P2P Cash or Settlement Layer?

[flix]

Regardless of current debates over different implementations or scaling solutions... it is much more important for us as a community to have a rough consensus on what we want for Bitcoin. Not in a year or two... but 10 years down the line. That way we can work together towards the same goal and plan ahead.

What do you want Bitcoin to be? Do you want Bitcoin to be digital P2P cash? Or do you want Bitcoin to be a secure settlement layer? or do you want it to be something else (Digital Gold? Smart Contract platform?)?

Please don't just vote, but also give your opinion and explain your reasons. This poll can provide extremely useful info for everyone... users, miners, devs...

And please, pretty please don't turn this into another us vs. them debate. We've had enough of those. Just rational arguments with no reference to people.

[Lauda]

It does not matter what people want if it is not possible. The real question is what is achievable.

Do you want Bitcoin to be digital P2P cash?

How do you define P2P cash? Is it not P2P cash right now? If you define it as a system which everybody in the world can use a the same time, then you won't like the answer.

[ahpku]

I want it to be exactly what it was meant to be:
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by S Nakamoto.

[flix]

It does not matter what people want if it is not possible. The real question is what is achievable.

So within what you believe is achievable... what would you want Bitcoin to be?

[Lauda]

So within what you believe is achievable... what would you want Bitcoin to be?

You didn't give me a definition of P2P Cash. I would say that a mixture of both is achievable by raising the block size limit (only conservative and safe time) and developing a secondary layer (e.g. Lightning Network). I do not think that Bitcoin can become "mainstream cash" on a single layer.

[Fortify]

I think the only magic ingredient left to be added is speed of confirmations. If you want to compete with the big credit companies and their payment processing platforms (VISA, Mastercard, Paypal, etc) then transactions need to be validated quickly. The fees that bitcoin could knock off are huge. It may be an inherent and unavoidable feature of the way bitcoin works but almost-instant confirmations would mean it beats anything else out there. This way would help both P2P and business deals

[pawel7777]

Why not both? They're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Also, maybe you should re-phrase the question to something like "what the primary purpose of Bitcoin blockchain should be". Otherwise the results won't tell you much. If someone sees BTC primarily as P2P cash but prefers txs to be done via off-chain solutions, how does he vote?

[danda]

I did not participate in the poll because the question presents a false dichotomy.

Bitcoin is what it is.

I want the consensus rules to remain the same.  If they change for anything that is not near 100% unanimous then that means that a majority can dictate to the minority and steal their funds away from them.   That undermines trust in all cryptocurrency, not only bitcoin.

[lolgato1]

I rather it be a p2p system as it seems I will be mainly be using that as I just like moving my coins around alot

[flix]

I did not participate in the poll because the question presents a false dichotomy.

Bitcoin is what it is.

I want the consensus rules to remain the same.  If they change for anything that is not near 100% unanimous then that means that a majority can dictate to the minority and steal their funds away from them.   That undermines trust in all cryptocurrency, not only bitcoin.

Maybe it's a false dichotomy... that is why there is the "Other" option... but still a fair point.

Bitcoin is what it is... but it is not a finished product, it is still evolving. I would at least want to make explicit what direction we want it to evolve in. There are many choices and trade-offs in development.... so it would be nice to know what priorities existing users have.

[flix]

So within what you believe is achievable... what would you want Bitcoin to be?

I would say that a mixture of both is achievable by raising the block size limit (only conservative and safe time) and developing a secondary layer (e.g. Lightning Network). I do not think that Bitcoin can become "mainstream cash" on a single layer.

I actually agree with you. Still.. given a choice I would like to see enough on-chain capacity for Bitcoin to be used regularly by millions of people. If we then need a second or third layer to reach billions of people.. I'm OK with that.

[Lauda]

I actually agree with you. Still.. given a choice I would like to see enough on-chain capacity for Bitcoin to be used regularly by millions of people. If we then need a second or third layer to reach billions of people.. I'm OK with that.

The amount that can be reached on-chain is very questionable. Look at the network now, we're still not sure what the exact block size limit would be considered safe (a maximum). Currently the network is able to do around 3 TPS on average. Even if we had 10 MB blocks, that's only 30 TPS and nowhere near enough for it to be used regularly by millions of people. It might be enough to be used occasionally by millions of people. However, wouldn't this make it some sort of settlement layer as well?

[flix]

I actually agree with you. Still.. given a choice I would like to see enough on-chain capacity for Bitcoin to be used regularly by millions of people. If we then need a second or third layer to reach billions of people.. I'm OK with that.

