Deleted

[kingcolex]

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[Blawpaw]

There are a lot of solutions. And many of them don't necessarily need to do big changes in the code. I find Sidechains, colored coins and the Bitcoin lightning network to be great solutions to this problem.

[maokoto]

I am quite a newbie and already seen a lot of block debate, but I barely can remember someone advocating small blocksizes. I have seen a lot of people telling that blocksize isn't still an issue, but almost none saying "let's keep the block size the same".

My feeling is that almost everyone supports bigger blocksize, difference is someone say we have to do it now, and some others say it is not a matter so urgent, so we have to debate more and wait for a solution that is agreed.

[clever trevor]

If any attempt is made to use altcoins to solve the bitcoin block size problem every altcoin bag holder will start screaming for their coin to be the only one that's used. It would create bigger, more ferocious arguments than the bitcoin block size problem created, and those arguments would spill out of the altcoin section and wreck the rest of the forum.

[vilain]

If any attempt is made to use altcoins to solve the bitcoin block size problem every altcoin bag holder will start screaming for their coin to be the only one that's used. It would create bigger, more ferocious arguments than the bitcoin block size problem created, and those arguments would spill out of the altcoin section and wreck the rest of the forum.

Well, I don't think adoption is a matter of who screams louder, so I don't see much point in this argument.

[jonald_fyookball]

so your solution is altcoins?

Its been proposed before.  Cant say im enthused.

[Lauda]

Sidechains are altcoins that have to pay to go through a team to get a stamp of approval I don't see why we should make even more altcoins, while lighting is essentially off the network and colored coins are proof of assets aren't they?

Wrong. Anyone who goes around saying that sidechains are nothing more than an altcoin is either very ignorant/misinformed or very stupid. Sidechains offer so many possibilities in regards to Bitcoin and so does LN. BIP101 is the second worst solution that I've seen so far, right after no block size limit. Your proposed solution is not a solution and I fail to understand the point of your post. Altcoins are not a solution, altcoins are alternatives. I also do not know many people in "camp 2". I was under the impression that most people want a increase one way or another.
It is pretty obvious that something like LN has the most pros and least cons if implemented properly. However, in order for it to be extremely effective we are going to need 100+ MB blocks eventually.

[countryfree]

Your division with Camp1 and Camp2 is a bit simplistic, but it's a quite true that the solution already exists. Nobody expects anyone to pull a rabbit out of a hat. The different solutions are all well known and well debated. The only question is which one will win.

[Lauda]

Could you tell me how a sidechain is anything but an altcoin? It's a two way peg system that can have different uses per sidechain, not sure how the peg will be enforced without centralization and why you skip over the company giving the stamp of approval which could easily lead to corruption is beyond me. I rather not believe the solution to Bitcoin use is though a company who will profit by having more and more sidechains (essentially leading to a giftcard or chain for every corporation or use), I think you are being ignorant to altcoins not being a possible solution but only an alternative. I am not saying they are an alternative to Bitcoin, at least the coins that would have real world use in common transactions would not be an alternative to bitcoin ( storage of wealth, high value exchange, longer block time for security) but an alternative to in development solutions and still decentralized and able to solve current issues today.

If you want to call them altcoins then go ahead, I won't be stopping you. Sidechains are not the same as altcoins even though they seem similar. If you can't comprehend how the two way peg could work then I can see the reason why. You've made a thread about sidechains a few months back, have you learned nothing from it? If we are going to pick a solution between altcoins and sidechains  then it is pretty much obvious which one is better. Sidechains can provide every benefit that altcoins have and decrease the risk that comes with them (scams, premine, viruses, devaluation, etc.).
However, my post was not about sidechains only. Sidechains are not the proposed solution (Luke-jr said on IRC), so people need to stop thinking badly of Core developers because they are involved in a Company. I'm not even sure what particular benefit made you think that altcoins are good? Anything that they have, can be implemented in Bitcoin. If you think that, explaining what Bitcoin is and how to use it is complicated now, good luck telling someone that they need to use 20 coins. We should be trying to make the system as simple as possible, not the other way around.

[NewBTCGuy]

I think your core premise is flawed.

It seems to me that most in the community want Bitcoin to be a good form of money - and a good form of money is BOTH widely accepted / fungible / divisible / easily transferable ("everyday currency" features) AND durable / price-stable ("good store of wealth" features).

The two general quality sets are not mutually exclusive and a refined Bitcoin implementation can arguably do both with no need for running two blockchains.

I also think that you're confusing the investment function with the monetary function - which is to be a store of value / accumulated wealth.  The investment function is not about storing wealth.  You invest to increase wealth, and you take risk to do that.  The whole point of investment is taking risk and thereby capturing the return which is commensurate with the level of risk that you're taking.  If you simply want to store your wealth (accumulated value / excess productivity) then you don't actually want to take risk, you want stability of value.

