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. +1 |
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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.
"already controversy is brewing" Wonderful zero-evidence hypothetical BS handwaving there. Yes, controversy is brewing... among those teenagers clueless about bitcoin and economics. Bitcoin value and press reports indicate new bitcoin users and businesses every day. The exact opposite of "back away" I don't mean to spread doom and gloom. I'm sorry.... You said yourself though in a post a long time ago that it's a marketing issue. And who is most susceptible to that? the clueless . edit: (and in case anyone was wondering what Justusranvier linked is what I was talking about. Just one case.) |
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There are people out there with whom things that go up in value faster than inflation, faster than a savings account, faster than pretty much anything short of a Ponzi, are not popular, it is true. It is a large part of why some communities on the web are very fond of claiming bitcoin is itself a ponzi. But long term I suspect what drove us down from $2 last time around was not people's lack of interest in small block size cryptocurrencies but, rather, the massive onslaught of major hacks and the lack of time tested value storing utility that left us short of past performance evidence with which to refute the "bitcoin is a ponzi" / "bitcoin is a scam" claims so many vocal detractors were making.
Blockchains are not ideal for retail sales payment processing, but for large transfers with small percentage fees they should be reasonably competitive.
Since we do not know which, if any, output of a transaction is change, nor even if a transaction with between someone and themself rather than someone and someone else, we really only have the price per bitcoin on exchanges and the number of bitcoins paid in transaction fees go by in measuring useful (as in paying for our infrastructure and operating -expenses) adoption.
We need to be adopted by money. Lots of money. People are less and less important in that regard the less and less money they bring in. The more money they bring in the more in fees and/or more in exchange rates, provided circulation involves fees. CIrculation that does not provide fees is mere churn, not useful in paying for the infrastructuire and operating-expenses of the network.
We should be looking to retain value, to store value, not to throw it away to freeloaders in the form of free transactions nor increase the cost of storing it by catering to decipayments nor even decapayments. We should aim at the centapayments and kilopayments markets not the centipayments and millipayments markets.
Lets store amounts of value that are actually worth going to the trouble and expense of storing them, while providing also the ability to transfer such amounts in and out of storage.
-MarkM-
First, I have a really hard time reading and understanding your posts... I usually skip over them. " Blockchains are not ideal for retail sales payment processing, but for large transfers with small percentage fees they should be reasonably competitive." So reddit, mega, wordpress are not what bitcoin is meant for? That's what you are saying because those are all retail transactions baby. If bitcoin isn't "meant for" small transactions it's only because there is a minority of people that want to keep an artificially low transaction limit. And I don't even think those people are miners (or bitcoin miners) . I think they just want bitcoin to fail for whatever reason. Maybe they own a bunch of litecoins . |
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Some of my view:
Actually many people here are just hoarding coins, there are not really a lot of transactions happening everyday, especially miners who connected to a pool. If we remove satoshi-dice, I think at least in the latest 2 years it will still work fine. Satoshi-dice is just an execellent example of no matter how big the block size is, there will be applications flood that space with meaningless transactions
And now imagine Satoshi-dice translated in 100 languages and used daily by 100 million people. And now imagine imagine another 100 Satoshi-dice type of service. That's going to be a problem, no matter how big the block size is. 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.
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If the block size limit is reached (for the average block), miners will implement algorithms to select transactions to include so as to maximize the fee collected. This will drive up the cost of fees as people compete to have their transactions included in a timely manner. Let's keep bitcoin the cheapest transaction processor around by avoiding such a scenario!
Let's not! If security needs to be paid markets will understand and self adjust. Why take it over limit and be sure small time merchant and miners can't keep up with bandwidth and storage requirements. It will be feasible in a few years though. Lets. 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. |
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- The block size limit is sufficiently high to allow "large" personal transactions (e.g. >$1000) to take place with acceptable fee levels.
Correct me if I'm wrong (unsure) but the bitcoin network doesn't "care" how much money you are moving. What it cares about are the amount of inputs. So it's possible to have a large amount of money with fewer inputs.. and a small amount of money with more inputs. So these "acceptable levels" are going to be for small transactions too. Which would as I said earlier...... means that bitcoin will probably fail with a hard low limit. Because if you are designing the network to have acceptable fee levels for 1k then it will also apply to smaller transactions. And those transactions and people will seek a new cryptocurrency. |
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You just took my argument and reversed it. This has absolutely no basis in reality.
