BTC.value = if(you_can_get_blocksize_together = 10K, dead);

[jubalix]

OK btc world, I am of the view that if the BTC community cannot get the blocksize issue sorted out now, and some sort of optional instant send side chain, the demand for the features are great enough that some alt will replace BTC, sooner than later. Not just for the blocksize issue, but for the implication of the state of dev in BTC.

Certain alts of recent should be a serious wake up call. They have proven the market is prepared to discount the faults instamines, some centralization whatever.

The market demand for instant send, open policy dev discussion and the ability to implement change is to high.

People are tired of the fight, and want solutions now, this is exacerbated by the fact they can see the solutions ready.
The BTC network is being driven to a halt for normal users as it becomes expensive to send BTC with current blocksize.

It is interesting to see the 1st to market advantage of BTC being thrown away, particularly as BTC now what it craved for so long, real world adoption and usage, unlike most other coins, and what is being done with it?

Fees have gone through the roof due to a stupid fight between a few people than no one cares about. Get a 8mb blocksize already or whatever if you want to live.

At the inflection point of BTC success, the dev model has failed to reach consensus. This may be one of the importnat boundary conditions of sucess::how a coin is sets up and dev/miners dynamic.

It seems the consensus there to make them work in harmony is just as important as on-chain consensus

I am agnostic as to whether BTC or some Alt takes the crown, but there you have it BTC can implement solutions now,

The bigger issue writ large ::

If BTC cannot even now take steps to address the blocksize issue, when solutions abound, how then can any meaningful dev take place to improve the utility of BTC?

Its up to you to see the writing on the wall or go down with the ship.

[AgentofCoin]

...
Certain alts of recent should be a serious wake up call. They have proven the market is prepared to discount the faults instamines, some centralization whatever.

The market demand for instant send, open policy dev discussion and the ability to implement change is to high.

People are tired of the fight, and want solutions exacerbated by the fact they can see the solutions. The BTC network is being driven to a halt for normal users as it becomes expensive to send BTC with current blocksize.
...

I disagree. The current altcoin rise is based on pure pump speculation from
statements such as yours, which only feeds into what they are attempting.

At the end of the day, majority of altcoins are worthless and not as secure.
If noobs think those are viable alternatives, they will soon get what they deserve.

Don't mistake a good old fashion altcoin pump, with actual utilization.
If you look at the charts, they are clearly pumps.

[Carlton Banks]

3 things


1. What business accepts these alts? It rhymes with "shogun"

2. Why not? Is it becasue of Bitcoin's coveted MASSIVE AMOUNT OF CUMULATIVE HASHES PROTECTING EVERYONE'S BTC? It is, isn't it?

3. Altcoin exchange rate or market caps mean nothing. Fiat money is free to those with the printing press or access to the right kind of credit. Rich adversaries of Bitcoin can empty their toilet paper into altcoin markets all they want, the market liquidity will drop right out when they move onto the next coin.

[jubalix]

3 things


1. What business accepts these alts? It rhymes with "shogun"

2. Why not? Is it becasue of Bitcoin's coveted MASSIVE AMOUNT OF CUMULATIVE HASHES PROTECTING EVERYONE'S BTC? It is, isn't it?

3. Altcoin exchange rate or market caps means nothing. Fiat money is free to those with the printing press or access to the right kind of credit.

I accept your points, but they are orthogonal to my main contention, which is the implication the Dev/Miner consensus look to have ground to a standstill with vastly deleterious effects

If they can not even get through a larger blocksize even as a stop gap of say 8mb or something, in the face of huge user demand, which btc community always sought, what does this mean for any meaningful dev on anything else.

What good are hash protected coins if they become unable to be moved?

Your so right we do have massive btc adoption, but now cannot cheaply spend our coins....!

[jubalix]

...
Certain alts of recent should be a serious wake up call. They have proven the market is prepared to discount the faults instamines, some centralization whatever.

The market demand for instant send, open policy dev discussion and the ability to implement change is to high.

People are tired of the fight, and want solutions exacerbated by the fact they can see the solutions. The BTC network is being driven to a halt for normal users as it becomes expensive to send BTC with current blocksize.
...

I disagree. The current altcoin rise is based on pure pump speculation from
statements such as yours, which only feeds into what they are attempting.

At the end of the day, majority of altcoins are worthless and not as secure.
If noobs think those are viable alternatives, they will soon get what they deserve.

Don't mistake a good old fashion altcoin pump, with actual utilization.
If you look at the charts, they are clearly pumps.

Instant send, and low transaction fee features are agnostic to being an alt.

The non speculative part of my statement is that here is an operating system that I can cheaply and isntantly send my coins, vs here is a system where I can not. This is where the value is being arbitraged out.

Looking at the charts, Percentage wise I am not sure btc dominance has ever been lower.

[AgentofCoin]

...
Certain alts of recent should be a serious wake up call. They have proven the market is prepared to discount the faults instamines, some centralization whatever.

The market demand for instant send, open policy dev discussion and the ability to implement change is to high.

People are tired of the fight, and want solutions exacerbated by the fact they can see the solutions. The BTC network is being driven to a halt for normal users as it becomes expensive to send BTC with current blocksize.
...

I disagree. The current altcoin rise is based on pure pump speculation from
statements such as yours, which only feeds into what they are attempting.

At the end of the day, majority of altcoins are worthless and not as secure.
If noobs think those are viable alternatives, they will soon get what they deserve.

Don't mistake a good old fashion altcoin pump, with actual utilization.
If you look at the charts, they are clearly pumps.

Instant send, and low transaction fee features are agnostic to being an alt.

The non speculative part of my statement is that here is an operating system that I can cheaply and isntantly send my coins, vs here is a system where I can not. This is where the value is being arbitraged out.

Looking at the charts, Percentage wise I am not sure btc dominance has ever been lower.

People are not buying altcoins because of instant send or low fees.
That makes no sense since the other person in the transaction would need to accept that alt as well.
There is no worthy infrastructure or economy for those alts.

The reason why those alts are rising is not adoption by noobs, but whale attempting to trick you.
They are using the higher bitcoin fees to take advantage. This is 2013-2014 altcoin pump all over again.

Eventually, majority will be converted back into btc, like always.

[dinofelis]

3 things


1. What business accepts these alts? It rhymes with "shogun"

That was the case once with bitcoin too.

2. Why not? Is it becasue of Bitcoin's coveted MASSIVE AMOUNT OF CUMULATIVE HASHES PROTECTING EVERYONE'S BTC? It is, isn't it?

Of course not.  Simply because bitcoin is first mover and more known.  Bitcoin is immensely OVERPROTECTED cryptographically.

If a merchant has troubles receiving his 0.02 bitcoin payment because it is still in the mem pool for 3 hours, he might prefer just any other alt coin that gets him to his 25 dollars or so more reliably than the utmost improbable case that the block chain will be overdone the time he holds these 25 dollars before converting them to fiat, or spending them otherwise.

