Bitcoin is a flawed technology

[myrkul]

I was under the impression that this label "Anarcho-Capitalist" applied to me. If that is infact not the case i would be interested in learning why. Would you be so kind as to explain your position with a bit more detail?

I don't know, I am not really familiar with your views.

To elaborate: Libertarianism puts the concept of ownership and contracts under the hood of "freedoms" which is inherently flawed.
The crux of the matter is that both are subject to power and the use of force, and they cannot exist with out it. Anarchism threats this in an agnostic way while Libertarians are dependent to take them for granted or their ideology falls apart.

ah yea deontological libertarins can be a little bit silly at times. To me property is nothing more than a useful construct that we as a society use to avoid conflict. You know since 2 people can not both eat the same apple, we can either chose to fight over it or we can establish some sort of property norm. To me the state is the former and i personally prefer the latter.

They can both eat half an apple.

Not if they both need a whole apple to survive.

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[ElectricMucus]

I was under the impression that this label "Anarcho-Capitalist" applied to me. If that is infact not the case i would be interested in learning why. Would you be so kind as to explain your position with a bit more detail?

I don't know, I am not really familiar with your views.

To elaborate: Libertarianism puts the concept of ownership and contracts under the hood of "freedoms" which is inherently flawed.
The crux of the matter is that both are subject to power and the use of force, and they cannot exist with out it. Anarchism threats this in an agnostic way while Libertarians are dependent to take them for granted or their ideology falls apart.

ah yea deontological libertarins can be a little bit silly at times. To me property is nothing more than a useful construct that we as a society use to avoid conflict. You know since 2 people can not both eat the same apple, we can either chose to fight over it or we can establish some sort of property norm. To me the state is the former and i personally prefer the latter.

They can both eat half an apple.

Not if they both need a whole apple to survive.

Then there is no other possible solution other than (deadly!) force.

Of course in nature there is never just one apple...

[herzmeister]

Back to topic, guys? 

Turns out Moore's Law is both correct and incorrect.

But in a way it's not so favorable to Bitcoin.

Single core processor speed as well as hard drive sizes have not significantly improved through the recent years.

That's because the desktop PC is dying. Everything goes smaller and mobile.

And these mobile devices are getting better and better. And the processors and storage media smaller and smaller.

It's only in this respect now that Moore's Law still holds true.

Either way, it's Satoshi himself who mentions that mining and blockchain storage will migrate to specialized data centers. And I'm afraid these specialists will turn out to be those corporations who don't care much if their servers cost $100,000 or a million.

[ElectricMucus]

Single core processor speed as well as hard drive sizes have not significantly improved through the recent years.

That isn't really true afik.

Even so hard drive capacity grows faster than moores law. It is just that it has become unfeasible to use hard disks in the way they were used before.

In the past it was possible to re-write and re-read hard disk many times in their lifetime. But since transfer speeds are increasing one exponent below that, mostly linear this becomes a bottleneck.
The ultimate death of the hard drives will not be that they can't be produced with higher capacity but that they can't be filled and read back two times before they become unusable.

SSD memory grows even faster still, but it too has some issues in that regard. It grows to the power of three where bandwidth grows to the power of two, not as bad as the 2:1 relationship with hard drives, but still.
The other issue is that the rapid growth in capacity is facilitated by storing more information in a single capacitor which makes them less reliable.
All in all increasing capacity should outperform the growth of the blockchain for quite some time. And after that I doubt that bitcoin will still be relevant. It should still be around but exponential growth should be over.

And what sense does make a limited amount cryptocurrency make for sustained exponential growth? None, it has to either hit a ceiling or fade away.

[ChanceCoats123]

Back to topic, guys? 

Turns out Moore's Law is both correct and incorrect.

But in a way it's not so favorable to Bitcoin.

Single core processor speed as well as hard drive sizes have not significantly improved through the recent years.

That's because the desktop PC is dying. Everything goes smaller and mobile.

And these mobile devices are getting better and better. And the processors and storage media smaller and smaller.

It's only in this respect now that Moore's Law still holds true.

Either way, it's Satoshi himself who mentions that mining and blockchain storage will migrate to specialized data centers. And I'm afraid these specialists will turn out to be those corporations who don't care much if their servers cost $100,000 or a million.

