1MB vs Gavincoin video explained in 3 minutes

[tvbcof]

But it is Gavincoin, isn't it? "XT" is what they would love to call it cuz that sounds to fresh and modern but really it's Geavin/Hearncoin and got nothing to do with the consensus based 'Bitcoin core' we are all using right now.
Gavincoin is an alt and everyone would be better off if these clowns would release it as an seperate coin instead of vandalizing bitcoin network.

That may or may not be the case.  It is a viable argument that the Bitcoin ecosystem contains a lot of participants who don't need it and who are doing it harm and causing excess risk a long as they are around.

It very well could be a gift if a lot of them were siphoned off, and I can think of few sieves which would be more nicely sized than the 20MB-plus-exponential-growth, damn-the-centralization-full-speed-ahead. govt-is-powerless-against-us one.  The piper's best tune to draw them away would be 'XT is the real Bitcoin.'

[Scamalert]

Finally I understand the whole 1MB vs Gavincoin talk. THANKS to the person who made that video.
In my optionion is the idea about buyin a cup of coffee with bitcoin just stupid.
This could be handled by payment processsors (like to video say) so we can finally stop all that talk about that bitcoin has too long confirmation time. Well even though I hate altcoins, thoese can be used to buy coffee as well if you like.

Bitcoin should be used for larger transactions, online sale, cars, houses ect. where the confirm time is irrelevent.

Before the video I kinda supported the 20Mb..... but am I convist that keeping the 1MB is the right choice.

[fairlay]

we created a market on the likelihood of a raise of the block size before mid March 2015. Recently the likelihood moved from 10% to around 30%. However - the volume is still low so that doesn't mean too much: https://www.fairlay.com/event/category/bitcoin/blockchain/all/?lt=1

[Kprawn]

We can pretend all we want.. We all know something has to change, no matter what.

The way we do it, will determine the integrity of the people doing it. If your reasons for doing it, is pure and to improve the Bitcoin community, you are on the right track. If you do it to improve your own individual agenda, you are setting yourself up for failure, because it will be exposed later.

Lately it seems as though this has more to do with control and other hidden agendas than anything else... and that is the sad part. 

[Lauda]

-snip-
everyone would be better off if these clowns would release it as an seperate coin instead of vandalizing bitcoin network.

That may or may not be the case.  It is a viable argument that the Bitcoin ecosystem contains a lot of participants who don't need it and who are doing it harm and causing excess risk a long as they are around.

It very well could be a gift if a lot of them were siphoned off, and I can think of few sieves which would be more nicely sized than the 20MB-plus-exponential-growth, damn-the-centralization-full-speed-ahead. govt-is-powerless-against-us one.  The piper's best tune to draw them away would be 'XT is the real Bitcoin.'

He can't really know or decide what would be best for the ecosystem. This raises the question if Gavin should be able to decide or not? They are after all kind of trying to force XT. I guess we will have to wait to see what is going to happen.
Every solution has its cons.

We can pretend all we want.. We all know something has to change, no matter what.

The way we do it, will determine the integrity of the people doing it. If your reasons for doing it, is pure and to improve the Bitcoin community, you are on the right track. If you do it to improve your own individual agenda, you are setting yourself up for failure, because it will be exposed later.

Lately it seems as though this has more to do with control and other hidden agendas than anything else... and that is the sad part.  

I think that most of us here know that things have to change. The problem is, however how to change it?

[TKeenan]

Doesn't make sense to me.

Seems to use fear and emotion as a propaganda tool to keep people from paying attention to the details (of which it gets several important ones wrong).

Exactly.  These guys want you to use their 'off blockchain' system. This introduces a WORLD of new problems.  Those side chains will have remarkable failure modes we can't anticipate today.  Changing to 20Mb is a tiny change likely to disturb almost nothing.  Changing to sidechains is freaking crazy!
Their argument that nodes will have to close down and only huge miners will remain is total rubbish. KnC and other mega miners are a result of conditions not related to blocksize.  Tiny nodes can buy a 2 Tera drive for about $60 these days.  Big blocks aren't that hard to digest for small miners.

[TKeenan]

Also, there is nothing "magical" about 1 MB.  I think we could almost all agree that 1 TB blocks would be "too big" and that 1 KB blocks would be "too small".  Somewhere between those extremes is a number that is "just right", but that number probably changes over time.  Why are you so certain that the correct number today is 1 MB, and not 750 KB or 1.75 MB?

I had this same notion. 

If 20MB will 'break' bitcoin, then what about 19? what about 18? will 17MB fuck things up?  Will 15?, 14?, what about 12MB? 5MB? 1.1MB. Somewhere in there is a point which doesn't mess things up.  It is not clear to me why 20MB will cause disaster. 

