Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers)

[johnyj]

I am a 1MB block supporter who feels 1MB is enough for many years to come. We have a network run on Raspberry Pi's and old laptops from the 90s, We need a stronger network and a stronger world wide web and a stronger Tor network; we need better mempool protocols to allow for rebroadcasting transactions with higher transaction fees and many other features like client side minimum fee requirement prediction but what we do not need is a larger block size. Bitcoin was never meant to be a free system, higher transaction fees are the only way to secure the network from government manipulation and control.

Hardforking now is impossible, consensus is everything and it will not be won by force, A hard fork now would mean fracturing the network into two distinct camps the 1MB faction and the others, it would be war.  A war the 1MB camp will win.
There can only be one Bitcoin and one Bitcoin network and the new fork would be seen as nothing more then an alt coin bootstrapping itself with the Bitcoin Blockchain. When in doubt people will side with the 1MB faction and people know it, this is the only thing preventing a hardfork now.

Higher transaction fees mean more incentive for mining pools to process transactions and reinvest profits in the cutting edge hardware needed to stay ahead of the mining difficulty wave.  The total cost of all transaction fees is more or less = to the amount of money spent on mining hardware, as that price falls so dose the price needed to manipulate the network. If miners are not constantly reinvesting profits to buy new hardware then governments will gain control simply by waiting for our mining hardware to become antiquated.  We should only raise the block size after transaction fees grow to a point where they become prohibitive to the growth of the network that inflection point will be around 1 to 5 USD per transaction. Again Bitcoin was never meant to be free. Freedom is not free and nether is Bitcoin.  

When transactions hit the 1MB limit nothing will happen other then through natural selection, the higher transaction fees will start culling out the useless tiny transactions (spam) of the network.

I'm very interesting to see how would a fee market become if the blocks become full at 1MB. It seems many people are afraid of seeing that happen, but what if it makes bitcoin more valuable?

Imagine that the mining fee per block becomes higher than 50 BTC, e.g. 0.0125btc per transaction for 4000 transactions per block at 1MB, and average transaction will be larger than 1 BTC to not feel the pain of fee. That is about 6 dollar per transaction at today's exchange rate, almost at the same level as today's international bank transfer fee, but still lower. So it won't impact two largest user group of bitcoin: Long term value store and international remittance

However, the result of 50 BTC fee per block is: In a 4 years' period, half of the coins will be collected by miners. Currently many people do not trust bitcoin because they doubt that it is a pump and dump scheme: Early adopters sitting on millions of coins, making lots of campaigns to merchants and users in an effort to dump them to late adopters and profit. However, if late adopters can become a miner and process transactions for early adopters and collect equal amount of coins like early adopters, then this monetary system is much better balanced and will not result in inequality long term wise. Because mining is almost free entry for anyone, this will attract more users, more than a low fee will do

In fact, this is already a concern when the next reward halving is coming, means over 75% of the coins have been mined. What would people do when a gold mine is depleted? Satoshi said that in future the block reward will be replaced by fees, but he did not mention how it can be done. If the block is always half-empty, then the fee per block will always be a small fraction of the block subsidy, which shrinks every 4 years

[johnyj]

As far as the numbers, there's 8 bits in one byte.  Therefore, a difference of 8 megabits in speed is one megabyte per second.
If block size is 8 MB, that's 8 seconds.  Yet it takes 10 minutes to solve a block so 8/600.

Each node connects to 8 nodes, and each of these 8 nodes connect to another 8 nodes, and so on. But some of these connections are duplicated, so it will take several hop before a block is relayed to majority of the nodes, 4-5 hops maybe. When you have 8 seconds for a block transfer and the block verify time of 8 seconds, the nodes on the far end of the network would receive it in 80 seconds, which is a significant delay

Let's first imagine the ideal bitcoin blockchain done by aliens: It takes 1 second to receive and verify each block, takes 1MB hard drive space, and can carry unlimited amount of transactions in 10 minutes    Then you add those real world limitations on it and see which part you can compromise

Ok fine, but the additional hops don't have anything to do with the miner himself and how long it takes him to propagate his winning block in the first place.
Therefore my point is still valid:  The small-blocker argument of 'geographic centralization will happen with bigger blocks due to internet speed descrepencies' doesn't really hold water.

Actually, I have a question that you might be able to answer for me.

If two miners get their blocks out at roughly the same time, and one has a slightly longer chain (not an additional block but just a lower hash/more work/more transactions/higher difficulty -- you know what i'm trying to say) , do nodes throw out the first one and use the second one?

I know what you are talking about thus I will not comment on miner's gambling mind set.   

