He thinks he can get to 100k TPS. What's the problem with doing 100k TPS on the main chain? (other than non-answers like "it's hard to do") |
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You could probably afford to lose the price of a cup of coffee. Bitcoin can not afford to have a billion people using a different currency/money substitutes to pay for their coffee. |
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Justusranvier says that it is 'econ 101' that mining reward will fall to zero (and I say it's likely to dip below semi-regularly.) I can't stop you from spreading misinformation, but I can point out when you're misquoting me. I said the profitability of mining will approach zero over time, just like the profitability of every productive enterprise in a free market approaches zero over time. |
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I think that the economic principle of operation you seem to be vehemently opposed to is inevitable in some form or another. There will be token money substitutes that really will be cryptographically "as good as bitcoin", in a way that paper money substitutes were never "as good as gold". Money substitutes will be created. They will not be as good as Bitcoin, unless they are a new currency we should switch to instead of Bitcoin. Bitcoin development can continue in a way that makes money substitutes less necessary and attractive (improved scalability to enable higher transaction rates, more economically robust P2P network model), or Bitcoin could intentionally cede the field to the money substitutes in the mistaken belief that it's possible for Bitcoin survive that way. |
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The blocksize debate gets muddled if we don't clearly differentiate between the blocksize limit and the actual average blocksize. When you mentioned "identify(ing) the problems which prevent price discovery from functioning and fix(ing) those," I assume you're talking about the price of actual P2P bandwidth/Blockchain space…in other words, things that affect the average blocksize rather than the limits on the blocksize that I was discussing. When it comes to the blocksize limits, it sounds like you're advocating for nothing at all: I do not think there should be protocol limit on the size of a block. I think that miners should pay the relay network to propagate their blocks and users should pay to receive them. If the cost of relaying a block was discovered in a competitive open market for relaying, then miners wouldn't be able to spam the system with huge blocks without incurring out-of-pocket costs. It would also mean that as the transaction volume goes up, so does revenue for relay nodes which they can use to pay their increased costs. Once the relay network was operating as a market instead of price-fixed-at-zero clusterfuck we wouldn't have to these continual pointless debates. Resource allocation would just work without needing to be constantly adjusted by central planners. |
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It might be a good idea to also mention that the probability that 0 blocks are found within the next 30 minutes is 4.978%. Then maybe people would stop complaining when we get the occasional over 30-minute block.
You can also express that percentage as "on average, once every 25.1 days we should see 30 minutes with zero blocks found." |
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One problem we face is it seems blockchains are inherently more expensive (bandwidth, latency, convergence time) at the limit that server clusters like Voting Pools for OpenTransactions and other related ideas. That might encourage people to not take up full bitcoin features if those systems turn out not to be able to match the features quite due to less decentralisation. Blockchains are inherently more expensive in terms of resource consumption than other solutions. On the other hand, they offer additional features which the less expensive options can't provide. We can't know what the optimal allocation between blockchain vs off-chain transactions - the only way to discover the optimal allocation is to allow blockchain transactions to find their true market price and compete fairly with off-chain transactions. That price can not be discovered as long as there's a production quota tilting the scale. sounds good to me. I think there is sort of assumed to be some price discovery via user preference and miner policy but as the blocks havent filled up so far we've never seen much supply shortage other than at 0 fees. The most important area where price discovery is lacking is bandwidth in the P2P network. Right now it's designed like every other P2P network along the principle of, "Let's give everything away for free, then craft a set of rules of ever-increasing complexity that force consumption patterns into the shape we desire". It would be a great sign of progress if we could all agree that's never been a viable long term solution to network design and that maybe it's time to consider "everybody pays for what they use" instead. |
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I think it was Gavin's argument that as long as the typical home internet connection in the developed world was sufficient for running a full node at the blocksize limit, then this was sufficient protection against centralization risk. I think it was this type of logic that he used to come up with the 20 MB limit + 50% / year growth proposal (which my gut tells me is too aggressive).