As long as transaction space is abundant there is no transaction market period. Markets spawn from scarcity not abundance. Scarcity does not prevent the formation of a transaction market since you cannot hoard transactions, they are there to be used, but abundance does.
The worst that can happen if the hard limit is reached is that transactions become much more expensive, but it won't reach astronomical levels since bitcoin transactions stand in natural competition with other systems.
This is a good thing since it would make bitcoin transactions matter and then only then we can collect the necessary data to come up with the right solution.
Ah exactly as I thought. Someone who basically wants bitcoin to fail at normal day to day activities so that "natural competition" like litecoin... can succeed. The worst that can happen is not that bitcoin transactions become more expensive (that's actually guaranteed if you assume that bitcoin grows in popularity) . But of course what you're saying is that transactions might not get more expensive because the "natural competition" will start being cheaper to transact with than bitcoin so people will use that instead. If you do not increase the hard limit of 1MB you do more than just produce scarcity. You create a bottleneck and you force a large portion of people off the chain entirely to use "natural competition" . Like lite coin. Or Clearing houses . Which are centralized, unaccountable, and weak links. |
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It can be phased in, like:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.
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There will always be liquidity. Mainly 2 reasons: because the price is unpredictable, because they are highly divisible.
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I think that this might be a great way to move the soft limit, but I still think we need to have a (much higher) hard limit. Did the earlier posts not sink in? The soft limit is not a proper limit, it is merely a thin road block designed to function as an early warning system. There's no "moving the soft limit." See my earlier post about analyzing the block chain to see the effect of the soft limit on miner behavior. As far as you are concerned, you should pretend as if the soft limit doesn't exist. As for having a much higher hard limit, again did you not read the earlier posts? A 10 megabyte hard limit (which isn't even "much higher" in your terms) would raise the minimum bandwidth requirements to 17Mbps. Do you have any idea how many miners would be knocked off the network? In an earlier post you were just explaining the limitations of international bandwidth and also that solo miners would like to actually use their internet connections while they are mining. How can you then claim that we need a much higher hard limit, with its accompanying much higher minimum bandwidth requirements? Go back and re-read the chapter and then try answering the test questions again. Don't be a dick. I read your posts. I believe that I understood them, but apparently you didn't understand my arguments. The soft limit is a voluntary limit at present, but there are things that can be done to disincentive miners from attempting to break that limit when it suits them. Did you not understand what I was trying to communicate concerning adding a 'soft limit' propagation rule to the clients? Truly harmless to the network and the client, and only somewhat damaging to the miner, unless a significant enough of a minority of clients participate in this rule, and the miner with an overlarge block ends up with an orphaned block as a direct result. It doesn't have to work every time, just enough for the miners to notice. would that basically be like checks and balances? miners are checked from overly large blocks? |
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Miners will want to increase the block size eventually...false short supply of transaction space in a block might temporarily increase the fee paid per transaction...but a block chain that can't support many transactions won't be very useful...so people won't use it...whereas a high block limit would increase the total number of fee payers (and probably decrease the mega fees paid by a very small number of people).
Exactly. The problem with the current block limit is that increasing the price does not increase the supply once the limit is reached. So a proper market cannot develop. Increasing the block size increases the miners effective cost so the market can properly set a price in terms of transaction fees; however if the block size cannot be increased no matter how much in fees is offered then this market and consequently Bitcoin will fail. One only needs to take a look at the current rate of Bitcoin adoption to recognize than when this hits it will be quite sudden and there will not be the time to implement the change over an extended period of time as Gavin has suggested. +1 |
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10/04/2012 10043 N 1 0 0 0 - Swapper
12/29/2012 15639 Y 0 0 1 0 - Swapper
02/20/2013 100016727 N 0 1 0 0 - Swapper
They apparently changed their order number scheme? I hope so. If they did I'm guessing that's actually 16727 |
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Just thought it would be a funny idea... but if there was an email system that used bitcoin (small fees) for sending messages. You could make it so that if someone sent you a message and it cost them a small fee... you could somehow reply and return the fee to the sender. this would make it even cheaper (since no one will probably respond to spam but they might to a valid user)
I suppose it would work like this: There is some kind of bitcoin clearing house where you set up an account. You can input a bitcoin amount and it will allow you to send a message. When the message is sent the bitcoin fee is put somewhere in reserve. If the person you email replies... then the fee is returned to you. Otherwise it's used to finance the actual service itself. Whatever the fee amount would be something low but not so low that a spammer could afford to spam the network .
