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AlexGR, do you allow for the possibility that maybe small blocks isn't a good idea?
Timing is crucial. Even 1TB per year blocks (20mb/block) will have its time when 20mb/block will be "alright". Upgrade too soon, you'll have 10gb txs and 990gb spam. Upgrade on time, you'll get 800-950gb txs and 50-200gb spam. I don't understand why it's spam when it pays a fee. Miners are free to exclude tx if the fee is too small. It's not, and nobody seems to think this through. Since you can't (usually, unless through analysis or public announcement of intention) know the source or purpose of a transaction, spam in bitcoin space can only be defined as a percentage function of a transactions fee value relative to other transactions or its probability of block inclusion. So like, if a transaction is in the bottom 10% of currently average fees paid, maybe you consider that spam... or maybe you consider transactions in the bottom 50% spam. All relative to the viewer. Or maybe we are all hodlers, and none of us are actually using bitcoin for anything useful, and all of it is spam. But then you have to ask, what is useful? What if a company that is literally doing nothing but spamming the network with 'useless' transactions but is paying good fees for it and pushing useful transactions away? Is that spam? Spam is a word that is only useful for the brain to justify something. It's not a number and bitcoin only cares about the math. |
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I think it's a good analogy, which makes the issue easier to understand. If there are flaws in the analogy, I'm happy to discuss them. The criticism of AlexGR that people on a bus are real, and Bitcoin transactions in a block (according to him) are not, is just childish.
His other remark that it's cheap to buy all the space in a block (because blocks are quite small and transactions cheap), doesn't discredit the analogy. If someone wants to take out the high speed train from Amsterdam to Paris, he can buy all the train tickets. It's doable, and effectively a DOS attack preventing any other people from using the train. If anything, it shows my analogy is a correct one.
Not there yet. When you broadcast a tx, where you "pay", say, 1 satoshi per byte, what you are *really* doing is that you are stating your intention that if you get included in some block then you will pay the said amount. You don't actually pay anything beforehand. The payment is only done upon inclusion. If you get the service, you get paid. If someone else pays more than you, then HE gets it, not you. In that scenario, where he got in and you didn't, the only party paying is him, not you. You haven't paid anything. You only said that you were willing to pay a trivial amount, which was less than him, and the miner said ok, you aren't paying me that much, so I'm going to process that other guy who pays me more. You are correct, Bitcoin tx are blind auctions. But it also works the other way around. Once you have issued a tx with a decent fee that you expect to be included, someone can come along and flood the (small) block with txs with a bit higher fee. It doesn't even have to be malicious -- a sudden event causing a lot of extra txs will do the trick. Your tx will get "stuck", and you are left behind frustrated. As has been demonstrated recently. . Maybe that's more accurate now.  |
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I am not sure exactly my strategy if we were to have another 10x bubble in the near future because that kind of price movement, depending on whether it occurs quickly, would cause a lot of temptation to sell a lot of bitcoins; however, even with a 10x increase in the price, a person would not need to sell all of his/her bitcoins in order to take reasonable measures to protect the investment.