The argument for a large block is to reduce the fee for average users, but what if a small block is better for bitcoin's adoption? See my post above

[Cuidler]

I'm very interesting to see how would a fee market become if the block size is full at 1MB. It seems many people are afraid of seeing that happen, but what if it makes bitcoin more valuable?

Imagine that the mining fee per block becomes higher than 50 BTC, e.g. 0.0125btc per transaction for 4000 transactions per block at 1MB, and average transaction will be larger than 1 BTC to not feel the pain of fee. That is about 6 dollar per transaction at today's exchange rate, almost at the same level as today's international bank transfer fee, but still lower. So it won't impact two largest user group of bitcoin: Long term value store and international remittance

However, the result of 50 BTC fee per block is: In a 4 years' period, half of the coins will be collected by miners. Currently many people do not trust bitcoin because they doubt that it is a pump and dump scheme: Early adopters sitting on millions of coins, making lots of campaigns to merchants and users in an effort to dump them to late adopters and profit. However, if late adopters can become a miner and process transactions for early adopters and collect equal amount of coins like early adopters, then this monetary system is much better designed and will not result in inequality long term wise. Because mining is almost free entry for anyone, this will attract more users, more than a low fee will do

In fact, this is already a concern when the next reward halving is coming, means over 75% of the coins have been mined. What would people do when a gold mine is depleted?

The argument for a large block is to reduce the fee for average users, but what if a small block is better for bitcoin's adoption?

I cant understand how coin with high fees can have better adoption (number of people using it), when there will be cheaper altcoin alternative (fees)... Can such coin just be used for international remitance players instead ? Well why not look for a cheaper alternative instead again ? Ok, and what about store of value, at least. Why would you store your value on a coin when the coin can hardly to be used for anything ?

As I see it, if you cap how much coin can be used (number of transactions), people just use other coins for the same purpose, and just stop caring about Bitcoin or even consider storing value there, just like you do today with random altcoin or coin you have no use for.

[Quantus]

I'm very interesting to see how would a fee market become if the block size is full at 1MB. It seems many people are afraid of seeing that happen, but what if it makes bitcoin more valuable?

Imagine that the mining fee per block becomes higher than 50 BTC, e.g. 0.0125btc per transaction for 4000 transactions per block at 1MB, and average transaction will be larger than 1 BTC to not feel the pain of fee. That is about 6 dollar per transaction at today's exchange rate, almost at the same level as today's international bank transfer fee, but still lower. So it won't impact two largest user group of bitcoin: Long term value store and international remittance

However, the result of 50 BTC fee per block is: In a 4 years' period, half of the coins will be collected by miners. Currently many people do not trust bitcoin because they doubt that it is a pump and dump scheme: Early adopters sitting on millions of coins, making lots of campaigns to merchants and users in an effort to dump them to late adopters and profit. However, if late adopters can become a miner and process transactions for early adopters and collect equal amount of coins like early adopters, then this monetary system is much better designed and will not result in inequality long term wise. Because mining is almost free entry for anyone, this will attract more users, more than a low fee will do

In fact, this is already a concern when the next reward halving is coming, means over 75% of the coins have been mined. What would people do when a gold mine is depleted?

The argument for a large block is to reduce the fee for average users, but what if a small block is better for bitcoin's adoption?

I cant understand how coin with high fees can have better adoption (number of people using it), when there will be cheaper altcoin alternative (fees)... Can such coin just be used for international remitance players instead ? Well why not look for a cheaper alternative instead again ? Ok, and what about store of value, at least. Why would you store your value on a coin when the coin can hardly to be used for anything ?

As I see it, if you cap how much coin can be used (number of transactions), people just use other coins for the same purpose, and just stop caring about Bitcoin or even consider storing value there, just like you do today with random altcoin or coin you have no use for.

Alt coins with less security and reliability and staying power, alt coins with less recognized value (the network effect) and thus fewer places to spend said coins.
People may choose to use other alt coins as the Bitcoin transaction fee grows but Bitcoin with its place as the first and the most reliable, dependable digital currency will be the flag ship of a whole fleet of new alt coins. If an alt coin shows it can be more stable and reliable with lower fees then those changes will be incorporated into Bitcoin but not before. Bitcoin is Borg it will take the best aspects of the lesser alt coins and incorporate them into itself.


Bitcoin or any other Crypto currency has yet to do battle with a government body, we need to keep our eye on the real threat, government intervention. A war is coming and if the bitcoin network should fall all crypto currency's will suffer as a result. We could be set back decades.

[jonald_fyookball]

As far as the numbers, there's 8 bits in one byte.  Therefore, a difference of 8 megabits in speed is one megabyte per second.
If block size is 8 MB, that's 8 seconds.  Yet it takes 10 minutes to solve a block so 8/600.