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So miners are the new banks. Fits exactly with my rant.  Think of it this way... with the current artificial restriction on block size there is a certain limit on the supply of transactions. If more users use bitcoin (we all hope this right? Hopefully? ) Then that is more people competing to make transactions on the same network that is bottlenecked by a restriction. What this means is that it will cost more and MORE and MORE to simply make a transaction. You talk of eliminating people from being able to use bitcoin? That is the surest way to do it. |
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I don't think any discussion of Bitcoin development should be based on assumptions that it's important to listen to those with 56.6kbps modems. Bitcoin should not be designed around the lowest common denominator of technology, just to dictate that "everyone can run it."
It should be usable by most people, but there's no reason to get hung up about fringe use cases like 56.6 modems.
56.6 is a fringe case? You people want Bitcoin to replace all world currencies. Do you even know what the world looks like? How over 20% of the world live on less than a dollar per day? How 15% of the world do not even have access to running water? And you want them to employ bitcoin? Funny enough, I totally understand Hazek. Ultra-Randian as he is, he only cares about bitcoin benefiting his own mores. And that's good and fine, at least he's honest about it. But if you follow that route, know you're only just rebuilding exactly the same system as we already have, only the faces have changed. And then bitcoin becomes not so much about freeing the people from the restraints current economic and political structures forces upon them. It is about becoming the new arbiter of constraints oneself. It's about abolishing "dictatorship" to become the new dictator instead. It's about Iznogoud becoming "Calife A La Place Du Calife". It's about people being butt-hurt they can't succeed in the current environment wanting to become the God-Emperor of Dune. He isn't talking about users of bitcoin. he is talking about MINERS. Already mining is somewhat exclusive. Think someone living on a dollar a day with a 56k modem is going to be able to afford an ASIC? What he is saying is that rather than trying to cater to 100% of people who can mine... it's better for the bitcoin network to have the grunt work(mining) done by users with decent internet connections. (which already prevail in the developed world). Otherwise the bitcoin network can't succeed because if it becomes more popular... then the network itself will be a bottleneck. |
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Because as Ben Franklin told a woman the Americans got a republic if they can keep it (turns out they couldn't) so too I'm here to tell you that you have an excellent money system on your hands, if you can keep it.
An excellent money system that can only handle 7 transactions per second. I think we are going to have to go with satoshi on this one. Satoshi - October 04, 2010, 07:48:40 PM -It can be phased in, like:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade. |
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Mike Hearn -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. "But with a hard-coded limit Bitcoin will fail to achieve popularity amongst ordinary people and will eventually be forgotten" . Just for the record... I spent money and ordered an ASIC last month because I wanted to be a miner for this very reason... I'll be supporting a raise on the limit because I don't want bitcoin to fail. Other people seem to want it to fail and I can only guess it's because........ well they are mining other alternative currencies at the moment. |
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From what I've read... the "intended design" of the blocksize not being raised isn't true. For those who want to keep it low......... they are probably mining litecoins as we speak because ultimately bitcoin will be relegated to very expensive transactions only (Like more than 20 dollars just for a transaction)or total failure . Bitcoin will become just a way to move huge amounts of money and that's it with the "hope" that bitcoin clearing houses(or the litecoins they are currently mining) step in and perform smaller transactions for us off the block chain. This is all argued because it will somehow prevent centralization. See how preposterous that is? Handicapping the bitcoin network and forcing people to use other methods for normal day to day transactions is going to "prevent centralization" . If by preventing centralization they mean preventing the use of bitcoin then sure. It's ridiculous. Thank god it's only a fringe minority of people that talk about it.
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the truth is that the "hoarders" are what gives bitcoin power. They raise the price of bitcoin itself and that allows bitcoin to enter new worlds. It allows it to do things that it couldn't before. If a bitcoin was 100 instead of 30 it could even go to further heights because it would now be a viable option for more types of transactions.
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