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Author Topic: How a floating blocksize limit inevitably leads towards centralization  (Read 71509 times)
Technomage
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February 19, 2013, 12:50:48 PM
 #61

For the blocksize limit removal proponents: What are you afraid of?

That you cannot make transactions for basically free anymore? Don't you get it?
The limit is there for a reason... some of which were already mentioned in this thread.

Maybe once we reach the limit there will be finally some steady income for miners (read not related to the initial block reward).
If the limit is reached consistently there would finally be a market for transactions which wasn't there before. You preach free markets and shit, but when it comes down to it you are afraid of them.

I'm not afraid of the markets nor do I think it's actually possible to achieve super cheap transactions with Bitcoin regardless of how this is handled. The problem is deeper and has to do with proof of work. The security that is achieved with proof of work does not come without a price. In the very long term proof of work / proof of stake hybrids will most likely be able to handle more transactions with less hashing power and less cost, and still be reliable enough.

I have long since accepted that Bitcoin transactions will cost more in the future than they do now. That is basically inevitable. The question is how much should they cost. The block limit is essentially an entirely artificial limit that's quite unintuitive. In my opinion the only truly valid reason to retain scarcity with the block limit is to keep miners incentivized in general. There needs to be scarcity, but not too much scarcity.

The solution in my mind for now would be to only increase the block limit when the current limit has truly reached its limits. We're not there yet so there is no immediate problem. The ideal solution would be to create a not-easily-rigged method of automatically adjusting the block limit. That can be implemented later, though.

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February 19, 2013, 12:59:02 PM
 #62

I have just realized that this is a major crossroad for Bitcoin. Leaving the limit as it is would lead to transaction fees rising to such levels that no one would use Bitcoin for sending money unless it's absolutely necessary and the amount is large enough to justify it. Another cryptocurrency would take Bitcoin's place as the currency for day to day exchange. What would happen to Bitcoin? If the competitive cryptocurrency has similar features... scarcity of the monetary base etc, would Bitcoin not simply wither away? Maybe, maybe not.

The other option is to compromise and decide how crowded the blocks need to become before something is done. This would lead to the risk of in my opinion marginal exploits and marginally more centralization. I don't think the third option is very viable, removing the limit entirely that is. For many reasons.

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February 19, 2013, 01:00:29 PM
Last edit: February 19, 2013, 01:14:47 PM by ElectricMucus
 #63

I'm not afraid of the markets nor do I think it's actually possible to achieve super cheap transactions with Bitcoin regardless of how this is handled. The problem is deeper and has to do with proof of work. The security that is achieved with proof of work does not come without a price. In the very long term proof of work / proof of stake hybrids will most likely be able to handle more transactions with less hashing power and less cost, and still be reliable enough.

So you are concerned with competition from alt-chains? Is that what this about?
Well that's life.

I have long since accepted that Bitcoin transactions will cost more in the future than they do now. That is basically inevitable. The question is how much should they cost. The block limit is essentially an entirely artificial limit that's quite unintuitive. In my opinion the only truly valid reason to retain scarcity with the block limit is to keep miners incentivized in general. There needs to be scarcity, but not too much scarcity.

The solution in my mind for now would be to only increase the block limit when the current limit has truly reached its limits. We're not there yet so there is no immediate problem. The ideal solution would be to create a not-easily-rigged method of automatically adjusting the block limit. That can be implemented later, though.

How is there supposed to be a market if there is unlimited supply? A limit which automatically raises if it is reached is no limit at all, just a bait and switch game.
The block size limit is exactly as artificial as the total coin limit, should we rise this as well?
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February 19, 2013, 01:05:46 PM
Last edit: February 19, 2013, 01:19:09 PM by markm
 #64

Miners can game the system too simply, such as by lots of them all deciding to only accept transactions with a high fee then spamming high fee transactions in concert ("I will put a high fee transaction if you will, between us we have huge chance one of us will get all those fees").

If it were not for that I would think judging by the fee required per kilobyte to get into a block would be a useful metric, since by relating that to the smallest transaction the primary chain "should" be used for (secondary chains existing for lower value transactions) and the percent the fee "should" be on that smallest value transaction in order to borderline discourage it one could tune the size to achieve the kind of scale of minimum value and percent fee on that minimum value.

So I do not think floating the size is a good idea.