In other words, the immense "cryptographic vaults by huge proof of work" don't matter for the guy holding the coin half an hour.  You don't put your 20 dollar bills in a highly secured vault, you keep them in your wallet and you spend them.
The cryptographic vault of bitcoin is designed to hold a RESERVE currency, not for a used currency that you obtain, and spend again.  It is meant to "hold your precious", and not to get it and transmit it again.

[jubalix]

People are not buying altcoins because of instant send or low fees.
That makes no sense since the other person in the transaction would need to accept that alt as well.
There is no worthy infrastructure or economy for those alts.

The reason why those alts are rising is not adoption by noobs, but whale attempting to trick you.
They are using the higher bitcoin fees to take advantage. This is 2013-2014 altcoin pump all over again.

Eventually, majority will be converted back into btc, like always.

People are buying alts for profit hedge and features.

Fictitious whales are not an argument against real division and to much friction in the BTC economy due to high fees, and a choke point via block size.

[dinofelis]

People are buying alts for profit hedge and features.

Bitcoin too.  Only a tiny little part of its market cap is "currency use with merchants".  The rest is just as well greater fool games.

[AgentofCoin]

People are not buying altcoins because of instant send or low fees.
That makes no sense since the other person in the transaction would need to accept that alt as well.
There is no worthy infrastructure or economy for those alts.

The reason why those alts are rising is not adoption by noobs, but whale attempting to trick you.
They are using the higher bitcoin fees to take advantage. This is 2013-2014 altcoin pump all over again.

Eventually, majority will be converted back into btc, like always.

People are buying alts for profit hedge and features.
Fictitious whales are not an argument against real division and to much friction in the BTC economy due to high fees, and a choke point via block size.

If you were knowledgeable, you would know that the average bitcoin user is ignorant of the blocksize issue.
The average user sends a tx and walks away, never participating or paying attention to the arguments.

The average bitcoin user is not buy altcoins as hedges.
The average bitcoin user has less than 0.5 btc, they aren't going to risk that into an alt.
Only the whales are buying those altcoins as pure speculation.
The Dumps will come like always.

[gentlemand]

If you were knowledgeable, you would know that the average bitcoin user is ignorant of the blocksize issue.
The average user sends a tx and walks away, never participating or paying attention to the arguments.

The average bitcoin user is not buy altcoins as hedges.
The average bitcoin user has less than 0.5 btc, they aren't going to risk that into an alt.
Only the whales are buying those altcoins as pure speculation.
The Dumps will come like always.

I think you're describing a user 10-15 years in the future. You've still got to be pretty weird and greedy to be using Bitcoin at this stage. It's possible a lot of people aren't paying much attention to the usual echo chambers but the idea that they're as carefree as a debit card user doesn't ring true.

And from perusing these forums, the newer you are the more likely you are to be throwing your coins away on ludicrous investment schemes and ICOs.

Alts at present are largely a mirage but there might be a tipping point that no one notices until the moment has passed.

[AngryDwarf]

Cryptocurrency is something like a dot com bubble where people are speculating on its future value.
Blockchain is this trendy thing where people want to implement it without considering if they really need it.
Don't be surprised to see many cryptocurrencies fail, and certainly many blockchain start ups will fail, just like the dot com bubble.
Without real world use, cryptocurrencies have no real value. People who believe a bunch of hard to compute 1's and 0's as a pure store of value are seriously misguided. But then just look at how many people are only interested in BTC as a get rich quick scheme. Considering BTC as a pure investment scheme it nothing short of a ponzi style pass the bag holder scheme.

As far as alts go, there is a lot of IOU trading occuring, but very little actual transactional use. Bag holders beware!
Ethereum is designed to be a distributed computer. Ether is the fuel for processing on this (once immutable) blockchain. Anyone who thinks it has value as a currency should try downloading the full blockchain. It is not efficient for that purpose.
Litecoin is a simple bitcoin clone with a few tweaked parameters and different proof of work algo. The creator has shown no innovation for this coin beyond a simple clone ever. No wonder it is dropping down the charts. If used heavily, it runs into the same problem as BTC.
Dash at least shows some technological innovation. However, its anonymity features are not very efficient (due to the number of UTXO's created). As a BTC fork, if used heavily, it runs into the same problem as BTC. At least it is showing to be adaptable change. It is not yet known how the masternodes would cope under real world stress.
Monero and other privacy centric coins at least have black market value!

Going back to BTC, at least is has some real world uses if it is not allowed to be strangled by artificially limited capacity. It might not be useful for buying a pack of rolling papers, but fiat can probably do that much more efficiently than any lightning network bank channel.

[jubalix]

People are not buying altcoins because of instant send or low fees.
That makes no sense since the other person in the transaction would need to accept that alt as well.
There is no worthy infrastructure or economy for those alts.

The reason why those alts are rising is not adoption by noobs, but whale attempting to trick you.
They are using the higher bitcoin fees to take advantage. This is 2013-2014 altcoin pump all over again.

Eventually, majority will be converted back into btc, like always.

People are buying alts for profit hedge and features.
Fictitious whales are not an argument against real division and to much friction in the BTC economy due to high fees, and a choke point via block size.

If you were knowledgeable, you would know that the average bitcoin user is ignorant of the blocksize issue.
The average user sends a tx and walks away, never participating or paying attention to the arguments.

The average bitcoin user is not buy altcoins as hedges.
The average bitcoin user has less than 0.5 btc, they aren't going to risk that into an alt.
Only the whales are buying those altcoins as pure speculation.
The Dumps will come like always.

The average user knows when his/her coins got stuck and payment not made which is increasingly the Now. So no.

[jubalix]

Cryptocurrency is something like a dot com bubble where people are speculating on its future value.
Blockchain is this trendy thing where people want to implement it without considering if they really need it.
Don't be surprised to see many cryptocurrencies fail, and certainly many blockchain start ups will fail, just like the dot com bubble.
Without real world use, cryptocurrencies have no real value. People who believe a bunch of hard to compute 1's and 0's as a pure store of value are seriously misguided. But then just look at how many people are only interested in BTC as a get rich quick scheme. Considering BTC as a pure investment scheme it nothing short of a ponzi style pass the bag holder scheme.

As far as alts go, there is a lot of IOU trading occuring, but very little actual transactional use. Bag holders beware!
Ethereum is designed to be a distributed computer. Ether is the fuel for processing on this (once immutable) blockchain. Anyone who thinks it has value as a currency should try downloading the full blockchain. It is not efficient for that purpose.
Litecoin is a simple bitcoin clone with a few tweaked parameters and different proof of work algo. The creator has shown no innovation for this coin beyond a simple clone ever. No wonder it is dropping down the charts. If used heavily, it runs into the same problem as BTC.
Dash at least shows some technological innovation. However, its anonymity features are not very efficient (due to the number of UTXO's created). As a BTC fork, if used heavily, it runs into the same problem as BTC. At least it is showing to be adaptable change. It is not yet known how the masternodes would cope under real world stress.
Monero and other privacy centric coins at least have black market value!

