Thanks to people who support 1-2 MB blocks - great idea u fools...

[chek2fire]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgjrS-BPWDQ&feature=youtu.be&t=12667

jgarzik suggests in his talk that Fidelity investment company has a beta bitcoin project which it is cannot turn on, because it would "max out" bitcoin capacity and future capacity growth is unknown

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21919/decentralist-perspective-bitcoin-might-need-small-blocks/

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[coalitionfor8mb]

I am glad that we are finally past "it is just downloading 8MB every 10 minutes, morons".

Every reasonable Bitcoiner wants the benefits of bigger blocks, but not at the expense of not being able to run a full node at home.

BTW, it currently costs $60 a month to run a full node on a dedicated Microsoft Azure VM. This includes virtual hardware (includes 1 dedicated CPU core) and bandwidth, which is around 600GB a month (mostly outgoing). It is not quite "free" anymore.

On the other hand, if running a full node (at full capacity) at home presents itself as inconvenient even today (I, for example, have more frequent freeze-ups during skype conversations while running a node, so I temporarily turn it off) and at the same time there is a demand for a Bitcoin-like system on a level one step higher than the one we are currently at (home-based network -> business-to-business network), then Bitcoin might be interested in taking that direction as a front-runner of the whole ecosystem, while the home-based niche (that it used to cover) will be filled by the next contender (Litecoin, for example).

However, a precedent like this might create an incentive for many other crypto-currencies to compete for higher bandwidth-levels, while the home-based layer will never be properly served, though that seems unlikely.

The main question here, is whether the big players (all across the planet) are capable of agreeing on acceptable consensus rules without tearing the whole network apart into regional and national sub-domains. My understanding was that the mass of the home-based demographic was supposed to prevent that, but who knows...

[johnyj]

IMO, supply/demand curve in a free market exists only on books of economy schools, it never really happens in reality because the reality is magnitudes complex than this too simplified model.

Are you saying that the Laws of Supply and Demand are not useful?

Supply and demand theory is easy for economy students to understand. But humans are all complex, using a simple formula to describe all the different type of people's behavior without considering their personality and influence is just too simple that the model only works at academic level. Economy is not science but politics. A policy maker will never make an economy policy that is against his own interest/benefit

[hodedowe]

Again, this video is just BitcoinXT in different clothes. The problem is easily solved by the very thing that freaks the fat guy in the video out - fees. You pay a higher fee (3 cents?) you get your transaction processed faster. You pay no fee you might have to wait 30 minutes to 3 hours.

For instance, if I'm sending 0.4btc to my mother in the deepest darkest jungles of africa I don't care if it takes 3 hours to confirm. I send with no fee and volia. I'm happy. She gets her coins. She pays the local warlord 0.1 btc for security.

Now, say I'm sitting at a register and I need to have a fast transaction. I pay 0.02 btc for a sandwich. The merchant takes my 0.02 btc, allows 3 cents USD for the fee so he knows he's paid almost immediately, and I leave with a full belly.

You guys keep thinking that 1 btc should equal $300 forever, but that's ridiculous. The currency will be worth more due to inflation. And as fees rise you'll pay $0.50 USD for an ultra fast transaction, but it will never be more than the MARKET can bear. It's the way markets work.


Quit monkeying with the system and crying doom and gloom. Bitcoin is great. Use it and enjoy yourself.

Have none of you guys studied fiat currency? You're setting a very bad precedent and making bitcoin seem unstable, killing the likelyhood of more adoption by the masses.

Edit: Going slowly through the video segment this guy seems to think that charity and goodwill will carry the mining community, but that's insane. Would you work all day for free hoping someone would slip a nickle your way?

[meono]

IMO, supply/demand curve in a free market exists only on books of economy schools, it never really happens in reality because the reality is magnitudes complex than this too simplified model.

Are you saying that the Laws of Supply and Demand are not useful?

Supply and demand theory is easy for economy students to understand. But humans are all complex, using a simple formula to describe all the different type of people's behavior without considering their personality and influence is just too simple that the model only works at academic level. Economy is not science but politics. A policy maker will never make an economy policy that is against his own interest/benefit

wow so much fud coming out of your ass.....