What are your thoughts? This is not a definition of "centralization risk" It's important to note that merely inventing a new phrase doesn't automatically mean that whatever it refers to actually exists. What is centralization risk? How do we know it exists? How to we measure it so that we can compared two proposed courses of action to predict how they will affect it? How will we know if our estimates were accurate or not after the fact? If you can't answer those questions and still propose to make decisions based on a concept you can't define or measure, then you're just guessing. If you can't tie the concept to something measurable in the real world you might as well be estimating the top speed of a galloping unicorn. Who could say if you're wrong or not? Gavin's "20 MB limit + 50% / year" guess about something that may or may not exist is as good as any other random number, and about as valuable. The best course of action is to avoid the central planner's fallacy, and stop pretending that it's possible for anyone to know the correct answer. Determining the allocation of economic output by having humans try to guess magic constants is known-flawed strategy. There is no way to achieve success using this method of problem solving. The problem solving technique that has been shown to work for allocating economic output is price discovery in a competitive open market. Instead of trying to guess unknowable magic numbers, identify the problems which prevent price discovery from functioning and fix those. |
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The debate then is one of finding the right balance between 'enough transactional bandwidth' on the Blockchain and 'too much centralization risk.' Do you happen to have a definition of "centralization risk" or a way to measure it? |
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Why don't you, cypherdoc, and whoever else be a sport and answer my theorem for a change:
"Bitcoin mining will always approach non-profitability due to unlimited supply." What is this, econ 101? Of course Bitcoin mining will always approach non-profitability - in a free market the production of all products and services always approaches non-profitability. That's what markets do. Absent some kind of forceful outside intervention, the price of all services in an economy approaches the cost of production plus a profit margin that tends toward zero over time. Why would you even bring this up like it's some kind of great revelation or a problem of any kind whatsoever? |
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Wrong again Bob. With sidechains, native Bitcoin is available to anyone who wants to pay what it's worth. That is the opposite of true. The price of native Bitcoin transactions will be artificially fixed above their free market price because there is a production quota. What you want is to model the ubiquitous welfare state structure that abound with plebs being subsidized by powerful institutions who leverage economies of scale to drop their own costs while milking the herd for different kinds of value streams. Again, what you're saying is the opposite of true. What I want is for transaction processing to be a competitive open market. That means let the market decide how many transactions to put on the blockchain instead of smugly asserting that most of humanity "doesn't need" that level of security and therefore will be forbidden from having it. There are problems with the P2P network lacking price discovery, and as a result use of the blockchain creates externalities. The correct response to that kind of problem, however, is not more central planning - it's more price discovery so that all costs are reflected in the price of using the network. |
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One of the interesting motivations for wanting the extensibility that sidechains provides is to be able to make that zero trust a reality for more bitcoin transaction types. That would be great, if it was possible. However any given sidechain will always require more trust than the main chain. I don't believe the white paper made the claim that sidechains will be zero trust, did it? The worst case scenario for sidechains is that they are used as an excuse to keep Bitcoin's transaction rate capped forever. Based on the composition of the Blockstream team, I feel pretty safe assuming this is a goal which they will actively pursue. In that scenario we do, in fact, end up replicating the legacy banking system. There will be a real Bitcoin which only a privileged elite can access, and the rest of humanity will be relegated to transacting in money substitutes. |
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Agreed. But you're also not completely off the hook. There are also economic implications from offchain and voting-pools version of offchain. People also have a right to ask about that similarly. There are actually economic implications. If OpenTransactions sucks a bunch of transactions off-chain that deprives bitcoin of transaction fees, and so it lowers bitcoin security. I am not saying this is a bad tradeoff, just point out that nothing is free of implications. Fair enough. It is true that if Open-Transactions could be use to transact in Bitcoin substitutes, and that would suck fee revenue away from Bitcoin. It is also true that outcome is 100% avoidable. The only reason OT would suck transaction fee revenue away from Bitcoin is if the Bitcoin blockchain is forbidden for processing those transaction. If Bitcoin won't process