Don't we need to increase block weight/size?

[ABCbits]

Even though i know the advantages of SegWit and LN, don't we need to increase block weight/size since i think current block weight/size won't be enough if more people adopt/use Bitcoin & some people might think LN isn't really useful since they still need to pay big fees to open/close LN channel?
I know raising maximum block size/weight is risking decentralization, but i think it won't be hurt to increase it not too much as long as there's data/consensus which says most nodes still can run even after raising maximum block size/weight?

What do you think? Also, CMIIW.

[RGBKey]

While I don't have a solid stance on raising the block size, I see a lot of roadblocks in the way of doing it.

• Raising the block size makes running a full node less accessible.
• Raising the block size requires a hard fork of the entire Bitcoin network, which imo would be extremely difficult.
• A lot of people are against it (/r/Bitcoin) just because other people have told them to be against it and haven't formed their own opinions, but are swept up in the tribalism

I also believe the lightning network will be successful. People may point at segwit and say "well segwit was supposed to help fees too, and we have low segwit adoption months after the soft fork". These people are correct, but they miss (imo) a huge point. Say a transaction fee on our congested network is $20. With segwit, that fee becomes ~$14 (roughly). With the lightning network, that fee becomes <$0.01. It's a massive, massive difference.

Say you have two choices: sell all your Bitcoins, because you believe Bitcoin is dead and can't properly scale. Alright, that takes 1 last transaction to move your coins to an exchange and sell them. OR, you could make one last transaction to open a lightning channel. Now, your Bitcoins are all available on the lightning network, where you can make instant, near-zero fee transactions.

I don't believe people will stop using the main network when people start shifting towards using the lightning network. But the more services that support the lightning network, the less payments will be made on chain, which frees up more room for people to make on chain transactions, transactions like opening more lightning network channels.

The battle that needs fought now (again, imo) is adoption of the lightning network. It's a drastic change from the benefits provided by segwit, which was more about fixing transaction malleability. If we could only fight one more battle, and it had to be raise the block size or get people to move over to the lightning network, the latter is going to work for a lot longer than the former. Because it's important which battles we choose here, because people will quickly get tired of needing to make changes to use Bitcoin.

[hatshepsut93]

Why raise blocksize if blocks aren't utilizing the recent blocksize increase of SegWit? Why raise blocksize if companies still don't batch their transactions? Why raise blocksize if a lot of software still uses horrible fee estimation algorithms? We have enough tools to keep fees reasonably low if only they were used more. But a lot of transaction traffic comes from centralized services like exchanges, and they are too incompetent or malicious to implement those technologies.

I know raising maximum block size/weight is risking decentralization, but i think it won't be hurt to increase it not too much as long as there's data/consensus which says most nodes still can run even after raising maximum block size/weight?

Some studies suggest that 8 MB would significantly decrease the network node count. We haven't even seen how SegWit's blocksize increase would affect it, so it would be very reckless to do any blocksize increases soon.

Sure, it's bad that fees are high, but high fees are not going to kill Bitcoin, because they are driven by open market, they are not installed by one side only like it happens in some centralized systems.
But centralization can kill Bitcoin, you can't undo the damage of big blocks if the blockchain became bloated past certain point.

[shield132]

Sure, it's bad that fees are high, but high fees are not going to kill Bitcoin, because they are driven by open market, they are not installed by one side only like it happens in some centralized systems.
But centralization can kill Bitcoin, you can't undo the damage of big blocks if the blockchain became bloated past certain point.

Of courde high fees can't kill bitcoin, it even didn't affect it overally but don't you hear words from people who says so high fees make it useless to make transaction? Bitcoin is decentralyzed for me, safest option and great currency. These high fees does shit job, I can't receive transaction quickly without ultra high fees. And yes, some people prefer high fees and spammed network because they use it for theirself. Block size must be increased and I think currently even 4MB will be absolutely enough.

[Amuzeddingo]

While I don't have a solid stance on raising the block size, I see a lot of roadblocks in the way of doing it.

• Raising the block size makes running a full node less accessible.
• Raising the block size requires a hard fork of the entire Bitcoin network, which imo would be extremely difficult.
• A lot of people are against it (/r/Bitcoin) just because other people have told them to be against it and haven't formed their own opinions, but are swept up in the tribalism

I also believe the lightning network will be successful. People may point at segwit and say "well segwit was supposed to help fees too, and we have low segwit adoption months after the soft fork". These people are correct, but they miss (imo) a huge point. Say a transaction fee on our congested network is $20. With segwit, that fee becomes ~$14 (roughly). With the lightning network, that fee becomes <$0.01. It's a massive, massive difference.

Say you have two choices: sell all your Bitcoins, because you believe Bitcoin is dead and can't properly scale. Alright, that takes 1 last transaction to move your coins to an exchange and sell them. OR, you could make one last transaction to open a lightning channel. Now, your Bitcoins are all available on the lightning network, where you can make instant, near-zero fee transactions.

I don't believe people will stop using the main network when people start shifting towards using the lightning network. But the more services that support the lightning network, the less payments will be made on chain, which frees up more room for people to make on chain transactions, transactions like opening more lightning network channels.