Have you heard of a company called Intel? Yeah, they not only follow Moore's law (since Gordon Moore was a co-founder), but their products have shown upward movement on a log scale in terms of transistors per chip, size of transistors, power consumption (decreasing, obviously). Not to mention that every time they have released a product since the days of Core 2 Duo, there has ALWAYS been a 5-10% increase in single threaded performance. Please do a little research before spouting lies.

[xavier]

Once a simple method for truncating the block chain has been distributed, the storage argument won't even be valid anymore.

Any simple method will not be able to stop the problem, that the size of the blockchain will increase exponentially over time. It will just be able to optimize it, or to provide some temporary relief. The fundamental design problem with bitcoin will still hold true, its in the design of the system.

That is an absolutely absurd time line for the average user to run out of space for the block chain. I understand that you firmly believe the block chain growth will out pace the produced storage space (theoretically), but there already exists enough storage space on the average computer to hold the block chain for years to come (and you can quote me on that).

Also, if large corporations were to come in to fill the void when the blockchain model becomes unviable..... that will result in bitcoin loosing its USP and becoming just like any other previous currency out there that required a central body to operate.

The blockchain right now is about 5GB if I understand it? If bitcoin continues to experience exponential growth, providing trnasaction limit is lifted,  my intuition tells me it wont be long until storage & bandwidth requirements exceed whats currently available. Understand VISA processes 11,000 tx per second. I will do the math later tonight.

[Anon136]

Once a simple method for truncating the block chain has been distributed, the storage argument won't even be valid anymore.

Any simple method will not be able to stop the problem, that the size of the blockchain will increase exponentially over time. It will just be able to optimize it, or to provide some temporary relief. The fundamental design problem with bitcoin will still hold true, its in the design of the system.

That is an absolutely absurd time line for the average user to run out of space for the block chain. I understand that you firmly believe the block chain growth will out pace the produced storage space (theoretically), but there already exists enough storage space on the average computer to hold the block chain for years to come (and you can quote me on that).

Also, if large corporations were to come in to fill the void when the blockchain model becomes unviable..... that will result in bitcoin loosing its USP and becoming just like any other previous currency out there that required a central body to operate.

The blockchain right now is about 5GB if I understand it? If bitcoin continues to experience exponential growth, providing trnasaction limit is lifted,  my intuition tells me it wont be long until storage & bandwidth requirements exceed whats currently available. Understand VISA processes 11,000 tx per second. I will do the math later tonight.

read this https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

we can reasonably expect it to scale to about the size of visa. If we really need more transactions than this than we can use alternative block-chains to avoid centralization in exchange for undesirable heterogeneity. I consider that a worthy trade off. This all assumes that someone doesn't find a decentralized way to scale the first blockchain up.

[myrkul]

At very high transaction rates each block can be over half a gigabyte in size.

It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. In Satoshi's paper he describes "pruning", a way to delete unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent. This reduces the amount of data that is needed for a fully validating node to be only the size of the current unspent output size, plus some additional data that is needed to handle re-orgs. As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.

Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary.

The primary limiting factor in Bitcoin's performance is disk seeks once the unspent transaction output set stops fitting in memory. It is quite possible that the set will always fit in memory on dedicated server class machines, if hardware advances faster than Bitcoin usage does.

[DoomDumas]

Bitcoin relies on distributing a file with unlimited size to every single node in the network in order to function. Bitcoin therefore would theoretically succeed if the resources required for storing and transmitting such an unlimited file size were also unlimited.

However, its clear that for the foreseeable future, storage is not unlimited, and also bandwidth is not unlimited. The unlimited size of the blockchain; the fact that anybody can add transactions for no cost, eg. SDice. The overhead with distributing an unlimited sized file to every node.

Moore's law is cited in Satoshi's paper as being a fundamental tenet on how the bitcoin system works. Quoting from Satoshi's paper:

If we suppose blocks are generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of 1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in
memory

However, "Moore's law" is not a law at all. It was just an observation made 40 years ago that the price of storage would decrease for the foreseeable future - that we were entering an era of microcomputing. It cannot hold true forever. There is a hard limit to how much information can be stored on a chip.  Its just we haven't reached it.

Therefore the concept of distributing an unlimited sized file to every node on the network is fundamentally not sustainable or economical - READ: flawed. Storage will not be getting cheaper forever but the principle underlying bitcoin is for the filesize of the blockchain to be getting bigger forever.

Let's not also forget the bandwidth usage requirement as well, which will also be getting bigger forever.

