That was not my statement. Bitcoin has always been and will always be vulnerable to some kinds of theoretical attacks. If miners wanted to, they can do all sorts of nasty things to the network. Satoshi's decision was fighting with the symptoms and was never a good solution for the long term. I agree that when the network was young it was sort of a safety measure similarly to having block chain check points hardcoded into the protocol. These days are over now, it's time to grow up and ditch those safety wheels.


Holy shit, people owning big amounts of shares in any company are also in advantage when voting for change. That's how it's supposed to be. You have more coins, that means you're a bigger stakeholder and your vote must count more.

2nd week confirmed.

Oh and now we have much better situation, right? I'd say that miners choosing the block size is the lesser evil. Miners could also combine their power and make a 51% attack, think of that. Miners have the ultimate power either way. They can mine zero tx blocks if they want to, they can decide what TXs to include and what not even though we have the max block size limit. Right now bitcoin is heading towards slow and painful death due to Satoshi's paranoia and distrust for miners. HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU DISTRUST MINERS IF THEY SECURE THE NETWORK?!

There's also a possibility to vote with your bitcoins what the block size limit should be and that voting can be included in the block chain itself. Take a look at NuShares and how shareholders pass motions in their network. The votes are stored in the block chain and the protocol counts the votes and decides what the maximum block size limit should be. Miners can vote with their coins that they mine. Bitcoin holders can vote with theirs. We have the technical capabilities to solve this problem democratically and yet  I see people only throwing trash at any improvement suggestions. From this I deduce that you are the traitors of the bitcoin network and should be banished from bitcoinland forever.

False. Miners could have chosen not to include spam tx-s in the blocks. Your argument is invalid. It was paranoia and hardcoding a max size was a kludgy hack that could have been solved on a different level by the means of prevention. Hardcoding a max block size is fighting with the symptoms and that is just a pathetic means to solve a problem.

That's a good idea. Miners protect the network so let miners decide how big blocks to allow.

edit:
the max size was implemented because of paranoia and not because of any real reason

I simply do not understand why miners would be against the larger maximum block sizes. The argument that including more unconfirmed transactions in a block gives the miner a disadvantage is a pseudo argument because miners can still choose what number of TXs to include in a block.

Let's say I'm a whiny little bitch miner with very shitty bandwidth. Even though the maximum block size is 8MiB I deliberately only include no more than 1MiB of TXs in a block that I'm mining. How does the bigger block size impact me negatively then?

The blocks that others have found may be bigger than 1MiB so downloading them could cost me some time. However, do I really have to download the full 8MiB block in order to start mining the next one? I am sure it is technically possible to only download the hash and the proof of work of the latest block (block header?) and I can already start mining the next block. So, what's the big problem? Until I don't know which exact TXs from my mempool were included in the latest block I can mine on an empty block (being a selfish little bitch that I am) and still get my profit.

So fuck you miners and fuck you chinise exchanges who want to harm bitcoin by opposing every improvement to the protocol no matter what. I am absolutely sure that those people are against improvements because they have released their own pathetic shitcoin and now they see bitcoin as a rival.

By the way, I have another idea of improving Bitcoin in the context of blocks getting full and backlog building up: TRANSACTION FEE AUCTIONS.

How does it work? The network must allow double spends with a small exception: it must be possible for the user to override their old transaction with a higher TX fee. That way the client can be shown real time mempool ordered by the TX fees. The user will see their TX in that ordered list and the rank of their TX. The list should separate TXs that fit into the maximum block size and the TXs that are probably going to be left out from the next block. The user must have a possibility to override their old transaction by making a new one with a higher TX fee, so that their TX will move up in the list. This situation will then look like an auction.

Technically, it would be rather simple improvement. When a bitcoin node receives a double spend, it checks whether the outputs and the output amounts of that double spend are exactly the same. The node then checks which TX has a higher TX fee and forgets the other TX. In case the previous TX had a smaller TX fee than the new one, the node will propagate the newly received TX as an update to the TX fee auction.

Actually you are overly pessimistic about it and not even thinking about the possibility that not all miners are selfish.

So let's say 9 out of 10 miners are selfish and decide not to include any TXs in the 6th fat block that has no size limit. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that each of those miners has equally 10% of the hashing power.

Because we have 1 good miner, 10% of blocks will be found by them. That means 10% of the potentially fat blocks (6th blocks) are mined by a righteous miner. The righteous miner will include all unconfirmed transactions in the fat block so the backlog of transactions gets regularly cleared. The only penalty is that instead of once per hour the backlog is cleared once per 10 hours.

And that was pretty much the worst case scenario. In reality, we would have more like 70% of the miners righteous and 30% of them selfish. That means the backlog is cleared once in every ~8 blocks.

Luckily this wouldn't be a problem with Proof of Stake blocks so in case miners start to damage the network with this selfish mining we could introduce PoS blocks and turn bitcoin into PoW/PoS hybrid.

someone may be attacking the network by finding blocks but not publishing them immediately. then when they have found 3 blocks in a row they would publish them all at once to reverse the transactions of last 2 published blocks since the attacker has a longer block chain.

Thanks for the constructive feedback. I didn't think of the possibility that miners could start to avoid mining on those big blocks, for example. But then again, let's suppose that 90% of miners switch off their miners when it's time to mine that 6th block. I am absolutely sure that there will be at least one miner that is willing to confirm that block but it could take too much time for them. Perhaps mining the 6th block should be easier by design? Or, better yet, the mining of the 6th block would be done by proof of stake? Either way, there should be some mechanism for clearing the backlog of unconfirmed transactions and this could be it. We could even imagine if every 144th block was allowed to include all the unconfirmed txs to have the tx mempool cleared once a day.

goosoodude asked whether it would be a simple code change. I'm pretty sure it's would be very simple because all you have to do is to divide the current blockchain height by the number 6 and see if the remainder is zero to allow a bigger block to go through.

Anyway, I hope I got the ball rolling and that we get some more interesting ideas now.

I was sleeping and then suddenly I woke up with this idea in my mind: remove the block size limit from every 6th block.

This guarantees that all TXs will be confirmed eventually (in an hour) while not impacting miners too much. Problem solved. Everyone can just STFU already and move on with their lives.

What is that? Do I hear someone complaining about the number 6 or saying that removing the size limit is too much? In that case, I wouldn't care if those constants were different. For example, every 18th block could have the size limit of 8 MiB, all the others would remain 1 MiB. Whatever configuration gets the most supporters.

Now get this idea out there, make it viral, comment, subscribe and question everything!

Such a coin already exists and is doing pretty well: NuBits. It's the first cryptocurrency that solved the volatility problem and has been holding a 1$ per nubit price peg for 10 months already since it was created.

dogecoin sucks

Better take some arginine then, it will make the pump last longer and feel better.

I totally support 8 MiB. But after that we should not increase it any more and find some long term solution.

I guess you didn't realize that OP is actually a bear troll such as yourself.

We will see 17777$ bitcoins by the year 2017 but there will be casualties. I'm not sure whether it's all good after that. Your 17k bitcoins may be a drop of honey in a pot of shit.

I suspect we may touch 270 by the end of this week. We have seen such rises many times during these general bear times and it is about time we saw another quick surge.

giving bitcoin holders some shares is a very good idea. has this been done before? if so then which projects?
also why haven't altcoin creators done that more often? with proof of stake mining it makes perfect sense to have the initial coin distribution in accordance to the current distribution of bitcoins.

I've been expecting this to happen for some time now. Last time it happened (~november 2014) it was only on Bitstamp and thus rather weak indicator. This time, however, it should be so on other exchanges too. Can anyone confirm and post charts?