The battle that needs fought now (again, imo) is adoption of the lightning network. It's a drastic change from the benefits provided by segwit, which was more about fixing transaction malleability. If we could only fight one more battle, and it had to be raise the block size or get people to move over to the lightning network, the latter is going to work for a lot longer than the former. Because it's important which battles we choose here, because people will quickly get tired of needing to make changes to use Bitcoin.

The Lightning network sounds like the best plan for Bitcoin's current issues, but what does it mean to adapt to it? Is it going to be totally different and outside of Bitcoin's blockchain? Does this make the value of Bitcoin lesser in any way?

[RGBKey]

While I don't have a solid stance on raising the block size, I see a lot of roadblocks in the way of doing it.

• Raising the block size makes running a full node less accessible.
• Raising the block size requires a hard fork of the entire Bitcoin network, which imo would be extremely difficult.
• A lot of people are against it (/r/Bitcoin) just because other people have told them to be against it and haven't formed their own opinions, but are swept up in the tribalism

I also believe the lightning network will be successful. People may point at segwit and say "well segwit was supposed to help fees too, and we have low segwit adoption months after the soft fork". These people are correct, but they miss (imo) a huge point. Say a transaction fee on our congested network is $20. With segwit, that fee becomes ~$14 (roughly). With the lightning network, that fee becomes <$0.01. It's a massive, massive difference.

Say you have two choices: sell all your Bitcoins, because you believe Bitcoin is dead and can't properly scale. Alright, that takes 1 last transaction to move your coins to an exchange and sell them. OR, you could make one last transaction to open a lightning channel. Now, your Bitcoins are all available on the lightning network, where you can make instant, near-zero fee transactions.

I don't believe people will stop using the main network when people start shifting towards using the lightning network. But the more services that support the lightning network, the less payments will be made on chain, which frees up more room for people to make on chain transactions, transactions like opening more lightning network channels.

The battle that needs fought now (again, imo) is adoption of the lightning network. It's a drastic change from the benefits provided by segwit, which was more about fixing transaction malleability. If we could only fight one more battle, and it had to be raise the block size or get people to move over to the lightning network, the latter is going to work for a lot longer than the former. Because it's important which battles we choose here, because people will quickly get tired of needing to make changes to use Bitcoin.

The Lightning network sounds like the best plan for Bitcoin's current issues, but what does it mean to adapt to it? Is it going to be totally different and outside of Bitcoin's blockchain? Does this make the value of Bitcoin lesser in any way?

The lightning network moves the majority of small transactions off-chain, in a way that they are always backed by a real transaction signed by both parties at all times. This allows users to pay each other without miner fees, but money transferred on the lightning network is always "real" bitcoin.

[synthlock]

Graphene is really where it's at. A block size in and of itself isn't a problem. Storage is cheap. It's bandwidth. So if we can get blocks broadcast with low overhead, high compression, and low latency, we can continue to enjoy decentralization while upping transaction processing capacity.

[Anti-Cen]

As a quick fix for crazy high fees playing with block size and timing might increase
Bitcoin from 7 TPS per second to maybe 15 TPS like it has done for ETH but its just a quick fix
but my code will sort out the 19,000 miners that we don't need anymore

public static money MaxFee=1.50 // only need 1,000 miners and then they can then earn fair days pay for fair days work.

Longer term the block-chain needs to scale and if it's so good like they have been saying
for years then why would they now be telling us that "Off-Block" is the way to go.

The development team are not loyal to us so why should I be loyal to them and its not like they
didn't know nine years ago that the block-chain as implemented would never scale, it was always
a hack job from the start and now they are milking it and this could result in a total crash

[Anti-Cen]

But centralization can kill Bitcoin, you can't undo the damage of big blocks if the blockchain became bloated past certain point.

Well is i am sure you know already when not opening threads and removing comments but reading them instead that
Lightning (LN) with its hubs/banks is using a degree of centralization so that old cherry won't work no more and LN takes
data "of-Block" so we may as well throw Block-Chain in the bin instead of making out it's the best thing ever designed by
man.

Yes you can undo the damage of big blocks by restructuring the data and is something called a data migration
but the BTC developers are getting rich pretending we are running out of space, disk space is worth $25 to store
a mere 250 bytes and they kind of like the introduction of banks that are trying to call hubs in LN

Maybe the development team needs to go back to school and learn what distributed computing is all about because clearly
the development team have dropped the ball and they are going about the fix in the wrong way entirely.

"But centralization can kill Bitcoin"

Fees are killing Bitcoin and we are getting some centralization anyway so why not patch for now and do the job
right using block-matrix or is that getting in the way of profits for them.

[Lee-2017]

I like very much the comment that large blocks help a 51% attack,.

Could someone please explain more these points:

1. "BTC developers are getting rich pretending ..." what does this mean, unlike DASH, there is no percentage for developers is there?

2. "Moving data to LN is killing the block chain": is the lightning network structured in a consensus manner similar to the block chain? so effectively it becomes a Block-Tree not a single chain, but still every spur is agreed upon before moving on to the next?

[Anti-Cen]

I like very much the comment that large blocks help a 51% attack,.