Each node connects to 8 nodes, and each of these 8 nodes connect to another 8 nodes, and so on. But some of these connections are duplicated, so it will take several hop before a block is relayed to majority of the nodes, 4-5 hops maybe. When you have 8 seconds for a block transfer and the block verify time of 8 seconds, the nodes on the far end of the network would receive it in 80 seconds, which is a significant delay

Let's first imagine the ideal bitcoin blockchain done by aliens: It takes 1 second to receive and verify each block, takes 1MB hard drive space, and can carry unlimited amount of transactions in 10 minutes    Then you add those real world limitations on it and see which part you can compromise

Ok fine, but the additional hops don't have anything to do with the miner himself and how long it takes him to propagate his winning block in the first place.
Therefore my point is still valid:  The small-blocker argument of 'geographic centralization will happen with bigger blocks due to internet speed descrepencies' doesn't really hold water.

Actually, I have a question that you might be able to answer for me.

If two miners get their blocks out at roughly the same time, and one has a slightly longer chain (not an additional block but just a lower hash/more work/more transactions/higher difficulty -- you know what i'm trying to say) , do nodes throw out the first one and use the second one?

I know what you are talking about thus I will not comment on miner's gambling mind set.   

The argument for a large block is to reduce the fee for average users, but what if a small block is better for bitcoin's adoption? See my post above

if by 'reduce the fee' you mean prevent it from becoming prohibitively large to the point where Bitcoin can't scale, then yes, we want to prevent that and help Bitcoin scale.


 

[Cconvert2G36]

I'm very interesting to see how would a fee market become if the block size is full at 1MB. It seems many people are afraid of seeing that happen, but what if it makes bitcoin more valuable?

Imagine that the mining fee per block becomes higher than 50 BTC, e.g. 0.0125btc per transaction for 4000 transactions per block at 1MB, and average transaction will be larger than 1 BTC to not feel the pain of fee. That is about 6 dollar per transaction at today's exchange rate, almost at the same level as today's international bank transfer fee, but still lower. So it won't impact two largest user group of bitcoin: Long term value store and international remittance

However, the result of 50 BTC fee per block is: In a 4 years' period, half of the coins will be collected by miners. Currently many people do not trust bitcoin because they doubt that it is a pump and dump scheme: Early adopters sitting on millions of coins, making lots of campaigns to merchants and users in an effort to dump them to late adopters and profit. However, if late adopters can become a miner and process transactions for early adopters and collect equal amount of coins like early adopters, then this monetary system is much better designed and will not result in inequality long term wise. Because mining is almost free entry for anyone, this will attract more users, more than a low fee will do

In fact, this is already a concern when the next reward halving is coming, means over 75% of the coins have been mined. What would people do when a gold mine is depleted?

The argument for a large block is to reduce the fee for average users, but what if a small block is better for bitcoin's adoption?

I cant understand how coin with high fees can have better adoption (number of people using it), when there will be cheaper altcoin alternative (fees)... Can such coin just be used for international remitance players instead ? Well why not look for a cheaper alternative instead again ? Ok, and what about store of value, at least. Why would you store your value on a coin when the coin can hardly to be used for anything ?

As I see it, if you cap how much coin can be used (number of transactions), people just use other coins for the same purpose, and just stop caring about Bitcoin or even consider storing value there, just like you do today with random altcoin or coin you have no use for.

Alt coins with less security and reliability and staying power, alt coins with less recognized value (the network effect) and thus fewer places to spend said coins.
People may choose to use other alt coins as the Bitcoin transaction fee grows but Bitcoin with its place as the first and the most reliable, dependable digital currency will be the flag ship of a whole fleet of new alt coins. If an alt coin shows it can be more stable and reliable with lower fees then those changes will be incorporated into Bitcoin but not before. Bitcoin is Borg it will take the best aspects of the lesser alt coins and incorporate them into itself.


Bitcoin or any other Crypto currency has yet to do battle with a government body, we need to keep our eye on the real threat, government intervention. A war is coming and if the bitcoin network should fall all crypto currency's will suffer as a result. We could be set back decades.

The network effect only has value when the utility of Bitcoin is better than the alternative. Artificially making Bitcoin less useful (high fees), makes alternatives more useful. It may take years to fully sacrifice the utility of the FMA, but if you do, don't be surprised if your first mover advantage turns out to be just as beneficial as it was to myspace, ashes between your fingers.

Of course there are limits, limits to be decided by miners that expend energy to create blocks. Creating megablocks that choke the network (and make your block stale in the process) is not the greatest concern here. Satoshi understood free market incentives, he designed the system around them, it's a shame to see an arbitrary malicious miner protection measure corrupt them in such a brutal fashion.