the transactions, they'll be processed somewhere else. It's up to the core developers and Bitcoin community at large whether or not OT ends up sucking fee revenue away from Bitcoin mining. I'm not a core developer, so I can't stop them from making changes to Bitcoin that would increase the blockchain's transaction processing capability. In fact, it would be extremely out of character for me to even argue against such a change given that I've spent three years arguing for more transactions to happen on chain, to the point of saying that's the only way Bitcoin can economically survive in the long term. It's also a perfectly viable future for OT to handle financial instrument contracts (BTC-denominated and otherwise) that aren't appropriate for the blockchain anyway while leaving all monetary transactions to the blockchain. It might even be the case that a high percentage of OT transactions end up causing a blockchain transaction anyway so that OT transaction volume helps drives Bitcoin transaction volume. But if real monetary transactions aren't allowed to happen on the Bitcoin blockchain, then Bitcoin substitutes will trade in OT. As far as the voting pool concept itself goes, I've always thought (and said many times) that people shouldn't leave their Bitcoins in the custody of a third party such as an exchange. However, since they're going to do it anyway no matter how many times I say that you don't own Bitcoins if you don't control the private key, and since I'm tired of seeing people lose money to incompetent and/or corrupt exchanges, I guess I have to fix the exchanges. |
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ps the correct response Is that you're still not off the hook. You've acknowledged that Blockstream is trying to change the protocol. You've acknowledged that other companies which are not trying to change the protocol aren't subject to the same levels of legitimate scrutiny as those which are. You haven't given a better answer than "trust us to to the right thing" for why Bitcoin users shouldn't be concerned about your plans for the protocol. Which basically means we're at the same point today we were this morning, and at the months leading up to today, and where I expect things will remain for the foreseeable future. |
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Nobody forced Blockstream into a position where your actions would draw greater scrutiny than other companies - that's a choice you made all on your own.
Asking why companies which did not choose to take the same route aren't subject to the same scrutiny is obfuscation.
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But I do find it pretty funny that you jump on me as trolling when I replay your own questions to you The trolling part is when you pretend that what we're doing is anything at all like what you're doing. We're building products which any future customers will need to trust are built correctly and everyone else can ignore. You're trying to change the Bitcoin protocol and are asking all present and future Bitcoin users to trust you. Your (and others) questions about our investors were far more pointy and detailed than I asked you also. You didnt name them. I actually don't know, except in extremely general terms. I've been designing products, not fundraising. You didnt say why we should trust you. You didnt give your backup plan for what'd happen if Monetas went evil. Again, I'm didn't answering that question since nobody has to trust Monetas, because we aren't putting ourselves in that position of asking for or requiring trust. |
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Blockstream and Monetas are essentially competitors, no?
Maybe, but it's too early to tell. I'm asking questions because I am concerned about the direction they are trying to take Bitcoin in. I asked the same questions with Bitcoin Foundation was announced, long before I ever heard of Monetas. |
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Nothing is known about the funding of that company. We dont know what your motives are. Monetas is funded by investors. Mostly from outside the US, so far completely without involving venture capitalists. It's been a lot harder than it should have been, because Monetas was apparently the only company not building a scamcoin for the VCs to pump and dump. The OT network voting trusts escrow everyones bitcoins so are a form of trust. Should we trust you. You dont have to answer.. just illustrating the sorts of questions you're asking so you can think about them and see the perspective on the receiving end. I've spent a considerable amount of time documenting what we are building, exactly what kind of trust model is involved, and have been consciously meticulous about making realistic claims about the security guarantees. The fact that you're trolling me like this just means you haven't bothered to read any of it. Anyway Daniel Krawisz view I'm willing to bet that I see Daniel in person far more frequently, and am more involved with the brainstorming leading up to his articles, that you are. You know not to troll you, but Justus you also work for a for profit company - Monetas/Open Transactions - right? Nothing is known about the funding of that company. We dont know what your motives are. The OT network voting trusts escrow everyones bitcoins so are a form of trust. Should we trust you. You dont have to answer.. just illustrating the sorts of questions you're asking so you can think about them and see the perspective on the receiving end.