Going back to BTC, at least is has some real world uses if it is not allowed to be strangled by artificially limited capacity. It might not be useful for buying a pack of rolling papers, but fiat can probably do that much more efficiently than any lightning network bank channel.

Good points, the real world use of the BTC blockchain is a system to organise you activities around, a ledger, much like you act in a manner that you see will fill your bank account ledger with money.

at the moment the ledger is fail, as its becoming hard to change the ledger as coins are struggling to be moved

[manselr]

What altcoin is going to have "instant send" with the volume of transaction of bitcoin?

Sorry but I dont see any alts competing. DASH is just Roger Ver pumping it. ETH has a ton of big brands behind the project.

Im eager to have faster transactions with cheaper fees but not at the cost of fucking up the project.

Tell miners to signal for segwit, what else can we do?

[AngryDwarf]

at the moment the ledger is fail, as its becoming hard to change the ledger as coins are struggling to be moved

Probably better to say it is getting harder and harder to get your transaction written into the ledger.

[jonald_fyookball]

OK btc world, I am of the view that if the BTC community cannot get the blocksize issue sorted out now,

I'm with ya... i like where this is going...

and some sort of instant send side chain,

...annnnd  you lost me... why do we need any side chains any time soon?
Bitcoin was totally working FINE until blocks got full...just lift the damn blocksize restriction
which was in place for spam.  The original Bitcoin code handled 32MB blocks.

[AngryDwarf]

Zero confirmation economic risk has changed from the disadvantageous double spend propagation attack to one where the transaction does not confirm at all due to restricted transaction processing capacity, mempool forgetfulness, and selective transaction relay.

[jubalix]

Zero confirmation economic risk has changed from the disadvantageous double spend propagation attack to one where the transaction does not confirm at all due to restricted transaction processing capacity, mempool forgetfulness, and selective transaction relay.

Yes their is risk, and using various system such as say a insentivized master node system, you can select wether you wanted a small value, my coffee to go through and for a  large value say broadcast tx to only be included on the block chain.

The option to take the risk for they type of transaction is what is needed. At the moment your are forced to send a coffee sized in to lanquish mempool with really high fees.

[AngryDwarf]

To reduce the amount of spam that can be created by sending free transactions, an emergent consensus minimum fee mechanism could be introduced. All transactions sent before the minimum fee change should eventually be confirmed, and new transactions below the minimum fee consensus should not be allowed on the network. Transaction relay rules follow the same minimum fee consensus rules. When the non-forgetful transaction pool reaches a certain size (yet again an emergent consensus parameter), the miners start to demand increasing fees. As the transaction back log clears, the transaction fee requirements can be reduced.
Result, zero confirmation risk is significantly reduced and that is how you get instant payments assuming a merchant is willing to accept a level of risk.
Emergent consensus is a dynamic system which does not rely on code changes that are too slow to deploy.

Basically emergent consensus allows the original satoshi vision to work, by solving the DoS spam problem.

[dinofelis]

Cryptocurrency is something like a dot com bubble where people are speculating on its future value.
Blockchain is this trendy thing where people want to implement it without considering if they really need it.
Don't be surprised to see many cryptocurrencies fail, and certainly many blockchain start ups will fail, just like the dot com bubble.
Without real world use, cryptocurrencies have no real value. People who believe a bunch of hard to compute 1's and 0's as a pure store of value are seriously misguided. But then just look at how many people are only interested in BTC as a get rich quick scheme. Considering BTC as a pure investment scheme it nothing short of a ponzi style pass the bag holder scheme.

As far as alts go, there is a lot of IOU trading occuring, but very little actual transactional use. Bag holders beware!
Ethereum is designed to be a distributed computer. Ether is the fuel for processing on this (once immutable) blockchain. Anyone who thinks it has value as a currency should try downloading the full blockchain. It is not efficient for that purpose.
Litecoin is a simple bitcoin clone with a few tweaked parameters and different proof of work algo. The creator has shown no innovation for this coin beyond a simple clone ever. No wonder it is dropping down the charts. If used heavily, it runs into the same problem as BTC.
Dash at least shows some technological innovation. However, its anonymity features are not very efficient (due to the number of UTXO's created). As a BTC fork, if used heavily, it runs into the same problem as BTC. At least it is showing to be adaptable change. It is not yet known how the masternodes would cope under real world stress.
Monero and other privacy centric coins at least have black market value!

Going back to BTC, at least is has some real world uses if it is not allowed to be strangled by artificially limited capacity. It might not be useful for buying a pack of rolling papers, but fiat can probably do that much more efficiently than any lightning network bank channel.

Hear, hear.  However, I don't distinguish *fundamentally* bitcoin and alt coins.  Bitcoin was here first, yes.  Bitcoin, being first, has the biggest network of users, the highest market cap and so on, yes.  But it also has the most primitive crypto technology, which is baked into it.  The big difference (we are witnessing it right now!) between a crypto currency and other technology, is that a crypto currency is a kind of smart contract laid down when its genesis block was published.  You normally can't change it.  Yes, you can change small details that do not affect economic aspects sometimes.  But you can't fundamentally change it.

As such, a crypto currency keeps the tech it has when it was put down (unless it regularly mutes, and has built-in regular hard forks).  When that tech starts to hinder its further development, I would think that it is normal that better tech takes over.  But in order for that to happen, the tech problems with the former first have to have REAL hindrance, not just potential future difficulties.  At that moment, the older coin will pay for its technological difficulties with the erosion of its first mover advantage.  To go to the next coin, who will maybe also run one day in problems.  To be taken over by a third one, and so on.

That doesn't mean that the first coin dies, but only that there is more "ecological competition", and that each coin will find its niche where it is useful.

[Carlton Banks]

The original Bitcoin code handled 32MB blocks.

When there were 2 people worldwide using Bitcoin, it could handle 32 MB blocks, but all the blocks were 1 kB or less at that stage. Because only 2 people were using it


When dozens began to use it, the same person who allowed 32 MB network messages (there was, in fact, no explicit limit on blocksize at all, it was "unlimited") changed their mind, and added the 1MB blocksize limit.


All of which you know, you lying scammy little shit

[dinofelis]

When dozens began to use it, the same person who allowed 32 MB network messages (there was, in fact, no explicit limit on blocksize at all, it was "unlimited") changed their mind, and added the 1MB blocksize limit.