The notion that small nodes will go away with 20MB just makes me want to do XT even more.  This is raging bullshit.  AntiXT people need to think up a better argument than that or they've surely lost their attempt to force everyone into BitStream and its stupid side chains plan.

[ammy009]

we need blockchain size increase but step by step ---

1. 2015 : 1 MB
2. 2016 : 2 MB
3. 2018 : 4 MB
4. 2020 : 6 MB
5. 2022 : 8 MB
....................
....................
& finally 20 MB. I think 20 MB is enough

[Scamalert]

I really had the impression that the 20Mb shit, XT or Asshole-client, call it what you want, was going to be an official client which you can download at bitcoin.org. Is it really some rouge project? how the hell can a rouge project get so much hype?

[DannyHamilton]

we need blockchain size increase but step by step ---

1. 2015 : 1 MB
2. 2016 : 2 MB
3. 2018 : 4 MB
4. 2020 : 6 MB
5. 2022 : 8 MB
....................
....................
& finally 20 MB. I think 20 MB is enough

What scientific analysis have you done to reach this conclusion?  Are you just pulling numbers out of your @$$ because you like the sound of them?  Do you really want to risk destroying the balance between incentive and cost on your "gut feel"?  How much do you care if your "guess" is correct?  If you're wrong and bitcoin is destroyed because of it, do you really care?

[alani123]

So Mr. Todd just added his comment on this:

FWIW this video is out of date in one respect: the off-chain transaction tech referred to by it has mostly been made obsolete by on-chain tx tech like hub-and-spoke payment channels and the Lightning network.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/39po7q/blocksize_youtube_animation_favoring_1mb_blocks/cs5cv1x

And there's maybe going to be a continuation/update of this video.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/39po7q/blocksize_youtube_animation_favoring_1mb_blocks/cs5hzfu

[tvbcof]

...
And there's maybe going to be a continuation/update of this video.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/39po7q/blocksize_youtube_animation_favoring_1mb_blocks/cs5hzfu

Msg to ~retep:  I'll make a contribution again if need be.  I don't use reddit because the 'tard ratio on Bitcointalk is already galling enough and reddit is fast becoming as slimy as Wikipedia and Snoops before it.

On the new vid, try to work in the fact that those of us who thought along these lines struggled for a way to tie subordinate chains (or more generally, 'stores of truth') to the Bitcoin blockchain all along (me since 2011) but certain ideas about how to do it are more recent.

IIRC, the debate around and push toward bloat was as fierce back when this vid was made a year and a half ago as it is now.  Scare stories about impending disaster were a similar part of the mix and they came from the same corners.  Somehow Mike and his clan can easily create super-node clusters to handle 'visa level' transaction rates or whatever, but they cannot see a possible way to deal with UTXO's cramping a memory cache.  Funny that.

[jeannemadrigal2]

I loled at that video, it is clearly fud.  It is pretty liberal with the facts, and outright lies in places.  I am thinking this video was funded by those devs who have a vested interest in the sidechains, and making a lot of money from keeping the block size low.

[tvbcof]

I loled at that video, it is clearly fud.  It is pretty liberal with the facts, and outright lies in places.  I am thinking this video was funded by those devs who have a vested interest in the sidechains, and making a lot of money from keeping the block size low.

Nice theory, but sidechains were not seriously talked about until about a year or so after the vid.

I'm not one of the devs, but the idea of scaling through subordinate chains which derive their value from a single primary chain was about the first thing which occurred to me since it was fairly obvious that a flooding network would not be especially practical if it were to remain a true peer-2-peer solution.  Not only is it kind of a no-brainer, but it opens the door for a variety of more specialized niche tuning, and some potential needs for a currency are mutually exclusive which makes a one-size-fits-all solution less desirable even if it were practical.

With a robust 2-way-peg (which is something I did not think of) a sidechain is a near perfect proxy for Bitcoin which doesn't bloat the infrastructure needs and doesn't impact the inflation/deflation characteristics.  Bitcoin as a backing or in native form is a sigle-point-of-failure which should be protected against all attacks.  If bloated and popularized it is susceptible to fungibility attacks through whitelisting and blacklisting which is something that certain people have advocated for a long time.  When used primary as a high-powered and highly distributed backing system it would be more difficult to attack successfully in this manner.

[Lauda]

What scientific analysis have you done to reach this conclusion?  Are you just pulling numbers out of your @$$ because you like the sound of them?  Do you really want to risk destroying the balance between incentive and cost on your "gut feel"?  How much do you care if your "guess" is correct?  If you're wrong and bitcoin is destroyed because of it, do you really care?