I refuse to take fear mongering in the form of government intervention seriously while a few phone calls and door knocks from the PRC would be nearly lights out. WRT major govts, we had/have two options... security through obscurity, or security through ubiquity.

[ATguy]

This is what I was referencing (such blocks might occur):

You need at least two known values to be able to extrapolate unknown values.

This guenie slide uses just one value, 1 MB with 30 seconds as the latest time any node process a block today. Then just says lets extrapolate unknown values 3 MB, 8 MB with function O(n^2).

This is bad science, you need at least two known values like 0.5 MB and 1 MB with corresponding propagation time to all nodes in order to create estimation of the function for any unknown values like 3 MB or 8 MB. Obviously the more know values you have (over 2), the more precise function you can create and the more reliable extreme far unknown values like 8 MB becomes.

But the slide is big fail with just one 1 MB known value and presented function which comes not from fit with at least two known values but just from author willd guess, thus the obvious and eye catching absurd 3 MB and 8 MB propagation time predictions.

[Bergmann_Christoph]

@Lauda

I appreciate we establish a civlized, intelligent conversation about arguments, not insult, in a thread that was made to insult.

While we do it, someone let the hooligans out which yell from the sideline

I don't care about such kind of childish hatefull chorus, but I have a hard time to understand why you and your co-moderators tolerate that these people rampage your forum and damage the reputation of knowledged small blockers like you and the core developers.

I was really really shocked that this quote from brg444 was not deleted:

The leaders of this governance coup are now nowhere to be seen, Mike Hearn having revealed themselves as the villain he always was is now gone working full time for the bankers he had probably always been in cahoots with. Gavin Andresen has taken residency over at a forum populated by notorious scammer cypherdoc and dangerous, sociopath, charlatan Peter R. After previously advocating for what was deemed a "safe" immediate increase to 20MB, he is now figuratively begging on his knees for 2MB "compromise" only for the sake of forcing a contentious hard fork on Bitcoin in order to undermine the trust of investors in what projects to be the most important year for Bitcoin yet.

I moderate myself a small bitcoin forum in germany, and I was told so often that I'm too soft against trolls. But I'd never ever allow some nobody with too much time to hooligan social media and to insult and polemize people which, if you like them or not, have done a lot for bitcoin and have brought out interesting research.

If you say moderators are independent, I believe you. But it's hard to believe that every moderator in this forum came freely to the conclusion that there should be no alternative client who violates consensus and that the blocks should not be raised now. It sounds more like the unity of a party than of free men. Or did I miss something?

Every moderator? No. While quite a lot have not expressed their views strongly like I have, there are others that have. E.g. Hostfat, he is in a strong disagreement with theymos on the matter (I think he even supports XT, I'm not sure).

That's kind of interesting. Thank you @Hostfat for you comment in this thread. Are you still moderator? Are you allowed to promote XT or any other forkcoin? Why are you still a moderator here?

I just know that in the german section I once postet a link to my blog where I did write about Bitcoins unsecure future and XT as an instrument to pressure devs to solve the scalability-problem, and this post was moved to altcoins, even as anybody did know that I wrote about Bitcoin and not an altcoin, and made some controversial, but valid point about the future and the government of bitcoin. This was the reason I thought the moderation policy "Don't talk about alternate clients with consensus critical change in bitcoin-sections" was enforced by every moderator of every section.

Tell me more about the 8MB blocks. What could they do? I follow this debate for long, more on reddit then here, but - I never heard really confessing reasons for not raising the limit. Bandwith? Space? CPU? Node-Centralization? Mega-Transactions? None of this problem seemed like a problem large enough to stall development of bitcoin and / or scaling it completely in a way that's not the original bitcoin (lightning).

This is what I was referencing (such blocks might occur):

Thanks for sharing. I read the roadmap-faq (and I find the roadmap a solution that could be quiet reasonable, especially with the now mentioned 2-4-8 approach after IBLT and thin blocks ...).

So I did know about that hard-to-verify transaction. But I never understood why this is such a big problem. If I send now a 2MB-Transaktion with my node - will other nodes validate it? If not - why not? Do other nodes have a limit of transactions that are valid? And what's the problem with making nodes say: "max-tx-size=1MB"? I have a really hard time to believe that this is a major problem. It would be quiet ironic after all if this would become the problem that makes bitcoin failing.

The other thing I deeple disargue with you is, as other people said: You and your team seem not to be willing to allow a free market of alternative clients and you hinder the community to collect informations to express their opinion with the choice of the client. This is a major democratic element in open source and in bitcoin, it's the major mechanism to protect bitcoin for an destructive takeover by developers (I explicitly don't mint this on Core!). If you deny and surpress this possibility, - what you say you do - you are no longer in a consensus of democracy. And bitcoin needs its own kind of democracy to survice.