Let me save you some time "We're not asking to change the sourcecode to the "disadvantage" of competitors ; We don't have core developers on board" Mark Friendenbach has first hand experience of trying to work for a year on bitcoin donations, that didnt work out very well. It would have worked out better for him if it would have ever answered an email every once in a while. |
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Like, how about every 4 years when the reword is halved, run a script that compresses all Bitcoin transactions down to just the addresses that actually have money The problem with your plan is that addresses don't exist on the blockchain, much less have a balance. |
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Sidechains are not a proprietary technology. Everything is FOSS, open IP. And we invested a fair bit of mental energy and legal review already into making sure it stays that way, even if blockstream management were someone replaced or blackmailed; to imagine yourself or a company a perpetual lifetime role is naive, and we've seen it before eg digicash patents got sold by the investors when they went bankrupt to some company that sat on them, preventing people who wanted to innovate using ecash. We're all anti-patent and want to avoid that kind of crap creeping into bitcoin. I have some first hand knowledge that some companies are patenting things related to bitcoin, and probably much more I dont know about. I suppose someone could search patent db though filing is a long slow process. At ZKS where I was working on our ToR-precursor and ecash, back in 1999-2001, Austin tried to buy digicash patent and making it available in the public domain, we failed to buy it sadly. John Gilmore was our advisor and he'd helped cook up an open patent license GNU like scheme.
Its not our softfork - its a softfork to enable a generic extension mechanism. We have no monopoly (and wouldnt want one) on use of the op code. Our only defence is meritocracy - if we build better, more secure sidechains and people prefer to use them. We wont be getting the fees off the sidechain either because those go to miners. If we have the technical edge and people use our stuff that seems sort of fair enough to me.
Personally I guarantee I trust each and everyone of our team more than J Random web2.0 startup CEO. What do those guys want? To make a profit. Would they stop at sabotaging bitcoin to get there? I doubt it. Some of the bitcoin web2.0 startup guys are cool and bitcoin enthused. But they're getting patents some of them, and not all of them will survive. Crappy things the less cool startup CEOs might try eg the red-ilist or other things so sucky I wouldnt even describe them for fear it'd give people ideas that they lack the technical competence to design.
I do get where you're coming from, in the past I was the guy holding people to account eg PGP incorporated when they were busy trying to include key escrow into PGP ostensibly for corporate data access. (I imagine people selling stingrays tell themselves something also). Partly due to my efforts that was never included in the open-pgp IETF spec.
Sidechains are just a mechanism to extend bitcoin. The interesting thing is the extension not the chain. If a better way to do it materialises great. If some sidechain innovations are so cool and well validated from $1b resting on them for a year that it allows bitcoin core to merge them fantastic. Actually Pieter Wuille views that as the best way to view the utility of sidechains, to enable longer and live validation of things that could then go into bitcoin where that'd be difficult to impossible to gain that confidence on directly.
There can also however be one-size fits-all limits. Some extensions are mutually incompatible, or too risky though interesting (eg snark contracts, zerocash) unless a way to contain the risk in chain is found. Also you can get some new scaling possibilities by having chains with different blocksizes. Its more decentralised and safer to have a small bitcoin main block and a medium sized sidechain block, than introduce a large main bitcoin block as there is an escape route and choice. You can within limits get your cake and eat it. What I see in this answer is statements that safeguards have been established, without any description of what they are or why we should assume they'll be effective. I also see a lot of appeal to past performance which amount to, "trust us." Despite being more verbose, in substance it's identical to the reply I got from Peter Vessenes when I asked him the same question two years ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113400.msg1227012#msg1227012 |
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