If you read the post, then you understand that these outputs can never be realistically spent, since they would cost more in fees than the amount received.
That's only true today. Maybe in the future a bitcoin becomes divisible to 16 places. Either way, who cares? Again, you do not understand that these transactions cannot be pruned. They must exist until the end of time, and yet the outputs cannot be spent. So what? If disk space is a problem for you, don't run a full node. I have 10x the current size of the Bitcoin blockchain available on one thumb drive I got for $30. And guess what, it turns out that storage gets cheaper over time. Crazy huh? No, I'm saying that we don't need fees to go up sooner than necessary just because of one bad actor on the network. We should be thankful for this "bad actor". He is helping to understand how to deal with a larger issue by working within the system as it currently exists at a stage that is early enough to correct the problem.
Every time SatoshIDICE sends a losing bet transaction, every current node and every new node must keep a copy of the transaction until the end of time.
Yup, that's how Bitcoin works. So what? SD paid a transaction fee to do that. |
|
|
|
banning *anything* will be the end of bitcoin When did I ever suggest we "ban" anything? You're thinking about someone else's thread and patch. I never said ban. You're right that developers need to address the issue. But for now the best us non-developers can do is try to raise awareness and use social pressure to encourage the actors on the network to act in it's best interests (although I concede that might be a long shot). The developers will address the issue and as we both know are already well aware of it. Your "raising awareness" is just your attempt to create FUD. Asking the actors to act in the network's best interest is the wrong approach. In the short term, a better solution would be for pool operators to detect this "abuse" and voluntarily decide to not include these types of transactions (matching this pattern) into their blocks rather than just "banning" certain addresses. Its economically unfeasible to spend a Satoshi today (and that affects pruning) because a Satoshi is less than the current standard transaction fee. No shit. That doesn't mean that it always will be. Guess what happens if the block size is never raised? It becomes economically unfeasible to spend a mBit or uBit because the transaction fee rises (in BTC) and a BTC's value drops (in USD or whatever). That makes this exact problem worse. Your motivations become more transparent by the day. |
|
|
|
You may have heard me say "Bitcoin is an experiment" before... well, we're finding out right now what happens as the experiment scales up. First: I sent a message to the big mining pools, reminding them of the run-time options they can set to control the size of the blocks they create. I did not tell them what they should or shouldn't do, I think we need to move beyond centralized decision-making. I did send them a pointer to this very rough back-of-the-envelope estimate on the current marginal cost of transactions: https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/5044482(if anybody wants to do a better analysis, I'd love to read it). Second: block size is half of the equation. The other half is transaction fees and competition for getting included into blocks. All of the bitcoin clients need to do a better job of figuring out the 'right' transaction fee, and services that generate transactions will have to adjust the fees they pay (and are, already). Finally: in my opinion, there is rough consensus that the 1MB block size limit WILL be raised. It is just a question of when and how much / how quickly. Thank you Gavin, this is exactly what people need to hear. |
|
|
|
This is so fucking naive. I'm not sure if that's true. In some cases I'm more inclined to believe malice to be more likely than ignorance. Some people don't want Bitcoin to be successful. I agree, I don't give a shit about anyone else's alt chains, bonded banking startup, or ripple investments. I love Bitcoin. Fuck anyone who doesn't. |
|
|
|
At step 13, transactions (and the fees they would have paid to miners) are fleeing bitcoin in droves. I'm not saying that Bitcoin will shrink, I'm saying that it will reach an equilibrium where there is no more growth in terms of new users operating directly on the block chain. Instead, there will be an industry of companies that do things off the block chain and settle up once a day or every few hours. Of course miners would love that, since the fees will be maximized. And anyone using Bitcoin as a store of value will be happy with it as well, since the network hash rate will be maximized. This is so fucking naive. 1) The network hashrate will not be maximized in a global context. Restricted number of transactions equals a supply ceiling. A supply ceiling prevents the supply / demand curve from being maximized. A non maximized curve means that total transaction revenue per block will ultimately be lower. This is also ignoring that BTC to local currency rates will be lower, further reducing economic incentive to invest in mining resources 2) Bitcoin will be less valuable as a store of value. Less total transaction revenue per block, fewer users, less overall commerce done using bitcoins, smaller economy represented in bitcoins, BTC to [your currency here] rate is lower, fewer mining resources, LOWER TOTAL HASH RATE. Lower total hash rate equals a less secure store of value Now pay attention to this last one 3) A declining BTC to other currency price means a terrible long term store of value. Declining types of potential use cases (resulting from more expensive INDIVIDUAL transactions), means smaller total economy represented in bitcoins, which then means a stagnant or declining BTC price. A bitcoin never grows into the $1000s without Bitcoin representing a significant portion of the global economy. A transaction limit never allows Bitcoin to do that. |
|
|
|
heh...well, remember that the negative consequences for leaving the block size alone are far less severe than if we implement a faulty system for making it adjustable. Because if we do nothing, we can always change it later. The worst that happens is we have a period of time where transaction fees are higher than normal and take longer to confirm. Certainly not the end of the world by any stretch.
