#Blocksize Survey

[flix]

Interesting summary of the often mentioned accusation against devs that oppose any block size increase:

The Blockstream Business Plan
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3gmkak/the_blockstream_business_plan/

tl;dr: Blockstream wants to choke transactions on the blockchain in order to spur adoption of sidechannels and the Lightning Network, where they will be perfectly situated to collect fees for providing that service.

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[Swordsoffreedom]

Voted for a less popular option since it's more complex but Adam Backs idea of sidechains as an extension of the Bitcoin infrastructure seems like the best long term solution to the problem as it addresses size issues and bandwidth capacity until the technology picks up, combined with a Pieter Wullies idea in the short term for incremental blocksize increases programmed into Bitcoin to ensure that Blocksize is Dynamic and adjusts relative to the capacity the network needs at any time, whether incremental increases can be set up this way would require a D@T discussion.
Else go back to Blockchain compression.

That said I can see Gavins idea of increasing the size to 8MB then implementing sidechains steadily over time to further enhance Bitcoin's capability and options as a viable idea as well but not an 8GB blockchain in the near future.

[RoadTrain]

Interesting summary of the often mentioned accusation against devs that oppose any block size increase:

The Blockstream Business Plan
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3gmkak/the_blockstream_business_plan/

tl;dr: Blockstream wants to choke transactions on the blockchain in order to spur adoption of sidechannels and the Lightning Network, where they will be perfectly situated to collect fees for providing that service.

What is sidechannels btw? Did he mean sidechains?

In fact, even the LN paper states that it needs bigger blocks to operate smoothly.

The OP is arguing that LN itself is centralized, so it's dishonest for Blockstream devs to argue against Bitcoin centralization. One question: what's better - to have a centralized system build on top of a decentralized one or a centralized system built on top of a centralized one? Also, these two kinds of centralization are probably very different, e.g. how costly is it to set up and operate a payment hub as compared to setting up and operating a mining farm of comparable characteristics (can we even compare them)?

Moreover, the OP downplays that Blockstream was created to develop sidechains (a completely different matter which he doesn't discuss at all) in the first place, and they became involved in the LN only very recently. Then he assumes they have a plan to monetize on the LN, but doesn't discuss what was their plan before the advent of the LN (did they plan to monetize of sidechains? How?). He's assuming that Blockstream investors want direct monetization, but that's not neccessarily true, e.g. investors can monetize by using their innovation in business.

This post might seem good at first glance, but if we dig deeper, it's full of baseless assumptions.

[Possum577]

Where can we get more background on the pros and cons of each option?

I'm not willing to vote until i have more information - can you point me (and I'm sure others) in the right direction to get more information?

Thanks.

[RoadTrain]

Where can we get more background on the pros and cons of each option?

I'm not willing to vote until i have more information - can you point me (and I'm sure others) in the right direction to get more information?

Thanks.

The most summaries I have seen so far are biased towards one of options. I'd suggest reading the bitcoin-dev mailing list (it's a link to page two, there are some relevant discussions), it might be a long read, but it can give you a better idea of what's going on.

[Lauda]

There are two points:
1) Yes, we are assuming no one does 51% attack, but this assumption is based on economics and game theory (e.g. that BTC becomes worthless and hurts miners so it's not rational). Though it doesn't mean there can't be a hostile actor who's dedicated to bring Bitcoin down, and it's an inherent flaw.
-snip-

Exactly. However, recently we've learned that economics and game theory aren't accountable as there are hostile people (i.e. transaction spam attacks).

