Wait, what?

Core is simultaneously accused that they want "higher fees" or "fee competition" and now accused for "wanting to massively reduce fees with lightning".

Please decide what core wants.

Good stuff, thanks.

Aha ok, that's better. I quickly read through it so I thought it had a more immediate effect. In any case, having the data before voting would actually be the best, otherwise the yes is a no-brainer. Everyone wants more tx capacity. The only issue is what problems start appearing due to the tradeoffs involved, usually near max-load circumstances or attack-vector deployments.

From what I understand, the quadratic explosion that occurs from 1mb to 2mb cannot be solved with fees. It will either need to limit the max transactions or the size of a transaction - to say 1mb.

Aside from that, do we have any maths on how x11 and 2mb blocks propagate and how that can affect mining and network operation?

I don't feel that people voting yes or no in such technical issues is appropriate.

I mean, yes, we all want bigger blocks, heck, why not 100mb? I mean duuuh? But there are tradeoffs involved and we have to see what they are.

If possible, I'd like to know these things:

1) With the proposed fee structure, how much would it cost me -as an attacker- to add 1gb of bloat to our blockchain? I want to know if its doable for one of our competitor coins to "sponsor" an attack and make our wallet unusable because noone will want to download a 500gb wallet and say "fuck dash, it's taking ages". This is not a theoretical attack, Monero had been on the receiving end of a bloat attack in the past - presumably by Bytecoin (?).

2) What's the propagation and verification speed data regarding 2mb blocks combined with 2.5m intervals - which, sometimes can get down to a few seconds and will it create problems in case of 2mb blocks? Is there any testnet simulation run or something with full blocks, or specially crafted attack blocks to see what will happen at full load?

3) Is there any reason in particular why we would like this change to occur now, instead of the future when we need >28tx/s? The only thing I can think of is ...marketing, in the sense of "hey bitcoin, look over here, we are doing it democratically" - and hitting the news with it, but, again, I'm not comfortable about the decision process when people don't have all the tradeoff data. Actually I don't feel good at all when it's left to anyone's decision process with a simple yes and no


Happy birthday people, the future is bright

+


The division and fees you mention imply 1mb limit forevah, or same tx/s capacity forevah, but this is not anyone's plan as far as I know. So, naturally, fees will be much lower. And if we get a technological breakthrough that allows much better scaling, they will probably drop like a stone.

No incentives. Yet if you look at an altcoin (dash), its masternode network has around 4000 nodes due to getting part of the block subsidy.


If the data and network requirements keep exploding, and network/storage/cpu capabilities are at the same progression rate, costs will be similar or higher.

Now, if there is a breakthrough in technology or in BTC scaling efficiency, that would be another issue altogether.


Personally I expect that subsidy reduction will mostly be covered by price increase in BTC.

Mining 50 BTC that cost 10$ gets you 500$.
Mining 25 BTC that cost 500$ gets you 10.000$ (do you mind that you are now getting 12.500 vs 500 per block? No. I thought so)
Mining 12.5 BTC that cost 6.000$, gets you 75.000$

...the only question will be what it costs for the miner (in terms of capex + opex) to get the block reward, due to diff increases and mining competition which will, in turn, eat the theoretical profit of a higher btc price.

As far as fees are concerned, we'll see how it goes. We are somewhat far from the point of replacing the subsidy and by that time a lot will have changed, both in blocksize and scaling solutions.

The point was that you simply pay the fee and skip the flood attack. Obviously if the flooders are paying fees to get accepted in the mempool due to the current or future antispam limit (as low or high it may be), you have to pay more than them to get ahead.

Everyone can have a p2p client that deals with 10kb/sec, has 100 mb storage requirements, needs 1 small cpu and 256mb ram. As you go up and up in hw requirements, cost goes up, "volunteers" go down - even if userbase goes up. As you hit datacenter level requirements the number of "volunteers" starts dropping significantly because costs start running in the 5 digit, then 6 digit category and eventually you'll be paying millions.

I don't think he meant what you think he meant. Otherwise bitcoin would have no issue right now with, say, 20mb or 100mb blocks. But it does. They won't work in real life. Unless of course you put Bitcoin in 5-10 data centers and then, yes, it'd work. Until the gov comes down and raids the data centers. That would be "awesome"...