And without realizing, froze this soft fork in forever, with important consequences on its later dynamics.
Or, if he realized, he meant bitcoin to be a reserve currency, and not a means of payment.  Which is not impossible.  With a decreasing block reward, fees must take over.  But in order for fees to take over, there must be something scarce about them, because mining was supposed to be a highly competitive market.  If block size is unlimited, there's no reason NOT to include a transaction with a minuscule fee: it is always better than nothing.  It is only when the *resources used* to do so, become more expensive than the fee itself, that the fee will be excluded, but this suffers from a "tragedy of the commons" problem: ALL miner's resources suffer from big blocks, while the miner taking in the (small) fee gets a (small) reward.  As such, with unlimited blocks, fees would remain very small, nothing would be pushing them up.

If you have a currency without "tail emission", and you need to spend "proof of work", there must be something paying for that, so you NEED BIG FEES.  The only way to obtain big fees is to make a transaction something scarce: finite, small blocks.

But if you make transactions scarce, you hamper fluidity of the currency.  It cannot be used any more for small payments.  It can only be used for big payments at small rates and high fees: a reserve currency.  Moreover, a finite amount of coins without "inflation" invites "hodling" and speculation, driving the coin price high.

So the phase of "generous block rewards and limited adoption" allowed for a phase of currency usage, getting a lot of people interested into it, telling people about buying their coffee with bitcoin and so on.  Once this (scammy ?) phase is over, bitcoin will have a very high price through speculation, early adopters will be very rich, and one doesn't need the coffee buyer any more, one needed only his "pump" to get the price where it is now. 

We now enter the transition of bitcoin into its final phase: very expensive reserve currency for unregulated big finance.

[Amph]

The original Bitcoin code handled 32MB blocks.

When there were 2 people worldwide using Bitcoin, it could handle 32 MB blocks, but all the blocks were 1 kB or less at that stage. Because only 2 people were using it


When dozens began to use it, the same person who allowed 32 MB network messages (there was, in fact, no explicit limit on blocksize at all, it was "unlimited") changed their mind, and added the 1MB blocksize limit.


All of which you know, you lying scammy little shit

i find it weird that satoshi didn't forecast the increase in usage and thus making the limit to 1MB since the beginning, also if he changed it later it mean that he hard forked bitcoin?

or maybe when you diminish it you don't need to hard fork(it would work as a opposite to ram increase in VMware for example you don't need to close the VM...), but i always thought that bitcoin was never hard forked

[dinofelis]

i find it weird that satoshi didn't forecast the increase in usage and thus making the limit to 1MB since the beginning, also if he changed it later it mean that he hard forked bitcoin?

or maybe when you diminish it you don't need to hard fork(it would work as a opposite to ram increase in VMware for example you don't need to close the VM...), but i always thought that bitcoin was never hard forked

Reducing the block size is a soft fork ; increasing it is a hard fork.

Soft fork = new blocks are still valid according to old protocol, but old protocol blocks are not necessarily valid under new.

Hard fork = new blocks aren't valid according to old protocol.  (there's still the choice whether old blocks are valid under new: backwards compatible hard fork, or unilateral hard fork, or not: full hard fork or bilateral hard fork).

Maybe Satoshi didn't realize the power of the immutability dynamics, and thought that one "simply had to agree over it".  Which is strange to think that, but as all this was new back then, and "a toy", he may have overlooked this.... or not at all and maybe he knew perfectly what he did, but didn't want to tell people yet that the goal was to make transactions scarce.  Or the "coffee buyer story" couldn't be told.

[eddie13]

The question in my mind is, how big of a dump is it going to take for something to be done about scailability?

Will it be worth the risk when BTC is $750? $300? $3?

Prospective continued growth is priced in, if Bitcoin can't grow anymore then it will be priced out soon, and I know that price is mostly what most of you care about..

Bitcoin isn't for the rich man store of value settlement layer, it is supposed to be the peoples liberty currency, for the common man that is sick of the fiat scam..

If the common man cannot use Bitcoin then you guys can have fun with your rich man store of value BS, me and many others that are into BTC for the ideals of libertarianism are going to be out..

Whatever happened to the "solution for the unbanked masses" Talk? Or permissionless transactions for the people who are down right sick of dealing with institutions?

We want freedom, we can't have it here? Well that's really really sad because I believed that this was something that could change the world for the better of humanity and now, "Oh no, this is too good for everybody to use, my precious HDD space and bandwidth, you can't all have it, joke's on you.."

So multi million dollar miners are built and just shove the small guy right out of being able to earn any BTC, but I guess they can't afford a frickin $50 hard drive and half ass internet now so it can't even really be used by people anymore..

I call BS, who is out there trying to run nodes on dialup and 10 year old computers? Nobody.. The network can definitely handle 2X or even 5X blocksizes and by time the chain gets massive either storage tech will be improved or pruning tech will become reality..

We need bigger blocks right now, now, immediately..
Add segwit to it now or later or even bigger blocks I don't care, but you better quit your arguing and do something about this right now or this revolution that showed such promise is DEAD, and soon..

Soft fork, hard fork, over easy medium rare fork, fork 3 times, DO IT!!

Fork 2 megs NOW to buy time before it's DEAD and then you can get back to your quibbling until the userbase doubles again..

This thing is having a stroke but you won't fix it because you're arguing about if it's the right time to give it a nose job at the same time or not..



Enough with the satoshi, he is gone, he did not envision much of what has happened up to now therefore rendering satoshi talk mute..
The founding fathers wanted uninfringable rights to bear arms but they didn't see nukes coming..

[dinofelis]

The question in my mind is, how big of a dump is it going to take for something to be done about scailability?

Will it be worth the risk when BTC is $750? $300? $3?

Prospective continued growth is priced in, if Bitcoin can't grow anymore then it will be priced out soon, and I know that price is mostly what most of you care about..

Bitcoin isn't for the rich man store of value settlement layer, it is supposed to be the peoples liberty currency, for the common man that is sick of the fiat scam..

No, that was the story to get it going.  It IS going to be the rich man store of value settlement layer ; which is why its PRICE will probably still be increasing a lot.  

If the common man cannot use Bitcoin then you guys can have fun with your rich man store of value BS, me and many others that are into BTC for the ideals of libertarianism are going to be out..

Me too.  But that's not what makes bitcoin's market cap today, so bitcoin won't care.  The libertarian stuff was for the kick off, the coffee buyers was to get it widely known and pump it.  Now, rich guys are keeping up the price amongst themselves.

Whatever happened to the "solution for the unbanked masses" Talk? Or permissionless transactions for the people who are down right sick of dealing with institutions?

Propaganda, or honest naivity (fell for it too).  Bitcoin's tech cannot handle it, or can handle it when there's a banking layer on top of it (like LN).   It would take 300 days if all Germans were to do one payment with bitcoin on chain today.  Even if you increase block size with a factor of 100 (!), all Germans could still do only one single transaction every 3 days.  They cannot buy their morning coffee with bitcoin with 100 MB blocks.  They can only do one single payment every 3 days.  The Germans only.  Don't talk about the Chinese.