When I see a good alternative that isn't biased by various suspicious people, then I might consider it. I would be okay with a decent alternative implementation, but you do have to admit that more implementations make the ecosystem more complex. This isn't good if one wants to keep Bitcoin simpler while introducing it to more people (e.g.Telling someone that they have to choose between X, Y, Z implementations).

Yes, I'm completely aware that the more clients, the more complexity and the more fragmentation of the development and the eco-system. If every client has its own developers, we'll face insufficient developer-communication and development-redundancy, and if every exchange and payment-provider and wallet has to integrate different clients and make them compatible, we will loose a lot of development-time. As I said in the conversation with Veritas in this thread, I also fear that a fragmentation of bitcoin can destroy the ecosystem.

BUT ...

You have to admit that solutions like SW and LN also add complexity to the ecosystem.+

Also, and Imho more important, the development and usage of different clients with, in the worst case, critical consensus changes, is the only instrument for the ecosystem to 1. express their unsatisfaction with core-development, 2. protect the system against a takeover of development and 3. enforce a consensus by pressure

I think these are integral parts of Bitcoin as a system and shouldn't be thrown away out of fear of a hard fork. We are far away from an hard fork, all alternate clients out there need to get a lot more support by nodes and miners to even think about forking the system. If they reach this point all it needs to prevent a split is core changing their minds and make a little step to big blockers. For example, if core accepts the solution brought in the game some days ago by a well-known payment-provider, i think this whole debate would be over in less than a week.

So at the moment I see more advantages by competing clients with competing consensus rules than in the prevention of this competition.

At last, I don't agree with you to rejecting alternate clients by some prejudicement of their developers. If you'd ask me about the integrity of core, I'd say it suffers heaviliy from the small block militia and that I'm skeptical to their biasment cause they don't distance themself from this kind of hooligans and from the restrictions in free speach that HostFat also criticizes. But if core presents good code, I'll run it. From the alternatives I like some, and dislike some other - I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about them explicitly - but this has nothing to do with the persons behind it.

[Lauda]

But the slide is big fail with just one 1 MB known value and presented function which comes not from fit with at least two known values but just from author willd guess, thus the obvious and eye catching absurd 3 MB and 8 MB propagation time predictions.

Maybe, just maybe the author ran tests?

I was really really shocked that this quote from brg444 was not deleted:

I can't do anything about that one.

I moderate myself a small bitcoin forum in germany, and I was told so often that I'm too soft against trolls. But I'd never ever allow some nobody with too much time to hooligan social media and to insult and polemize people which, if you like them or not, have done a lot for bitcoin and have brought out interesting research.

That's kind of interesting. Thank you @Hostfat for you comment in this thread. Are you still moderator? Are you allowed to promote XT or any other forkcoin? Why are you still a moderator here?
-snip-

I'm quite strict actually; same applies for people who tend to manipulate with words. Hostfat is still a moderator and has the same posting rights as every other user. As far as the german section is concerned, you would have to check in with the moderators there. Moderators tend to handle situations differently and have the right to interpret rules in their own way (to a reasonable degree obviously).

Thanks for sharing. I read the roadmap-faq (and I find the roadmap a solution that could be quiet reasonable, especially with the now mentioned 2-4-8 approach after IBLT and thin blocks ...).
-snip-

I really recommend that you watch the first scaling workshop if you want to learn more about the transactions.

Yes, I'm completely aware that the more clients, the more complexity and the more fragmentation of the development and the eco-system. If every client has its own developers, we'll face insufficient developer-communication and development-redundancy, and if every exchange and payment-provider and wallet has to integrate different clients and make them compatible, we will loose a lot of development-time. As I said in the conversation with Veritas in this thread, I also fear that a fragmentation of bitcoin can destroy the ecosystem.
-snip-
At last, I don't agree with you to rejecting alternate clients by some prejudicement of their developers. If you'd ask me about the integrity of core, I'd say it suffers heaviliy from the small block militia and that I'm skeptical to their biasment cause they don't distance themself from this kind of hooligans and from the restrictions in free speach that HostFat also criticizes. But if core presents good code, I'll run it. From the alternatives I like some, and dislike some other - I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about them explicitly - but this has nothing to do with the persons behind it.

So it doesn't matter if an alternate client is run by potentially bad actors? Would you just let some random (potentially harmful) stranger keep your house safe? Of course you would not. I might be okay with a single (good) alternative. If we have more than that, then the added complexity will most likely not be worth it. I do admit that SegWit and LN add complexity but they offer advantages that make it worth it (especially LN).

