I know what it means.


I've done nothing of the sort.  If I add a rule to my client that it quietly drops blocks that are over 250Kb, what have I done to you?  Unless a majority of users also do so, I've done nothing.  Perhaps I dno't drpop it from my own chain, I just don't forward it.  It's something that I can do right now, and it's only effective if a significant number of others also do so.  However, if it does exist, it's presence becomes an enforcement mechanism upon the soft limit that miners presently abide by, that can be easily removed simply by a significant portion of the users agreeing that it should be done, and upgrading to the next versiuon of their client that has a higher soft limit.

For all we know, there are already clients that quietly drop blocks based upon the block reward address not being in their whitelist, or any other such metric.  Or even randomly.  None of this would matter until half of users followed the same rule.

Not a certainty; so don't depend entirely upon limits that can be commented out by miners.  Use block verfication rules as well, which could be commented out by the users, but why would they do this?  The propogation of the block is very much part of the system.  Include the soft limit into the verification rules of as many clients as possible, and miners who first comment out that rule for themselves will be punished by the network at least until a majority of users upgrade their clients to match.  The rest of the miners that didn't commetn out the rule would benefit from teh harm the first mover takes upon himself.

Or it could be a hybrid of your two ideas.  The increase in difficulty triggers an increase in the blocksize, but not linerally.  For example, no matter how much the difficulty increases (beyond a minimum), the blocksize increases by 10%.  No matter how much the difficulty decreases (beyond a minimum) the blocksize decreases by 5%.  Or vise versa, depending upon which is more likely to result in a favorable sscarcity.

Throw in my unlimited-if-all-free transactions rule.

I don't agree that the hard limit is the only way to promote scarcity.  Bear in mind, no matter how we do this, the scarcity is still artificial.  If we don't do it right with a hard fork, we're stuck with it.  If we increase the hard limit to a high predicted future limit, and use soft limits and/or other block verification rules to impose scarcity on transaction processing, most of the miners & pools will abide by the soft rules even when commenting out those rules is provablely in their own economic interests.  Reputation matters here, even moreso than it does in the "real" business world.

Another possible solution to the scarcity of transaction space versus an infinately growing transaction queue (with infinately growing free transaction confirmation delays) is to permit an unlimited (or massively huge limit) block to legally occur under specific conditions that would not incentivise miners towards anti-competitive activities.

For example, there could be an exception rule for the blocksize limit if zero fee paying transactions were included into the block.  This rule would permit a miner to queue dump for his own reasons, be it that his queue is too large, it's owned by a major bitcoin holder that simply wishes to help the network at his own expense, or a major retailer (think WalMart) that has a huge amount of free transactions from customers to process, and mining isn't directly their business model.

Another method would be to permit an un-limited block based upon an interval that miners could not depend upon.  For example, the difficulty is adjusted every two weeks or so, but the difficulty adjustment block could also be an unlimited block, also permitting (perhaps expecting) the miner that finds that block to not only include every single fee paying transaction in the block, but also every single transaction still in his queue.  This would limit the delay for free transactions to a two week maximum, and only burden the bandwidth challenged clients and miners once every two weeks and on a predictable schedule.

Occasionally flushing the transaction queues would benefit all players, without significantly impacting the scarcity of transaction space for the remainder of the time period.  However, the second method is likely to encourage free transactions leading up to the unlimited block's expected arrival; whereas the prior method of permitting unlimited blocks based upon a fee-less transaction queue would not encourge same, but nor could users be certain that their free transactions be processed in any reasonable time frame, as there is not way to be certain that any miner would be willing to do this.

No we are not.  At least I'm not.  I'm talking about off-network Bitcoin transactions, of any type, but that are still denominated in bitcoins.  This could be people who trade in sets of private keys (unsafe, yes; but possible), it could be people who trade in a paper currency denominated and/or backed by a bitcoin reserve, or this could be people trading within a single online wallet service (think Ebay, using something like MyBitcoin.com rather than Paypal as the default transaction method) or a potential parrallel network of wallet services that function like banks, taking the Bitcoin equivilant of bankchecks and settling up with one another on much longer intervals.

All of these methods, at least all that I can think of, require more trust between parties and involve greater risk than using the main Bitcoin network; but that is also why they would be a cheaper alternative most of the time.  If you're going to be buying/selling a car with bitcoins, you're going to want to use the Bitcoin network; but if you're buying a snickers bar at the store, a standardized method of trading private keys might be a viable alternative to a blockchain transaction fee.  Microtransactions were never Bitcoin's strong point; distance & high security with low trust were.  Not all transactions require that kind of certainty.