Most current forms of "money" are poor stores of wealth because they have a near-zero marginal cost of production and will therefore be produced until they have no value - which is to say that they only become price-stable at near zero.  The point of central banking is to control that production via cartelization, but ultimately central banks can only really delay the endgame of the market value of the currency declining to its marginal cost of production.

Bitcoin potentially solves the "store of wealth" problem by having a significant marginal cost of production built into its protocol.  And if it can manage to become widely accepted then its volatility (risk) will decline substantially and it will cease to be a good/bad speculative investment vehicle leaving the door open for it to become a very good store of value.  The issue remains as to how it can solve its own "everyday currency" problems (in the specific BP101 case - easy transfer-ability) and that's what the current debate over block size is about.  Folks have different opinions about how transfer-ability might be threatened by either:

1. Large block sizes and the bandwith required to process them (and how that effects decentralization which might potentially effect transfer-ability) and...
2. The ability of the current protocol and fee structure to manage a large overflow of unconfirmed transactions in the Mem Pools of the various network servers.

Personally I have some non-trivial concerns about 1 and absolutely no faith in 2 so kicking the can down the road by increasing block size A LITTLE while the community develops a better long-term solution makes sense to me.  The problem with XT is that it increases the block size a LOT (thereby substantially increasing the risk of issue 1) and does nothing to solve the bandwidth/decentralization problem that will (hopefully) eventually affect XT as well.  It would seem that the proponents of XT either believe that cheaply available bandwidth will outpace the growth of Bitcoin over the intermediate term or that they don't really share the same concerns about centralization of payment processing that I and a lot of the community do.  

>

[DooMAD]

We already have tons of altcoins that are perfect for this situation and can easily be converted back into bitcoin via things like shapeshift, so what we need to do is kill the negative perception of altcoins and start integrating a system for them, maybe mobile wallets that allow you to convert your btc to altcoins for shop use or other things.

Still waiting for Antpool and a few others to update so the softfork for BIP65 can reach activation and OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY can be used.  Once that's done and a few clever coders update some wallet software, you'll be able to trade/convert directly from one blockchain to another without using a third party.  There's definitely a role for altcoins to play in future.

[brg444]

Could you tell me how a sidechain is anything but an altcoin? It's a two way peg system that can have different uses per sidechain, not sure how the peg will be enforced without centralization and why you skip over the company giving the stamp of approval which could easily lead to corruption is beyond me. I rather not believe the solution to Bitcoin use is though a company who will profit by having more and more sidechains (essentially leading to a giftcard or chain for every corporation or use), I think you are being ignorant to altcoins not being a possible solution but only an alternative. I am not saying they are an alternative to Bitcoin, at least the coins that would have real world use in common transactions would not be an alternative to bitcoin ( storage of wealth, high value exchange, longer block time for security) but an alternative to in development solutions and still decentralized and able to solve current issues today.

If you want to call them altcoins then go ahead, I won't be stopping you. Sidechains are not the same as altcoins even though they seem similar. If you can't comprehend how the two way peg could work then I can see the reason why. You've made a thread about sidechains a few months back, have you learned nothing from it? If we are going to pick a solution between altcoins and sidechains  then it is pretty much obvious which one is better. Sidechains can provide every benefit that altcoins have and decrease the risk that comes with them (scams, premine, viruses, devaluation, etc.).
However, my post was not about sidechains only. Sidechains are not the proposed solution (Luke-jr said on IRC), so people need to stop thinking badly of Core developers because they are involved in a Company. I'm not even sure what particular benefit made you think that altcoins are good? Anything that they have, can be implemented in Bitcoin. If you think that, explaining what Bitcoin is and how to use it is complicated now, good luck telling someone that they need to use 20 coins. We should be trying to make the system as simple as possible, not the other way around.

Sidechains are effectively altcoins. Not in the sense that we're accustomed with but their respective units are definitely not bitcoins. It's semantics but the distinction needs to be made.

What's interesting and new is they can be cryptographically pegged to Bitcoin and exchangeable back and forth natively from the protocol.

[brg444]

Could you tell me how a sidechain is anything but an altcoin? It's a two way peg system that can have different uses per sidechain, not sure how the peg will be enforced without centralization and why you skip over the company giving the stamp of approval which could easily lead to corruption is beyond me. I rather not believe the solution to Bitcoin use is though a company who will profit by having more and more sidechains (essentially leading to a giftcard or chain for every corporation or use), I think you are being ignorant to altcoins not being a possible solution but only an alternative. I am not saying they are an alternative to Bitcoin, at least the coins that would have real world use in common transactions would not be an alternative to bitcoin ( storage of wealth, high value exchange, longer block time for security) but an alternative to in development solutions and still decentralized and able to solve current issues today.

