I find it a bit curious that you want to suggest that I have arrived at my conclusion because I am "relatively new here."
No slight intended. I formed the impression that you thought the discussion over the max block size was a recent phenomenon. I just meant to point out that it has been ongoing for years.
Fair enough.
Surely, we will need to concede that the discussion of this matter intensified in about mid 2015 around the time that Gavin introduced XT – and some core developers understood the matter as being forced upon them. At that point, even if the discussion had been ongoing, presentations from the various camps became more heated, and trolls (and other seemingly anti-bitcoin folks and even those talking their short books) in these here forums began to take advantage of the disagreement to push a lot of FUD and to engage in a lot of exaggerated rhetoric regarding the supposed impending doom of bitcoin if it does not scale.
So, no matter what, even if the scaling discussion had been around for a while, it came to a much higher level of discussion, and even Gavin admitted that part of his purpose in introducing XT was to really light a fire under this matter… blah blah blah… which some rightly or wrongly understood as a form of extortion (or threat).
I'm not really taking sides, even though some people would assert that I am because I am not currently seeing an emergency need for some immediate increase in the block size limits, but I still believe, all in due time, and various efforts are being made to address some of these block size issues.. and even if some worse case scenarios (of continuously full blocks) were to take place, then at that point various emergency measures could be taken (whether temporary or permanent).
The issue is that, once the lines intersect, growth is limited at the 'about 350,000' transactions a day level. The upward trending line of transactions a day flatlines - limited at the intersect to the system capacity. She can' take any more, cap'n'
Yes. I mostly agree with the concept that you are describing to be one of apparent increasing block sizes and limited capacity; however, your trajectory assumes that nothing is being done or that there is no implementation before or during that time that can adequately address the situation.
We are certainly not at your tragic point yet, and from what I can tell, it seems that we are quite a distance, still from that point.. whether it is a year or some other time frame, but even if we have been crossing into that point of congestion during current times, I have not been hearing too many convincing stories regarding any current problems (besides some anecdotal claims and seeming exaggerations of problems that are not really attributable to currently full blocks). Too many ongoing exaggerations are being bandied about on an ongoing basis.
By 'trajectory' do you mean to denote the rate of growth in the transactions per day? For there is nothing that _can_ be done about this curve. It just is, and reflects all the multitudinous decisions that scores of independent actors arrive at in their usage of the blockchain. It is a reflection of the actual amount of use that people are getting out of Bitcoin.
I think when I am discussing my opinion about trajectory, I am saying something similar to Marcus of Augustus regarding the upward trajectory being elastic rather than inelastic. I am a different person than him, but I thought that he described something similar to me in a much better way.
In essence, I am suggesting, like him, that hypothetically, if the blocksize were to stay at 1 megabyte, then the various inputs are going to adapt to that, and it will not cross and go over because there is a limit. Surely, it may reach the maximum, and also, it may cause numerous problems and delays, but those are yet somewhat unknown and hypothetical problems because we are not quite there yet. Surely we can anticipate and project how the various actors are going to behave, but we cannot really know for sure without experiencing it.
Accordingly, there is nothing to be done about the trajectory. What we can do something about is the capacity for transactions per unit time.
Just because something can be done, does not mean that something has to be done right now, and it does not mean that the thing that you are suggesting “has to be done” in fact has to be done, either now or in the future.
I personally believe that more than 90 % of small blockers believe that sooner or later the block size is going to need to be increased; however, must of the dispute likely pertains to the urgency of the need to do it right now and without engaging in other considerations first and potentially exploring other remedies that may address both the expanding number of transactions and preserve some of the advantages of small blocks for smaller (in terms of computing power) nodes.
Surely, I keep repeating this over and over that I am trying not to take any sides in this question because I really don’t care that much about whether the block size increases or not within the next week, within the next month or within the next five years, so long as the process for increasing the blocksize has been sufficiently vetted…
If at some point, it appears that a mistake was made, then I may need to leave bitcoin, or if a competitor is doing a better job, then I would migrate my funds over to that.. and surely, maybe some of us will be mourning various lost opportunities with bitcoin, but to some extent that we have to give into the dynamics of the masses and the dynamics of society in spite a large number of injustices and unfairnesses because some of those injustices are systemic… and we still need to live with some of the status quo injustices and adapt our lives accordingly. Doesn’t mean that we may not complain, also, about a variety of the injustices existing in society… and try to figure out ways that we may have an impact in causing certain positive changes.
Sorry, I am straying a bit, but my point remains that black and white descriptions wear upon me as being exaggerations, and I see that there is a lot more going on in the space. Surely something needs to be done to address various short falls, but there is more than one solution, and I appreciate the dynamics of consensus, even though we get a lot of drama through that, too.
When should such a change come about? I would advocate ASAP.
You may be correct that there is some urgency in having various plans and attempting to address various issues related to the matter. I have quite a few doubts that an immediate doubling of the blocksize is necessary because there are various relief plans in place already.
Let’s say for example seg wit goes into effect in April/May and lightning network has some relief, there also may be other solutions along the way that cause some relief… and all of these facts could change the timeline. On the contrary, increased users (and transactions as you suggested) could also cause pressures in the opposite direction to increase the blocksize. Each of these inputs are a work in progress, and surely, increasing from 1 to 2 mb could be on the backburner, for example if there is an ongoing continuous delay in transactions or something like that… but currently, it appears that in the past 60 days the block size average has fluctuated largely between about 45 and 80%.
