Block size isn't important.
What is important, is how many transactions per second 2MB and larger block sizes can yield.
You couldn't be more right The storage space is the means, not the end. Transactions per second is what's actually important.Storage space is not the only means to increase the transaction rate. It may be the most effective force multiplier, but it's equally effective at persuading users to not run a Bitcoin full node. And the network of Bitcoin full nodes is what makes everyone's BTC valuable, so we depend on getting the balance between transaction space and a decentralised Bitcoin network exactly right. This means the blocksize has to be as close as possible to exactly the right size to reflect that balancing act. |
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From my own point of view, the original Segwit proposal is enough for now (until 2018/19). But if the growth of 40% per year continues, then in one or two years real transaction bottlenecks could emerge. Sort of pointless saying that when you go on to accept that on-chain is not what will give us the exponential growth in transaction volumes needed. I doubt most transactions were spam. Me too. The margin that constitutes filling 90% full blocks up to 100% makes a huge difference to the dynamics of the fee market though. The users choose their price in that circumstance, it's a buyers market. But my comment was more directed to the power struggle - real "big blockers" don't want 2MB, they want 8 or even 32 MB. I don't agree with them because like you I believe we should concentrate on second-layer solutions, but I'm sure that 2MB+Segwit (8 MB max but we will probably never reach even 6MB) or Doomad's conservative flexible cap would cause no harm to decentralization. So it would have been an intelligent move by the Core devs to support a 2MB+Segwit variant with their own desires included (e.g. "all those nice features we can achieve with an hardfork" and delaying the hardfork to 2018). Well, for one, 8MB would be easy to spam: just get the right weight of sig-heavy transactions that fill up the witness blocks. So I'm not sure why you're saying that, filled up 8MB blocks would be all but inevitable if the Bitcoin user community accepted the Segwit "2x" hard fork variant. And you're making the same point about "conciliating with big blockers" that you did already, so I will reiterate also: 4MB for the Segwit soft fork is already pretty big as a max size. The count of Bitcoin nodes on the network is healthy, but hardly mirroring the ATH range we have with the exchange rate. I'd be happier with Segwit 4MB if there was a clear jump in node numbers that demonstrated that all these new users understood that the strength in numbers on the Bitcoin network is the foundation of what makes BTC valuable in the first place. We will see, but this is hardly ideal circumstances for 4MB, let alone 8MB. Now instead, we'll have a bumpy ride, with a likely chain split and maybe a new reference client controlled mostly by miners.
Let them. It cannot be sustained long term, despite the inevitable chaos. My advice: the more this vaunted hard fork is given credibility, the more the chaos Bitcoin will see. You're not doing very well at the talking-down-the-hard-fork-coup thus far, I suggest you fix that if you want minimum disruption to Bitcoin. I mean, people listen to you, right? That means you carry a little responsibility for how your words resonate within the community I've only been around for little under a year but it's difficult to ignore the pattern even as a passer by. If the correlation is accurate, we'll be experiencing the next one in a matter of weeks. And the resources that have been mounting indicates that they'll have a strong appetite for a sustained battle of attrition.
I expect these things will indeed happen, one way or another |
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"5 different ideas in 5 different months"? If you mean the successive tweaks I've made to what I'm now calling SegWit Adaptive, that's what happens to new ideas. They incrementally improve and evolve as time passes. Basically the definition of the word "development". Or would you prefer I had kept pushing BIP106 in it's original form, which could potentially (in the sense that the code permitted it) have resulted in... Yea, those 5 ideas  |
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@CarltonBanks re: demand for economic tx, yes! Although I do believe that this as well isn't accurately reflective of economic demand - trading volume is relenting across the board and perhaps this easing off is partially owing to speculation fatigue.
Concurred. It is, however, difficult to ascertain what peak demand was at any given time recently, we've been in a world of politically driven transaction demand for, what, 2 years? A little longer? And this is likely a lull in that dynamic anyhow, you can bet that the mother of all spam floods is being prepped right now for the time when it's perpetrators need it the most. |
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Hypocritical Guardian, oh how typical
The Guardian are always the first in line to talk up "compassion for the disaffected in society", and "laws that do more harm than good", but when people in society actually do something by themselves to break the cycle of bullshit, y'know Guardian, something that isn't just words on a page or people holding up signs saying "please daddy government, we want something you don't want to give us", then what does The blessed Guardian do?