The amount that can be reached on-chain is very questionable. Look at the network now, we're still not sure what the exact block size limit would be considered safe (a maximum). Currently the network is able to do around 3 TPS on average. Even if we had 10 MB blocks, that's only 30 TPS and nowhere near enough for it to be used regularly by millions of people. It might be enough to be used occasionally by millions of people. However, wouldn't this make it some sort of settlement layer as well?

I am not talking about millions of people now... but in 5-10 years time. Sure, there are technical hurdles. I don't think that these obstacles are larger than what the Internet had to overcome in the 1990s to become what we use today. I still remember WebCrawler and Mosaic...

[flix]

If billions of people can share selfies, videos and other media online.... I have to believe that we will be able to find a way to send a few million txs a day and have the Bitcoin Network process them. The theoretical n² traps only affect a few aspects of tx confirmation and validation.

I understand the argument that Facebook, YouTube or Bittorrent don't have to have every node independently validating all the data that they transmit... but if you think about it, neither does Bitcoin.

How much data do you need about a tx to really validate it? can you validate txs in the mempool and then just check that txs in blocks are ones that you had already validated? can you torrent the mempool? can you delegate validation of certain parts of the blockchain among collaborating groups of nodes? Can you separate parts of the tx data (as SegWit proposes) to reduce the amount of on-block data? Can you make validation modular so that different types of nodes focus on different parts of the process (just like mining specialised by separating from full nodes)?

The truth is that Bitcoin has less than 100 significant contributors on GitHub. It is a tiny project with tiny resources. Once we get to 1/100th the size of Linux and there is significant more brainpower put into this... we will find all kind of solutions that right now seem far fetched.

[Lauda]

I am not talking about millions of people now... but in 5-10 years time. Sure, there are technical hurdles. I don't think that these obstacles are larger than what the Internet had to overcome in the 1990s to become what we use today. I still remember WebCrawler and Mosaic...

Well, we can't exactly know when these block sizes are going to be safe exactly right now. Additionally, it is worth saying that the internet uses several layers in order to operate.

If billions of people can share selfies, videos and other media online.... I have to believe that we will be able to find a way to send a few million txs a day and have the Bitcoin Network process them.

This is a very bad analogy. You're comparing uploading/downloading data from centralized servers and uploading/downloading data from a P2P decentralized network.

The theoretical n² traps only affect a few aspects of tx confirmation and validation.

That's what the worst case scenario is, and one has to be prepared for it.

[flix]

If billions of people can share selfies, videos and other media online.... I have to believe that we will be able to find a way to send a few million txs a day and have the Bitcoin Network process them.

This is a very bad analogy. You're comparing uploading/downloading data from centralized servers and uploading/downloading data from a P2P decentralized network.

It is not meant as an analogy... that is why it is immediately followed by this:

I understand the argument that Facebook, YouTube or Bittorrent don't have to have every node independently validating all the data that they transmit...

..so I am not ignoring the argument. Just trying to inject some perspective.

[flix]

The theoretical n² traps only affect a few aspects of tx confirmation and validation.

That's what the worst case scenario is, and one has to be prepared for it.

Agreed. But if that worst case scenario proves unfounded and there are solutions... we should make the most of them.

[btcbug]

Both?

[Lauda]

..so I am not ignoring the argument. Just trying to inject some perspective.

Oh, I must have missed that part somehow (fatigue got the upper hand). However, I don't prefer this perspective as some might think that it can be directly compared.

Agreed. But if that worst case scenario proves unfounded and there are solutions... we should make the most of them.

A worst case scenario can't be unfounded. When it comes to the processing time of algorithms, different instances will have different processing times and those will always be in O(something). That O(something) is the upper limit, i.e. worst case scenario. That upper limit is obviously used for a reason and would never be an unfounded numbers. People who have worked with algorithms and data structures should be aware of this, the other well, might have a hard time understanding even when it gets explained to them. It might be worth reading this if you want to learn more.

[flix]

So... let's say that we want 20 million people to be able to use Bitcoin as P2P cash regularly (say once a day).

20.000.000 tx/day --> 232 tx/s or 13.889 tx/min --> 138.890 tx/ block

Currently txs are on average 250 bytes... but let's say that we can somehow get that down to 100 bytes... (I've see discussion on several ways of doing this).

140.000 txs x 100 bytes = 14.000.000 = 14MB


What would be the big tech constraint in 2020 preventing 14MB blocks?

Memory? Bandwidth? latency?