You should write a book about this fud, ... genius AT work

[adamstgBit]

its not a question of supply and demand, if miners know other miners will orphan his block if it take >a few seconds to validate then no reward is worth getting your block orphan cuz you don't get a reward if your block is orphaned.

i guess miners have to come up with some guide lines as to what constitutes a valid block, or more to the point what constitutes an invalid block.

Partly true, if all the miners have an agreement that refuse to relay a block that takes bigger than a few seconds to validate. However, some of the super nodes might have 10 times more capacity that can verify it 10 times faster. And F2pool does not need other miners to relay his blocks, he just need to mine continuously two blocks in a row to write his block permanently into the blockchain, it happens quite often https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC

F2pool needs to operate in a "nice" way or his users will go mine at another pool.  longest chain wins != after 2 blocks it's a done deal. and yes "time" isn't the best way to decide, there is probably a simple way to say if the TX is XXX.XX complex its invalid. there no reason a TX would need 50K inputs, right now miners agree on simple stuff like " if the inputs are already spent, its not valid to spend it again "
they need to expand their rule book a little that's all.

[LiteCoinGuy]

However, with greater adoption of Bitcoin, there is a long-term secular pressure to increase the block size. Even for a conservative application of Bitcoin in global settlements, with low transaction volume per person per year, the transaction capacity needs to be raised well above the upper limits of most block size proposals

This means larger blocks are inevitable. Unfortunately, this means that data-center mining and full nodes may be inevitable too depending on hardware and network infrastructure performance over time. The centralization risk depends on the adoption curve, the degree that layer 2 networks remove transactions off-chain, and number of on-chain transactions that are attempted despite the presence of layer 2 systems.

Failing to raise the transaction capacity centralizes the number of actors with access to the blockchain, recreating a financial system that presently exists. Ironically, while the network may be able to run on anyone’s computer, none of the participants may be able to afford to use it. This scenario describes the left side of the Bitcoin failure bathtub.

https://medium.com/@OB1Company/scaling-bitcoin-9366988972b6

[tl121]

I'm more interested in this

30 seconds to verify a transaction on one node! And to relay that block to all nodes you need at least 4-5 hop, that adds up to 2-3 minutes, I believe that we are going to see some serious problem when we reach the 2MB block size limit (If it ever get that large)

Actually I'm getting more cautious after more evidence showing that the blockchain does not scale at current technology, not even to 2MB if you want to have some safety margin

If the slide is correct and Core actually takes O(N^2) to verify a block then the software has a serious performance bug.  There is no excuse for this.  If this is true it calls into question the competence and credibility of the core developers.  I would have expected better from "experts" with PhD degrees in Computer Science who are supposed to be operating in the real world of product development.

It would be interesting to hear what the Core developers have to say about this issue. (And other developers who are working on alternate code bases.)

 (My apologies if this report proves false.)

This is a nature result of how bitcoin works. For validation of each transaction, you must validate all of its unspent output all the way down to its root, when the unspent output are all dust coming from thousands of other dusts and dusts several layers down, the time to validate the transaction rises exponentially

Just try to import a private key from coinwallet give out and see how long it takes on your machine to get an idea why 1MB block can even be deadly sometimes
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1175321.msg12390644#msg12390644

Each transaction has to be evaluated only once to see if all of its inputs are valid. The previous work of tracing back each input to its source in some coinbase transaction was done when previous blocks were verified by the node and there is no need to redo this work. 
If there are two transactions going into the same block where one spends the outputs of the other then this will require sorting the transactions (via a topological sort), so that one transaction can be processed at a time and the proper accounting of the UTXO set be performed (remove and add).
Finally, the processing of each transaction will have to verify that each of its inputs is used only once in the transaction. This can be done together with verifying the presence of each input if an efficient data structure is used.  With appropriate use of hashing there will probably not be the need for any sorting operations and performance can be O(N), at least with a very high probability.  (If random access memory is limited, the worst case here requires sorting and this makes the overall operation order n log n, not order n^2 assuming competent design and programming.)

[coalitionfor8mb]

A few more thoughts on the matter...

Internet has multiple levels of bandwidth (from home-based ADSL copper lines to fiber-optics under the ocean). The idea of Bitcoin (as a decentralized consensus system with open-source protocol rules) can therefore exist on any such level, but arguably only one at a time!