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=60days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=I’m no expert, and I just consider some of the information that I read, and in that regard, surely seg wit seems to be capable of addressing some of the inefficiencies within that current 45-80% fluctuation to effectively bring the average down to below 45% on a regular basis… and even with expansion of bitcoin users and transactions, with the implementation of seg wit and maybe some other efficiency creation measures, there may be considerable abilities for the bitcoin network to continue to handle those increased transaction quantities with throughput of well under 60% for some time into the future.
Therefore, the math problem changes when the inputs and the capacity changes, so then the question remains regarding whether there is any real and meaningful urgency to increasing the block size when that may not be necessary and potentially incapacitating some of the smaller nodes?
Incapacitating smaller nodes is no small cost in my thinking.
The 50% bet, based upon a 2x/year extrapolation, is somewhat less than a year. But what if we get a surge in adoption? For we don't know when the next great influx will arrive. If it happens next month, we will have scores of befuddled newcomers utterly unable to comprehend where there money disappeared to. With attendant widely-published horror stories. Which runs a very good chance of shunting these -- and future -- newcomers onto some other system. One without such a stupid artificial restriction.
The restriction is not stupid and artificial.
When people come into bitcoin, they come in for a variety of reasons, and if they are disappointed because bitcoin is something other than what they expected, then that is going to happen.
Surely, there can be some dangers when bitcoin is marketed by some as a replacement of visa, and really that is a bit of hyperbole.
Yes, bitcoin is complicated and people may not even understand what they are getting when they invest into bitcoin.
Even if bitcoin is not replacing visa, bitcoin remains very valuable to hold and transfer value, and yes maybe some day bitcoin will develop and transition to such an extent to be able to compete with and to replace visa.. yet I don’t see how that should be a short term goal.. and really a more important goal, at least in the short term, is probably preserving some of the peer to peer nature of bitcoin and the ability to avert various kind of government and financial institution controls over bitcoin is by allowing the network to grow more organically with community input (which frequently seems to be messy), and in the end, it is likely that bitcoin is going to become more and more capable of handling more and more users and there is also going to be more and more processing power that is going to be held by individuals while at the same time mining farms are going to continue to also be constructed around bitcoin and to potentially centralize it beyond individual inputs.
You may claim that nearly a year is enough time to work things out. And that is the ~50% probability (assuming the 2x per year is a good curve fit). But those who have been around this for a while know that this animal seems to get adopted in fits and starts. If we had a proportional spike like we did in Jul, or in Sep, or in Dec, the system could not handle the volume. Period. No capacity whatsoever. If it was a spike, the backlog would eventually clear out. But how would the newcomers feel about their money being in limbo for a month? And what if it would have been Bitcoin's eternal September - we would kill all prospects of an explosion in adoption like the Internet experienced in 1993.
It seems to me that when you describe more or less exacting timelines of a year or some impending soon time into the near future, that is an oversimplification to suggest that this is largely a math problem that a certain number of usages is going to bring us into this filled up capacity...
I'm thinking you must have thought something other than you typed here. A certain number of usages will indeed "bring us into this filled up capacity". This is pure math. The consequences that fall out of such an event can be debated, but the capacity is the capacity. The math is the math. It ain't even sophisticated math. Simple elementary school arithmetic will suffice.
I don’t know. I wrote what I wrote, and maybe sometimes, I am not being very clear in what I am saying.
And, even in this post that I am making now, I feel that I am being a bit repetitive in my presentation and even rambling somewhat.
In essence, I continue to challenge mathematical formulations of the problem as you seem to be frequently asserting.
I agree that there is math involved with bitcoin scaling and there are capacity issues that are limited by the blocksize.. yes, yes, yes,, but math is not the only thing at play in predicting what is going to happen regarding the blocksize limit or deciding what to do about the problem (if there is a problem) or when to do it, if at all.
I am repetitively agreeing that measures need to be taken to consider and address the matter, but maybe continuing to vary in my assessment of the degree of the “problem.”
Yes, some evolving situations (whether expected or not) are going to cause a bit more senses of urgency regarding blocks fullness, but in the end, I feel fairly optimistic that the bitcoin blockchain is strong enough to survive a variety of attacks from a variety of angles... to adjust to the the attacks and to the overclogging, and likely bitcoin participants will also, from time to time, suffer from some delays in processing their transactions, here and there, and it will not be the end of the world or the end of bitcoin.
First, the problem is not "a variety of attacks from a variety of angles". The problem is simple usage of Bitcoin, in the manner it was designed to be operated, absent a change in the max block size, is limited to 'about 350,000' transactions a day. Period. If more transactions than this are attempted, for a sustained period, those transactions will not be simply delayed. The excess over 'about 350,000' per day will
never clear.
You seem to be a very reasonable and well articulated poster, and maybe your assertions in this above paragraph exemplifies the essence of our disagreement, and we really don’t need to belabor these points?
You are asserting never and absolutely and for sure and black and white. I don’t agree, and when you attempt to phrase any technical issue that also includes at least social, political and economics, then you are approaching territories in which you are very likely to be wrong with your absolute assertions. Sure, I will continue to listen to your arguments, and I don’t mind politely engaging with you from time to time, but in some sense, we just need to agree to disagree.. because our fundamental framework differs.. Maybe on some points, we will agree, and maybe with the passage of time and various unraveling of events one of us will come closer to the other in his perspective… and I don’t really have a problem with that.
Whether in real life or over these kinds of forums, I also don’t have a problem in dealing with people who frame matters more mathematical than I do; however, I sometimes will engage and point out flaws in the perspective, but sometimes, I will chose not to engage when it seems that the discussion is not really going anywhere or it is devolving too much into a non productive space.
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