Even with LN, we can't talk of "infinite scaling". We need to open a LN channel for every user with an on-chain transaction, and there must also be space on the blockchain to close it. Doing a little bit of kindergarden math: If we'd 2 MB blocks (~the effective estimated Segwit block size) and a value of 180 byte per transaction, then ~11000 users could open a payment channel per block, or 1,5 million per day. That's a lot, but it's not enough for the whole world's population, and it doesn't take into account channel closing transactions and other on-chain transactions. That's not taking something very important about the transaction capacity of Lightning Network into account; once the channel is open, you can use the BTC in the channel infinitely (well, unless you run out of BTC of course). There is no need to close the channel, unless you need it for an on-chain transaction, or if someone you exchange BTC on Lightning with tries to start replaying old transactions. So your "kindergarten math" is not very insightful, because it paints the absolute worst case scenario for Lightning's capacity. Sidechains and extension blocks are a way to get closer to "infinity". I prefer a three-layer system: 1) Main chain 2) Sidechains or "extension" blockchains 3) LN.
Extension blocks simply produce the same outcome as Bitcoin Unlimited with a different method. The miners control which extension block they put a regular user's transaction into, and so they can create new chains at will, and force users to download the extension chains they create against the user's will. And so extension blocks simply give miners all the power to turn the mining network into servers that control the client software that the users use, Bitcoin would cease to be decentralised or peer to peer. Miners could create extension chains so huge that it would be no longer practical for regular users to download all the extension chains that their transactions are placed in, or to donwload the chains that contain BTC they receive from others. It's basically an even worse idea than Bitcoin Unlimited, as the miners don't even need Bitcoin nodes voting for the blocksize, they can change the blocksize to anything they like at whim. |
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Bitcoin "space travel" doesn't have to just be the design backed by Elon Musk, or the different design that Richard Branson funded. It can be any 2nd layer network on top of Bitcoin, there are already a few designs for 2nd layer Bitcoin transaction networks. But I agree that Lightning is a contender.
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On the record high of unconfirmed transactions, would a 2mb blocksize house all that?
Arguably yes, but the effects that increasing capacity promote are more complex. It's the psychology of supply and demand at work, in essence. The effects of more people using the network (as a result of 2MB or whatever blocksize increase) will, of course, increase the supply of the economic good known as the Bitcoin transaction. But there is a positive feedback loop produced by that change, the increase in supply increases use of the network commensurately, people will simply justify using Bitcoin in further ways than they did before; new users are attracted by their increased opportunity to observe Bitcoin being used, existing users send more transactions because it's cheap to send again, and spammers will spam more, for their spammy reasons. Metaphorically, it's similar to the problems of creating road infrastructure; when a new road is built, people just compare this nice new clean, empty looking road with the congested roads they already use, and some of those people come up with reasons to use the new road, and before you know it, the new road is just as traffic jammed as the old ones it sought to provide relief for. The real answer is not more roads, as it simply begets more people buying and using more cars. A different transport paradigm is the solution, something that inherently has more capacity than we could possible imagine ways to use, we're looking for the Bitcoin equivalent of air travel or spaceflight, really. |
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Why fight?
Just go to where Bitcoin can thrive, if the Californian State Legislature want to make it difficult, that's their problem. There are already a million and 1 reasons for residents to leave California in any case. Colorado and Arizona aren't far, you can visit California easily too.
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classicsucks, why can't you tell us something, instead of just sending all this scatter-gun of whining all over the place like an incontinent baby after a chicken vindaloo?
It's because that's all you've got, isn't it
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Here's a reason why Bitpay have no place being described as "committed to working for the greater good", they joined in the chorus with a bunch of Bitcoin companies in support of Extension Blocks. Extension blocks allow miners to just create as many side chains to the main blockchain as they like. And so really, it's very similar in outcome to Bitcoin Unlimited; miners choose how many extension chains exist, and they also control which chain your transaction is mined into. So, the miners can take control very easily by leaving empty blocks in the main blockchain that we have now, and forcing people to download their choice of extension chains to keep using peer-to-peer Bitcoin directly, and they are limited to, let's see, an infinite number of extension chains. Sounds a bit Unlimited to me. @gentlemand, show some responsibility towards your fellow Bitcoiners, please. You frequently state you have no clue about the technical matters behind Bitcoin, you should not be making these vague assertions on topics you confess to know nothing about |
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Oh really? The latest big blocks proposal that gives more control to the big players is increasingly supported by the big players? You don't say  |
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The original reddit post is deleted, all the more confirming what I and several other people said. Police had valid reason to do what they did.
Way to go, punching down, Mr. Righteous Indignation. There is no such thing as universal morality If your house got raided for basically "being that Bitcoin person", guess what some people with different moral values to you would say? "The police had every right to raid Emoclaw the way they did, these Bitcoiners make me sick" |
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Politicians, celebrities, businessmen and all their surrounding clique get away with drug crime all the time, and their influence on addicts and all the immorality surrounding that culture is much more pernicious than that of this girl. Someone did a chemical analysis of surfaces in bathrooms of the EU parliament one time, and there was significant residues of cocaine and heroin all over the place
Sounds to me like she wasn't rich, wasn't powerful, but being pretty stupid was her only real crime. I'm noticing that no-one's saying "And what about who sold her the drugs? And the person who sold that dealer the drugs?"
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Obviously they're out for themselves, but they're going around it by committing to Bitcoin's general growth too. Many companies are too dim to figure that out. They're one of the companies with proper long term vision.