Only full nodes have to store the whole blockchain.. and for storage, I remember arround 16 years ago, I had to pay hundred of dollars for 8 Mb of RAM, last week I bought 8 Gb for less than 50 buck.. this is 2000 times cheaper than 16 years ago.. so, what will worth a 8 Tb memory chip in 15 years, I dont car if I have to buy few of the to stay a full node, I will for sure !

I just disagree on the OP point.. and many other option are possible in the software sphere !  No panic at all here.. Sustainable IMO !

[myrkul]

I remember arround 16 years ago, I had to pay hundred of dollars for 8 Mb of RAM, last week I bought 8 Gb for less than 50 buck.. this is 2000 times cheaper than 16 years ago..

Isn't capitalism great?

[Impaler]

ElectricMucus has stuck it to yall so effectively I've decided to take him off ignore.

[xavier]

Single core processor speed as well as hard drive sizes have not significantly improved through the recent years.

That isn't really true afik.

Even so hard drive capacity grows faster than moores law. It is just that it has become unfeasible to use hard disks in the way they were used before.

In the past it was possible to re-write and re-read hard disk many times in their lifetime. But since transfer speeds are increasing one exponent below that, mostly linear this becomes a bottleneck.
The ultimate death of the hard drives will not be that they can't be produced with higher capacity but that they can't be filled and read back two times before they become unusable.

SSD memory grows even faster still, but it too has some issues in that regard. It grows to the power of three where bandwidth grows to the power of two, not as bad as the 2:1 relationship with hard drives, but still.
The other issue is that the rapid growth in capacity is facilitated by storing more information in a single capacitor which makes them less reliable.
All in all increasing capacity should outperform the growth of the blockchain for quite some time. And after that I doubt that bitcoin will still be relevant. It should still be around but exponential growth should be over.

And what sense does make a limited amount cryptocurrency make for sustained exponential growth? None, it has to either hit a ceiling or fade away.

So ... SSD and bandwidth grow slower than bitcoin transactions? Or quicker?

To all those people talking about pruning or any such optimizations: what we are considering here is growth rate not file size so please stop talking about pruning. My arguement is that the blockchain will grow faster than bandwidth / storage, making the P2P model invalid.

Only people with valid arguements about growth should continue to post in this thread.

[badgerman]

How has this managed to slpi past us? gee whizz I'm glad you spotted that... doh! As opposed to the other flawless options that I missed before?? 

Of course it has flaws, everything does, even your head no matter beautiful or perfect it is. The only difference is with this flawed system is Im not getting taxed to death everytime I fart out a penny, any assosiated fees and charges that go with using any currency day to day are no where nearly outrageous scandalous as the the ones the bankers pirates and merchants thieves charge you on your human money.

Besides, BTC is more of a hobby that a currency. Its just so the community can jump on the rollorcoaster exch/rate and play pretend economy with having someone scold us if we have to much fun.

So stop being such a grouch, turn that frown upside down and jump on the band wagon with the rest of us!!

[yocko06]

Bitcoin relies on distributing a file with unlimited size to every single node in the network in order to function. Bitcoin therefore would theoretically succeed if the resources required for storing and transmitting such an unlimited file size were also unlimited.

However, its clear that for the foreseeable future, storage is not unlimited, and also bandwidth is not unlimited. The unlimited size of the blockchain; the fact that anybody can add transactions for no cost, eg. SDice. The overhead with distributing an unlimited sized file to every node.

Moore's law is cited in Satoshi's paper as being a fundamental tenet on how the bitcoin system works. Quoting from Satoshi's paper:

If we suppose blocks are generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of 1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in
memory

However, "Moore's law" is not a law at all. It was just an observation made 40 years ago that the price of storage would decrease for the foreseeable future - that we were entering an era of microcomputing. It cannot hold true forever. There is a hard limit to how much information can be stored on a chip.  Its just we haven't reached it.

Therefore the concept of distributing an unlimited sized file to every node on the network is fundamentally not sustainable or economical - READ: flawed. Storage will not be getting cheaper forever but the principle underlying bitcoin is for the filesize of the blockchain to be getting bigger forever.

Let's not also forget the bandwidth usage requirement as well, which will also be getting bigger forever.

Data May be stored on your skin in the future. They are finding DNA has far better storage than any current technology.

https://theconversation.com/dna-data-storage-100-million-hours-of-hd-video-in-every-cup-11777

http://earthsky.org/human-world/scientists-successfully-store-data-in-dna

I wouldn't be trying to talk down bitcoin on the basis of technology not moving forward fast enough. We are heading into a totally different age with the way we do things.   