[franky1]

my biggest gripe with SW is around the relaying of data.

the proposal is that by default miners running SW wont transmit signatures.. and that only special commands only available to new SW clients can ask to receive signatures. (client version numbers/ transaction version numbers as part of the handshaking ritual)

this totally kills off older/non segwit clients instantly.. in a brutish and nasty manner castrating them
what should be done is that the default is to send signatures. unless SW clients sends a command to not want signatures..

that way every fullnode still gets signatures. and if people want to run lite clients they can send their desired command to not get signatures.
win win for everyone old and new..
then............... (here is the bit lauda and SW fanboys will love)

"eventually" if segwit really does live up to the promise it makes, people would voluntarily upgrade by choice after they have let others take the risk first and get their reviews... rather than by forced mass upgrade without knowing the future impact

that way no balls are chopped off, it becomes a free choice and if all works out people upgrade happily in their own time.

yea i know it means that it then treats SW lite clients as second class because fullnodes wont want to connect to them. but thats why they should be deemed as second class, if they are not willing to hold the full archival data.

id happy only have a nodes list of full archival signature sending sw nodes.. once the dust has settled and it has lived up to promises.. but i dont want to be left limp and castrated.. which no fullnode should ever be

[hdbuck]

my biggest gripe with SW is around the relaying of data.

the proposal is that by default miners running SW wont transmit signatures.. and that only special commands only available to new SW clients can ask to receive signatures. (client version numbers/ transaction version numbers as part of the handshaking ritual)

this totally kills off older/non segwit clients instantly.. in a brutish and nasty manner castrating them
what should be done is that the default is to send signatures. unless SW clients sends a command to not want signatures..

that way every fullnode still gets signatures. and if people want to run lite clients they can send their desired command to not get signatures.
win win for everyone old and new..
then............... (here is the bit lauda and SW fanboys will love)

"eventually" if segwit really does live up to the promise it makes, people would voluntarily upgrade by choice after they have let others take the risk first and get their reviews... rather than by forced mass upgrade without knowing the future impact

that way no balls are chopped off, it becomes a free choice and if all works out people upgrade happily in their own time.

yea i know it means that it then treats SW lite clients as second class as fullnodes wont want to connect to them. but thats why they should be deemed as second class, if they are not willing to hold the full archival data.

id happy only have a nodes list of full archival signature sending sw nodes.. once the dust has settled and it has lived up to promises.. but i dont want to be left limp and castrated.. which no fullnode should ever be

The USG and its power rangers has finally manage to enforce cryptographic castration and democratic segregation. Shocker.

[Bergmann_Christoph]

So it doesn't matter if an alternate client is run by potentially bad actors? Would you just let some random (potentially harmful) stranger keep your house safe? Of course you would not. I might be okay with a single (good) alternative. If we have more than that, then the added complexity will most likely not be worth it. I do admit that SegWit and LN add complexity but they offer advantages that make it worth it (especially LN).

Yes! That's the whole point of the thing: trustlessness. As long as there is a competition, no bad actor can enforce bad code.

Other answers later. If you have links to help me to understand your position, I'd appreciate it (instead of looking through youtube and randomly looking at presentations)

[Quantus]

Satoshi thought that in the future the block reward would be replaced by transaction fees, but he never mentioned how it would be done or really thought about it in depth. If the block is always half-empty, then the fees collected from each block will be minuscule and worth next to nothing. We can not have a mining network maintained with the cutting edge hardware needed to protect us from government intervention on these pathetic transaction fees. We need small blocks to keep transaction fees high 1+ USD each. We should not be changing block size based on the number of transaction requesting admittance into the blockchain but by the amount of money people are willing to pay to gain that admittance. We should be adjusting the block size based on fees not on the amount of spam. Unfortunately this means there will be no room for free transactions.

[VeritasSapere]

I find that there are some strange misconceptions here. I will attempt to address some of them in this post.

First of all, the idea that hitting the blocksize limit will just remove unwanted or spam transactions is false. First of all I reject the idea of discriminating between transactions thinking that some of them are desired and others are unwanted. Bitcoin is meant to be a permissionless network, so we should not discriminate between transactions, as long as miners include them in the blocks is all that matters. More importantly however is that once the blocks do become consistently full. It is not the case that you would simply have to pay a higher fee but that there would not be enough capacity for everyone to transact regardless of the fee.

Again, a fee market does not fix this, a fee market simply priorities who is able to use Bitcoin and who is not able to use Bitcoin. There are losers in a fee market that become priced out.