Maybe Satoshidice could serve as an estimation tool, we could watch to see how much fee people making tiny (low-value) wagers turn out to be willing to pay to play, maybe it will turn out that they tend toward making fewer, more value per wager bets when blocks are full enough that Satoshidice has to increase the fees it is paying? If so the "problem" might be self-correcting for a while, and meanwhile many miners are already stocking up on secondary-chain coins as a currently not immediately-profitable but forward-looking natural consequence of merged mining so small-value gamblers and thus maybe small value transactions already have alternatives to continuing to clog up the primary chain with "trivial value" transactions.

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February 19, 2013, 01:07:24 PM
 #65

Quote from: rini17
This requires conspiration of biggest pool owners with majority of hash power.
Huh? It's the arguments that the pools (note: miners are not even invoked here, the idea that the authority is handed over to a couple pools is already so easily accepted) will reject "too large" blocks that demands a conspiracy.  Peter Todd's point is that a single miner can push off all the smaller ones, all on their own— unless there is a conspiracy to stop them from including these otherwise valid blocks.  As you argue such a conspiracy "will result in abuse of current rules", and I agree.  Worse, if we as a community can't figure out a criteria to conspire on and put it into the system— where there is no risk of defection— how can we expect a pool-conspiracy to do better when they have less powerful tools to enforce conformance?  Also, while the network is choking on blocks which will be rejected users are left around waiting longer times for confirmation because its not obvious when a chain is going to get orphaned because it violated the invisible cartel rules.  Finally, even if the cartel is successful at preventing single miners from breaking the system, its in each member's individual best interest to mine the largest possible blocks, so we should expect a slow evaporation which has the same conclusion: a single primary miner/validator.
I understood the argument as "big miners/validators will mine too big blocks, leaving smaller users unable to receive/verify them behind". My objection i don't see answered is, what stops other miners to spontaneously build longer chain with smaller blocks that more easily propagate? (In absence of said cartel.) Everyone starts with strawman "we will inevitably have single primary megaminer/supernode, heeelp!" and argues from there. Why? How? I'm running myself two instances of bitcoind on one 5 years old desktop PC with dedicated 5400rpm HDD on 10mbit internet and it does fine. I estimate this setup would happily accept 10x, and with some updates 100x current volume.

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February 19, 2013, 01:12:05 PM
 #66

I'm not afraid of the markets nor do I think it's actually possible to achieve super cheap transactions with Bitcoin regardless of how this is handled. The problem is deeper and has to do with proof of work. The security that is achieved with proof of work does not come without a price. In the very long term proof of work / proof of stake hybrids will most likely be able to handle more transactions with less hashing power and less cost, and still be reliable enough.

So you are concerned with competition from alt-chains? Is that what this about?
Well that's life.

Think merged-mining. Don't think of it as alternate currencies, just alternate chains. They are not competing with bitcoin, they are more chains that are all part of the same family, bitcoin providing high value high security international settlements and the basic security shared by all the merged chains, other chains providing space for smaller value transactions, whatever stuff the primary chain becomes too expensive to be economical to do. The same miners mining all the chains or however many of them they choose to.

It is not competition, it is co-operation.

Floating the blocksize would maybe lead to more centralisation in chains too, detracting from miners' motivation to merge more chains, instead leading to them ignoring more of the merged chains than they otherwise would do when the primary chain starts to be full-to-overflowing with high-fee transactions.

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February 19, 2013, 01:25:09 PM
 #67

There are most likely methods of adjusting the block limit dynamically in a way that is not easy to game. Even if there is not, I would still advocate for a one time increase of the block limit. Artificially keeping it at a fixed level forever is absolutely ridiculous. The limit can be much higher than 1 MB without any significant setbacks, and thus we could handle a lot more transactions.

Some people in this thread are trying to make this into a black & white issue, which it is most certainly not. My view is probably closest to Pieter Wuille's on this, in that increasing the limit needs to be done, but it needs to be done carefully.

I could easily turn the argument around as well, I mean what are the proponents of keeping the limit fixed afraid of? More centralization I guess. Well, if it was for "pure profit motive" as you call it (which is false), early ASIC companies would have the incentive to simply take 51%. On cost basis it's an absolute no brainer. That's it for Bitcoin. However, the fact that it is very bad for Bitcoin, likely stops them from doing that.

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February 19, 2013, 01:29:46 PM
 #68

- snip -
My objection i don't see answered is, what stops other miners to spontaneously build longer chain with smaller blocks that more easily propagate? (In absence of said cartel.) . . .
The proof-of-work system.