[ChanceCoats123]

Single core processor speed as well as hard drive sizes have not significantly improved through the recent years.

That isn't really true afik.

Even so hard drive capacity grows faster than moores law. It is just that it has become unfeasible to use hard disks in the way they were used before.

In the past it was possible to re-write and re-read hard disk many times in their lifetime. But since transfer speeds are increasing one exponent below that, mostly linear this becomes a bottleneck.
The ultimate death of the hard drives will not be that they can't be produced with higher capacity but that they can't be filled and read back two times before they become unusable.

SSD memory grows even faster still, but it too has some issues in that regard. It grows to the power of three where bandwidth grows to the power of two, not as bad as the 2:1 relationship with hard drives, but still.
The other issue is that the rapid growth in capacity is facilitated by storing more information in a single capacitor which makes them less reliable.
All in all increasing capacity should outperform the growth of the blockchain for quite some time. And after that I doubt that bitcoin will still be relevant. It should still be around but exponential growth should be over.

And what sense does make a limited amount cryptocurrency make for sustained exponential growth? None, it has to either hit a ceiling or fade away.

So ... SSD and bandwidth grow slower than bitcoin transactions? Or quicker?

To all those people talking about pruning or any such optimizations: what we are considering here is growth rate not file size so please stop talking about pruning. My arguement is that the blockchain will grow faster than bandwidth / storage, making the P2P model invalid.

Only people with valid arguements about growth should continue to post in this thread.

Your argument is just plain wrong though.
 
There is absolutely no way bitcoin will out pace the already exponential growth of technology and storage (and definitely not in 6 months).

What you fail to realize is that storage and technology have a 30 year head start. Try graphing  two exponential functions, and give one of those functions an exponent of (t+30).
No matter what you do (within reason, because we know the relative growth rates of the block chain), you WILL NOT get those graphs to converge within a reasonable timeframe.

Look, I understand there is a theoretical flaw in bitcoin. I won't argue that. But realize that we don't live in theory land where friction doesn't exist and physics all works perfectly. We live in the real world where theoretical problems don't become real problems until after the human species goes extinct.

[ElectricMucus]

Single core processor speed as well as hard drive sizes have not significantly improved through the recent years.

That isn't really true afik.

Even so hard drive capacity grows faster than moores law. It is just that it has become unfeasible to use hard disks in the way they were used before.

In the past it was possible to re-write and re-read hard disk many times in their lifetime. But since transfer speeds are increasing one exponent below that, mostly linear this becomes a bottleneck.
The ultimate death of the hard drives will not be that they can't be produced with higher capacity but that they can't be filled and read back two times before they become unusable.

SSD memory grows even faster still, but it too has some issues in that regard. It grows to the power of three where bandwidth grows to the power of two, not as bad as the 2:1 relationship with hard drives, but still.
The other issue is that the rapid growth in capacity is facilitated by storing more information in a single capacitor which makes them less reliable.
All in all increasing capacity should outperform the growth of the blockchain for quite some time. And after that I doubt that bitcoin will still be relevant. It should still be around but exponential growth should be over.

And what sense does make a limited amount cryptocurrency make for sustained exponential growth? None, it has to either hit a ceiling or fade away.

So ... SSD and bandwidth grow slower than bitcoin transactions? Or quicker?

To all those people talking about pruning or any such optimizations: what we are considering here is growth rate not file size so please stop talking about pruning. My arguement is that the blockchain will grow faster than bandwidth / storage, making the P2P model invalid.

Only people with valid arguements about growth should continue to post in this thread.

The last time I checked it was lower, but that was a few months ago, before the rise in popularity in satoshi dice.
What really bugs me though is that storing the blockchain isn't rewarded in any way, while a hard drive costs about the same as a gpu.

All in all I do think that eventually Bitcoin will be superseeded by another cryptocurrency, not a fork like those altchains but a re-implementation from scratch,

[Spendulus]

Single core processor speed as well as hard drive sizes have not significantly improved through the recent years.

That isn't really true afik....
And what sense does make a limited amount cryptocurrency make for sustained exponential growth? None, it has to either hit a ceiling or fade away.

So ... SSD and bandwidth grow slower than bitcoin transactions? Or quicker?
...