For example, if a person has about 100BTC, then he knows that every dollar BTC goes up, he has $100 profits. Therefore, he could sell some of those profits and maintain the principle... There are probably as many strategies as there are people; however, I am mostly similar to you in the sense that I am attempting to accumulate overall (even though at the moment, your average BTC buy price seems to be a whole hell-a-va lot lower than mine)
When I first bought bitcoins (starting at $68) I figured I'd sell enough to recoup my original investment when the price had tripled in value. By the peak of the spring 2013 bubble, my average price had risen to about $120 and the market price only reached $266, a hundred bucks shy. When the "dead cat" bounce took the price back up to $155 after the crash down to $50, I sold some coins and was feeling fairly smug after making a 30% profit after a crash. It didn't take long to realize I wanted to buy more bitcoins though. Luckily I was able to buy back in for $97. Now I realize that If I sold any coins, I'd only end up buying them back again, probably at a higher price. I happened to get lucky with my timing then but I can't count on being that lucky again. I'm not a gambler by nature (in fact I'm adamantly anti-gambling for myself) so I'll stick to the slow and safe. I'm not a gambler either. Tried trading, wasn't for me. It's too much exhausting work to try and stay on top of things (at least as much as is needed to be competitive in trading), so I am just an accumulator as well. My time is better spent earning money elsewhere so I can use that money to keep buying more coins. I buy them assuming I'm throwing the money away, so if they are worth $0 or $300,000 in a year I won't sell. My average buy in price is something like $200 for my 210 coins, so I feel lucky. Although my buddy Jake told me about bitcoin when they were worth like 20 bucks and I dismissed him... darn! |
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Im a true bitcoin believer and lately there is a lot of fud going around about BTC, why is this? Even cryptolovers in forums are fudding, dont understand this  People are just realizing that mostly everyone working on bitcoin code right now are mentally handicapped. |
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I don't think the traditional definition of spam really works for bitcoin. Since we don't (generally) have enough information to know why any given transaction was sent, it could just as easily be ignorance or malice that it was with too low a fee. "Spam" generally has an ulterior motive, such as advertising, or installing a trojan on your machine, to get your bank account info, nigerian prince wants to give you money, etc, which is much easier to determine in email or chats just based on the content. But with bitcoin there isn't any content to analyse other than the transaction itself.
In an engineer mindset, it makes more sense to just avoid words like spam altogether, and just label every transaction with a % probability of being included in the next block. Then you just have a useful number, instead of terms which mean different things to different people. Label transactions with numbers, not words, as the blockchain does not care what words we use. Then you can decide yourself if you think everything below a 3% chance is spam, or maybe you think everything below 90% is spam, doesn't matter as long as we have a probability baseline.
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ledgerjournal is run by a charlatan.
bitcoin could not care less about academics circlejerkers
Who is this madman people keep talking about? |
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There's plenty of code, there's plenty of stubbornness, there's not enough analysis. The block size problem should have been dealt with two years ago. And if someone had done the legwork back then it would have been done two years ago. The one project trying to do this kind of stuff, ledgerjournal.org, is run by a fairly controversial member of the community. His project needs to be strengthened and there also needs to be different voices on the scene. If you want to make a difference in Bitcoin then this is a good entry point.
I didn't know about ledgerjournal, thanks. |
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I am still curious why did everyone get stuck on this 1mb value? I mean, like I said earlier, why not 1.2mb, or why not just 1 transaction per block if limiting it is the best? I'm just so confused why the current transactions per second limit became the magic number.
It's arbitrary really. Satoshi actually gave more room than necessary, but then again the fees paid back then were like 0.01. That's what I was thinking, it seems 1mb was just a nice round number for him to pick at the time. This is why I can't understand where all this contention is coming from. It seems out of left field for me. I run a software company, which we will be exiting this year (assuming all goes well), and I just can't fathom the stubbornness on the function of this single value that seems totally arbitrary. I would be running analysis, bug testing, etc, every possible iteration of that number. Perhaps even writing a simulation to see how the change of the number would effect network performance, hash rates, probably miner dropout, etc. I've been considering what I will do with my time when I exit my current company, and it seems likely that it will be bitcoin related. And I'm starting to wonder if I should just contribute code directly or work on the analysis side of things. I'd love to submit code but it seems the stubbornness is a harder problem to solve than the technical hurdles  |
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That's like saying "if the gays can get married, whats to stop people from marrying their pets!". How can you seriously compare raising the block size limit to a slippery slope of raising the total supply? Nobody wants to devalue their coins by creating more, but they DO want to increase the value in them by making them more accessible and liquid.