Block-chain-I-have-to-know-all-transactions-in-the-world-ever systems are too precious concerning transactions for normal payments.  No competition with fiat possible.  So only niche applications are possible.  But the VERY strict condition on bitcoin makes that it can only sustain a VERY SMALL transaction rate.   But it has a high market cap, and is very secure.  So: reserve currency.  GOLD in VAULTS.

[Carlton Banks]

"Oh no, this is too good for everybody to use, my precious HDD space and bandwidth, you can't all have it, joke's on you.."

So multi million dollar miners are built and just shove the small guy right out of being able to earn any BTC, but I guess they can't afford a frickin $50 hard drive and half ass internet now so it can't even really be used by people anymore..

I call BS, who is out there trying to run nodes on dialup and 10 year old computers? Nobody.. The network can definitely handle 2X or even 5X blocksizes and by time the chain gets massive either storage tech will be improved or pruning tech will become reality..

If hard disk space and bandwidth were the only issues, you might have a point.

HD space and internet speeds are more serious issues than you're imagining anyway; your hard disk is big enough, your internet is fast enough, your wages can afford all those things, and your internet and phone companies can afford to upgrade their infrastructure, all in your region of the world.

But, guess what? You're not the only person that exists, in the only region of the world. Not everyone is experiencing the exceptionally good conditions, that you are fortunate enough to have. Other people aren't so fortunate.

We need bigger blocks right now, now, immediately..
Add segwit to it now or later or even bigger blocks I don't care, but you better quit your arguing and do something about this right now or this revolution that showed such promise is DEAD, and soon..

Soft fork, hard fork, over easy medium rare fork, fork 3 times, DO IT!!

Fork 2 megs NOW to buy time before it's DEAD and then you can get back to your quibbling until the userbase doubles again..

This thing is having a stroke but you won't fix it because you're arguing about if it's the right time to give it a nose job at the same time or not..

Not only is Bitcoin working perfectly well for those who know how to use it (clearly you're struggling to understand how to figure out the needed transaction fee), but BIG BLOCKS IS NOT THE ONLY SOLUTION.  

And

BIG BLOCKS IS THE MOST DANGEROUS SOLUTION

do I need to make that clearer?

[dinofelis]

So multi million dollar miners are built and just shove the small guy right out of being able to earn any BTC, but I guess they can't afford a frickin $50 hard drive and half ass internet now so it can't even really be used by people anymore..

I call BS, who is out there trying to run nodes on dialup and 10 year old computers? Nobody.. The network can definitely handle 2X or even 5X blocksizes and by time the chain gets massive either storage tech will be improved or pruning tech will become reality..

You are perfectly right that the "big blocks are going to centralize" is BS.  But the issue remains that block-chain-with-all-transactions-ever is not going to fly in the next coming decades.  But you're perfectly right that a 1MB limit is serving ANOTHER purpose: pumping the fee market, to keep the miners running with their crazy PoW security.  This is why bitcoin is designed as a GOLD VAULT, and not as a payment system.  The PoW security of bitcoin is mind-boggling.  No need to have that to secure $50 transactions.  Totally out of your mind to waste so much resources on so much PoW.  But to keep the rich man's gold secure, yes, that's better.  But that comes with a (large) price, and that can only be the case with high fees, and hence an artificial scarcity of transactions.

Too expensive HD, indeed, BS.

[eddie13]

The needed TX fee is 10k sat unless you want to be greedy with time and cut in line it seems to me, rising TX fees is just a race to cut to the front of the line, It doesn't matter if fees are 1 whole BTC per TX it's still not going to fit more TXs into the same block no matter how much you pay, I've never had a single TX drop out of the mempool and never confirm..
No need to be condescending Mr. Banks, I don't exactly have a private sever and fiber optic but my $50 a month internet is plenty along with my $200 used computer..
We can run the network for the poor people in Africa, we don't need their added decentralization, not like we have it anyway..

What I struggle with is everyone seeming to give up..

I'm not a coder but I have this crazy idea..

BTC keys are hex 256 compressed to fit a larger number into less bytes correct? And BTC is all about the security of big numbers correct?

Why couldn't you just make up a bunch more characters and go hex 2,056 or something and compress those big numbers even further to fit more into the same data package?

[Tigggger]

The original Bitcoin code handled 32MB blocks.

When there were 2 people worldwide using Bitcoin, it could handle 32 MB blocks, but all the blocks were 1 kB or less at that stage. Because only 2 people were using it


When dozens began to use it, the same person who allowed 32 MB network messages (there was, in fact, no explicit limit on blocksize at all, it was "unlimited") changed their mind, and added the 1MB blocksize limit.

Someone want to check my maths.

Currently, there are 457,468 blocks, if they had ALL been 32MB and full from the start that is 14,638,976MB, which is 14.6TB hardly an earth shattering size.

[dinofelis]

Someone want to check my maths.
Currently, there are 457,468 blocks, if they had ALL been 32MB and full from the start that is 14,638,976MB, which is 14.6TB hardly an earth shattering size.

Absolutely.  And only miners and big users and interested people need to have a full node holding that.  Because what matters, is the block chain that is made by miners, and they won't waste hash rate on faulty chains, so the chain you can get from them is of course the good chain.  No need to have proxy servers (sorry) nodes in every basement. 

[jubalix]

HD space and internet speeds are more serious issues than you're imagining anyway; your hard disk is big enough, your internet is fast enough, your wages can afford all those things, and your internet and phone companies can afford to upgrade their infrastructure, all in your region of the world.

But, guess what? You're not the only person that exists, in the only region of the world. Not everyone is experiencing the exceptionally good conditions, that you are fortunate enough to have. Other people aren't so fortunate.

Only the smallest fraction of people run nodes, 6000/6,000,000,000 so the analogy does not hold.

[Carlton Banks]

Since when does sending 32 MB blocks on any version of Bitcoin actually work in reality? Since when does downloading 14.6 TB of data sound enticing? Are you mad?


Since when has there been 6 billion Bitcoin users? Are you mad?

[Velkro]

If BTC cannot even now take steps to address the blocksize issue, when solutions abound, how then can any meaningful dev take place to improve the utility of BTC?

I was thinking like that before, but what blocksize issue? Network is working good, waiting time for confirmation is sometimes a little bit painful but conservative approach is key to bitcoin success. Look at Bitcoin XT, Ethereum or Bitcoin Unlimited, they have innovative and fast approach, and they ALL FAIL!!!

[Tigggger]

Since when does sending 32 MB blocks on any version of Bitcoin actually work in reality? Since when does downloading 14.6 TB of data sound enticing? Are you mad?


Since when has there been 6 billion Bitcoin users? Are you mad?

I didn't say it would work in reality, and I'm not claiming there are 6 billion users and I'm not advocating 32MB blocks, so no I am not mad.

I am just illustrating that the common argument that larger blocks = centralisation of nodes = bad is rubbish.