Say we don't have fees.

What's stopping me from instering 500 Terabytes of spam for the lolz into the blockchain. Would everyone have to pay the cost of my spamming?

This could be a nice meme though... split screen shows a guy with a happy face and has a caption like "Doesn't complain for paying XXX in bank fees per month", the other side shows him using btc and yelling at the screen with a caption like "Gets furious at 'smallblockers' due to paying 0.16$ fee for a BTC tx".

Something like that...

The hypocrisy, some times, is mind-blowing. And I'm not talking about specific users, you, or someone else - I mean generally.

There is no flaw in the argument. As a consumer you want to pay the least possible money, and that is zero. A cash tx is zero. My post office, for example, says for credit card you'll be charged +0.35 euro. So cash it is then. Why pay extra 0.35? Fuck them.

But even if we are talking non-zero you always want to pay the least possible. So why is it such a problem if paypal, banks, cc's ask you a ton of money and miners ask you a fraction of it for processing your tx? They are still the cheapest option available and doing it while dealing with the inefficiency of a p2p system. Why are you proclaiming that the system violates user demands etc etc? It doesn't make any sense for me. I mean, if we can live with banks, ccs, paypals etc and bitcoin has a fractional cost of them, why are we so hypocritical and vent against bitcoin fees - when everyone else is sucking us dry?


Why would I take on the cost of maintaining a large data center when others can do it? Does it make economic sense for me?

In any case, if Bitcoin reaches the point where it will be hosted in 30-50-100 data centers worldwide, a few co-ordinated government raids and a DDOS on the rest, will shut it down. If we want such a vulnerable system that can be shut down like the piratebays etc, then we are idiots - we have no clue what the system was in the first place and how it should be operated. Some think centralization and decentralization as totally abstract concepts, but they are not. They have very real life consequences in how BTC can be shut down. If the average guy can host a node in his bedroom with his vdsl or fiber (adsl will probably be obsolete due to problematic upstream), that's helping A LOT because shutting down multiple thousand nodes is more difficult, although it is doable with other methods like filtering the traffic by controlling the ISPs and global backbones. But that's a card that they will burn only if they need to.


Nobody says it has to be stagnant - on the contrary. The system has to expand to meet capacity demands, but you have to be realistic on what demands you will serve due to technological constraints. The desire to have everything right now is normal, but to be realistic some time must pass in terms of technological progression - or software hacks.

If you click the link, you'll see the discussion was from a question of a member about what does the 0.01 btc fee solve in terms of antispamming and how this would prevent microtransactions etc, and satoshi explains that it is intentionally limiting them.

=>


In any case, I wouldn't take it as a fixed value. I mean if BTC goes to 10.000 dollars, 0.01 BTC is meaningless as a limit (it's 100$).


See? It works as Satoshi said

It's not the micropayment word that I put the quotes up. And they are not random.

Poster above wrote:

"I do not understand how "smallblockers" or elitist..."

"There are no all knowing wise guys, who tell the peasants what is good for them (and that his tx is "spam". Such arrogant elitism!)..."

Satoshi wrote:

"The dust spam limit is a first try at intentionally trying to prevent overly small micropayments like that."
"If we started getting DoS attacked with loads of wasted transactions back and forth"

...people have problem when I say "dust", "spam", "waste" and they are like "who are you to determine what is spam, dust and waste". Some others say "arrogance, elitism" etc. Yet satoshi was using similar words in dealing with the real life problem of network abuse. Why would he intentionally prevent small transactions if he thought they weren't a problem - at least for now?

As for your argument regarding fees and block size, I've said multiple times that I wouldn't object much larger blocks if there were much higher fees involved. In absence of serious antispam fees, the block size is the last line of defense. Additionally, oversupply of space will not give much motivation for those transacting to pay fees. So block size and fees paid by a spammer are related (again, in absence of serious anti-spam fees).

On the other hand, this could be "solved" if miners went on a "strike" and didn't process transactions if they were paid some serious tx fees - which would lead to a user revolt or some kind of "intervention" by devs who would then try to "force" the mining of transactions. At least for the next 4 or 8 years when block subsidy will probably be much bigger than the fee market.