As systems like these cannot be established centrally and instead emerge and grow slowly as grass roots movements, they cannot begin to occupy a higher level of bandwidth before saturating the previous one. In principle, however, nothing should stop the idea to keep propagating itself onto the higher and higher levels (with different degrees of decentralization though).

As recent discussions show, Bitcoin seems to have saturated the level of home-based internet infrastructure and is being asked the question: "move up or stay?". That's a tough one to answer, because competitors are nowhere close and there is no one to ask an advice from. It's an uncharted territory.

What if consensus rules can be protected not by sheer quantity of full nodes but rather by a better quality of fewer ones (that's what evolutionary stage transition means!)? What if we can bake the rules into Bitcoin's brand itself, with a pre-defined (4-year) schedule to revise and adjust them? We can then have multiple large full nodes in the system (like various block explorers today) which would provide a web interface for studying and inspecting every aspect of the blockchain without the necessity to run it at home. Any deviation from the consensus will be quickly noticed and the public will be alerted about the nodes and services that decided to deviate from it. The system would still remain perfectly transparent.

Now, if Bitcoin decides to increase its block size cap (and it seems like many in the community want to do it in one way or another), I still wouldn't aim higher than 8MB (or 2-4-8 if that fits better) just to make sure that transition onto the next level is smooth and clean (even if that means that home-based nodes will eventually be pushed out). This approach still requires active (big) players to regularly and consistently agree on the protocol rules and have enough patience and respect for each other to freeze and bake those rules into Bitcoin's brand for at least a period of 4 years (after which they will be revised again).

If Bitcoin decides to stay (at home), it will allow competitors to catch up (bandwidth-wise) and eventually one of them will move forward.

[VeritasSapere]

A few more thoughts on the matter...

Internet has multiple levels of bandwidth (from home-based ADSL copper lines to fiber-optics under the ocean). The idea of Bitcoin (as a decentralized consensus system with open-source protocol rules) can therefore exist on any such level, but arguably only one at a time!

As systems like these cannot be established centrally and instead emerge and grow slowly as grass roots movements, they cannot begin to occupy a higher level of bandwidth before saturating the previous one. In principle, however, nothing should stop the idea to keep propagating itself onto the higher and higher levels (with different degrees of decentralization though).

As recent discussions show, Bitcoin seems to have saturated the level of home-based internet infrastructure and is being asked the question: "move up or stay?". That's a tough one to answer, because competitors are nowhere close and there is no one to ask an advise from. It's an uncharted territory.

What if consensus rules can be protected by means other than a sheer quantity of full nodes? What if we can bake them into Bitcoin's brand itself, with a pre-defined (4-year) schedule to revise and adjust them? We can then have multiple large full nodes in the system (like various block explorers today) which would provide a web interface for studying and inspecting every aspect of the blockchain without the necessity to run it at home. Any deviation from the consensus will be quickly noticed and the public will be alerted about the nodes and services that decided to deviate from it. The system would still remain perfectly transparent.

Now, if Bitcoin decides to increase its block size cap (and it seems like many in the community want to do it in one way or another), I still wouldn't aim higher than 8MB (or 2-4-8 if that fits better) just to make sure that transition onto the next level is smooth and clean (even if that means that home-based nodes will eventually be pushed out). This approach still requires active (big) players to regularly and consistently agree on the protocol rules and have enough patience and respect for each other to freeze and bake those rules into Bitcoin's brand for at least a period of 4 years (after which they will be revised again).

If Bitcoin decides to stay (at home), it will allow competitors to catch up (bandwidth-wise) and eventually one of them will move forward.

Eight megabyte blocks for example would not effect most people running full nodes. Bandwidth wise this is not an issue for most people, since block propagation is only more critical for miners, and since home miners connect to pools and do not even run their own full nodes for mining this again does not effect them. Therefore eight megabyte blocks does not represent a departure from home-based internet infrastructure.

[brg444]

A few more thoughts on the matter...

Internet has multiple levels of bandwidth (from home-based ADSL copper lines to fiber-optics under the ocean). The idea of Bitcoin (as a decentralized consensus system with open-source protocol rules) can therefore exist on any such level, but arguably only one at a time!

