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Just a couple of basic questions as I'm trying to understand ripple....
Would ripple help secure bitcoin because it further abstracts exchange? For instance already bitcoins are a "virtual" currency. The government can try to make bitcoins illegal. But if ripple is built on top of bitcoin all the sudden now not only is it a virtual currency being traded but it isn't even really being traded... just debts are being passed around. Is it possible that it could somehow legally protect bitcoin in the future? Just wondering.
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Even more surprising is that the Big Bang Theory hasn't featured Wolowitz mining on the government supercomputer. It surprised me that The Good Wife featured a Bitcoin episode before The Big Bang Theory. Next week, Sheldon is discovered to be a closet Bitcoiner. Then he's claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto by the rest of the gang which provide a myriad of proof to support their claim. At the end of episode, Spook wakes him from his dream. Cameo of BW interviewing Sheldon Nakamoto, along with being on the cover of Bitcoin Magazine. i'd love that haaaah |
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sure the size should be what the nodes can currently handle. But if in the future an increase in the size is needed it means a hard fork... that's a problem because that creates inflexibility right?
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I may be understanding things wrong but I see it like this....
Let's say the "limited resource" of a fixed block size drives prices up. Sounds good for miners because of huge fees right? But....... in any financial system... isn't the greatest amount of transactions in the lower range? So in other words if all the sudden you had this high transaction cost... it would correspond with moving high amounts of money. But if what makes up the bulk of a financial systems are smaller amounts... you could be pushing the vast majority of transactions off the network. If that happens... then all those transactions.. even though they don't involve high amounts of money.. they won't be adding to whatever total amount is gained from transaction fees. So doesn't that mean that the total hashing power is reduced? If you could prove that miners would lose revenue in total from having a majority of lower amount transactions done off the network wouldn't you also prove that it would reduce hashing power since hashing power is related to reward?
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The lake itself was built to cool the nuke plant. Half of it is warm and the other half is cool.... this house is on the cool side.
How is the fishing?  Just having some fun and posting in a hopefully house sold for bitcoin thread! Virginia is awesome. Good luck!  lol I've caught a few decent sized fish. There were no offers though; I don't think many people have stacks of 10k bitcoins laying around. |
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Can you explain this in more laymen terms of why it needs to be increased to at least 1.7 MB? Do you still support a fixed limit or is a dynamic one based on something possible?
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How can you be more liable than a politician? There was a politician that accepted bitcoins..... they basically just told him to ask for the name that's all. I would say
Request to know the name
record IP
treat it like cash for tax purposes
But I'm not a lawyer... (there is also a legal subsection)
wish you the best.
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it means you could buy bitcoins with a credit card and get them immediately to spend. The merchant is more likely to sell you bitcoins for such an irreversible transaction if you have already done a transaction and didn't reverse it. To get on the whitelist.
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what about the fact that bitcoin helps gambling because it makes it easier for someone to make a gambling website? This would increase the amount of sites and competition between online gambling sites and probably even save the gambling site money allowing them to offer better odds.
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A nice place in the azores
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I see announcements dropping like dominoes about new bitcoin related things. It's almost like a self feedback loop.. the higher the price goes the more viable it becomes at what it's meant to do. That in itself gives it more worth.
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Already controversy is brewing... Already businesses are starting to back away from bitcoin because if the block limit isn't raised then one of three things will happen: 1. Bitcoin fails. 2. Bitcoin gets used only for moving large amounts of money and other cryptocurrencies take over eventually displacing bitcoin itself. 3. Bitcoin gets used for only moving large amounts of money and "bitcoin clearing houses" fill the gaps, which increase the risk of fraud/theft/unaccountability, add avenues of attack, and form REAL centralization. Not some hypothetical BS.
1 - seems doubtful. 2 - seems 'so what?' 3 - seems that Bitcoin would fall into a role where it can provide a solid and reliable backstop against which other solutions may built and evolve. Some will be scams or maybe even fractional <gasp!> but those which don't work or are mis-managed will die and those which do and are well managed will thrive. Critically, Bitcoin may still be used...possibly at some cost...as a shuttle between competing solutions when the need arises. Of course I would like to see Bitcoin be everything to everybody. Perfect in every way and all that. But it's not realistic. #3 would still be one hell of an achievement and a great leap forward. Isn't it possible to have a better happy medium though? Where transactions are say........ a dollar at most? Or maybe a few? Just how big would they get? Maybe that's why all the devs are saying wait and see. :T But yeah it would still be an achievement to actually need a greater block size |
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Maybe it's because there are a handful of people who are trying to keep the price from bubbling to far out of control and also at the same time selling a little sliver of their hoard. Someone with a million bitcoins could put up walls all day and by the time we got to 50 they could have made millions
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The post office already doesn't like packages that are 13 ounces are over if they are paid with just stamps because they think it's more secure if it's metered which means they can trace who purchased the postage easier. So bitcoin would fit that same problem (for packages 13 ounce and over)
what the post office should do is use smart phones instead of their stupid 1600 dollar scanners that run DOS or some antiquated piece of crap. Then they could allow customers to not only track when their packages where delivered but they could track them in real time down the street.
It would also be nice if they weren't constrained so much by congress and union rules.