Compare this with adjusting the block size and then discovering that well, yeah it seems retep was right about losing some decentralization due to bandwidth.
That's totally wrong, the negative consequences for leaving that block size alone are that Bitcoin fails to adequately scale, fees for accepting bitcoins grow prohibitably large (larger than other payment methods because Bitcoin usage becomes dominated by fee insensitive transfers like gambling), merchants stop accepting bitcoins, and it ultimately fails and is replaced. You act like a switch can just be flipped in the future, it may end up being too late. |
|
|
|
Do people trading Gold need more than 7 tx's per second?
(i.e. do you think Bitcoin would really *die* if that was the limit?)
1) For all the gold in the world, traded amongst all the people in the world? Yes 2) It will die because it will be replaced by something without a silly limit. All it takes is that people start doubting the technology, and opening the door to a competitor that is obviously better. |
|
|
|
|
No one is going to use Bitcoin, even for high value transactions, if they have to
1) Pay a fee to have their local currency converted to bitcoins
2) Pay a large transaction fee
3) Cover the fee of the recipient converting bitcoins back to their local currency
These steps will be necessary if bitcoins are expensive to spend. And bitcoins will be expensive to spend if the number of transactions is artificially limited.
Large transaction fees makes Bitcoin uncompetitive and it makes it less useful. If you have to exchange bitcoins back to cash, to spend them on ordinary purchases, why bother at all?
This is technology, if it can't scale, it will be replaced by something that can. The people investing in bitcoins are doing it because they believe it can be digital cash. 7 transactions per second is not digital cash. Its not digital gold either, gold does not cost large amounts of money to trade.
|
|
|
|
14. Pleased with their profitability, miners refuse to accept any hard fork to block size.
Because why sell 1000 apples for $0.75 each when you can instead sell 10 for $1.00 each. Especially when your variable cost for additional apples is effectively zero. Makes perfect fucking sense. Even better, turns out there are enough oranges for everyone to have one, and nobody gives a shit about apples at all anymore. |
|
|
|
|
Looking to buy shares, please PM me price.
|
|
|
|
Also I like it because it leaves the issue of block size aside. On the other hand maybe that might be a problem? If the maximum block size is increased, then this proposal will prevent fees from dropping to nothing. I like it! Yea this is good stuff right here. |
|
|
|
That was excellent, I think this is exactly how it will play out as well. |
|
|
|
Multiplying by two every time we halve the block subsidy would be pretty bulletproof, as we'd have four years to prepare for each upcoming change.
We'd also have four years to figure out whether that was far too optimistic (increasing too fast) and would have to be slowed down.
So I think merely just a fixed constant is not likely at all.
The main thing might be sheer predictability, so people can do their five year, ten year, and twenty-year plans, or something like that.
Thing is, people don't think that specific rate I cited above would be fast enough.
They hope for exponential uptake, but are not even doing tests like, say picking one branch/city store in which to do a market study, seeing how much that affects the syste so as to judge how many more of their branches to to expand the test into, come back when the current limit is full and say hey we brought in all the traffic that is making blocks nicely full now, that was only 1% of our branches world wide, so we now know to start accepting bitcoins at the rest of our branches will cause X amount more traffic on your blockchain, how soon will you be ready for me to bring that new traffic?
We have not seen anything like that, just wild fantasies about the future by people who seem n ot to even have enough customer base to bring in to even fill the blocks we already have.
-MarkM-
This at least it would solve all of the problems of losing the decentralized nature of Bitcoin, fighting exponential growth (and the attack vectors that come with it), and forever relegating Bitcoin to a very limited use. And as you say, its entirely predictable. This approach is preferable to a single constant increase (requiring additional ones in the future), or a potential gameable automatically adjusting algorithm, and I would be fully in favor of it (doubling max block size whenever subsidy gets cut in half, even if its still "not fast enough") |
|
|
|
There is nothing to fear from a limited (low) TPS. It is a tradeoff for guaranteeing Bitcoin's high security and reliability as a long-term store of value. Savers should not be sacrificed to accommodate merchants and bankers. I think that's what the message embedded in the genesis block is all about. The world desperately needs rock solid secure undebaseable savings vehicles for the little guy. Ask Zimbabweans, Iranians, Argentinians, etc.