And even if it somehow did, how many people actually NEED the entire blockchain, and would the network still function if there were only 500 nodes, yes it would. Also, I'm sure there are plenty of ways that the blockchain can and will be stored in the future that don't require you to have it all anyway.

[Carlton Banks]

I am just illustrating that the common argument that larger blocks = centralisation of nodes = bad is rubbish.

No, you didn't succeed in that at all, you demonstrated the precise opposite.


Downloading 16 TB to get on the Bitcoin network is a vast centralisation risk, as hardly anyone would do it

[dinofelis]

Downloading 16 TB to get on the Bitcoin network is a vast centralisation risk, as hardly anyone would do it

Not at all.  As the block chain is just a "big digital signature that costs a lot of PoW to be made", there are no alternatives around, so whether 500 data centers hold a copy, or 50 000 home computers, doesn't matter really.  The miner network provides ONE SINGLE valid block chain and there is not another one around, it doesn't exist, nobody spent the PoW to make it.  So there are no fake block chains around.

Big users have of course all reasons to hold a copy.  16 TB costs about $500 in disk space.  Add a good $2000 workstation, and your node is up and running.  32 MB per 10 minutes needs a link of 56 KB/s.  Most people torrent faster when downloading movies.

This means that you can set up a few nodes in every town if you want to.  More than good enough.

Want to get a kick start ?  Buy, say for $1000,-, a preloaded copy of the block chain on some 3TB disks from someone having the chain already.

Selling storage with pre-loaded chain can be a small business.

The true, and only, centralisation risk is mining.  And that's already the case.  Because in a PoW system, those providing PoW decisions are the deciders.  Take the 10 biggest pools and you have bitcoin's oligarchy.

[AngryDwarf]

In financial trading systems, a trade is a trade no matter what the consideration (price * amount) is; it still costs the same in computing processing and network bandwidth to create such a trade. The financial system hasn't gone, "oh no, we must stick to a trade transaction rate limit!' As technology has improved they have been able to get more smaller high frequency trades through. In fact, the processing and network bandwidth costs of creating a trade has increased with enhanced functionality.

So bitcoin limiting itself is just slow suicide as competitor systems are improving.

[Carlton Banks]

32 MB per 10 minutes needs a link of 56 KB/s.  Most people torrent faster when downloading movies.

There are probably more people with 56 Kk/s connections than any other speed (and less, even more people have access to only 28 kB/s)

Your idea is to force people with 56 kB/s to use their ENTIRE INTERNET BANDWIDTH to download 32 MB blocks? Which get solved ON AVERAGE every 10 minutes, and in reality can (and often do) occur 2-3 seconds apart because of the variance around that average? 28 kBs be damned. Great plan

So bitcoin limiting itself is just slow suicide as competitor systems are improving.

Right, and none of those financial companies would dream of jeopardising their very valuable trading systems by pushing the network resources used right up to the limit, they would employ a provable margin of safety, and find a better way to improve their transaction rate. This is not difficult to understand

[AngryDwarf]

So bitcoin limiting itself is just slow suicide as competitor systems are improving.

Right, and none of those financial companies would dream of jeopardising their very valuable trading systems by pushing the network resources used right up to the limit, they would employ a provable margin of safety, and find a better way to improve their transaction rate. This is not difficult to understand

When the system nears max capacity traders find there positions (balance) are unreliably backlogged and they can no longer make fully informed decisions. You argue with the technology manager that near system capacity usage is actually a bottleneck, and a hardware upgrade is required. The trading manager is so frustrated that he is willing to sign off the budget for the new hardware. On the new hardware the system keeps up, and actually uses less processing power than before, and is far more responsive (less latency). The traders then thank the employee who argued with the stubborn technology manager.

Real world example, BTW.

In bitcoins case, emergent consensus could be used to restrict capacity to technological capacity:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1828428.msg18204464#msg18204464

[Carlton Banks]

But your example is not analogous to a peer-2-peer system, so it's not meaningful. You may as well be one of these people that say "why can't the miners mine BTC faster to solve this"

[dinofelis]

32 MB per 10 minutes needs a link of 56 KB/s.  Most people torrent faster when downloading movies.

There are probably more people with 56 Kk/s connections than any other speed (and less, even more people have access to only 28 kB/s)

Your idea is to force people with 56 kB/s to use their ENTIRE INTERNET BANDWIDTH to download 32 MB blocks? Which get solved ON AVERAGE every 10 minutes, and in reality can (and often do) occur 2-3 seconds apart because of the variance around that average? 28 kBs be damned. Great plan

Those people are totally unimportant: they will not weight in on the market price of bitcoin (their market share is way too small, their financial capacity is way to small).  As such, they are not a source of profit for the miners.  Their transactions are not profitable, small fish.

A PoW system is optimising itself to extract a maximum of value out of its users.  In the first phase, that's by block reward, in the second phase, that is by fees.  These coin incomes have to be sold at market price. 

So a PoW system will optimise the expenditure of (block reward + fees) x market price, to produce the largest amount of PoW possible, the product sold to the users.  This system is sensitive to market price, and hence market makers on one hand (big fish) and the fee incentive (fee market) on the other.

Increasing the block size, and releasing pressure on the fee market, to gain some transactions from small fish that cannot afford more than a 56Kb line, is ridiculous: the relief on the fee market to get these guys in would plummet the fee income much more, than that these players are capable of pumping up the market price.

If anything, I expect soft forks to REDUCE the block size in the long run.  When bitcoin is a reserve currency, and a coin is over $100 000,- it would be tempting to increase the fees by lowering the room on the block chain, and have all these big investors fight for the small transaction room.

But what counters this, is that "room on the block" will probably be bulk-sold contractually (human contractually) between mining pools and big users (exchanges, on line casinos, and all those other players needing a non-regulated reserve currency for their unregulated financial affairs).  So limiting the stuff you can sell expensively would be good for the miners, but they will not respect it amongst themselves. 

[Carlton Banks]

If those people (i.e. people with 1Mb/s internet) are totally unimportant, why did they form the central component of your previous argument

[AicecreaME]

3 things


1. What business accepts these alts? It rhymes with "shogun"

2. Why not? Is it becasue of Bitcoin's coveted MASSIVE AMOUNT OF CUMULATIVE HASHES PROTECTING EVERYONE'S BTC? It is, isn't it?

3. Altcoin exchange rate or market caps means nothing. Fiat money is free to those with the printing press or access to the right kind of credit.

I accept your points, but they are orthogonal to my main contention, which is the implication the Dev/Miner consensus look to have ground to a standstill with vastly deleterious effects

If they can not even get through a larger blocksize even as a stop gap of say 8mb or something, in the face of huge user demand, which btc community always sought, what does this mean for any meaningful dev on anything else.

What good are hash protected coins if they become unable to be moved?

Your so right we do have massive btc adoption, but now cannot cheaply spend our coins....!