Smear it, as subtly as possible. This insidious establishment mouthpiece is disgusting, they should be ashamed of their middle-class po-faced smug febrile selves. They've done nothing but launch the most subtle attacks they can muster on Bitcoin since the beginning, they're a disgrace to the human race
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Dashjr claims that 1 MB block size has been dangerous to Bitcoin and wants it to get reduced. Tells a lot about this guy. I believe that he has invested quite heavily in the alts such as Ethereum, and want to crash the Bitcoin exchange rates. If he claims that 1MB has caused a lot of harm, then let him give the evidence to prove the same.
Up until recently, Luke was right, the evidence you request proved it. And the evidence was? The number of copies of the Bitcoin software running the Bitcoin network. A few months ago, it was on a 3-4 year downward trend, the high was 8,000 Bitcoin nodes on the network in around 2013 or 2012. Now, we've come back up from a local low of 6,000 nodes to the healthier 7,500 number we have today, stimulated by Bitcoin's bull-run in the last few months. You wanted evidence that Luke has a point, that's it. He's on the extreme end of the small-blocks spectrum, but the argument has merit, and empirical evidence to back it. You even have the option of following both forks if you like. That's how much control, freedom and choice you have. But if you willingly choose not to follow consensus, you can't then also complain that you can't use those services, or have your tx confirmed by those miners. That's what "taking your ball and going home" looks like.
And so you're saying that 80% of miners agreeing to take the network in the exact direction they choose, with their own fork isn't a little "melodramatic" itself? And you appear to be defining "consensus" a little strangely, as if what the miners choose to do is the meaning of that word. Funny how you're the one always subtly pushing at the edges of what the Bitcoin developers want, isn't it? You've had about 5 different ideas in 5 different months about how "they're doing it wrong", you're basically just a walking/talking/singing/dancing Bitcoin hard-fork really, huh?  But you're right, the users will choose as they wish. I predict you'll continue to criticise both what the users choose (as you constantly do) and what the developers come up with (as you constantly do) I somewhat agree with Carlton Banks' interpretation. It is a power struggle. But the Core developers could have maintained a high degree of control over the code if they agreed to any compromise involving - even slightly - bigger blocks than the 1MB+Segwit variant.
re: bolded, what for? The easing off in the spam transactions recently only goes to show that demand for economic transactions (i.e. non-political transactions) was always artificial, the world still doesn't really need 350,00 Bitcoin transactions per day. And even if they do, are you seriously trying to suggest that 4x the transaction supply is needed? Or that increasing the max blocksize to 4MB is not a compromise? Neither is true right now. Even if it were, the secondary network layers enabled after Segwit should be the focus, you know as well as I do that on-chain transactions will never scale, by definition. |
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SegWit2X is a very decent alternative that I don't mind to support. No it isn't It's no different to the other hard fork dev team coups, richardsNY. It has nothing to do with the good of the network, it's about taking control of who writes the code. And that's what will happen if people follow this fork: the miners, the exchanges, and whoever lies behind those organisations, will start to dictate what code we all have to run. This is a dangerous precedent, you would do well to understand what the whole context is before making hasty statements such as the above |
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Look Spain, Spain had had to inject more than 41 billion €, lent by the european union. The total bill for rescuing Spanish banks would have even reached 61 billion pay by taxpayers There's no "if" or "would" with the Spanish banks either, el Banco Popular in Spain recently got bought for 1 euro (by Santander) after their liquidity collapsed last month. They were something like the 6th largest bank (i.e. possibly the smallest) in Spain, and all their losses, obligations, and liabilities/bad debts now belong to Santander. |
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There will be countless versions of bitcoins. The majority chain won't always get the 100% support. Once we get into the Hard Fork business there will be no end to it.
Disagree The more the effect you're describing escalates, the more incentive there is for the Core developers to take the nuclear option and hard fork to a new proof of work. That would be the definitive move, as users would be very enticed by the CPU mining goldrush that ensued. It doesn't matter what way you slice or dice it, the expertise behind development is what makes Bitcoin what it is. The smart money will always follow the coding talent, and the coding talent will always follow the smart money. The suits can wail and gnash their teeth as loud and hard as they like they cannot stop decentralised cryptocurrency, it is a fait accomplis. We want it, and we will get it |
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Lightning Network is basically Ripple on top of Bitcoin. We don't need another IOU system. We need a peer-to-peer digital cash system.
