They do not.

There are a multitude of ways to increase the transaction rate WITHOUT increasing the blocksize. The blocksize is perhaps the most dangerous way to increase the tx rate, why do that at all until every other avenue has been exhausted?


And you've been here far too long not to have heard this perspective, can you not read?

When will the banks begin to use it?

This seems like a strange view of reality, regardless of who said it and how astute their observations about money are. The banks and their media cronies have been publicly deriding Bitcoin for a long time, and trying to ape it with their hilarious proprietary "blockchain" tech.

How dare you! (guilty as charged )

This really highlights quite how scammy these vehicles potentially could be. Who's forcing SolidX to actually buy real BTC with the $1million dollars investment capital they're selling? At least with the less scammy Bitcoin exchanges, you can withdraw real Bitcoins to prove that actual BTC trading has taken place (well, at least some of the time on some exchanges. "People's" Republic of China, I'm looking in your direction)

Well, I send merchants less than 100 satoshis per byte right now, and it confirms pretty quickly (<10 blocks most of the time)

Not sure why it could be such a big problem for anyone else, there's nothing special about the coins I'm sending.

Just like the difference between full nodes and SPV nodes, you can run Lightning nodes either using a full node or using a lite node. Appropriate trade-offs apply, again, just like they do with lite nodes and full nodes. i.e. there's a desktop version with more capabilities that uses more resources, and a version with stripped down capabilities with stripped down resources to use it.

I disagree with this a little.

Bitcoin (at today's exchange rate) works fine with the type of merchants who accept it anyway: online shops that mail the goods to you. For that, instant confirmations, or even confirmation in the next block just isn't needed, the goods will take a day or more to arrive anyway.

With LN, I think IRL bricks and mortar merchants are the most appropriate use case. It requires a fair amount of trust to actually route the payment through a merchant's own personal Lightning node to pay them, they could try and exploit that in a couple of ways (Lightning isn't perfect). With in-person merchants, they're incentivised to be co-opeative with their customers, one can get alot of information about whether the merchant will still be selling from the same spot the next day, or the next month. This would reduce the risks of using Lightning to virtually zero, IRL shops have a powerful incentive to behave themselves as a result. With online shops, you can't always be so confident that way.  And of course, instant transfers will be far preferable with IRL purchases, so it seems like a perfect fit.

It would make much more sense to buy the shoes with the money in the channel? If you have money in a channel, it can be routed to anywhere else on the Lightning network, that's how Lightning is designed. You basically don't get LN. Not my problem, I'm afraid.

Economic majority need to act, Andresen has gone full retard.


They won't stop. Playing nice is over, and should have finished long ago.

Not a planned hard fork, it's a rogue hard fork perpetrated by miners behaving with malign intent. It could happen at any time, so it's likely that the Bitcoin devs would not have the time to prepare that code for a change like this, they would be more likely to try to do only the things that mitigate the problems of having 2 Bitcoin chains existing simultaneously.

Also, there are numerous other improvements to the transaction rate that could be implemented vai hard fork, this is only 1 such idea.


Saying that, I broadly support this idea, but only if it can be demostrated to be safe and effective with a convincing study of the issue. Orphan rates and block propagation have seen significant improvements over the Bitcoin version 0.1 design, and the performance of the internet's infrastructure has also improved since then.

So it's not something to rule out, it would be good for the network if a proper case were made for what interval could be handled safely. But it comes with trade-offs, as everything does, let's not forget the practical points against doing it, as well as the practical points in favour.


Above all, this is a very important reminder: big blocks is not the only way to increase the transaction rate, and big blocks just so happens to be the most dangerous way to do it, as it doesn't improve the scaling of the network, big blocks deteriorate the scaling properties of the Bitcoin network

Both FlexTrans and xThin were written by the same member of the Classic team, that's correct. And in no way does that contradict what I said at all, you're confused

This would be a hard fork, and better ideas could be introduced in any hard fork (as just about anything about Bitcoin can be changed in a hard fork, that's what defines a hard fork)


It's not the worst solution, but hard forks give us the opportunity to make pretty much any change, it doesn't make much sense from that perspective.

You're late to your own discussion by several months, this is not an original suggestion.

The block interval target is 10 minutes for important reasons: orphan rate, inherent latency of TCP/IP networks etc. It's also a hard fork change, and so much more could be done with any hard fork that relegates the importance of reducing the block interval target.

It's not the worst idea, but you're not really contributing anything useful by bringing this up for the Nth time.

