To at least some extent I suspect that getting to the point where all the coins are mined faster is better.

Once all the coins are mined there will no longer be all those miners dumping new coins on the markets all the time, their income will be presumably somewhat proportional to the amount that the system is actually being used. There are plenty of younger chains that will still be bringing them freshly minted coins, and we already have seen, and are about to see again, extended periods when the average time between blocks was less than ten minutes due to rapid increases in hashing power.

In fact as ASICs come online we might see enough more blocks per day that we will already anyway be making more space for transactions by pumping out blocks faster.

-MarkM-

You would store value in the primary chain, whenever you feel the fees involved in dealing with the primary chain make it worth your while. It is similar to deciding whether to hoard gold bars, expensive to trade, or local currency, easy to trade.

Here in Canada one-cent coins are being dropped, any value I stored in pennies is trying to go away.

Moral of the story presumably is go buy whole bitcoins when you have accumulated the vast amount of wealth one entire bitcoin amounts to, and don't buy too many of the tiniest-value chain's coin, just enough to go buy a few days' popsicles or whatever.

People's penny-collections are going out of date, its a gamble whether the raw metal they are made of makes them worth continuing to hoard or one should go buy loonies with them.

Its not an insurmountable problem else farthings and halfpennies would not have gone out of style presumably.

Heck you could even build chains that have fixed exchange rates built into their atomic between-chain transactions protocol if you are really worried about it. For most people most of the time it would probably suffice to denominate their life-savings account in bitcoin and let their day to day pocketmoney account just use whatever Ripple determines is the most efficient way to buy lunch on a given day.

-MarkM-

Is there a massive difference ultimately between doubling the size of blocks and doubling the number of blocks per period of time that makes doubling the size of blocks much better than doubling the frequency of blocks?

Maybe we would be better off decreasing the target time between blocks than increasing the size of the blocks?

-MarkM-

Well for starters we could say the decimals in the coins are not there to allow less than one whole coin transactions, just to allow a lot of granularity in the exact size of one whole coin or greater transactions.

Then for each chain you'd basically do things worth less than one whole coin of that chain on a lower-value chain.


Bitcoin provides the world's most difficult proof-of-work. That hashing-power secures ALL the merged-mined coins, not just the "primary" chain, using the same hashing-power. Basically once you are already mining bitcoin anyway, mining any or all of the secondary chains requires no additional hashing-power (or maybe if you mine lots and lots and lots of them might make some slight dent in your mining efficiency).

Basically it allows the existing hashing power to secure more stuff, with each chain of more stuff being separately optional to the miners, so miners too small to handle 150 chains could opt to only mine 75 of them, those that cannot handle that many handle less, the tiniest miners maybe even mining only the primary chain or even only one of the secondary chains.

-MarkM-

I do think it is kind of black-and-white.

Basically until fees get so insane that the vast majority of stakeholders insist "something must be done" it is probably not time to change the max block size.

Either the fees people have to pay to get reasonable-value transactions into the blockchain are too high, resulting in effective transaction fees people actually have to pay to get a transaction into a block within about six blocks or so skyrocket or they are not.

It is a pity that generally the lower the value of a transaction the faster the person doing it, or person receiving it, tends to want it to be confirmed, but on the other hand the smaller the value of a transaction the less likely it is that the merchant who gets hit with the occassional chargeback by handing out product without waiting overnight for transactions to clear will be bankrupted by not getting "instant" irreversibility.

As long as paying a few cents suffices to get you into a block within an hour or so there probably is no big need to increase block size.

Heck right now people are still able to get free transactions into blocks, until that is no longer possible there seems time yet. Should free transactions ever get in, really? Even after many days? Or would a free transaction getting in within a week or so indicate there is still not full paid utilisation of the already available space?

-MarkM-

Think merged-mining. Don't think of it as alternate currencies, just alternate chains. They are not competing with bitcoin, they are more chains that are all part of the same family, bitcoin providing high value high security international settlements and the basic security shared by all the merged chains, other chains providing space for smaller value transactions, whatever stuff the primary chain becomes too expensive to be economical to do. The same miners mining all the chains or however many of them they choose to.

It is not competition, it is co-operation.

Floating the blocksize would maybe lead to more centralisation in chains too, detracting from miners' motivation to merge more chains, instead leading to them ignoring more of the merged chains than they otherwise would do when the primary chain starts to be full-to-overflowing with high-fee transactions.

-MarkM-

Miners can game the system too simply, such as by lots of them all deciding to only accept transactions with a high fee then spamming high fee transactions in concert ("I will put a high fee transaction if you will, between us we have huge chance one of us will get all those fees").