If you want to call them altcoins then go ahead, I won't be stopping you. Sidechains are not the same as altcoins even though they seem similar. If you can't comprehend how the two way peg could work then I can see the reason why. You've made a thread about sidechains a few months back, have you learned nothing from it? If we are going to pick a solution between altcoins and sidechains  then it is pretty much obvious which one is better. Sidechains can provide every benefit that altcoins have and decrease the risk that comes with them (scams, premine, viruses, devaluation, etc.).
However, my post was not about sidechains only. Sidechains are not the proposed solution (Luke-jr said on IRC), so people need to stop thinking badly of Core developers because they are involved in a Company. I'm not even sure what particular benefit made you think that altcoins are good? Anything that they have, can be implemented in Bitcoin. If you think that, explaining what Bitcoin is and how to use it is complicated now, good luck telling someone that they need to use 20 coins. We should be trying to make the system as simple as possible, not the other way around.

Sidechains are effectively altcoins. Not in the sense that we're accustomed with but their respective units are definitely not bitcoins. It's semantics but the distinction needs to be made.

What's interesting and new is they can be cryptographically pegged to Bitcoin and exchangeable back and forth natively from the protocol.

Do the positives outweigh the corporation involvement negatives?

What corporation? Sidechains is open-source code.

[Lauda]

I don't think people are thinking badly of core because they are involved in a company I think people are thinking this company is going to do whatever it can to maximize profits because that's what companies do and if they have a fee to legitimize a chain they will want to legitimize as many as possible to make more money, thus their company should logically want people to use a large number of chains.

That's pretty much the same thing which confirms my initial point. People are too paranoid that they'd even completely turn their backs to the people who have helped Bitcoin survive for such a period of time (security flaws not available to the public).

What corporation? Sidechains is open-source code.

blockstream are going to be doing a stamp of approval and verify code for a fee, I don't see anyone exchanging to a sidechain without it being verified and approved since it is an option, essentially making paying a fee to blockstream mandatory to have a used chain.

Mandatory by the user? Not necessarily. If someone wants to help everyone they're going to pay the initial fee (if its that is their business model) and the users would essentially not have to worry about it.

Do the positives outweigh the corporation involvement negatives?

Yes they do. You're missing the vital piece of information that I've provided. Sidechains are not the proposed solution to the "block size problem".

[ATguy]

So what can we do? Well we might already have a solution, as we know an everyday currency IS NOT an investment, but storages of wealth like Bitcoin are. Currently we have a system that works exactly like Bitcoin, we know how to use it, how to safely store it and confirmations are quick, cheap and don't congest the network. Altcoins, yes altcoins, now you may be wanting to click the report to moderator and type wrong section but this is very much in the right section as we need to realize we have the technology that is decentralized and can easily fix our problem.

Now you maybe in the CAMP 1 group and are turning red but listen, if you want a crypto currency that is easy for merchant to accept, quicker confirmation times and lower fees then why do you care it is has those specific three letters before the word coin?

We already have tons of altcoins that are perfect for this situation and can easily be converted back into bitcoin via things like shapeshift, so what we need to do is kill the negative perception of altcoins and start integrating a system for them, maybe mobile wallets that allow you to convert your btc to altcoins for shop use or other things.

In this altcoins scenario you basically have to constantly pay exchange fees to the cenralized exchanges - pretty bad and ineffecient idea. As others said, sidechains at least solve these unnecesary exchange fees.

So I pretty much doubt your altcoins scenario is economically possible, I mean in the long run the more effective solution most of the time wins, so people will choose not to pay the exchange fees if there are cheaper solutions.

[spartacusrex]

There is no silver bullet..

1) LN only works when you transact with someone more than once. AND you have to lock up all the funds you might wish to use before hand. It's cool but certainly not as nice as just using btc straight up. My weekly poker group will love it though.. 

2) Sidechains do not get the security of the main chain.. They have to run on whatever the side chain dictates. POS / POW / Delegated etc . That's how the exchanges are currently using their sidechain from blockstream (fully delegated). So unless you want to use a new POW / less secure / not-decentralized / POS variant / DPOS etc etc side chains are also not a 1to1 alternative to using btc straight up. Obviously the 2 way peg is nice, but as DooMAD has already mentioned we are about to see full atomic cross chain transfers between BTC to alt coins very soon (which will be JUST AS SECURE as a sidechain and trustless to boot) so that's not something overly special either..

There is only 1 solution I can think of..

We need to 'prune' bitcoin properly. Then running a full node will be something you can easily do on your phone. Seriously.

Mentioned it here, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1162684.msg13119659#msg13119659

The size of the UTXO set is a 'tiny' 1GB.  http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/unspent-transaction-output-set , and more importantly it grows very slowly.

At 144MB per day (with each block full at current 1mb limit), that's 30x144 = 4.3GB / month of TXNs being fired around the network. (I download more than that in an evening watching netflix..)