A forker can troll us with an argument of the following style: "High tx fees reduce adoption, so we need low tx fees to increase adoption. If that doesn't happen, BTC is dead. So it's preferable to have more than 21mn coins through constant inflation rather than raising tx fees".They could say "you are crippling BTC's potential through those high fees, we need much lower fees and in order to do that we need subsidy / more coins".If people insist on having low-fee txs, then the end-game is a ...DOGEcoin (infinite inflation). Higher fees solve both the inflation issue and also address the sane block utilization issue. Fees at 1 to 3 cents are ridiculous anyway. I don't necessarily disagree with you that there will be people that want more than 21m coins. However, 'trolling' does not move the economic majority into submission. They can say it all they want. It's not like anyone in particular will own bitcoins direction if theres a fork, not anymore than anyone owns its direction now. If the economic majority wants more coins it'll happen, regardless of whether it is 'big blockers', 'small blockers' or anyone else. But my guess is that would not happen, as I can't think of any situation where it would be logical to devalue your own coins by making more, when they are already practically infinitely divisible. People would rather divide their own and sell than create more. I am still curious why did everyone get stuck on this 1mb value? I mean, like I said earlier, why not 1.2mb, or why not just 1 transaction per block if limiting it is the best? I'm just so confused why the current transactions per second limit became the magic number. |
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If you had 10 MB blocks tomorrow morning, you'd still need 0.8$ in fees, per tx, to replenish lost subsidy income.
People are currently paying 0$ to 0.03$ (for first block inclusion) while "blocks are full", under the current 1 MB scheme. With the current fees, even with 100 MB blocks, and them being full, you'd still be unable to pay the subsidy loss (you'd need 0.08$ per tx). So you'd need something like 250MB blocks with the current fees. This makes it pretty obvious and simple: Fees have to rise.
If fees don't rise, then miners bail out and the network loses security. OR, some new "forkers" will come and say something retarded like "we want free txs forevah, so let us inflate the money quantity instead... why limit btc to 21mn coins? That's ...crippling to BTC... yeah, let's uncripple it by issuing a few hundred million more... we don't want to pay high tx fees you know... we prefer inflation".
That's like saying "if the gays can get married, whats to stop people from marrying their pets!". How can you seriously compare raising the block size limit to a slippery slope of raising the total supply? Nobody wants to devalue their coins by creating more, but they DO want to increase the value in them by making them more accessible and liquid. Has any analysis been done to determine why 1mb is the best? why not 1.2mb, or half a meg. If limited supply is the answer, let's just make it one transaction every block for ultimate success! Why is less than 5 transactions a second the ideal number? Why would raising that to 10, 20, 30, 40, 100, or 1000 ruin bitcoins security? More on that... how many hashes are done per transaction, and how many miners do we need for the network to be secure? Does anyone know. I mean, it seems like we are doing quite a lot of calculations per transaction, which means mathematically the transactions are plenty secure, even with an order of magnitude more of them. |
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In this hypothetical scenario, your imaginary friend has actually probably done you a favour.
Most sub-continental asians live on a largely vegetarian diet, low fat, sugar, sodium and no alcohol. I'd happily snap up an Indian kidney over a flogged out old American kidney any day of the week.
Lots of opium though. |
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Bitcoin is somewhere between Monero and Ethereum. You need contracting, but too much creates complexity traps. Some folks are trying to make Bitcoin too complex and adding unneeded features. Those will be selected out in future forks. The safest route is minimal functionality for what is most needed. Monero doesn't have enough to be useful for Zooko's Triangle. Everything else will be cloned and branded and not a store of value.
This is actually something a lot of people don't realize. For a coin to function, it has to be open source. And if a coin has something cool and new in it that is genuinely starting to make bitcoin irrelevant, then the open source nature of the coin means we can copy that feature into bitcoin. Of course the move could cause a hard fork and be contentious in many ways, but in a dire situation where a coin is putting bitcoin out of business, the network will react. I don't particularly like that bitcoin is reactionary not proactive, but I have no doubt that bitcoin will always be the top coin. Its better to maintain stability with less features and add them later as other coins experiment to find the new stuff. EDIT: For that matter, is anything blockstream doing with lightning and so on going to be open source? If so, how do they tell their investors they will get a 10x return when anyone could copy it to fork their own version or implement it right into bitcoin? If not, who is going to trust them to handle their money? |
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scaling bitcoin isnt about how big we can make the blocks, but how efficiently we can use block space
Scaling bitcoin isn't about either of those things, it's about getting more transactions per block. Ideally that is done efficiently, but scaling can mean one or the other or both. The end result is more transactions. If the goal wasn't more transactions then segwit would lower the block size to match its efficiency to keep the amount of transactions the same. |
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