One could do that using multi sig transactions today, and no-one does. It's an attack that costs alot of money compared to it's effectiveness, hence it doesn't happen in practice. Filling every single block with nothing but attack transactions would cost a fortune, the attacker would push the Bitcoin price to the moon all by themselves in order to pay the fees to do it. Only the ultra rich could do it, and it seems they're not interested to throw that amount of money away.


That attack is possible now. The ratio of signature to tx-data can be expanded massively in a regular 1MB block, DoS'ing block space from people who wnat to use it benignly. Segregating the signatures doesn't alter an attackers ability to do this at all. It falls into the same category as the attack in your first paragraph, far too expensive to do, except for the ultra rich.

You should try to understand Segwit better before you make such ill-considered assessments.


There are huge problems with FlexTrans that you've demonstrated already you prefer to ignore. Let's not forget that FlexTrans was designed by the same incompetent who gave us xThin block propagation, which carried not 1 but 2 fatal bugs, 1 of which was recently exploited to BU's demise.

Snake oil can be freely sold in the Marketplace sub-board, I hope your business goes well  

All good, except this part. That's not "optimal", that's "cheapest", which are separate concepts.

You will have a choice. Don't need super high levels of privacy to buy a packet of chewing gum? Then use a larger channel to save on fees (and who says the street vendor will let you use that large channel without sending it through THEIR node first? Everyone competes on a level playing field, as there is no real barrier to be a Lightning network node)


No, you've already accepted that aggregating multiple LN transactions into 1 on-chain transaction will allow far more transaction capacity, which will shift the more meager capacity away from the on-chain Bitcoin network. Settlement fees could end up cheaper than today's transaction fees no problem. Settlement transactions are hardly highest priority, and that together with the effects of some capacity shifted onto LN will create positive and immutable incentives to keep on-chain AND off-chain transaction relatively cheap. Fewer people needing on-chain tx's naturally frees up on-chain capacity.

The positive incentive to settle to one's detriment doesn't exist, all honest participants will want to save money, not cost themselves and others unnecessary fees. Of course, people could use malign incentives to deliberately close channels earlier than makes economic sense, but it's not like Bitcoin miners are just nice people wanting to help everyone out right now, our current 3rd parties are also being uncooperative and obstructive towards the network's best interests. If anything, LN improves that situation, as we can choose who processes our LN transactions, and deny business to those who want to be anti-social or destructive.

I'm telling you all now: we must do something with this outrage other than speak it out loud, then invite the coyotes in for tea and cake and a nice chat



We cannot sit by as passive protagonists where the aggressor's sole intent is to harm and disrupt, we must become the preemptive antagonistic force in order to stop these coyotes from tearing the network and the community apart.

These people will not stop, they will ratchet up the tension and the propaganda, and they almost certainly have cleverly prepared multi stage plans, not just using the Bitcoin community, but using society at large to act against us

Do not forget the articles in The Guardian and The Economist reporting on XT, replete with Gavin and Mike Hearn passing themselves off as gracious gentlemen who just want the best for everyone, kissing babies etc. They can, and will, fight even dirtier than that (labeling people who see through these rhetorical tricks as "crazy paranoid Bitcoiner nut" is an obvious starting point)


We must act, to remove miners working against Bitcoin from the network. I don't want their hashrate if it means paying the fascist establishment to protect us against the fascist establishment, it's self contradictory and no different to the principles that dominate our lives already

No, not like banking at all. Hubs may well develop naturally, but they're not the network model for Lightning, one can just as easily find one's self connected to a very large Bitcoin node, that does not mean Bitcoin is centralised around 1 well connected node. Lightning is also peer-2-peer, no different to Bitcoin.


If there is no-one forcing anyone to use certain LN nodes, and the only barrier to entry is running a Bitcoin full node, I'm failing to see any loss of control, or any centralisation in that.

anyone? no?

This is entirely their strategy

1. Invent falsehood
2. Spread the falsehood
3. Repeat it, relentlessly
4. Don't respond directly to criticisms that expose the falsehood, change the subject instead
5. Repeat falsehood often enough that it drowns out exposition of the falsehood

Oh, and I forgot

6. If anyone becomes understandably irate with their behaviour after N repetitions of 3-5, point the finger: "See? See how unreasonable they are, they know they've lost the argument when they lose their temper"

It should be "You know you've lost the argument when complex lies and tricks are all you can do to 'win' "

you're SLIPPING jonald.