Everyone starts with strawman "we will inevitably have single primary megaminer/supernode, heeelp!" and argues from there. Why? How? I'm running myself two instances of bitcoind on one 5 years old desktop PC with dedicated 5400rpm HDD on 10mbit internet and it does fine. I estimate this setup would happily accept 10x, and with some updates 100x current volume.
You aren't paying attention to the debate.  This is about miners with slower internet bandwidth.  Try again with a 1200 baud dial-up connection and see how long it takes you to receive the next 1MB block when it is added to the blockchain.
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February 19, 2013, 01:30:46 PM
 #69

I'm not afraid of the markets nor do I think it's actually possible to achieve super cheap transactions with Bitcoin regardless of how this is handled. The problem is deeper and has to do with proof of work. The security that is achieved with proof of work does not come without a price. In the very long term proof of work / proof of stake hybrids will most likely be able to handle more transactions with less hashing power and less cost, and still be reliable enough.

So you are concerned with competition from alt-chains? Is that what this about?
Well that's life.

Think merged-mining. Don't think of it as alternate currencies, just alternate chains. They are not competing with bitcoin, they are more chains that are all part of the same family, bitcoin providing high value high security international settlements and the basic security shared by all the merged chains, other chains providing space for smaller value transactions, whatever stuff the primary chain becomes too expensive to be economical to do. The same miners mining all the chains or however many of them they choose to.

It is not competition, it is co-operation.

Floating the blocksize would maybe lead to more centralisation in chains too, detracting from miners' motivation to merge more chains, instead leading to them ignoring more of the merged chains than they otherwise would do when the primary chain starts to be full-to-overflowing with high-fee transactions.

-MarkM-


At first how would that work? Are they supposed to accumulate transactions and make bitcoin transactions to somewhat reflect the micro-transaction balance at intervals? How do you suppose the compability between them works? You are looking at an ever increasing demand for storage capacity and network bandwidth here. This overhead is at worst O(n!).... with every new chain.

Second: What's the incentive to do it? If you go through the hassle of creating another protocol why tie it to bitcoin? Not only you miss out of the early adopter reward you create other problems in the bitcoin economy by deluding the supply of the transaction market.
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February 19, 2013, 01:36:43 PM
Last edit: February 19, 2013, 01:50:18 PM by markm
 #70

I do think it is kind of black-and-white.

Basically until fees get so insane that the vast majority of stakeholders insist "something must be done" it is probably not time to change the max block size.

Either the fees people have to pay to get reasonable-value transactions into the blockchain are too high, resulting in effective transaction fees people actually have to pay to get a transaction into a block within about six blocks or so skyrocket or they are not.

It is a pity that generally the lower the value of a transaction the faster the person doing it, or person receiving it, tends to want it to be confirmed, but on the other hand the smaller the value of a transaction the less likely it is that the merchant who gets hit with the occassional chargeback by handing out product without waiting overnight for transactions to clear will be bankrupted by not getting "instant" irreversibility.

As long as paying a few cents suffices to get you into a block within an hour or so there probably is no big need to increase block size.

Heck right now people are still able to get free transactions into blocks, until that is no longer possible there seems time yet. Should free transactions ever get in, really? Even after many days? Or would a free transaction getting in within a week or so indicate there is still not full paid utilisation of the already available space?

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February 19, 2013, 01:37:41 PM
 #71

You aren't paying attention to the debate.  This is about miners with slower internet bandwidth.  Try again with a 1200 baud dial-up connection and see how long it takes you to receive the next 1MB block when it is added to the blockchain.

The miners with slower bandwidth will be outcompeted by miners who have faster bandwidth. In the same way as miners with lower electricity costs outcompete miners with higher electricity cost. In the same way as miners who can use the heat of their miners for heating can outcompete miners who can't. In the same way...

I may be fairly privileged to live in a country where a 100mbit connection is fairly standard these days. I believe a 2mbit connection is the legal minimum over here, that must be provided for all people. That will probably change to 10mbit in a few years, which is probably the same time we'll be seeing gigabit home connections.

The same goes for running a full node. Not everyone can do it now, nor can everyone do it in the future. It doesn't mean Bitcoin can only be run by megacorporations in the future. Based on the calculations I've seen in this thread, even if Bitcoin has the amount of transactions PayPal has, running a full node is still well within a decent computer setup with a good connection.