As systems like these cannot be established centrally and instead emerge and grow slowly as grass roots movements, they cannot begin to occupy a higher level of bandwidth before saturating the previous one. In principle, however, nothing should stop the idea to keep propagating itself onto the higher and higher levels (with different degrees of decentralization though).

As recent discussions show, Bitcoin seems to have saturated the level of home-based internet infrastructure and is being asked the question: "move up or stay?". That's a tough one to answer, because competitors are nowhere close and there is no one to ask an advise from. It's an uncharted territory.

What if consensus rules can be protected by means other than a sheer quantity of full nodes? What if we can bake them into Bitcoin's brand itself, with a pre-defined (4-year) schedule to revise and adjust them? We can then have multiple large full nodes in the system (like various block explorers today) which would provide a web interface for studying and inspecting every aspect of the blockchain without the necessity to run it at home. Any deviation from the consensus will be quickly noticed and the public will be alerted about the nodes and services that decided to deviate from it. The system would still remain perfectly transparent.

Now, if Bitcoin decides to increase its block size cap (and it seems like many in the community want to do it in one way or another), I still wouldn't aim higher than 8MB (or 2-4-8 if that fits better) just to make sure that transition onto the next level is smooth and clean (even if that means that home-based nodes will eventually be pushed out). This approach still requires active (big) players to regularly and consistently agree on the protocol rules and have enough patience and respect for each other to freeze and bake those rules into Bitcoin's brand for at least a period of 4 years (after which they will be revised again).

If Bitcoin decides to stay (at home), it will allow competitors to catch up (bandwidth-wise) and eventually one of them will move forward.

Such "fraud proofs" do not exist right now. You're asking us to trust corporations with the maintenance of the network!? You know a "block explorer" can be cheated right? Remember when Blockchain.info's block explorer showed that Satoshi had spent his bitcoins?

[iCEBREAKER]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgjrS-BPWDQ&feature=youtu.be&t=12667

jgarzik suggests in his talk that Fidelity investment company has a beta bitcoin project which it is cannot turn on, because it would "max out" bitcoin capacity and future capacity growth is unknown

If they have such high throughput needs, why use bitcoin in the first place and not create their own altcoin?

They could have it merge-mined or secured by regular checkpoints stored in the BTC blockchain instead, using BTC just for security rather than using it as a storage network.

Basic question being why should a common shared blockchain become the one every single company with massive upscaling plans needs to be in?

For full scale, blocks would need to be in the GB range, today, and tens of GB with tech growth in the future, which would completely change the nature of bitcoin.

Fidelity doesn't need to create their own altcoin.  That's not their core competence.  VIA and Clearinghouse were created for such use cases.

As for LiteCoinGuy jgarzik, he needs to understand that Bitcoin, being Sovereign, does not adjust itself to fit the quarterly ratfucking preferences of TBTF petro-fiat hoarding dinosaurs like Fidelity.  Rather, it is those dinosaurs that will adapt to Bitcoin, or perish in the next mass extinction.

[brg444]

A few more thoughts on the matter...

Internet has multiple levels of bandwidth (from home-based ADSL copper lines to fiber-optics under the ocean). The idea of Bitcoin (as a decentralized consensus system with open-source protocol rules) can therefore exist on any such level, but arguably only one at a time!

As systems like these cannot be established centrally and instead emerge and grow slowly as grass roots movements, they cannot begin to occupy a higher level of bandwidth before saturating the previous one. In principle, however, nothing should stop the idea to keep propagating itself onto the higher and higher levels (with different degrees of decentralization though).

As recent discussions show, Bitcoin seems to have saturated the level of home-based internet infrastructure and is being asked the question: "move up or stay?". That's a tough one to answer, because competitors are nowhere close and there is no one to ask an advise from. It's an uncharted territory.

What if consensus rules can be protected by means other than a sheer quantity of full nodes? What if we can bake them into Bitcoin's brand itself, with a pre-defined (4-year) schedule to revise and adjust them? We can then have multiple large full nodes in the system (like various block explorers today) which would provide a web interface for studying and inspecting every aspect of the blockchain without the necessity to run it at home. Any deviation from the consensus will be quickly noticed and the public will be alerted about the nodes and services that decided to deviate from it. The system would still remain perfectly transparent.