I get this, and I agree from an economic incentives perspective.  This is the very same problem of scarcity that prompted a minimum fee rule, in order for a transaction to be considered a fee paying transaction according to the priority score algo that Gavin put in a couple of years ago.  The limits prompt delays in free transactions, and that is a cost to consumers.  Wise consumers will pay a fee for speed, but not more than they must.  If the transaction fees can ever be expected to replace the decending block reward, there must be some kind of scarcity there.  If we remove the limits altogether, the supply of transaction space will (functionally) be as close to infinate as the supply of bandwidth availabe to email spammers.  There will be no incentive for the majority of users to contribute a fee, even after the block rewards decrease to nominally zero, unless they are running up against some kind of limiting resource.  I believe that free transactions should always be possible, but if speed of confirmation is the concern you're going to have to contribute.  We can suffer a lot more 'freeloading' than can VISA or Mastercard, but the network is not costless, so the service to users cannot be costless either.

While I can see your point, I still think that there should be a hard limit, however high that might be.  In this way, there is always an absolute for which large miners 'cheating' by trying to force out smaller players (via padding of the transaction queue or similar) will run into that limit.  Hopefully this absolute limit will discourage those unscrupulous players from turning to the dark side, simply based on the idea that there are going to be a percentage of players that they could not force out of the mining business, no matter how much larger they could grow on a relative basis.

However, upon further thought, I think that said hard limit should be pretty freaking high, in order to allow the soft limit to be our control method for many more years without further need of hard forks.  And if we are going to do this hard fork against the desires of some miners (which is probably a certainty) it's better that we get to it sooner rather than later.  If we start bumping up against the hard limit, some miners might just manage to profit from that artificial scarcity in ways that would turn a good portion of the miners aginst the idea of a hard fork, whereas they might otherwise not oppose one before we get there.

How high would such a hard limit be?  Can we estimate how many transactions per second that, say, a one Gb hard limit could process?  As already pointed out by many, we don't need to accommodate all of the transactions that occur in the world; but we need to be able to do much better than 7 per second.  What is a good target?  VISA's transaction volume?  Paypal's? Or VISA + Mastercard?  Once we decide, then we need to set it and let it go, and be willing to let the market in transaction fees and off-network transfers simply run.  We are going to get way too big to do this kind of thing twice.

Not only do you not understand Bitcoin, you don't even understand what money generally is.  What you want to do is literally impossible.  Yet, you are free to try it on your own.  We wouldn't try to stop you, although a great many of us are going to be quite amused at your attempts.  If you're right, you'd be a hero.

But you're not right.  Currencies are an amoral tool.  Nothing more, nothing less.  The fact that you disagree with how this one was designed makes no difference at all.  Are you going to claim that you do not use fiat currencies to live?  The nature of those currencies are far worse than anything that you imagine that Bitcoin may be.  That is what the alternative actually is.  What you would wish for is immaterial unless and until you, personally, make it happen.  Right now, what you want is not a choice, and no matter what you say on this forum, Bitcoin isn't going to change to suit your illusions.

They already are.  Bitcoin is not intended to, nor is it likely to, replace national currencies.  It's going to be a long time coming before Bitcoins displace paper cash in small daily transactions.  That said, it's not unreasonable to assume, should the central banking model not be able to adjust to the reality of Bitcoin (and presumedly not be able to destroy it), that new paper cash currencies that claim a reserve backing of bitcoins that displace national fiat currencies.  So yes, in many cases simple paper cash would function as an "alt-chain" just fine; although I'd predict that should a bitcoin backed banknote ever come into existance, it's more likely to be a plastic token with a digtial artifact imbedded into it, probably using many of the very advanced security features that casino tokens use today.  And just like the gold in a vault never actually moves under a (auditable) gold standard, the bitcoins that presume to back those banknotes would rarely, if ever, need to move across the blockchain.  The important part to all this is that, in the end, any peer forever has the ability to move transactions across the blockchain.  That is the part that makes it 'decentralized', not the number of network nodes (although that is an important minimum) or the common size of a mining operation.  The important part is that there are no 'super-nodes' with special abilities to ignore or exclude other nodes from the network.  If the block-max-size issue ever started to trend toward nodes that were so much larger than the entry level node as to functionally have the ability/incentive to ignore the small nodes, and have that actually work, then I'd be concerned.  I do not claim to know what is the best method for increasing the blocksize limit, but I do not believe that increasing it to 10mb, 20mb or even 50mb as a hard limit would be a dramatic burden on most full nodes.  Perhaps a combo solution; a higher than currently reasonable hard limit combined with an adjustment algo for a soft limitation.  For example, the hard limit could be set to something like 250Mb, and an algo that can adjust the soft limitations within that hard limit withn a range based upon, perhaps, the average number of blocks delayed that a minimum fee transaction experiences during the prior two week period. 

Although I havn't a clue how that could be actually implimented.

Of course it's possible.  You're trusting that the exchange sites are honest.  These trades are onsite, not on the blockchain, so there is no way to be certain that they are not, in practice, manipulating the exchange prices to their own benefit.

I've pretty much assumed that they do this as a matter of course for three years, but whatever they might actually be doing, doesn't shift the official price by much or for long.  Any bot making trades over a one cent move still makes money.