Where can we get more background on the pros and cons of each option?
-snip-

Well if you read the thread and you would know a few. Basically Gavin's proposal is risky mainly because of China and their bandwidth outside of the country. If we increase the blocks too much then it will cause even more centralization as miners outside of China will be generating more orphans. I think that a 2 or 4 MB compromise wouldn't cause such a issue.
There are also cons to sidechains. Basically that's completely unexplored territory, something that has never been done before. Sidechains are going to add a lot of unnecessary complexity for their benefits. It's hard to teach people already how to use Bitcoin, not to mention how harder it is going to be to explain sidechains and two way peg. Another factor is that we don't know when it is going to be fully operational. Even if we use sidechains or the LN right now, eventually 1 MB blocks will not be enough. I certainly would not want to be having the same discussion in 10-15 years.

Tl;dr: There can't be an agreement because nobody is willing to compromise. There are a ton of topics on here and reddit for you to read about the debate.

[RoadTrain]

There are two points:
1) Yes, we are assuming no one does 51% attack, but this assumption is based on economics and game theory (e.g. that BTC becomes worthless and hurts miners so it's not rational). Though it doesn't mean there can't be a hostile actor who's dedicated to bring Bitcoin down, and it's an inherent flaw.
-snip-

Exactly. However, recently we've learned that economics and game theory aren't accountable as there are hostile people (i.e. transaction spam attacks).

Well, I think that they are still accountable as the hostile actor still needs money to execute an attack, and our job is to make this attack as expensive as possible. That's why e.g. JorgeStolfi has argued for bigger blocks - to make a spam attack more expensive thus less likely. It might not apply only if actors are completely irrational, I guess.

[RoadTrain]

Jorge Timon has posted a summary of concers raleted to raising blocksize limit and not raising it.

[iCEBREAKER]

No change, and/or Dr. Back's soft fork.  Give extension blocks (Layer 1.5) a chance before resorting to bloating-as-scaling desperation.

Jorge Timon has posted a summary of concers related to raising blocksize limit

That summary sucks.  We can do much better:

I'm not sure if you are aware of the centralization pressure that occurs when miners are allowed to pick their own block sizes. Miners have incentives to encourage a very high orphan rate, if the orphan rate is properly targeted. Mining is a 0-sum game, which means that miners have incentive to hurt eachother. (less competition means lower difficulty and more blocks for you).

The ideal scenario for a miner is that the block they produce immediately hits a large portion of the hash power (at least 51%, but I'm not sure what the optimal percentage is), and then never hits the remaining hashpower at all. That remaining hashpower will have to find 2 blocks before the rest of the hashpower finds a single block - this will be detrimental to the profits of the minority hashpower, significantly so.

Large blocks provide a way to achieve this to some effect for bigger miners....

...This attack can be levied by a single large miner with no collusion. Simply by prioritizing the other large miners, and refusing to send the block to the low-bandwidth minority, a big miner can create blocks large enough to heavily impact the orphan rate of smaller miners without significantly affecting their own orphan rate.

This is very bad. The block size limit is important to stop this class of attack.

The vast majority of research demonstrates that blocksize does matter, blocksize caps are required to secure the network, and large blocks are a centralizing pressure.

Here’s a short list of what has been published so far:

1) No blocksize cap and no minimum fee leads to catastrophic breakage as miners chase marginal 0 fees:

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2400519

It’s important to note that mandatory minimum fees could simply be rebated out-of-band, which would lead to the same problems.

2) a) Large mining pools make strategies other than honest mining more profitable:

    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcArXiv.pdf

2) b) In the presence of latency, some alternative selfish strategy exists that is more profitable at any mining pool size. The larger the latency, the greater the selfish mining benefit:

    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.06183v1.pdf

3) Mining simulations run by Pieter Wuille shows that well-connected peers making a majority of the hashing power have an advantage over less-connected ones, earning more profits per hash. Larger blocks even further favor these well-connected peers. This gets even worse as we shift from block subsidy to fee based reward :

    http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg08161.html

4) Other point(s):

If there is no blocksize cap, a miner should simply snipe the fees from the latest block and try to stale that block by mining their own replacement. You get all the fees plus any more from new transactions. Full blocks gives less reward for doing so, since you have to choose which transactions to include. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fpuld/a_transaction_fee_market_exists_without_a_block/ctqxkq6

[tadakaluri]

The long debate over the bitcoin block size is over. The updates being done to the bitcoin code have been published by the core developer Gavin Andresen on GitHub. The block size will change from 1MB to 8MB, with further doubling every two years – so in 2018, it will reach 16 MB, then 32MB in 2020 and so on.