These are the only bits that matter.

I have mucked about with the 'pruning mode' in the latest BTCore, and if I may, it just doesn't go far enough.. No disrespect, it's lovely work, but we're just scratching the surface.

I need to be able to run a full, validating, independent node, without any SPV-ness, with around 2GB of space, and my current mid-tier internet connection.    

That's it.

(Discard the un-needed, only put the hash of txn in blocks, put the UTXO merkle root hash in the block, store the UTXO as a new weird dataset type, scrape the spam-dust off and give it to the miners, use a proof-chain (just block headers with valid POW) instead of storing the whole block..  etc etc blah blah.. )

Then this whole 'big block' issue will become a non-issue. And we can all keep using Bitcoin the way we want to use it. Directly.
 

[Lauda]

There is only 1 solution I can think of..

We need to 'prune' bitcoin properly. Then running a full node will be something you can easily do on your phone. Seriously.
Mentioned it here, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1162684.msg13119659#msg13119659

-snip-

Then this whole 'big block' issue will become a non-issue. And we can all keep using Bitcoin the way we want to use it. Directly.

I have to agree with point 1, and I won't comment on point two. The rest what you wrote implies that you have a limited understanding of the underlying problem of big blocks (exact number is debatable; problem exists even at 1MB). You should be able to run a full (pruned) node pretty soon (possibly in the next version unless they have delayed it). This makes it easier for node owners and helps more people run nodes indeed. However, this does nothing to help the current 'problem' that we are facing. It seems to me that people who have not studied IT/engineering/etc. have a hard time understanding propagation delay. Storage is not so much of a problem as are orphan rates and propagation delay.

[spartacusrex]

There is only 1 solution I can think of..

We need to 'prune' bitcoin properly. Then running a full node will be something you can easily do on your phone. Seriously.
Mentioned it here, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1162684.msg13119659#msg13119659

-snip-

Then this whole 'big block' issue will become a non-issue. And we can all keep using Bitcoin the way we want to use it. Directly.

I have to agree with point 1, and I won't comment on point two. The rest what you wrote implies that you have a limited understanding of the underlying problem of big blocks (exact number is debatable; problem exists even at 1MB). You should be able to run a full (pruned) node pretty soon (possibly in the next version unless they have delayed it). This makes it easier for node owners and helps more people run nodes indeed. However, this does nothing to help the current 'problem' that we are facing. It seems to me that people who have not studied IT/engineering/etc. have a hard time understanding propagation delay. Storage is not so much of a problem as are orphan rates and propagation delay.

Eh.. Gonna have to disagree with you here.

What about my understanding of sidechains are you saying is wrong ?

Propogation can be 'played with'. That's why I mention only putting the hash of txns in the blocks. They will already have been sent through the network beforehand anyway. There are other techniques also.

As for the pruning - You CANNOT run a full pruned node without first downloading from a non-pruned node. This is what I am saying..  We should all be running in this new pruned mode.

The WHOLE of bitcoin can fit into 2 GB of disk space and 4.3GB of network traffic a month (at current block size). That's childs play.

[DooMAD]

Obviously the 2 way peg is nice, but as DooMAD has already mentioned we are about to see full atomic cross chain transfers between BTC to alt coins very soon (which will be JUST AS SECURE as a sidechain and trustless to boot) so that's not something overly special either..

Well, it could be a little while yet.  Wallet software and GUIs will need to be updated to support it first.  I'm still a little fuzzy on how the matchmaking actually works between buy and sell orders over different chains, but it's definitely possible because ACCT has already been successfully accomplished between two altcoins.  Would be nice if it's ready this year, but early-to-mid 2016 seems more likely.  Speculators should definitely be looking at altcoins which are ready to support it.

[Lauda]

Eh.. Gonna have to disagree with you here.

What about my understanding of sidechains are you saying is wrong ?
Propogation can be 'played with'. That's why I mention only putting the hash of txns in the blocks. They will already have been sent through the network beforehand anyway. There are other techniques also.

I said I would not comment on that part. I was talking about the 'solution' under your second point. Just because it can be played with, that does not mean that it would have the same level of security/not cause other problems.

As for the pruning - You CANNOT run a full pruned node without first downloading from a non-pruned node. This is what I am saying..  We should all be running in this new pruned mode.
The WHOLE of bitcoin can fit into 2 GB of disk space and 4.3GB of network traffic. That's childs play.

You should be able to run a full (pruned) node pretty soon.

Have you not read my post? I'm not saying that one can do it right now. You've calculated 6 (blocks per hour at 1MB) x 24 (hours a day) x 30 (days on average) and have gotten a correct number. However, I have no idea why we are talking about the current amount of traffic when the vital information is the traffic that we're going to have, should a increase happen. Increasing it to 8 megabytes would result in 34.5 GB of downloaded traffic, but what about node owners?