Now, if Bitcoin decides to increase its block size cap (and it seems like many in the community want to do it in one way or another), I still wouldn't aim higher than 8MB (or 2-4-8 if that fits better) just to make sure that transition onto the next level is smooth and clean (even if that means that home-based nodes will eventually be pushed out). This approach still requires active (big) players to regularly and consistently agree on the protocol rules and have enough patience and respect for each other to freeze and bake those rules into Bitcoin's brand for at least a period of 4 years (after which they will be revised again).

If Bitcoin decides to stay (at home), it will allow competitors to catch up (bandwidth-wise) and eventually one of them will move forward.

Eight megabyte blocks for example would not effect most people running full nodes. Bandwidth wise this is not an issue for most people, since block propagation is only critical for miners, and since home miners connect to pools and do not even run their own full node for mining this again does not effect them. Therefore eight megabyte blocks does not represent a departure from home-based internet infrastructure.

We have posters here from China who's full node can barely keep up under 1 MB limit.

[iCEBREAKER]

eight megabyte blocks does not represent a departure from home-based internet infrastructure.

We have posters here from China Florida who's full node can barely keep up under 1 MB limit.

Fixed it for ya.

[VeritasSapere]

eight megabyte blocks does not represent a departure from home-based internet infrastructure.

We have posters here from China Florida who's full node can barely keep up under 1 MB limit.

Fixed it for ya.

Well I have an average connection for Europe and i could easily support two gigabyte blocks from home, eight megabyte blocks would not be a problem at all. This person in Florida needs to either get a new internet provider or update his client by the sounds of it. lol

I agree that we should scale the blocksize according to the technical limitations that exist today. However it would not make sense to use the worst possible examples as our baseline. There will always be some people that can not run a full node because of bandwidth, even today. We should consider the bandwidth limitation for the majority of people, not just the few that have terrible connections. The Chinese miners have also clearly stated that they can handle eight megabyte blocks, and it is the pools that are most effected by block propagation after all.

[Chris_Sabian]

However, with greater adoption of Bitcoin, there is a long-term secular pressure to increase the block size. Even for a conservative application of Bitcoin in global settlements, with low transaction volume per person per year, the transaction capacity needs to be raised well above the upper limits of most block size proposals

This means larger blocks are inevitable. Unfortunately, this means that data-center mining and full nodes may be inevitable too depending on hardware and network infrastructure performance over time. The centralization risk depends on the adoption curve, the degree that layer 2 networks remove transactions off-chain, and number of on-chain transactions that are attempted despite the presence of layer 2 systems.

Failing to raise the transaction capacity centralizes the number of actors with access to the blockchain, recreating a financial system that presently exists. Ironically, while the network may be able to run on anyone’s computer, none of the participants may be able to afford to use it. This scenario describes the left side of the Bitcoin failure bathtub.

https://medium.com/@OB1Company/scaling-bitcoin-9366988972b6

How long would it take to transmit a 10mb block across the network?  It can't be more than a few seconds.  Besides, this debate about block size should be settled now.  Sooner is better than later.

[brg444]

Well I have an average connection for Europe and i could easily support two gigabyte blocks from home, eight megabyte blocks would not be a problem at all.

How long would it take to transmit a 10mb block across the network?  It can't be more than a few seconds.  Besides, this debate about block size should be settled now.  Sooner is better than later.

No, just no. If you really believe so it shows how very little you understand how Bitcoin works.

Well-known cryptographer and digital currency veteran Nick Szabo explained:

So a 1MB block takes vastly more resources than a 1MB web page, for example, because it has to be transmitted, processed and stored with such high redundancy for Bitcoin to achieve its automated integrity.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21919/decentralist-perspective-bitcoin-might-need-small-blocks/

[coalitionfor8mb]

...
What if consensus rules can be protected by means other than a sheer quantity of full nodes? What if we can bake them into Bitcoin's brand itself, with a pre-defined (4-year) schedule to revise and adjust them? We can then have multiple large full nodes in the system (like various block explorers today) which would provide a web interface for studying and inspecting every aspect of the blockchain without the necessity to run it at home. Any deviation from the consensus will be quickly noticed and the public will be alerted about the nodes and services that decided to deviate from it. The system would still remain perfectly transparent.
...