It isn't drive or bandwidth size that is relevant, but available excess capacity.

If bandwidth doubles, but bandwidth demand quadruples, not good.

[xavier]

Single core processor speed as well as hard drive sizes have not significantly improved through the recent years.

That isn't really true afik.

Even so hard drive capacity grows faster than moores law. It is just that it has become unfeasible to use hard disks in the way they were used before.

In the past it was possible to re-write and re-read hard disk many times in their lifetime. But since transfer speeds are increasing one exponent below that, mostly linear this becomes a bottleneck.
The ultimate death of the hard drives will not be that they can't be produced with higher capacity but that they can't be filled and read back two times before they become unusable.

SSD memory grows even faster still, but it too has some issues in that regard. It grows to the power of three where bandwidth grows to the power of two, not as bad as the 2:1 relationship with hard drives, but still.
The other issue is that the rapid growth in capacity is facilitated by storing more information in a single capacitor which makes them less reliable.
All in all increasing capacity should outperform the growth of the blockchain for quite some time. And after that I doubt that bitcoin will still be relevant. It should still be around but exponential growth should be over.

And what sense does make a limited amount cryptocurrency make for sustained exponential growth? None, it has to either hit a ceiling or fade away.

So ... SSD and bandwidth grow slower than bitcoin transactions? Or quicker?

To all those people talking about pruning or any such optimizations: what we are considering here is growth rate not file size so please stop talking about pruning. My arguement is that the blockchain will grow faster than bandwidth / storage, making the P2P model invalid.

Only people with valid arguements about growth should continue to post in this thread.

The last time I checked it was lower, but that was a few months ago, before the rise in popularity in satoshi dice.
What really bugs me though is that storing the blockchain isn't rewarded in any way, while a hard drive costs about the same as a gpu.

All in all I do think that eventually Bitcoin will be superseeded by another cryptocurrency, not a fork like those altchains but a re-implementation from scratch,

It just takes a few jokers like SDice to start adding transactions like crazy..... and things can get bad.

I agree- there needs to be some fee for storage.

For this reason anyway, I continue to think that bitcoin's scalability is an issue.

[Spendulus]

....

So ... SSD and bandwidth grow slower than bitcoin transactions? Or quicker?

To all those people talking about pruning or any such optimizations: what we are considering here is growth rate not file size so please stop talking about pruning. My arguement is that the blockchain will grow faster than bandwidth / storage, making the P2P model invalid.

Only people with valid arguements about growth should continue to post in this thread.

Well, transactions grow with usage.  You could presume that transactions ramp up in identical fashion to paypal over similar numbers of years.  Or presume that they ramp up to "all humans on earth" and some fraction of their transaction volume.  Let's take the latter case, as it is the limit, that after that volume is reached, then current transaction volume is limited by population size.

But storage capacity, processing speed and networks will continue to grow by compounding, ie, by an exponential factor.  You can argue that might be a weak or a strong exponential.

Thus in the relative long term, storage certainly does outpace transaction growth.  Could there be a momentary hiccup or two as a result of sudden surge in usage?  Yeah, but so what.

[KSV]

Bitcoin relies on distributing a file with unlimited size to every single node in the network in order to function. Bitcoin therefore would theoretically succeed if the resources required for storing and transmitting such an unlimited file size were also unlimited.

However, its clear that for the foreseeable future, storage is not unlimited, and also bandwidth is not unlimited. The unlimited size of the blockchain; the fact that anybody can add transactions for no cost, eg. SDice. The overhead with distributing an unlimited sized file to every node.

Moore's law is cited in Satoshi's paper as being a fundamental tenet on how the bitcoin system works. Quoting from Satoshi's paper:

If we suppose blocks are generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of 1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in
memory

However, "Moore's law" is not a law at all. It was just an observation made 40 years ago that the price of storage would decrease for the foreseeable future - that we were entering an era of microcomputing. It cannot hold true forever. There is a hard limit to how much information can be stored on a chip.  Its just we haven't reached it.

Therefore the concept of distributing an unlimited sized file to every node on the network is fundamentally not sustainable or economical - READ: flawed. Storage will not be getting cheaper forever but the principle underlying bitcoin is for the filesize of the blockchain to be getting bigger forever.

Let's not also forget the bandwidth usage requirement as well, which will also be getting bigger forever.

The requirements of porn means the creation of greater storage will never cease.

hahaha, u beat me to it