Bitcoin could move even though in the high transaction fee or low transaction fee, the only thing is, we don't want to pay for this transaction fees price, why? because if we are not earning enough bitcoins, and we do have to pay this high transaction price every transaction, then it is really a problem to us, but if we are going to think of it, this problem is so little and can be solve by changing our ways on earning bitcoin, so this transaction fee that most of us are complaining about won't be a problem anymore.

And it is not that bitcoin couldn't move because of this delay transactions, it's just every transaction take time since the blocksize have already reach its limit and can't process transaction that fast like before because of the bitcoins transaction count is more than the bitcoins population count.

So, if we really want to have faster transactions, then we have to pay higher fees, and if we are only willing to pay low transaction fees, then we have no right to complain if we are going to wait till our transactions to be confirmed.

[dinofelis]

If those people (i.e. people with 1Mb/s internet) are totally unimportant, why did they form the central component of your previous argument

There are different statements, and arguments for these statements, which are mixed here.

The first statement is:
"The claim that, for a crypto currency based upon PoW leads to centralisation, is bogus".  

The example crypto currency can be a HYPOTHETICAL bitcoin with 32 MB blocks, or any other crypto currency with free block size.  This is where I argued that:
1) as long as the miners agree and make only one block chain, nodes can only copy that block chain, there ain't any other around.  So whether there are LOTS of proxy servers (nodes), or just a few, doesn't matter, what matters is the miners that make that chain.  Users only need to access A node with their wallets, and *if they really want to, for themselves, can download the entire block chain to verify*.
2) even 32 MB blocks every 10 minutes doesn't require extra ordinary computing and network equipment as of today.

Mind you that we are not talking about the real bitcoin of today, but about a hypothetical bitcoin, or another crypto, with blocks that can be 32 MB.

The second statement is:
"Given that the actual bitcoin protocol is blocks of 1MB, and that the only agents capable of modifying this, are miners (they make the blocs !), in order for this potentially to happen, there has to be a huge consensus between miners to do so, and to do so with the same protocol change ; this won't happen, because there is NO incentive AT ALL for ANY MINER to go to bigger blocs and release pressure on the fee market".

Here, my argument is that small fish don't matter, because increasing bloc size to allow smaller fish to transact some bitcoin, doesn't increase miner revenue, on the contrary.  This means that miners have no incentive, not only to get these fish to bitcoin and transact and they CERTAINLY have no incentive to try to make them do so with a 2nd tier network because these poor suckers can't even download a bloc chain.

In other words, the original lowering of the bloc size from 32 MB to 1 MB, to "allow poor suckers to use bitcoin over their 56kb lines" is totally BS.  But now that that 1 MB limit is part of the protocol, the only people that could, eventually, decide to lift it, the miners, have absolutely no reason to remove that bonus for them, not with bigger blocs, and not with a second tier network.  

Miners don't need small fish adoption.  They want big whale usage of bitcoin, with few transactions of large amounts, and the current protocol is perfect for that.  It didn't need to be so, but by error or by intend, it has been designed that way, and they would be crazy to remove this.

[Xester]

OK btc world, I am of the view that if the BTC community cannot get the blocksize issue sorted out now, and some sort of optional instant send side chain, the demand for the features are great enough that some alt will replace BTC, sooner than later. Not just for the blocksize issue, but for the implication of the state of dev in BTC.

Certain alts of recent should be a serious wake up call. They have proven the market is prepared to discount the faults instamines, some centralization whatever.

The market demand for instant send, open policy dev discussion and the ability to implement change is to high.

People are tired of the fight, and want solutions now, this is exacerbated by the fact they can see the solutions ready.
The BTC network is being driven to a halt for normal users as it becomes expensive to send BTC with current blocksize.

It is interesting to see the 1st to market advantage of BTC being thrown away, particularly as BTC now what it craved for so long, real world adoption and usage, unlike most other coins, and what is being done with it?

Fees have gone through the roof due to a stupid fight between a few people than no one cares about. Get a 8mb blocksize already or whatever if you want to live.

At the inflection point of BTC success, the dev model has failed to reach consensus. This may be one of the importnat boundary conditions of sucess::how a coin is sets up and dev/miners dynamic.

It seems the consensus there to make them work in harmony is just as important as on-chain consensus

I am agnostic as to whether BTC or some Alt takes the crown, but there you have it BTC can implement solutions now,

The bigger issue writ large ::

If BTC cannot even now take steps to address the blocksize issue, when solutions abound, how then can any meaningful dev take place to improve the utility of BTC?

Its up to you to see the writing on the wall or go down with the ship.

Though bitcoin is experiencing this kind of problems but it doesnt mean that it will be the end of bitcoin. Even if there are no solutions to the problem there are already alternative ways that we can do so we can adjust to the problems. One possible answer is like what blockchain.info wallets did and it is to set up measures within the site. They are having a low mining fee and if we use both blockchain.info wallets the bitcoin will appear in our balance even if it is not confirmed yet.

[dinofelis]

They are having a low mining fee and if we use both blockchain.info wallets the bitcoin will appear in our balance even if it is not confirmed yet.

That's banking.  The bank is called blockchain.info.  You are not handling bitcoin, but a bitcoin IOU. 

[LoyceV]

I disagree. The current altcoin rise is based on pure pump speculation from
statements such as yours, which only feeds into what they are attempting.

You could argue the same from Bitcoin. If everybody dumps it, it's worthless, and if everybody wants it, it's value grows exponentially.
I really hate that for the first time since I'm using Bitcoin, I feel like I'm losing confidence in it. This is entirely caused by the limited blockspace. Transactions got 50 times more expensive in 2 years, and this isn't going to improve any time soon.
Bitcoin is losing market share to altcoins, and many altcoins are now in the bubble-area Bitcoin was 3-4 years ago.

In my humble opinion, Bitcoin needs to improve on a technical level before it's being overtaken.

Of course not.  Simply because bitcoin is first mover and more known.  Bitcoin is immensely OVERPROTECTED cryptographically.

I never thought of it this way. It's always argued a high difficulty and high hash rate is needed to protect Bitcoin, but indeed, you have a point. All the Bitcoin hashing power could easily be used to hijack an altcoin, but that too doesn't happen. The whole 51%-attack-fear seems overrated.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin mining consumes vast amounts of energy, mainly from relatively dirty power plants in China.

So, if we really want to have faster transactions, then we have to pay higher fees, and if we are only willing to pay low transaction fees, then we have no right to complain if we are going to wait till our transactions to be confirmed.

Paying more fees doesn't change the fundamental problem: Bitcoin can't handle enough transactions at the moment. If we all decide to pay 100 times more fees (keep in mind it already went up a lot!), we're still waiting just as long! The only result will be that some people can't afford their transaction anymore, and drop out. That

[Tigggger]

The second statement is:
"Given that the actual bitcoin protocol is blocks of 1MB, and that the only agents capable of modifying this, are miners (they make the blocs !), in order for this potentially to happen, there has to be a huge consensus between miners to do so, and to do so with the same protocol change ; this won't happen, because there is NO incentive AT ALL for ANY MINER to go to bigger blocs and release pressure on the fee market".