You use the banks, paypal, credit cards etc, don't you?

As a user you want ZERO fees.

They don't give it to you. They charge you. Some times a lot.

Are these organizations dying from not meeting user demands? Did their network effect got negatively affected and thus never became widespread? If no, why?

The reason is because there was no alternative. So, your economic idealism about market demands by users etc etc hits the wall of economic realities.

Bitcoin is the first thing that comes close to challenging them on multiple fronts. Yet, it too, has some limitations due to technology. These may not be true in 5-10-20 years, but right now they are. So... with this as a given, you can still position bitcoin in the market segment where it is way more profitable to transact with it than the banks, paypal, credit cards etc.

For example paypal says if you receive money, I take 0.35$ and something between 1.5 and 3.5% in fees - or something to that effect. So if I lose 4$ in a 100$ payment, of course it would be better for me to choose BTC for that 100$ payment and keep like 3.5$.

The prices, fees and disadvantages of my competitors (reversible txs, having my own money or "freezing them") etc etc are what ensure that I go upwards in the free market that you mention because I'm better than them.

I do the transaction faster, cheaper and in a non-reversible manner (after 1conf). It's not whether I allow spam/dust txs or not. If your fees are like <0.5$, then you are already beating most banks, credit cards and online payment systems - which automatically means that you have the competitive advantage and you'll increase your marketshare. As you do that, you increase your tx capacity to accommodate, but not giving away space for free to abuse because that acts in a self-defeating way for the functionality of the network. P2P networks are inefficient. Hierarchical databases / centralized databases are orders of magnitude more efficient. So when you try to scale P2P networks the inefficiency kind of multiplies and you need to be careful, in the technical sense.

As for waste, spam, elitism etc, just read the quotes of satoshi in my post above. Was he an elitist or a realist - in terms of how the network operates?

Satoshi said the system was not suitable for micropayments. He said it would probably not be suitable for <0.01 txs. He considered spam a problem and he said he is taking intentional measures to restrict very small transactions.

The value of the network will not increase if the blockchain is 100 terabytes full of junk, requiring gbps to move around junk. But it will increase if it is efficient in its hardware and network resources even if that means restricting dust - as it was intended to. Not by me, not by "blockstream", but by satoshi himself.

Adam back disagrees / is very close in position with what Satoshi (or "Satoshi") wrote:

In that sense, yes. But that doesn't mean just because you are a mining majority that you are the "right" coin. For example if hackers get control of two mining pools with 60% mining power and start mining blocks with million new coins out of thin air, people, exchanges, miners etc, can select the old chain - and for all intents and purposes it will be considered the legitimate chain and not the "altcoin".

If you don't like how bitcoin is you create an altcoin. There is no dictatorship involved. You can change from a single parameter to every parameter.

If you want to change bitcoin itself there is the strong possibility that other developers might disagree if you propose something that is not optimal. Since you can't have multiple implementations for every single point of disagreement (multiple forks/currencies as a result / corrosive to trust in the currency) it is logical to first find a consensus. Is that a "dictatorship"?

You are stating assumptions as facts and assumption is the mother of all fuckups. You do not know whether it is fake or real and therefore ignore serious risks involved.


That's more about the technicalities of a normal fork-split situation rather than a social-engineered takeover attempt.


You can summarize it as follows: I believe the future of bitcoin is in better hands with the core devs. They've done a good job over the years and the alternative is not attractive.

There is nothing that makes me believe that "classic" is better in any way than core.

Classic lacks manpower and proven ability to maintain and evolve bitcoin, plus their motives and strategies are suspect because they are not based on technically sound arguments. Additionally they are not presenting any scaling solution (unlike the core people), rather they are just tampering a constant with known restrictions and compromises which gets us nowhere in the long run. Plus they are ruthless in the way they are trying their power grab, even by destroying confidence and creating two separate currencies - which, as a precedent, is dangerous for any future point of disagreement. It's a power grab, camouflaged as a block size upgrade under a false pretext of urgency.

I don't like any of this shit and I don't trust them at all.

The vote in "No" is a superset of "this post is faked". If one believes it's fake, then why would they take the warning seriously?