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February 19, 2013, 01:40:20 PM
 #72

- snip -
My objection i don't see answered is, what stops other miners to spontaneously build longer chain with smaller blocks that more easily propagate? (In absence of said cartel.) . . .
The proof-of-work system.
How, I'm asking again? The proof of work will naturally favor smaller blocks that can be spread faster to majority of the network (and thus support decentralization). Yes, worst connected nodes will be left behind, but as long as there are plenty of "middle class" nodes that will naturally favor blocks less than certain size and slow propagation of oversized blocks making them into orphans more likely, I don't see a problem.

Everyone starts with strawman "we will inevitably have single primary megaminer/supernode, heeelp!" and argues from there. Why? How? I'm running myself two instances of bitcoind on one 5 years old desktop PC with dedicated 5400rpm HDD on 10mbit internet and it does fine. I estimate this setup would happily accept 10x, and with some updates 100x current volume.
You aren't paying attention to the debate.  This is about miners with slower internet bandwidth.  Try again with a 1200 baud dial-up connection and see how long it takes you to receive the next 1MB block when it is added to the blockchain.
You seriously insist on making mining or running full node possible through 1200 baud dialup? Please don't be ridiculous. 10mbit-like satellite connection is affordable in most of the world now.

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February 19, 2013, 01:43:44 PM
 #73

As long as paying a few cents suffices to get you into a block within an hour or so there probably is no big need to increase block size.

Heck right now people are still able to get free transactions into blocks, until that is no longer possible there seems time yet. Should free transactions ever get in, really? Even after many days? Or would a free transaction getting in within a week or so indicate there is still not full paid utilisation of the already available space?

-MarkM-

I agree with this. It's not time yet. Free transactions actually get into the blocks quite well at the moment. They are not even significantly delayed. I'd say that if a free transaction gets stuck for over a day (144 blocks), then it is already time to start planning the change.

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February 19, 2013, 01:47:10 PM
 #74

At first how would that work? Are they supposed to accumulate transactions and make bitcoin transactions to somewhat reflect the micro-transaction balance at intervals? How do you suppose the compability between them works? You are looking at an ever increasing demand for storage capacity and network bandwidth here. This overhead is at worst O(n!).... with every new chain.
Well for starters we could say the decimals in the coins are not there to allow less than one whole coin transactions, just to allow a lot of granularity in the exact size of one whole coin or greater transactions.

Then for each chain you'd basically do things worth less than one whole coin of that chain on a lower-value chain.

Second: What's the incentive to do it? If you go through the hassle of creating another protocol why tie it to bitcoin? Not only you miss out of the early adopter reward you create other problems in the bitcoin economy by deluding the supply of the transaction market.

Bitcoin provides the world's most difficult proof-of-work. That hashing-power secures ALL the merged-mined coins, not just the "primary" chain, using the same hashing-power. Basically once you are already mining bitcoin anyway, mining any or all of the secondary chains requires no additional hashing-power (or maybe if you mine lots and lots and lots of them might make some slight dent in your mining efficiency).

Basically it allows the existing hashing power to secure more stuff, with each chain of more stuff being separately optional to the miners, so miners too small to handle 150 chains could opt to only mine 75 of them, those that cannot handle that many handle less, the tiniest miners maybe even mining only the primary chain or even only one of the secondary chains.

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February 19, 2013, 02:00:06 PM
 #75

@markm ok that could work, but I still don't see an incentive to implement it, at least now.

I'd say that if a free transaction gets stuck for over a day (144 blocks), then it is already time to start planning the change.

Why should free transactions get in anyway?
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February 19, 2013, 02:03:10 PM
 #76

Basically it allows the existing hashing power to secure more stuff, with each chain of more stuff being separately optional to the miners, so miners too small to handle 150 chains could opt to only mine 75 of them, those that cannot handle that many handle less, the tiniest miners maybe even mining only the primary chain or even only one of the secondary chains.

This raises the issue of exchange rates between chains.  A user might see their "bitcoin" total vary over time if it has stored some of the coins as bitcoin-chain7 and bitcoin-chain12 coins.

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February 19, 2013, 02:07:01 PM
 #77

- snip -
My objection i don't see answered is, what stops other miners to spontaneously build longer chain with smaller blocks that more easily propagate? (In absence of said cartel.) . . .
The proof-of-work system.
How, I'm asking again? The proof of work will naturally favor smaller blocks that can be spread faster to majority of the network (and thus support decentralization). Yes, worst connected nodes will be left behind, but as long as there are plenty of "middle class" nodes that will naturally favor blocks less than certain size and slow propagation of oversized blocks making them into orphans more likely, I don't see a problem.