If it were not for that I would think judging by the fee required per kilobyte to get into a block would be a useful metric, since by relating that to the smallest transaction the primary chain "should" be used for (secondary chains existing for lower value transactions) and the percent the fee "should" be on that smallest value transaction in order to borderline discourage it one could tune the size to achieve the kind of scale of minimum value and percent fee on that minimum value.

So I do not think floating the size is a good idea.

Maybe Satoshidice could serve as an estimation tool, we could watch to see how much fee people making tiny (low-value) wagers turn out to be willing to pay to play, maybe it will turn out that they tend toward making fewer, more value per wager bets when blocks are full enough that Satoshidice has to increase the fees it is paying? If so the "problem" might be self-correcting for a while, and meanwhile many miners are already stocking up on secondary-chain coins as a currently not immediately-profitable but forward-looking natural consequence of merged mining so small-value gamblers and thus maybe small value transactions already have alternatives to continuing to clog up the primary chain with "trivial value" transactions.

-MarkM-

The ability to frivolously use the primary chain being "severely handicapped" need not be a "bad thing", it could actually be a "good thing". Blockchains are not ideal anyway as payment networks, so trying to compete in the payment network space is probably doomed to failure from the start. Storing value securely and moving significant value securely should not be sacrificed for the ability to tell the whole world about every penny-ante gambler's every wager and every child's purchase of a popsicle.

Let the transaction fees on the primary chain go up to whatever the market pushes them to, lower value transactions can use the first secondary chain for its presumably lower transaction fees (possibly also with lower security if less miners bother to merge that chain), people wanting to transact for free can migrate to the least of the secondary chains as long as there remain enough chains in the family for one or more of them to still offer space for free transactions.

Throw in Ripple to make exchanges between the chains transparent, or clients that do atomic cross-chain exchanges, to hide the underlying many-chains "complexity" from users who prefer not to think about the nitty gritty technical details of how money is implemented. Add more chains as needed.

-MarkM-

If there is still space in blocks reserved for free transactions will that go away first before bothering to actually increase the block size?

At how much fee per kilobyte will a megabyte per block cease to be "enough" to accommodate all transactions willing to pay that fee?

-MarkM-

Bitcoin is just the primary chain in a whole family of merged-mine-able blockchains; it provides, primarily, the world's most difficult proof of work.

Anything other than providing the world's most difficult proof of work can be delegated out to one or more of the secondary chains, most of which currently seem to in any case be mostly "backed" by bitcoins thus not only have a vested interest in keeping the world's most difficult proof of work difficult but also in keeping the coins/tokens of value of that primary chain, which provide most of the funding for the massive proof of work, valuable.

More transactions per day, faster transactions, anything other than sheer proof of work power and sheer (store-able?) value (or, at least, some means of funding that difficult work) are secondary thus can reasonably be delegated to secondary chains, surely?

-MarkM-

There are many meanings attirbuted to the term information. Consider ones where the value of information is the difference that information makes to the probability of an event.

For example the probability of a shop shipping me a pair of alpaca socks without that information as compared to the probability of their shipping me such socks given that information...

The fact that the whole world knows the information (account X send Y bitcoins to account Z) actually enhances its value, doesn't it?

Would the shop be as likely to ship me the socks if only they and I possesed that information, the rest of the world not knowing it?

-MarkM-

Altcoins draw in people who consider being able to mine the main reason to get involved, they might just go away in a huff due to not being able to mine if there were not various alts around whose difficulty is still really low. A lot of them then sell the alts they mine for bitcoins, thus the alts serve as gateway drugs to get them addicted to cryptocurrencies then they graduate to the hard staff aka difficult stuff...

-MarkM-

You can solve the not enough bids problem by involving your supplier or sockpuppet or helpful reliable bidding corp etc in the bidding.

Basically have a supply company that supplies the items and that also bids on them, basically buying back from the auction site anything that would otherwise be sold at a loss, and passing the savings back to the auction site company. (Having distinct companies to play the roles is mostly just a cosmetic thing to avoid the auction site itself directly messing with the auctions.)

For example if bids cost a dime each and you are auctioning something that cost a dollar you need ten bids just to break even from the bid tickets, leaving the actual amount bid as gravy. So just have helpful associates such as that supply company idea or whatever always make a bid in response to any third party bid until at least ten third party bids have been made.