Such "fraud proofs" do not exist right now. You're asking us to trust corporations with the maintenance of the network!? You know a "block explorer" can be cheated right? Remember when Blockchain.info's block explorer showed that Satoshi had spent his bitcoins?

I agree, that it's somewhat less secure and would require some trust, but still if the rules are fairly small and simple, only one honest player in the ecosystem would be enough to prevent any potential conspiracy to deviate from the established consensus.

That, of course, implies that public still owns private keys from their coins and responsibly chooses full node servers (which comply with the rules) to transact in the network.

Well I have an average connection for Europe and i could easily support two gigabyte blocks from home, eight megabyte blocks would not be a problem at all. This person in Florida needs to either get a new internet provider or update his client by the sounds of it. lol

I agree that we should scale the blocksize according to the technical limitations that exist today. However it would not make sense to use the worst possible examples as our baseline. There will always be some people that can not run a full node because of bandwidth, even today. We should consider the bandwidth limitation for the majority of people, not just the few that have terrible connections. The Chinese miners have also clearly stated that they can handle eight megabyte blocks, and it is the pools that are most effected by block propagation after all.

How long would it take to transmit a 10mb block across the network?  It can't be more than a few seconds.  Besides, this debate about block size should be settled now.  Sooner is better than later.

As discussions on previous pages indicated, linear increase in block size may cause the effective bandwidth in the network to grow exponentially due to peers sending the same data to each other many times. So it's not 1MB per every 10 minutes, the actual bandwidth is much higher.

[Chris_Sabian]

Well I have an average connection for Europe and i could easily support two gigabyte blocks from home, eight megabyte blocks would not be a problem at all.

How long would it take to transmit a 10mb block across the network?  It can't be more than a few seconds.  Besides, this debate about block size should be settled now.  Sooner is better than later.

No, just no. If you really believe so it shows how very little you understand how Bitcoin works.

Well-known cryptographer and digital currency veteran Nick Szabo explained:

So a 1MB block takes vastly more resources than a 1MB web page, for example, because it has to be transmitted, processed and stored with such high redundancy for Bitcoin to achieve its automated integrity.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21919/decentralist-perspective-bitcoin-might-need-small-blocks/

How then would you expand bitcoin to have more transactions per block?  If there is not room for growth, then bitcoin will die.  Simple as that.

[thejaytiesto]

Again, this video is just BitcoinXT in different clothes. The problem is easily solved by the very thing that freaks the fat guy in the video out - fees. You pay a higher fee (3 cents?) you get your transaction processed faster. You pay no fee you might have to wait 30 minutes to 3 hours.

For instance, if I'm sending 0.4btc to my mother in the deepest darkest jungles of africa I don't care if it takes 3 hours to confirm. I send with no fee and volia. I'm happy. She gets her coins. She pays the local warlord 0.1 btc for security.

Now, say I'm sitting at a register and I need to have a fast transaction. I pay 0.02 btc for a sandwich. The merchant takes my 0.02 btc, allows 3 cents USD for the fee so he knows he's paid almost immediately, and I leave with a full belly.

You guys keep thinking that 1 btc should equal $300 forever, but that's ridiculous. The currency will be worth more due to inflation. And as fees rise you'll pay $0.50 USD for an ultra fast transaction, but it will never be more than the MARKET can bear. It's the way markets work.


Quit monkeying with the system and crying doom and gloom. Bitcoin is great. Use it and enjoy yourself.

Have none of you guys studied fiat currency? You're setting a very bad precedent and making bitcoin seem unstable, killing the likelyhood of more adoption by the masses.

Edit: Going slowly through the video segment this guy seems to think that charity and goodwill will carry the mining community, but that's insane. Would you work all day for free hoping someone would slip a nickle your way?

This. Let a fee market develop is the way to go vs ruining decentralized nodes. If you want a better service pay more for it. It's still free goddammit, if you want to do it for free then wait your ass until the transaction gets confirmed or pay a smaller fee if anything.
Bitcoin will eventually be valuable as hell because it only gets more scarce with time. No one is going to keep the mining process going without incentives so the fee market is the way to solve this.