The point of this debate is that the incentive for miners with faster bandwidth is to intentionally pad out their blocks to be so big that only slightly more than half of the hashing power on the network can receive them before the next block is discovered.  This leaves almost 50% of the hashing power on the network continually working on old blocks never to earn any rewards while those with the highest bandwidth leave them behind and increase their own rewards.  Doing so forces those with lower bandwidth out of the market, allowing the process to repeat, consolidating the mining into only those with the absolute highest bandwidth on the network.

The proof of work prevents the miners with slower bandwidth from solving a block any faster than those with higher bandwidth, and the bandwidth issue keeps them from working on the correct block.

Everyone starts with strawman "we will inevitably have single primary megaminer/supernode, heeelp!" and argues from there. Why? How? I'm running myself two instances of bitcoind on one 5 years old desktop PC with dedicated 5400rpm HDD on 10mbit internet and it does fine. I estimate this setup would happily accept 10x, and with some updates 100x current volume.
You aren't paying attention to the debate.  This is about miners with slower internet bandwidth.  Try again with a 1200 baud dial-up connection and see how long it takes you to receive the next 1MB block when it is added to the blockchain.
You seriously insist on making mining or running full node possible through 1200 baud dialup? Please don't be ridiculous. 10mbit-like satellite connection is affordable in most of the world now.


No, that is an extreme case used as an example, but the point still stands and it the crux of the debate at hand:

Now the transactions themselves aren't a problem, 1MiB/10minutes is just 1.8KiB/second average. However, what happens when someone finds a block?

So Alice finds one, and with her 1MiB/second connection she simultaneously transfers her new found block to her three peers. She has enough bandwidth that she can do all three at once, so Bob has it in 1 second, Charlie 4 seconds, and finally David in 20 seconds. The thing is, David has effectively spent that 20 seconds doing nothing. Even if he found a new block in that time he wouldn't be able to upload it to his other peers fast enough to beat Alice's block. In addition, there was also a probabilistic time window before Alice found her block, where even if David found a block, he couldn't get it to the majority of hashing power fast enough to matter. Basically we can say David spent about 30 seconds doing nothing, and thus his effective hash power is now down by 5%


However, it gets worse. Lets say a rolling average mechanism to determine maximum block sizes has been implemented, and since demand is high enough that every block is at the maximum, the rolling average lets the blocks get bigger. Lets say we're now at 10MiB blocks. Average transaction volume is now 18KiB/second, so David just has 32KiB/second left, and a 1MiB block takes 5.3 minutes to download. Including the time window when David finds a new block but can't upload it he's down to doing useful mining a bit over 3 minutes/block on average.

Alice on the other hand now has 15% less competition, so she's actually clearly benefited from the fact that her blocks can't propagate quickly to 100% of the installed hashing power.


Now I know you are going to complain that this is BS because obviously we don't need to actually transmit the full block; everyone already has the transactions so you just need to transfer the tx hashes, roughly a 10x  reduction in bandwidth. But it doesn't change the fundamental principle: instead of David being pushed off-line at 10MiB blocks, he'll be pushed off-line at 100MiB blocks. Either way, the incentives are to create blocks so large that they only reliably propagate to a bit over 50% of the hashing power, *not* 100%
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February 19, 2013, 02:09:54 PM
 #78

Interesting debate.

First of all, my opinion: I'm in favor of increasing the block size limit in a hard fork, but very much against removing the limit entirely. Bitcoin is a consensus of its users, who all agreed (or will need to agree) to a very strict set of rules that would allow people to build global decentralized payment system. I think very few people understand a forever-limited block size to be part of these rules.

...

My suggestion would be a one-time increase to perhaps 10 MiB or 100 MiB blocks (to be debated), and after that an at-most slow exponential further growth. This would mean no for-eternity limited size, but also no way for miners to push up block sizes to the point where they are in sole control of the network. I realize that some people will consider this an arbitrary and unnecessary limit, but others will probably consider it dangerous already. In any case, it's a compromise and I believe one will be necessary.

Realize that Bitcoin's decentralization only comes from very strict - and sometimes arbitrary - rules (why this particular 50/25/12.5 payout scheme, why ECDSA, why only those opcodes in scripts, ...) that were set right from the start and agreed upon by everyone who ever used the system. Were those rules "central planning" too?

I tend to agree with Pieter.

First of all, the true nature of Bitcoin seems to be the rigid protocol as it helps the credibility among masses. Otherwise one day you remove block size limit, next day remove ECDSA, then change block frequency to 1 per minute, then print more coins. It actually sounds more appropriate to do such changes under a different implementation.