Nope, wrong. You have no clue. Not just anyone can open up a Ripple gateway, you need to go through all sorts of formalities and already be a financial mafia *ahem* industry institution (and so you already need to have been through all those cartel initiation ceremonies *ahem* legal/regulatory proceeding and due diligences) Lightning node? Download the software. Finished. |
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In the 2-layer model, the base letter is the settlement layer. The problem is that if you force people not to use that base layer, it doesn't really matter what the layers on top will look like, because institutions become gatekeepers. Define institutions. LN hub node operators? Also, wouldn't you still be able to use the raw Bitcoin protocol, albeit at a higher transaction cost? Why would main-chain settlement be more expensive, when billions of transactions are happening on the Lightning network? Moving billions of transactions onto a higher, more efficient network layer would free space on the main-chain, not congest it. |
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@carlisle1
All currently proposed 2nd layers are fee aggregators, not 3rd party systems. They reduce fees, and enhance transaction privacy. 3rd parties are precisely what Bitcoin frees us from, no point in reintroducing them just to improve the payment experience.
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Restaurants and other IRL merchants are just not a good use case for Bitcoin right now; the tx fees have increased too much and RBF is now up and running. Bitcoin as a settlement layer is already reality in that regard.
IRL, physical businesses need instant settlement, real cash. Only additional networks layered on top of Bitcoin can provide that. So this news is a little pointless, as with the Burger King news. Who wants to pay the same amount as a whopper burger just to send the BTC to a Burger King outlet? We need 2nd layers now.
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It's sort of a game of chicken. Many people say that there will be a hard fork but the miners have a lot to lose if they hard fork and people don't go with it. I actually think it's likely that there will be two Bitcoins and that the more decentralized one will win.
+1 And it's unlikely to be the 2x fork. Segwit2x is just the 5th (or 6th?) attempt at big business trying to take control of Bitcoin's source code, it started with Bitcoin XT 2 years ago, and there have been umpteen attempts since then. And it always involves a hardfork so that the Bitcoin codebase becomes controlled by the people proposing the fork. Bitcoin will continue with the actually talented and innovative programmers it has now, one way or another. If it means we must do our own hardfork to evade malicious miner action against the Bitcoin Core chain, then so be it. Come with it you cowards. |
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If its more difficult and more expensive then I don't want decentralisation.
Do you want Bitcoin, then? Bitcoin is difficult and expensive, and decentralised (although to be fair, Lightning will make it easier and cheaper, at least in terms of transaction fees). It seems that the increasing number of people joining the Bitcoin holders and the Bitcoin network disagree with you. But by all means, make your own choice. |
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We (as a community) just need to make sure the protocol is not co-opted to raise barriers to entry in handling Bitcoin TX
Best example: massive increases to the blocksize. With small blocks and conservative blocksize increases, Lightning is much more conducive to a decentralised network topology. And at the end of the day, as long as the blocks are small enough for any small business to have sufficient cash flow that they can run their own hub, then that's exactly what small businesses will do: be their own bank. Business people instinctively want control over their livelihoods. Whereas the alternative is the various Bitcoin takeovers (that never seem to quit with new coup attempts, disguised as a "technology upgrade"), which all mysteriously give all the control to miners by design (did I mention that the miners always push the community to adopt their wonderful takeover plan?). Lightning could end up like that, but doesn't have to be, if the blocksize stays conservatively small. |
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@terraformer
Apologise for the whole post, you're using the word "scaling" without knowing what it means.
Neither Segwit or big blocks change the scale of the Bitcoin network. Neither of them.
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How many times have I reiterated that what remains a complete mystery is what happens after segwit gets activated when we're staring down the barrel of the 2MB base blocksize (an 8MB overall block weight hence why I add the word base in there)
If that's what you really think, why do you keep feeding the publicity drive for this 2x proposal? You've been doing nothing but talk up it's relevance since it appeared, and yet you're conceding here that there are withheld details that will be imposed (or at least expected) once Segwit 4MB (i.e. BIP141) is activated. You should make your position clearer: do you think mystery clauses in contractual agreements a good idea or not? |
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....and the crucial 2016 block rolling average is now at it's highest ever value, around 37% of the most recent 2016 blocks are signalling BIP141.
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I know it's a bit off topic, but I think emotions play a major (if not the biggest) part in this whole scaling issue, and thus should be reckoned with; logic or not...  It's the most relevant point in this thread for a while When lies, deceit or manipulation are used to prosecute a certain developmental direction in Bitcoin, people get pissed. That's where the emotion comes from. And this Segwit2x thing started as a deceit and is going to continue as one also. The idea is to change the total blocksize to 8MB (not 2MB, as it was rhetorically mislabeled at first), then to move that size to 16MB only 1 year later, then more doubling the next year to 32MB (and so "2x" is a good description of this plan, in fairness). Until Bitcoin is under the centralised control of the miners. So, don't allow the miners to do this, that's my recommendation. Your money will be turned into centralised fiat, the opposite of what Bitcoin was conceived as. |
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