed time from the previous block just from the past couple of days alone (Data from insight.bitpay.com):

EmptyBlock /Time since previous block/ Size of previous block(bytes)/Mined by====================================================370165  29s  720784  Antpool370160  31s  50129    BTCChinaPool370076  49s  469988  F2Pool370059  34s  110994  Antpool370057  73s  131603  Antpool
We have preceding blocks as small as 50KB with 30s passing and the miner continues to mine empty blocks via SPV mining.
The most glaring case is Block 370057 where despite 73s elapsing and the preceding block being a mere 131KB, the miner is unable to download/validate fast enough to include transactions in his block. Unless ofcourse the miner is mining empty blocks on purpose, which does not make sense as all of these pools do mine blocks with transactions when the elapsed time is greater.

This is a cause for great concern, because if miners are SPV mining for a whole minute for <750KB blocks, at 8MB blocks, the network will just fall apart as a significant portion of the hashing power SPV mines throughout. All a single malicious miner has to do is mine an invalid block on purpose, let these pools SPV mine on top of them while it mines a valid block free of their competition. Yes, these pools deserve to lose money in that event, but the impact of reorgs and many block orphans for anyone not running a full node could be disastrous, especially more so in the XT world where Mike wants everyone to be running SPV nodes. I simply don't see the XT fork having any chance of surviving if SPV nodes are unreliable.

And if these pools go out of business, it will lead to even more mining centralization which is already too centralized today.

It's the 3600 coin/day inflation that's putting the downward pressure on price. What's amazing is that there has been an average ~$1 million/day being pumped in to hold the price ever since the $166 bottom last winter.  Miners are selling all or almost all they mine. You gotta love the Chinese. On a macro level, they sell stuff at cost and then lend us the money to buy it. No way that can end well. I'm not just talking about bitcoin. All their exports. If you think about it, Chinese miners are using subsidized electricity so it's actually the Red Chinese government that are providing us all these cheap coins.  It's the only thing China actually sells that prolly won't be worthless in five years.

And why are you still here, in cypher's world of free speech, instead of running with your soulmates, the supressors and illiberals?

iwilcox 9 points
If people decide to take their toys and go home because they didn't get their way...

Mike didn't get his way on various PRs. Some wish he had gone home, but instead he decided to wait for a divisive debate he could take advantage of to attempt a coup.

You're part of a group on a plane which is being remodelled mid-flight, with Mike, and out of concern for all on board you refuse him several changes with ill-considered side-effects. He gets up, declares himself pilot and starts swinging a sledgehammer about, crying "Growth at any cost! We're redirecting towards PayPal HQ." Who'd stay on that plane, with the sledgehammer-swinger as the new pilot?

I see now you aren't Napoleon at all, that's ice. You are Winston.

I wonder at what point will you start to question your role at Minitrue?

What are you talking about read the second top pined post, he is sleeping and coming in with an axe befor you wake up tomorrow.

The guy's thinking he's creating a time out - he's lost it.

Looks like Blockstream mean business. I think first Gavin and Mike will be sued for messing with there business plan and software.   not that they have a public businesses plan it's probably a class action on behalf of the community.



I bet that Yong kid theymos got a letter telling him he's an accomplice or something.

I suspect we need a better incentive for users to run nodes instead of relying solely on altruism.

He also thinks we need to HARD fork bitcoin to enable (direct? ...implied) "decentralized" full node compensation?

Sigh, if satoshi expected max_blocksize to stay at 1MB to infinity, as important as the distribution curve. He should have damn well said so when he was here.  

Our window over this weekend into what the true uncensored opinion is in/r/bitcoin shows just how much in favor the economic majority is for larger blocks.