That is actually what I wanted to point out somewhere. Who gets to decide what is right and how?
I guess that is one of the problems. Everyone is trying to pursue their own agenda/way in regards to the problem even if that 'solution' has significant cons. Even though I'm in for gradual increase, I'm not so sure about the exact numbers.
Personally I think that 4 or 8 MB would be better to start rather than 20 MB.

[DannyHamilton]

Who gets to decide what is right and how?
I guess that is one of the problem.

Yes.  Consensus is difficult.  Nobody gets to "decide" for everybody else, and everybody gets to decide together.  That's great when everybody agrees, but when there are multiple competing ideas and there is no agreement then it all becomes a HUGE mess.  In the end, several people will put forth their own preferences in software.  Some of those may "catch on" and the system could fork into competing currencies.  Some may die as the developers come to realize that they don't have as much support for their idea as they thought they did.

I'd like to think that the concepts that have the best analysis and research behind them will be the most likely to succeed, but in the short run it will probably be the ideas that have the most persuasive personalities involved, and in the long run it's likely to be "survival of the fittest" with many random and poorly conceived ideas suffering painful and horrible deaths along the way.

[DannyHamilton]

It's funny how some sort of cult has been created about 1MB, as if Satoshi magically found the perfect number of the blocksize forever was 1MB.

Only among the uneducated and easily manipulated.  Those that take the time to learn about the details are aware that in Satoshi's original software the block size limit was 32 MB. It wasn't until 2010 that Satoshi decided that he'd temporarily add a 1 MB limit.

The only thing we know is we are on a dead end if we don't upgrade the blocksize, with our without Lightning Network type workarounds... so there.

You might think that you "know" that, but many people would disagree with you.

[Lauda]

Yes.  Consensus is difficult.  Nobody gets to "decide" for everybody else, and everybody gets to decide together.  That's great when everybody agrees, but when there are multiple competing ideas and there is no agreement then it all becomes a HUGE mess.  In the end, several people will put forth their own preferences in software.  Some of those may "catch on" and the system could fork into competing currencies.  Some may die as the developers come to realize that they don't have as much support for their idea as they thought they did.

I'd like to think that the concepts that have the best analysis and research behind them will be the most likely to succeed, but in the short run it will probably be the ideas that have the most persuasive personalities involved, and in the long run it's likely to be "survival of the fittest" with many random and poorly conceived ideas suffering painful and horrible deaths along the way.

Even when the increase in block size was first proposed (months back) it was a mess, but now it is much worse. If I recall correctly in a recent statement Gavin (video) was sitting next to Mike and he said that a lot of people have been telling him to take the lead on the matter. However I wonder who these "people" are, since nobody likes when things are being forced on them.
Disregarding whether I agree with his solution or not, I definitely disagree with the way that he is trying to solve things.

My question would be: What would be the best way to get out of the mess that we're currently in and make a decision, even if it isn't the right one?

[DannyHamilton]

Disregarding whether I agree with his solution or not, I definitely disagree with the way that he is trying to solve things.

Why do you disagree?  Is there any other way to do it?

There is nobody "in charge" that can make a decision for everybody.  There isn't any kind of "vote" that would satisfy everybody.

Bitcoin requires consensus, and in this situation consensus is impossible.  The only option remaining is for there to be multiple separate "consensus" each with their own fork of the blockchain.  Then some measure of chaos begins while the competing ideas play out in the real world and we see what happens.

With Gavin's current "way he is trying to solve things", the larger blocksize isn't being forced on most people.  There is an option available to anybody that wants it to support larger block sizes.  Once the miners (and merchants) exceed 90% on the matter the decision won't need to be made, effectively consensus will exist. If the miners never reach 90% on the matter, then everything stays the way it is today and others are free to try whatever solution they prefer.

My question would be: What would be the best way to get out of the mess that we're currently in and make a decision, even if it isn't the right one?

There is no way "out of the mess", by its very nature all protocol changing decisions in bitcoin will always be messy.  The only thing that can be done is to accept the messy nature of it, provide software that makes clear what is supported, and hold off on activating any forking changes until the system has arrived at near consensus on the matter.

The consensus requirement has always been (and always will be) one of bitcoin's biggest weaknesses.  It's a great thing for stability in design (making it nearly impossible for any single entity or group to force their own changes on the majority), but it makes advancement and improvement extremely difficult to accomplish.

[manselr]

Aren't both proposed solutions non scalable?
How long could we go with 1MB + LN solution without a hard fork (which is what is tried to avoid at all costs) vs Gavin's blocksize increase?
Do we just accept with 1MB + LN situation that fees will keep increasing indefinitely?