2016: 8 MB
2018: 16 MB
2020: 32 MB
2022: 64 MB
2024: 128 MB
2026: 256MB
2028: 512 MB
2030: 1024 MB
2032: 2048 MB
2034: 4096 MB

Personally I believe that this well overestimating the rate internet connection-speeds and hard-disk space will grow. Just look at ADSL or even cable for instance.

4096mb per 10minutes in a year will grow to: 205TB per year worth of storage.

I wonder if they took in account the laws of physics in this equation. It is not impossible but who can and will pay for such an investment just to be a unpaid bitcoin client (full node).

[RoadTrain]

The long debate over the bitcoin block size is over.

No, it's not.

The updates being done to the bitcoin code have been published by the core developer Gavin Andresen on GitHub.

Who cares?

The block size will change from 1MB to 8MB, with further doubling every two years – so in 2018, it will reach 16 MB, then 32MB in 2020 and so on.

In case of doubling, Bitcoin is doomed.

I'd personally favor an altered sipa's approach, which starts in 2016 instead of 2017 and maybe has a bit higher base limit (e.g. 2Mb). His suggestion of 17% yearly increase looks conservative enough to try to avoid any downsides while providing enough time to develop the LN.

[Swordsoffreedom]

The long debate over the bitcoin block size is over. The updates being done to the bitcoin code have been published by the core developer Gavin Andresen on GitHub. The block size will change from 1MB to 8MB, with further doubling every two years – so in 2018, it will reach 16 MB, then 32MB in 2020 and so on.

2016: 8 MB
2018: 16 MB
2020: 32 MB
2022: 64 MB
2024: 128 MB
2026: 256MB
2028: 512 MB
2030: 1024 MB
2032: 2048 MB
2034: 4096 MB

Personally I believe that this well overestimating the rate internet connection-speeds and hard-disk space will grow. Just look at ADSL or even cable for instance.

4096mb per 10minutes in a year will grow to: 205TB per year worth of storage.

I wonder if they took in account the laws of physics in this equation. It is not impossible but who can and will pay for such an investment just to be a unpaid bitcoin client (full node).

The part that bugs me about that schedule of growth is that it may work in the West especially if the internet of things picks up and bandwidth becomes even more valuable but it surely will not be anywhere near as fast elsewhere it causes a huge US centered node base for Bitcoin with Japan in Asia and any opportunities for catching up bandwidth wise is unlikely with 2 year interval increases.

A global increase rate would probably be 1/3rd of that over the same duration

2016: 8 MB --> 2.7 MB
2018: 16 MB --> 5.3 MB
2020: 32 MB --> 10.6 MB
2022: 64 MB --> 21.3 MB
2024: 128 MB --> 42.6 MB
2026: 256MB --> 85.3 MB
2028: 512 MB --> 170.7 MB
2030: 1024 MB --> 341.3 MB
2032: 2048 MB --> 682.7 MB
2034: 4096 MB --> 1365.3 MB --> In 2033 Global speeds will finally reach the 1GB level

At least that's how I see it who will want to run a full node without Proof Of Stake makes me wonder if an incentive would have made sense retroactively as it does seem like a weakness.

[Lauda]

The long debate over the bitcoin block size is over. The updates being done to the bitcoin code have been published by the core developer Gavin Andresen on GitHub.
-snip-

The debate is not over. Gavin has published that code for Bitcoin XT which has no relationship with Bitcoin Core. This means that your post is irrelevant and contains useless information.
Basically Gavin has made the proposed changes and implemented them into Bitcoin XT. However, people related to Bitcoin Core do not agree with him.