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...would bitcoin cease to exist... No, because Bitcoin would remain the chain with the highest hash rate / proof of work. that's another thing i meant to ask you about... I was wondering how do you figure that? just out of curiosity. for instance if you suddenly have high transaction rates of.. say 10-20 dollars you are going to push a lot of transactions off the chain to something else. Those transactions pay fees too that you no longer would be getting right? (or do I misunderstand?) |
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...the 1Mb limit is reached and transaction delays occur to such an extent that the chaos and negative press stops enough people from using bitcoin that it can limp along with saturated 1Mb blocks. I already outlined the likely scenario describing what happens when transaction volume reaches the max block size limit: we should see what happens as we run into the soft blocksize limits...what do you predict will happen? In this order: 1. Most blocks are at or near the 250 kilobyte soft limit. 2. The memory pool of transactions grows due to insufficient space in blocks. 3. Users notice trend of transactions taking longer to confirm, or not confirming at all. 4. Fees increase as users pay more to improve confirmation times. 5. Miners (or mining pools) modify code to select transactions with the highest fees per kilobyte to fit into blocks. They remote the 250 kilobyte soft limit. Some miners disallow free transactions entirely. 6. Transactions clear much more quickly now, but fees decrease. 7. Blocks increase in size until they are at or near the one megabyte hard limit. 8. Fees start increasing. Free transactions rarely confirm at all now. 9. Small transactions are eliminated since they are not economically feasible. SatoshiDice increases betting minimums along with fees. The volume of SatoshiDice transactions decrease. 10. Users at the margins of transaction profitability with respect to fees are pushed off the network. 11. Many people, most non-technical, clamor for the block size limit to be lifted. 12. Fees reach an equilibrium where they remain stable. 13. Spurred by the profitability of Bitcoin transactions, alternate chains appear to capture the users that Bitcoin lost. 14. Pleased with their profitability, miners refuse to accept any hard fork to block size. There will be no "chaos" or long transaction times, just high transaction fees. Users for whom it makes economic sense to utilize the Bitcoin network will pay the fees. Everyone else will use alternatives which are guaranteed to appear for economic reasons. If Bitcoin's transaction volume requires fees that are so high that some people get pushed off the network (like SatoshiDice) there is clearly a market for payment networks. We should be so lucky that we get transaction volume sufficient to drive up fees to where users look for alternatives. It means Bitcoin is doing something right!!! What about step 15? The fact that if an alternate chain starts being used and gains value.. and that chain can do everything bitcoin can do but also doesn't have the artificial limit... or maybe it has a smarter limit that dynamically adjusts... would bitcoin cease to exist? Because some people seem to think that expensive transactions will kill bitcoin. I realize that in order for transactions to get that expensive... to an extent that means bitcoin has to "succeed" to get to that point. what if a transaction costs the equivalent of 10 dollars? It's going to push more than just 10 dollar and less transactions off the network. Even if you use a payment processor you have to send your money to the processor. And then what? Right now I can spend money for instance and send some to the reddit tip bot. Or I can donate to wikileaks. If I'm forced to use a payment processor then in order for me not to kill myself financially I would have to move everything I own to it all at once and leave it in their hands. I'm no longer in control of my own wealth. Exchanges are a weak link because governments or criminals can attack them. If they go down... that hurts. So just to be clear it seems to me this is the case: Gavin and Mike hearn want to "wait and see what happens" . But it sounds like they want to raise the limit somehow and do it in an intelligent way. It sounds like Jgarzik wants to leave the cap in place and never move it. Maybe we shouldn't worry about it.......... because in order for it to be a problem bitcoin has to succeed. But I don't want it to collapse after it succeeds. I realize that "microtransactions" like satoshi dice will inevitably have to be done off the blockchain. But that still doesn't justify 10... 15... 20 or even higher transaction fees. |
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Some folks cling to dogma and don't actually read all the responses.
You misquoted that last one..... And I think there is misunderstanding because everyone isn't on the same page including the developers. For instance I think there are some things we can all agree on.
We're all keen to see efficient protocols built on top of Bitcoin for things like micropayment channels (which allow lots of fast repetitive satoshi-sized payments without impacting the block chain), or trusted computing (which allows offline transactions to be carried around in long chains until final resolution). Also the payment protocol should eliminate the most absurd abuses of micropayments like SDs messaging system. These things fall into the class of "no brainers" and were discussed for a long time already.
Other more exotic ideas like Ripple-style networks of payment routers using contracts don't seem against the spirit of Bitcoin if they keep the low trust aspects of the system.
At the same time, as evidenced by the disagreement on this thread, there are too many unknown variables for us to figure out what will happen ahead of time. The only way to really find out is to try it and see what happens. If Bitcoin does fail to scale then the end result will be a smaller number of full nodes but lots of people using the system - this is still better than Bitcoin being deliberately crippled so it never gets popular because even if the number of full nodes collapses down to less than 1000, unknown future advances in technology might make it cheap enough for everyone to run a full node again. In the absence of a hard-coded limit the number of full nodes can flex up and down as supply and demand change. But with a hard-coded limit Bitcoin will fail to achieve popularity amongst ordinary people and will eventually be forgotten. now there is this Sigh, they need to do more research.
Transaction rates can easily scale far beyond 7 tps, even with 1MB limit in place.
The current network is just the base settlement layer.
Many organizations will layer instant payment networks, settlement networks, credit layers and other things on top of the current layer.
Anybody who looks at the current technology and assumes "that's all there is" or "the whole world is limited to the current network" makes fatally flawed assumptions.
Satoshi openly acknowledged this by noting insuitability of microtransactions for the current network, and it is clear that digitally signed messages may be sent, exchanged, combined by a myriad different payment processors, aggregators etc. Those two quotes overlap but they don't quite coincide if you notice. In mikes it would appear "deliberately cripple" means not raise the limit from 1 MB ever. garizk's on the other hand said it can scale even with the limit.......... correct me if I'm wrong plz |
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