Probably such approaches should be worked out carefully with legal counsel though as in some places auctioneers are not allowed to bid in their own auctions, and if that is the case the details of how long an arm you need for your reliable helpful bidder to be "at arms length" in your jurisdiction could vary from place to place and so on.

Certainly it is what I would expect any sleazy / unlicensed / scammy penny-auction place to do, the lower their traffic the more necessary it'd seem to do some such thing, and reading business/financial news does not lead me to expect businesses in general not to do such things if their lawyers let them.

-MarkM-

Yeah the plan was to make new ones based on more-recent bitcoin code, just didn't get to that yet. Once 0.8 is stable, maybe.

-MarkM-

Technically I think it is out of date by one github patch, someone submitted a pull request on github to turn off the compiling in of the mini plug and play library because the version of plug and play this old code uses is much older than the one more-recent bitcoin-derived code uses so most people if they have the plug and play lib installed at all probably have the newer version that uses a different syntax (different number of arguments in a function call).

I don't think I bothered to make a new package for sourceforge for just that tiny change, since in any case anyone not wanting to compile in the lib would just put USE_UPNP= on the make invocation line instead of USE_UPNP=0 or USE_UPNP=1

Basically the change was to make it default to empty string instead of the 0 or 1 it used to default to.

The github repos are

https://github.com/knotwork/old-devcoind

and

https://github.com/knotwork/old-devcoin-qt

-MarkM-

Just thought it might be worthwhile to remind folks that this coin is still chugging along, and can still be merged-mined alongside bitcoins, namecoins, devcoins, ixcoins, i0coins and coiledcoins. It seems a few more merged-miners have picked up on that fact recently but so far its difficulty is still well within the reach of small at-home GPU-miners...

Also with the advent of the new Ripple, Open Transactions is no longer the only "exchange" available for it...

-MarkM-

The current Ripple is maybe better referred to as a B2B network than a P2P network, since really it is not intended that ordinary people will run an actual node (server).

-MarkM-

With so little hashing-power bitcoins, namecoins and devcoins would be lotteries, over the months you will from time to time find a block but if you set up p2pool for bitcoins you will get tiny fractions of a bitcoin regularly, and p2pool supports merged-mining so alongside the bitcoins you can merged-mine namecoins, devcoins, ixcoins, i0coins, groupcoins and coiledcoins. YOu might find a namecoin block every several months or maybe one a year or couple some years or something, from time to time you will happen across a devcoin block, ixcoin blocks you will find more often, but i0coins, groupcoins and coiledcoin you will keep raking in all the time. Currently coiledcoins a little slower than groupcoins and i0coins but I suspect that is because coiledcoin got stuck at a high difficulty when many miners abandoned it and it has been taking a long time for its difficulty to drop down to match the current low amount of miners that are working on it.

Basically 200 MHash is tiny so you need the coins like groupcoins, i0coins and coiledcoins that the "big boys" consider to be beneath their notice, but p2pool can let you get a trickle of fractions of a bitcoin while you do that.

It would maybe be nice for p2pool to be patched so that it can use devcoins as primary chain, so people could use it to get a steady trickle of devcoins while merged mining other chains instead of devcoins having to be one of the merged chains, since variance is massive on merged chains that are difficult as compared to your hashrate. (You get a whole block every once in a possibly long while instead of a steady trickle of fractions of block-reward all the time.)

-MarkM-

Yes but if the government cannot trust someone to co-operate in curbing terrorism how comfortable will someone be in trusting that same someone with their money? I guess if you are part of the same bunch of terrorists, maybe, but what if your gang splits up on some ideological grounds leaving some of the "branches" or "gateways" that were part of your gang suddenly in effect a rival gang wanting to seize your money because you don't agree with their variation of your previously common ideology?

A lot of folks just won't trust terrorists, and thats okay, a lot of terrorists probably don't trust them either.

(Lets bear in mind too that some gangs some refer to or treat as governments, or are governed by, might well be terrorists, in at least some folks' eyes.)

-MarkM-

Selling the initial coins is a form of proof of work requirement, since in general on the whole money of whatever kind tends to be regarded as a kind of proof of someone somewhere once having either worked or gotten lucky (inherited someon else's work, discovered a pile of gold in the ground or whatever).

I am not suggesting using bitcoin's proof of work type of approach. How to distribute coins in a way that causes each and every actual person or entity to have only a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the total is an interesting problem that seemingly has not yet been solved, at least by private entities. Maybe governments could do it by issuing it to everyone on their citizenship records but even then presumably all the alternate identities that spy movies show them issuing to their secret agents and such would cause at least some "unfairness"...

-MarkM-