Then I can't help this: With such floating block limit isn't everyone afraid of chain splits? I can imagine a split occurring by a big block being accepted by 60% of the nodes and rejected by the rest.

How about tying the maximum block size to mining difficulty?
...
The difficulty also goes up with increasing hardware capabilities, I'd expect that the difficulty increase due to this factor will track the increase of technical capabilities of computers in general.

This sounds interesting.


I think we should put users first. What do users want? They want low transaction fees and fast confirmations.
This comes down to Bitcoin as a payment network versus Bitcoin as a store of value. I thought it was already determined that there will always be better payment networks that function as alternatives to Bitcoin. A user who cares about the store of value use-case, is going to want the network hash rate to be as high as possible. This is at odds with low transaction fees and fast confirmations.
This!

Bitcoin is about citizen empowerment. When ordinary citizen can't run their own validating nodes anymore you lost that feature (independent from the question of hashing). Then bitcoin is commercialized. The bitcoin devs need to keep that in mind. (If you need to freshen up on your brainwash, here's a great presentation from Rick Falkvinge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjmuPqkVwWc)

+100


For me a Neewb, I was attracted to Bitcoin due to it's decentralized nature and the ability for anyone to mine, We already have centralised currency systems that have been corrupted and do not work for the people, so please can we stay away from that paradime, I know it is the natural evolution of organisations to do so but these systems always become self serving, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Now that things have progressed it seems hopeless for an average guy to be able to compete or make and money mining, Even considering I have experience in sysadmin and can pick up some nice dual quad-core xeon servers, It'd be nice if average nerd could still make some money and contribute to the decentralization and transaction processing of the network, with the kind of hardware now being disposed of by corporations. For me I do not care if transaction fees are a little higher or if transactions take longer,, I do care about how centralized the transaction power is and who has control of it.

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markm
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February 19, 2013, 02:13:26 PM
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Quote
This raises the issue of exchange rates between chains.  A user might see their "bitcoin" total vary over time if it has stored some of the coins as bitcoin-chain7 and bitcoin-chain12 coins.
You would store value in the primary chain, whenever you feel the fees involved in dealing with the primary chain make it worth your while. It is similar to deciding whether to hoard gold bars, expensive to trade, or local currency, easy to trade.

Here in Canada one-cent coins are being dropped, any value I stored in pennies is trying to go away.

Moral of the story presumably is go buy whole bitcoins when you have accumulated the vast amount of wealth one entire bitcoin amounts to, and don't buy too many of the tiniest-value chain's coin, just enough to go buy a few days' popsicles or whatever.

People's penny-collections are going out of date, its a gamble whether the raw metal they are made of makes them worth continuing to hoard or one should go buy loonies with them.

Its not an insurmountable problem else farthings and halfpennies would not have gone out of style presumably.

Heck you could even build chains that have fixed exchange rates built into their atomic between-chain transactions protocol if you are really worried about it. For most people most of the time it would probably suffice to denominate their life-savings account in bitcoin and let their day to day pocketmoney account just use whatever Ripple determines is the most efficient way to buy lunch on a given day.

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February 19, 2013, 02:33:35 PM
 #80

So...  I start from "more transactions == more success"

I strongly feel that we shouldn't aim for Bitcoin topping out as a "high power money" system that can process only 7 transactions per second.

I agree with Stephen Pair-- THAT would be a highly centralized system.

Oh, sure, mining might be decentralized.  But who cares if you either have to be a gazillionaire to participate directly on the network as an ordinary transaction-creating customer, or have to have your transactions processed via some centralized, trusted, off-the-chain transaction processing service?

So, as I've said before:  we're running up against the artificial 250K block size limit now, I would like to see what happens. There are lots of moving pieces here, so I don't think ANYBODY really knows what will happen (maybe miners will collectively decide to keep the block size low, so they get more fees.  Maybe they will max it out to force out miners on slow networks.  Maybe they will keep it small so their blocks relay through slow connections faster (maybe there will be a significant fraction of mining power listening for new blocks behind tor, but blasting out new blocks not via tor)).


I think we should put users first. What do users want? They want low transaction fees and fast confirmations. Lets design for that case, because THE USERS are who ultimately give Bitcoin value.


you could never get away with a hard fork on this point so the best you could do is create an alternative cryptocurrency which you would then become the developer of instead of bitcoin. In this respect i say more power to you! lets get some healthy competition in the cryptocurrency market! (litecoin doesnt count as competition)

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