If you factor in the network problems related to centralization and China, 16 MB blocks by 2018 would be catastrophic. It would be much worse every 2 years.

-snip-
I'd personally favor an altered sipa's approach, which starts in 2016 instead of 2017 and maybe has a bit higher base limit (e.g. 2Mb). His suggestion of 17% yearly increase looks conservative enough to try to avoid any downsides while providing enough time to develop the LN.

Well the problem is that people are not willing to compromise. A increase in 2016 to 2 MB (as Jeff suggested) and a 17% yearly increase would be a decent compromise. We need to buy more time without risking anything.

[boopy265420]

I gave vote for Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik's suggestions.It seems more logical and applicable according to my very limited knowledge and information.It is very hard to understand what exactly these changes are for and their long term consequences.We give vote on base of big lines.

[iCEBREAKER]

Another reason to do the fork soon, is that after the next reward halving (est.2017) it will be much harder to convince miners to accept low tx fees. Right now fees are a tiny part of their income compared to the 25BTC reward... in effect all BTC holders are currently paying miners via inflation. As new money creation declines, fees will have to pay for the network.

...but it is better for everyone if fees become a major source of income for miners at 50 million users and 1M daily txs than earlier. Scale must come first.

Social media companies (like Twitter and Facebook) that delayed revenue generation until they reached massive scale and network effects are a good example.

We have no idea what the price of Bitcoin (in fiat/gold/energy) will be in 2017, so who knows what part of miners' income will come from tx fees then?

Scale cannot come before security, which includes decentralization.

And you cannot scale by simply accommodating 8MB of mostly-spam in every block.  Scaling entails doing more with less, not more of the same.  You scale by adding layers, not by stuffing everything into a bloated Layer 1.

TWTR and FB are terrible examples.  Bitcoin is fintech, which emphasizes high availability and 100% security.  Nobody loses their life savings (or defection fund) if some daft corporation's vapid social media site is down for a week or hacked.

[iCEBREAKER]

Gavin:

I understand you want to build an extremely decentralized system, where
.

I think it is more interesting to build a system that works for hundreds of
millions of people, with no central point of control and the opportunity
for ANYBODY to participate at any level. Permission-less innovation is what
I find interesting.

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/009902.html

I wish Gavin and Hearn good luck with their unicorn project.

But if they try to change Bitcoin's social contract (everybody participating trusts nothing except the genesis block hash), in order to capture and repurpose Bitcoin as the engine of their utopian altcoin, both projects may be ruined.

[kelsey]

bitcoin reminds me of one of those anti establishment rockbands 

now this is the $hit that happens when all the corporate dogs notice the $$$$$ possible from said rockband 

[Adrian-x]

thanks for the survey and condensed summary.

[Adrian-x]

Gavin:

I understand you want to build an extremely decentralized system, where
.

I think it is more interesting to build a system that works for hundreds of
millions of people, with no central point of control and the opportunity
for ANYBODY to participate at any level. Permission-less innovation is what
I find interesting.

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/009902.html

I wish Gavin and Hearn good luck with their unicorn project.

But if they try to change Bitcoin's social contract (everybody participating trusts nothing except the genesis block hash), in order to capture and repurpose Bitcoin as the engine of their utopian altcoin, both projects may be ruined.

Keep dreaming :-) its not a unicorn project its call Satoshhi's Bitcoin.  Hearn and Gavin have both toyed with unpopular or potentially devastating ideas, but unlike Gmax and Back they have never tried to implement them.

We all learn as we go, I'll only judge what they have done or are to do, and right now BIP 101 makes is the most appropriate solution to keep the original intent of Bitcoin intact.

[GreenStox]

No increase until the block doesnt reach 70% fullness, its no reason to increase it until we have low block size.

I`d prefer the 8mb one if they would do it, but i think its not needed.

But anyway its not us who decide but the miners... Talking about decentralization... Bitcoin is a fucking oligarchy!