It's not.

None of the above.  If there are 10K full nodes, then there are 10K copies of the blockchain.  That is all that this implies.  There is no data to tell us; 1) how many are single user nodes versus how many are multi-user nodes or Stratum servers, 2) how many users on any of these light client servers exist nor 3) how often these users need to "settle up".  The actual number of the full clients in the network is mostly a product of the "many-copies-keeps-data-safe" security model.  But the cost of this redundency is not zero (even though it's still cheaper than fiat currencies).  This cost would be spread out greater as the market grows, but the resources that miners consume are not the only costs of running the network, as a great many of those resources are contributed in-kind by users with both the resources and the determination to run full nodes.  As the resources required to participate in the network as a full node increase (at a rate faster than those same resources grow, as available to the average power user) some of those back-up nodes with marginal/non-existent pay-back will stop participating.  Hopefully, the services of running a parrallel payment network, for example BitcoinSpinner's business model, will be able to turn a profit, since they will (out of necessity) also run a full node.

This reminds me of another point.  Lactose intolerance in adulthood is a relatively uncommon occurance in humans, which is why it's considered a medical condition.  Whereas, every other mammal loses the ability to properly digest milk of their own species shortly following infancy, including actual dairy cows.  Lactose intolerance in human infants is far more rare than in adulthood, also.

This also implies; both from a scientific/evolutionary model and from a religious/creationist model; that humans are generally evolved/designed to consume dairy products, for the inability to do so in adulthood is abnormal.

You seem to fear the inevitable.  If Bitcoin is ever to become truly successful, a transaction throughput volume that is well beyond what the average end user is capable of, or willing to, committing the resources to maintain a full client must occur.  There is no point in crying about this, it has already begun.  I dont run a full client anymore, myself.  While it's important that the blockchain be replicated many places across the Internet, and into the deep web such as Tor, there comes a point of rapidly dimminishing returns.  I think that we have around 10K full nodes that can be identified (which should exclude any in the deep web), who here thinks that this isn't more than enough redundency for security purposes?  There must be some degree of centralization, as the bitcoin network as it presently exists is too costly relative to it's current market size.  We don't want the network to get smaller, really, but nor do we need it to grow more; we simply need the market to outgrow the network until the relative costs of running the netowrk are much lower than now, and we need this to happen well before the block reward cuts in half once again.


Light clients and their supporting overlay networks are the future of Bitcoin, if it is to ever have one. 
Eventually, a live transaction on the main netowrk should become an uncommon event, relative to the number of off-network transactions that occur.  This futture has been known to those of us that are versed in economic theory, for as the economy grows the growth must outpace the ability of the main bitcoin netowrk to scale.  As this happens, there will be incentives for off-network transactions to dominate; and a balance between the costs of the main network with it's high security model versus the costs with overlay and parrallel netowrks with their lower transaction costs and associated less seucre models will develop.  If Bitcoin is to ever become as large an economy as, for example, the SystemD (for which it is so well suited) the vast majority of small value and daily transactions are gointg to be handled by overlay networks and the online wallet-like servies that develop them; while higher value transactions (for example, your weekly paycheck) might still be handled by the main netowrk.

Funny you should mention that, for I have a story in this regard.  My wife is particularly well suited to breastfeed multiples, and as my first born was starting to age out of breastmilk, my wife joined a breastmilk donation network for a time.  It was a religious calling for her, and for the next month or so, she laborously pumped, sorted, froze and shipped several gallons of breastmilk in single baby-bottles.  That was the first time that I had ever heard that there was a federal law against deliberately profitting from human sourced tissue or bio-products.  Yet, blood plasma companies work around this limitation by paying the donator labor time, because the donation process is time consuming.

It's also surreal how effective of a weight loss program that a high yield breastmilk extraction activity can be.  Presumedly, it's also pretty effective at sucking the nutrients out of the donator as well.

But I digress...

How do you feel about those of us with the luck to discover Bitcoin early, and the education to understand it's implications, but not the balls to invest all I *cough* <<we had?

I made a small investment in late 2010, and since then my bitcoin holdings increased in value by about 41,500%  If I had the balls to withdraw from my 401K and buy bitcoins then, I'd be that guy with a fortune close to 1% of all bitcoins.  

BTW, that is probably Satoshi himself.  If he is still alive, he deserves it.

No.  The ignore button is to your left.

Feel free to fork the code and attempt your view.  It's already been done, though, and it never made it out of the planning stages.  The design of Bitcoin is not arbitrary. There are many reasons that bitcoin is the way it is, and being different from central banking/fractional researve/national fiat currencies is definately one of those reasons.

The Bank of Canada is developing an electronic version of their currency, so it won't be very long before you get exactly what you want without the effort.  It remains to be seen if it will offer any real alternative to Bitcoin, though.  I have my own doubts.

Care to explain?

There are other forums with a focus on Bitcoin? Where?