If adoption did increase under these circumstances which I do not think it would, but hypothetically at least. Bitcoin would become a settlement network for larger payment processors, financial institutions and banks. Bitcoin would not be able to be used as a currency directly anymore. Since average people would not be able to outbid these type of institutions for block space. I do question how many people would even choose to run full nodes for these types of larger financial institutions considering that they can not even use Bitcoin directly themselves, it seems counter intuitive if that was the reason for this sacrifice? The vast majority of people would be reliant upon third parties build on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, this would not be that different compared to the system we live under today, with some very important differences granted, however it would not share all of the same and full benefits of the original vision of Bitcoin, which is that it can become a currency for the whole world. Thereby empowering people and fundamentally changing the power structures of our civilization for the better.

I do not think that a limited blocksize in Bitcoin would lead to its use as a global clearing house or a reserve currency in the first place, I find it utterly unrealistic. Since without mass adoption by the people as a currency first I do not see any reason why the current status quo would adopt Bitcoin, since they can design their own systems that they are in control off, which would benefit them more at this point, the only way that I see the establishment adopting Bitcoin on mass is if they are "forced" to do so in order to stay relevant. Exactly because of mass adoption by the people which I believe will not be possible with a limited blocksize, it would simply become out competed by better, faster, more reliable and cheaper alternatives.

Secondly allowing the blocks to fill up thereby overloading the network would make transactions much more unreliable and obviously more expensive, it would also make for a much worse user experience compared to today. This would not be good for adoption, I find it strange that anyone would even claim such a thing, it really is just basic economics.

Further, wallet software User experience is very, very poor in a hyper-competitive fee market.

I also do not consider moving transactions off chain as a solution to scaling the Bitcoin blockchain itself. The main Bitcoin blockchain itself needs to have great value in order to pay for its security into the future. This brings me to my next point.

I find the idea that we must have high fees in order to pay for security flawed. I would argue that it is better to have a high volume of low fee transactions compared to a low volume of high free transactions. An increased price is what would presently allow for increased security, I think that the price of Bitcoin is linked to its utility, by not increasing the blocksize we are decreasing Bitcoins utility which I think would negatively impact the price and therefore also its security. Over the long term we need a high volume of transactions to pay for this security, this also further supports the idea of adoption being critical for the long term survival, decentralization, utility and freedom of Bitcoin.

Higher Service prices can negatively impact system security. Bitcoin depends on a virtuous cycle of users boosting and maintaining bitcoin's network effect, incentivizing miners, increasing security. Higher prices that reduce bitcoin's user count and network effect can have the opposite impact.

It is a valid and rational economic choice to subsidize the system with lower fees in the beginning. Many miners, for example, openly state they prefer long term system growth over maximizing tiny amounts of current day income.

Transaction-fee levels are not in any general need of being artificially pushed upward. A 130-year transition phase was planned into Bitcoin during which the full transition from block reward revenue to transaction-fee revenue was to take place.

Lastly I would like to very clearly state here that Bitcoin is freedom.

While I don't think Bitcoin is practical for smaller micropayments right now, it will eventually be as storage and bandwidth costs continue to fall.  If Bitcoin catches on on a big scale, it may already be the case by that time.  Another way they can become more practical is if I implement client-only mode and the number of network nodes consolidates into a smaller number of professional server farms.  Whatever size micropayments you need will eventually be practical.  I think in 5 or 10 years, the bandwidth and storage will seem trivial.

Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section Cool to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day.  Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes.  At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.

The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users.

I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.

[johnyj]

The argument for a large block is to reduce the fee for average users, but what if a small block is better for bitcoin's adoption?

I cant understand how coin with high fees can have better adoption (number of people using it), when there will be cheaper altcoin alternative (fees)... Can such coin just be used for international remitance players instead ? Well why not look for a cheaper alternative instead again ? Ok, and what about store of value, at least. Why would you store your value on a coin when the coin can hardly to be used for anything ?

As I see it, if you cap how much coin can be used (number of transactions), people just use other coins for the same purpose, and just stop caring about Bitcoin or even consider storing value there, just like you do today with random altcoin or coin you have no use for.

If bitcoin's value rise 400% per year and it is very expensive to transact in bitcoin (like 100 USD per transaction), I think everyone would still rush into bitcoin like there is no tomorrow. They will do like pooled miners, combine their transactions as a single one to save the transaction fee

You should understand why most of the people come to bitcoin: Because this is a gold rush in cyberspace. They don't desperately want cheap transactions, so the payment function is the least to worry about. The California gold rush created the boom of the west coast, similar to bitcoin mining frenzy created most of these bitcoin companies today

The most attractive part of bitcoin is that by mining bitcoin, you can become your own central bank, participating in the money creation. This is totally impossible in today's fiat money system, and this property already attracted lots of enthuthiasts around the world when bitcoin were still worth almost nothing

There is a false claim from banks that money's value are generated from its transaction demand (to cover the fact that fiat money does not have any cost), but for honest money with a production cost (like gold or bitcoin), their value are not generated through its transaction demand. The fact that gold has quit transaction for decades but still rise in value clearly denied that theory. In fact, even for fiat money like USD, its value is not decided by how many people use it, but by people's trust. That's the reason when you have much lower transaction demand during a recession, the value of USD even rises because people desperately want USD when they are poor

Once you cleared this misconception, you will understand that raised level of bitcoin transaction capacity will not raise its value, its value would still be mainly decided by the mining cost and long term storage demand

So the question is: To make bitcoin a forever prosperous gold rush or a mobile payment system like other similar solutions?