Any actual reasons? You're just saying "Bitpay are great" with no "because....." |
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VPS is hardly running your own node, that's someone else's hardware running it for you
Explain "hacked up code". It's a bit of a vague criticism, I notice the developers (who evidently understand coding) don't share your claim
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Goatpig, Achow101, Droark and others, you should really have a donation address so that we can at least buy you a few beers for your hard work, much appreciated.
goatpig suggested that he might do it after this release, and he definitely deserves it, now that Armory is in such good shape. goatpig? |
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Pruning has been available for nodes for quite some time now. You may need to download the whole chain once, but you only need to store as little as 6GB, including daemon executables. Yep, and if your disk gets corrupted or damaged or whatever, you still need to download the whole thing again to get back to as little as 6 GB (it's less than that actually, but whatever). You're backing the irresponsible idea that the 125 GB needed, even for a pruned node, should start growing at 8 or 16 times the current rate. We could have a 1 terabyte blockchain by the end of the year, and that would seriously hurt the number of people willing to download such a huge database, despite the benefits it brings. But the miners can just run Bitcoin all on their own, right?  Besides, Segwit only increases the storage requirements for nodes. The total of the witness and block data becomes larger. Yep, and I'm on record saying I'd prefer less than 4MB blocks with Segwit, but hey, here we are, accepting the compromise between Big Blocks and actual scaling paradigms. Oh no, wait, you just keep saying over and over again that miners should be given the right to force whatever blocksize they like on people, huh? My bad And, has anyone solved the "Anyone can spend" issue of Segwit transactions?
Litecoin is stagnating and waiting to dump after Segwit adopts on it.
Has anyone solved the "anyone can spend" issue for the 10 or so other soft forks that are already activated on the Bitcoin network since months and months ago? "anyone can spend" _is_ the soft forking mechanism, trying to twist things so that it's some kind of problem only demonstrates how desperate you all are, you know full well that nodes will reject someone trying to spend BTC that's not theirs, as ANYONE_CAN_SPEND is just the backwards compatibility logic that allows pre-Segwit nodes to "understand" Segwit transactions without actually needing to understand them at all. Your FUD is pure comedy, big dicks blocks propagandist in chief Gavin Andersen couldn't even try that one with a straight face |
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I don't even understand what you're saying, it's not a popular topic on this forum
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You're wrong freebutcaged, everyone can run their own node, if you design the software as smart as can be. And it's the best way: a not-central bank (where are you getting the idea that everyone running their own node is just 1 big central bank  ) Doing what you're suggesting (miners are the only full nodes) gives too much power to the miners to change the Bitcoin software to whatever they like, that's a part of what all this Bitmain controversy is all about. And re: downloading only part of the blockchain, that's been in Bitcoin Core since version 11, since over 18 months ago |
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Random people on there don't represent the hashrate, they're never going to change their opinions and mining pool leaders are even less likely to change their opinion.
Random people (or their total aggregation) do represent the Bitcoin economy. If the people participating in Bitcoin vouch for one direction or another, the miners have little choice but to follow the economic majority. And the ecomomic majority gets stronger in favour of Segwit and Bitcoin Core all the time, and has been the majority for months now. Currently 65% and rising support Segwit on the Bitcoin network, +80% supports Bitcoin Core. |
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An emotionally charged appeal to stop using emotional arguments? Riiiiiiight It's very simple, technically. Even the current blockchain is pretty large as a database, 120 GB and growing at nearly 5 GB per month. It takes a long time to download (24 - 48 hours), and a longer time for a typical computer to validate ready for use. Even changing the blocksize by x2 would seriously impact the widespread ability to download it new. Saying "you only have to download it once" doesn't observe reality properly, I've been using Bitcoin a long time now, and I've re-downloaded the whole 120 GB once recently, it was pretty inconvenient as I wanted to trade on exchanges at the exact time that my copy of the blockchain became corrupted, that's the real world. There are far better ways to improve Bitcoin's capacity, that are actual real scaling solutions (increasing the blocksize simply does not change the scale of the Bitcoin network, those that repeat this falsehood need a serious reality check) - 2nd layers
- Improving transaction encoding efficiency
The latter can improve on-chain transaction capacity to somewhere between 350,000 and 425,000 transactions per day, still only using 1MB blocks. More could possibly be done to improve onchain efficiency, it just takes some more engineering innovation. And bear in mind that (when combined with Segwit's 4MB plain, non-scaling, blocksize increase), this equates to between 1,500,000 and 1,700,000 transactions per day, very high numbers by today's standards. And the 2nd layer solutions change the dynamics completely, e.g. Lightning can allow for +100 million transactions per day, using the blockchain to validate transactions while only having to write the bare minimum of data to the blockchain (and simultaneously freeing up on-chain capacity enormously). And Lightning is not the only idea for 2nd layers on top of Bitcoin. Smart solutions, where we use the blocksize we have much, much more efficiently, are the literal definition of what the word "scaling" actually means. The world will be able to handle bigger blocks, eventually. But now, or any time soon, is the wrong time to do it, Bitcoin needs a healthily increasing number of full-nodes to thrive and remain decentralised, this is vital to keeping the balance of power in Bitcoin as well rounded as possible. If we allow one contingent of control within Bitcoin to become too powerful, that faction could exert their control (to wit, the recent behaviour of the Bitmain mining corporation) and the experiment would be in danger of failing, that means no more price rises, and a leaner smarter competitor cryptocurrency outcompeting Bitcoin. |
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They may as well say they are planning to legalize people scratching their nose
Fuck off governments, we don't need you or your smiley official bullying
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He did? I disagree with you, I made a bad point Maybe boumalo bumped the wrong thread? It's a typical thing that happens though, someone bumps some ancient thread that's not relevant to the current exchange rate action to try to make it relevant (and hope no-one notices the date), seems like I made a mistake though (don't even remember the Tim Draper story from this year, mind you) |
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