BTW I'm not opposed to increasing the block size gradually and conservatively as average storage/bandwidth improves, but I'm opposed to the idea of overdoing it based on unscientific hunches, or the false narrative that Bitcoin will go extinct if TPS is set too low. Again, look at gold to see the resounding succcess of a 0 TPS monetary unit.
Firstly let me say that I appreciate your post very much. It was well thought out and did a good job to illustrate the issue. The concern that I have with your statement is that if transactions are expensive, Bitcoin is then NOT a savings vehicle for the little guy because its too expensive for him to make deposits. Now I realize that people like MarkM are saying "look, we are so far from transactions being expensive that this isn't a concern yet, let the market play things out with the existing block size limit", but my concern is that a change at that point will be incredibly more difficult since it would require miners to make larger blocks for potentially smaller transaction fees (in the short term). Instead of aligning user and miner interests, it puts them at odds. Users want more transactions and cheaper, miners want fewer transactions and more expensive. What we should go for is users and miners want maximum transactions at maximum market supported rate. Otherwise we have an artificial price floor, as supply has been limited to a level less than what the market could supply otherwise. Here's a thought experiment, how valuable would Bitcoin be if it could only support one single transaction per day? Sure, that transaction might cost a large sum of money (if anyone still cares to use it), but it would certainly be less than the combined transaction fees in a system that supports many more transactions. The reason for that is that the technology is much less useful, less used, less competitive against others, etc. So if you agree that a Bitcoin which could only perform 365 transactions per year would be a less valuable Bitcoin, which can't you agree that a Bitcoin that can only support x number of transactions per year forever would be a less valuable Bitcoin? And why is no one concerned that we are going to enter into a situation where miners and normal users are at odds? |
|
|
|
After a hard fork, even there are only 4 people hashing on the original chain with old client, it will quickly develop into a popular chain and most possibly knock out the new chain
It is a no brainer: One chain has limited resource (expensive), another chain has abundant resource (cheap), btc on which chain will worth more?
To answer your question, the one that will be worth more will be the one that people trust in and use. If one has 4 people securing it, and the other has thousands of people securing it, which do you think people will trust in more? |
|
|
|
|
rafGBxUaHYMhvNDgMwed3KJmswm9CL1b3v
|
|
|
|
It is crucial to understand the concept and, yes, economic impact of a hard fork before even approaching the economic analysis of changing the max block size. A hard fork is a significant event that knocks legitimate users off the network, makes coins unspendable, or potentially makes the same coins spendable in two different locations, depending on whether or not you're talking to an updated node. It is, to pick a dramatic term, an Extinction Level Event. If done poorly, a hard fork could make it impossible for reasonable merchants to trust the bitcoins they receive, the very foundation of their economic value. Furthermore, a hard fork is akin to a Constitutional Convention: a hard fork implies the ability to rewrite the ground rules of bitcoin, be it block size, 21M limit, SHA256 hash, or other hard-baked behavior. Thus, there is always the risk of unpredictable miners, users and devs changing more than just the block size precisely because it makes the most engineering sense to change other hard-to-change features at the time of hard-fork. It is a nuclear option with widespread economic consequences for all bitcoin users. That puts it in very good perspective. Thank you for that post. |
|
|
|
While this number isn't remotely what it would have to be to handle the kind of transactions normally done in cash, we don't really want to handle every single transaction.
Why not? Because it would require 25GB blocks (to do 15,000,000,000 transactions per day) and that seems completely impossible right now? Computing resources are growing much faster than either the number of people on this earth, or their number of financial transactions. Think about how valuable Bitcoin (and the resources that protect it) would become if it ever got to that scale. I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow or even in 10 years. But in my mind, more (paying) transactions = more success for Bitcoin. |
|
|
|
Yeah I know but I at least wanted to see if there's a possible middle ground as opposed to just lifting that limit entirely which I'm absolutely against.
But is anyone actually advocating for that? Nobody wants a miner to be able to make a 100GB block today full of free transactions. People just want confidence that Bitcoin can be more than a crappy replacement for wire services with a stupidly small potential number of maximum transactions (at costs that eliminate many potential use cases). |
|
|
|
Its not even digital gold at that point... I can trade a piece of physical gold for free.
But you can't divide it into 10,000,000 pieces. And it's not so easy for someone say in Turkey to get his gold coin to a dude in Vancouver. There is no purpose in dividing it into 10,000,000 pieces if it costs more to transfer those pieces then they are worth. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