[Kprawn]

For me there is a clear difference between shilling and having an opinion about something and expressing that opinion strongly. A shill blends into the environment, but the

majority of the posts are concentrated on obtaining one specific goal. You only need to browse such a users post history to isolate them. The shill will troll some threads and

post something with little value... but when it comes to his/her main goal, they will post extensively and with vigor. The OP is 100% correct in saying that these people needs to

be identified and labelled... but it's not going to be easy to differentiate between a shill and someone who feel strongly about a subject. Many of these people joined in,

because they felt strongly about what they perceived as censorship and not really anything to do about block sizes.    

[Quantus]

I find that there are some strange misconceptions here. I will attempt to address some of them in this post.

First of all, the idea that hitting the blocksize limit will just remove unwanted or spam transactions is false. First of all I reject the idea of discriminating between transactions thinking that some of them are desired and others are unwanted. Bitcoin is meant to be a permissionless network, so we should not discriminate between transactions, as long as miners include them in the blocks is all that matters. More importantly however is that once the blocks do become consistently full. It is not the case that you would simply have to pay a higher fee but that there would not be enough capacity for everyone to transact regardless of the fee.

Again, a fee market does not fix this, a fee market simply priorities who is able to use Bitcoin and who is not able to use Bitcoin. There are losers in a fee market that become priced out.

I simply disagree. I see nothing wrong with pushing users out of the Bitcoin network for not being able to pay because as of now there is no better way. No one can guarantee will ever see higher transactional demand, demand that would need to be so high that if it was ever met would be 10k times larger then what we see today, so high our network would fracture into a million parts from latency and orphaned blocks.  

[bargainbin]

[...]
If bitcoin's value rise 400% per year and it is very expensive to transact in bitcoin (like 100 USD per transaction), I think everyone would still rush into bitcoin like there is no tomorrow. [...]

Is "400% per year" price growth likely for a currency costing $100 per transaction?
"Bitcoin 2.0: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic [Useless As] Cash System"?

[johnyj]

The network effect only has value when the utility of Bitcoin is better than the alternative. Artificially making Bitcoin less useful (high fees), makes alternatives more useful. It may take years to fully sacrifice the utility of the FMA, but if you do, don't be surprised if your first mover advantage turns out to be just as beneficial as it was to myspace, ashes between your fingers.

Of course there are limits, limits to be decided by miners that expend energy to create blocks. Creating megablocks that choke the network (and make your block stale in the process) is not the greatest concern here. Satoshi understood free market incentives, he designed the system around them, it's a shame to see an arbitrary malicious miner protection measure corrupt them in such a brutal fashion.

I refuse to take fear mongering in the form of government intervention seriously while a few phone calls and door knocks from the PRC would be nearly lights out. WRT major govts, we had/have two options... security through obscurity, or security through ubiquity.

Of course it will be good that the blockchain can also be used to purchase coffee, but there is little meaning in it, since the lower the transaction value, the less trust you need

Similar to existing centralized payment services like paypal or VISA, in future you can use large bitcoin service providers to do zero transaction fee and instant confirmation transactions, if that's the utility you want. I don't see why people would use the blockchain to do it, which is more expensive and slower. The only reason that you'd rather use blockchain to do the transaction is because you are moving large amount of money or have specific privacy concern, in that case you will be willing to pay a high fee

[johnyj]

[...]
If bitcoin's value rise 400% per year and it is very expensive to transact in bitcoin (like 100 USD per transaction), I think everyone would still rush into bitcoin like there is no tomorrow. [...]

Is "400% per year" price growth likely for a currency costing $100 per transaction?
"Bitcoin 2.0: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic [Useless As] Cash System"?

Why do you want to use the blockchain directly when all you want is zero fee transaction? There are so many mobile payment solutions which charges zero fee and instant confirmation, why bother using bitcoin?

If all you want is zero fee transactions, then you can use some web wallet service. I think the high fee on blockchain will push them to establish their major clearing channel, then they will provide zero fee transactions, or even negative fee transactions if that makes you happy