You said what I was trying to more eloquently, so have cut the rest out.

Can you expand on this paragraph, and the reason you think that pools seem to be the ones driving the charge to larger blocks and thereby releasing the fee pressure. I get that is the reason they don't want Segwit/LN, but then why are they supporting BU or similar alternatives. Is it just the only tool they have to fight Segwit/LN and they have no intention of actually going through with it, ie it's all a big bluff.

I don't btw, scaling isn't that big of a problem, and increased usage outweighs any short terms pitfalls, and the pitfalls are relatively easy to manage by just going slowly.

[gentlemand]

In other words, the original lowering of the bloc size from 32 MB to 1 MB, to "allow poor suckers to use bitcoin over their 56kb lines" is totally BS.  But now that that 1 MB limit is part of the protocol, the only people that could, eventually, decide to lift it, the miners, have absolutely no reason to remove that bonus for them, not with bigger blocs, and not with a second tier network.  

Miners don't need small fish adoption.  They want big whale usage of bitcoin, with few transactions of large amounts, and the current protocol is perfect for that.  It didn't need to be so, but by error or by intend, it has been designed that way, and they would be crazy to remove this.

Small fish are what got Bitcoin where it is today and they still sustain it. It's not a creation of big whales and I can't see much sign of them being present so far.

If all of this was taking place ten years in the future then it begins to make sense but miners would be very dim to count on an outcome that hasn't arrived yet. Small fish may walk away leaving nothing for whales to pick up.

[dinofelis]

Small fish are what got Bitcoin where it is today and they still sustain it.

First part, yes, second, no, I don't think so any more.  It is now a whale's sports.  Look, about 2 million bitcoin users, market cap 20 billion, AVERAGE bitcoin holding hence $10 000.  Apply power-distribution law Pareto style, and you see who is important.
If you're below $100 000,- you're not counting. 

[BillyBobZorton]

The original Bitcoin code handled 32MB blocks.

When there were 2 people worldwide using Bitcoin, it could handle 32 MB blocks, but all the blocks were 1 kB or less at that stage. Because only 2 people were using it


When dozens began to use it, the same person who allowed 32 MB network messages (there was, in fact, no explicit limit on blocksize at all, it was "unlimited") changed their mind, and added the 1MB blocksize limit.


All of which you know, you lying scammy little shit

i find it weird that satoshi didn't forecast the increase in usage and thus making the limit to 1MB since the beginning, also if he changed it later it mean that he hard forked bitcoin?

or maybe when you diminish it you don't need to hard fork(it would work as a opposite to ram increase in VMware for example you don't need to close the VM...), but i always thought that bitcoin was never hard forked

Hard forks aren't a problem when nobody gives a fuck about your software.

Hard forks are a big problem when there are 20 billion dollars invested in the technology.

Pretty simple to understand why hard fork are terrible idea. Even satoshi himself said he wouldn't like to see his software forked.

[dinofelis]

Hard forks aren't a problem when nobody gives a fuck about your software.

Hard forks are a big problem when there are 20 billion dollars invested in the technology.

Pretty simple to understand why hard fork are terrible idea. Even satoshi himself said he wouldn't like to see his software forked.

Normally, a hard fork splits the market cap over the two branches, because all previous owners now have the two coins in equal amounts. 

[gentlemand]

First part, yes, second, no, I don't think so any more.  It is now a whale's sports.  Look, about 2 million bitcoin users, market cap 20 billion, AVERAGE bitcoin holding hence $10 000.  Apply power-distribution law Pareto style, and you see who is important.
If you're below $100 000,- you're not counting. 

The number of people with that much skin in the game can't be more than a few tens of thousands at best. If they try to operate in a vacuum then they're not going to get very far. I don't see how long it could survive as a pure top down deal.

[dinofelis]

First part, yes, second, no, I don't think so any more.  It is now a whale's sports.  Look, about 2 million bitcoin users, market cap 20 billion, AVERAGE bitcoin holding hence $10 000.  Apply power-distribution law Pareto style, and you see who is important.
If you're below $100 000,- you're not counting.  

The number of people with that much skin in the game can't be more than a few tens of thousands at best. If they try to operate in a vacuum then they're not going to get very far. I don't see how long it could survive as a pure top down deal.

Well, they can sustain a certain time the "greater fool game" between big fish.  But in the end, it will just become a currency, but for very big amounts and relatively few transactions, used between big financial players to settle their unregulated financial affairs.  Then, Fisher's formula applies.  It is then a currency, but for big stuff.  For instance, circuits between exchanges, online casinos, dark markets and (big) private investors, to whitewash dark market money.
Or banking and big online stores like Amazon in war-prone and unstable regions where one cannot count on the legal system.  
You can think of many examples where one cannot count on the legal system to make sure that value can be transferred between big players.

There is more chance for this to "go in circles" than to have a fully closed economy with normal goods and services.

[manselr]

Hard forks aren't a problem when nobody gives a fuck about your software.

Hard forks are a big problem when there are 20 billion dollars invested in the technology.

Pretty simple to understand why hard fork are terrible idea. Even satoshi himself said he wouldn't like to see his software forked.

Normally, a hard fork splits the market cap over the two branches, because all previous owners now have the two coins in equal amounts. 

Yesh, and both branches suffer from a massive crash. To original devs always win because they are usually the best. All we get is to delay bitcoin progress for more than 3 years as well as poorer holders.

[eddie13]

The question in my mind is, how big of a dump is it going to take for something to be done about scailability?

Will it be worth the risk when BTC is $750? $300? $3?

Getting close..

[The One]

The original size was 32mb block.

Simply raising it to 4mb would solve the issue for now until the 4mb is used up.

Then raise it to 8mb... 12mb... 16mb... so and so.

Stop fannying around on stupid wallet features that are pointless.

Make it clear to the miners that it is in their interest that the blocksize goes up so the value of BTC can grow. All this stupid pathetic argument and division does nothing but puts off newbies, business users etc.

[jonald_fyookball]

The original size was 32mb block.

Simply raising it to 4mb would solve the issue for now until the 4mb is used up.

Then raise it to 8mb... 12mb... 16mb... so and so.

Stop fannying around on stupid wallet features that are pointless.

Make it clear to the miners that it is in their interest that the blocksize goes up so the value of BTC can grow. All this stupid pathetic argument and division does nothing but puts off newbies, business users etc.

Well, yeah...of course.

But if people wouldn't listen to Gavin (the man Satoshi himself chose to lead Bitcoin), they won't listen to you or I.

Core has decided to be opposed to be on-chain scaling.