Could someone please explain more these points:

1. "BTC developers are getting rich pretending ..." what does this mean, unlike DASH, there is no percentage for developers is there?

2. "Moving data to LN is killing the block chain": is the lightning network structured in a consensus manner similar to the block chain? so effectively it becomes a Block-Tree not a single chain, but still every spur is agreed upon before moving on to the next?

Anyone that writes a financial system and needs to protect against a 51% attack needs to find another job as do any
programmers that need CPU-wars between miners to keep Intel and AMD rich along with big oil and the icing on the
cake is Bitcoin will not scale and they knew this from day one, like nine years ago.

80% of the Bitcoin code is about mining, the miners and developers are one and the same and no one works for free
but now they have got greedy and are offering us bread today and jam tomorrow but it's too little, too late IMHO

Nothing at all "Block-Chain" about LN and the main sales pitch is on about "Off-Chain" which seem like back peddling
from what they have been trying to promote for the past nine years and if you look closer then it uses banks that host
private ledgers and charges fees but the development teams like to call them hubs instead.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpfvhiqFw7A

Come on 20,000 full nodes just to process seven transactions a second when VISA can process 25,000 per second
and the network has 1000 X less processing power than the Bitcoin network and people fall for this clap trap.

I am aware my posts are being watched but they dare not drop by and have it out with me so do they
fear developers that are "Not on the team" and how long will it be before the masses see that huge
transactions fees is the real reason for $6,000 being knocked off the price of BTC
 

[RGBKey]

I heavily disagree with Anti-Cen who is going full conspiracy theorist, saying "censorship" and "ln is the same thing as banks". That's not how any of this works. Lightning Network is so vastly different from banking.

Lightning Network	| Banks
Completely Trustless	| Requires trust in a financial institution
Instant payments	| Payments take days to be routed through ACH

etc, etc...

I highly recommend that anybody not familiar with how the lightning network operates read this overview on how transactions are created and routed through the lightning network.

As for the rest of what they're saying, I'm not even going to give them the satisfaction of arguing with them because it seems very much like they're not interested in the technical details of how things work, but would rather go around with a sign on a stick telling everybody the end is nigh.

[Wind_FURY]

Even though i know the advantages of SegWit and LN, don't we need to increase block weight/size since i think current block weight/size won't be enough if more people adopt/use Bitcoin & some people might think LN isn't really useful since they still need to pay big fees to open/close LN channel?
I know raising maximum block size/weight is risking decentralization, but i think it won't be hurt to increase it not too much as long as there's data/consensus which says most nodes still can run even after raising maximum block size/weight?

What do you think? Also, CMIIW.

You "think" it would not hurt to increase it. Ok, I want achow or someone who has a deeper understanding of the block sizes and block propagation to make a comment on OP's "thinks it would not hurt to increase the block size".

OP, then why are the Core developers unwilling to do it? There has to be a good technical reason, correct?

[Anti-Cen]

I heavily disagree with Anti-Cen who is going full conspiracy theorist, saying "censorship" and "ln is the same thing as banks". That's not how any of this works. Lightning Network is so vastly different from banking.

Would you like to send me your email address so that I can forward on to you the messages that I get when my posts here are deleted and
then lets talk about "conspiracy theorist"

Yes banks not same as Bitcoin if we are talking about Ripple and VISA, they work fast and don't charge such high fees
and SWIFT like Bitcoin is living in the days of the past.

I highly recommend that anybody not familiar with how the lightning network operates read this overview on how transactions are created and routed through the lightning network.

Do you deny these hub things take transactions of the block-chain that we were told was the best thing since sliced bread
Do you deny these hub things charge fees and keep a private ledger 
Do you deny these hub things use a degree of centralization

disagree all you like but I will call these "Hub things" banks because they are

[Carlton Banks]

Do you deny these hub things take transactions of the block-chain that we were told was the best thing since sliced bread
Do you deny these hub things charge fees and keep a private ledger  
Do you deny these hub things use a degree of centralization

disagree all you like but I will call these "Hub things" banks because they are

Anyone can open a Lightning channel with anyone else, and anyone can also open as many channels as they like. But I guess you're going to call anyone with more than 1 channel a bank


You've had it explained to you many times already, but it seems you're resistant to learning and just want to shout about everyone being a bank instead. You can use the same logic for Bitcoin mainnet, it's absolutely full of banks. One of the original taglines to promote Bitcoin was, in fact, "be your own bank".


agreeing with everyone who says "blocks aren't full yet", or "Bitcoin needs validation performance increases first so the network can handle it"

[bob123]

.. i think current block weight/size won't be enough if more people adopt/use Bitcoin & some people might think LN isn't really useful since they still need to pay big fees to open/close LN channel?

People forget that IF they start to actively use the lightning network, there will be far less on-chain-transactions.
Most TX's will be handled on the LN. There won't be the need to close a channel immediately. Your coins can 'remain' there without any problem.
This, compared with exchanges adopting segwit, would lower the fees to make it 'payable' again.

I know raising maximum block size/weight is risking decentralization, but i think it won't be hurt to increase it not too much ..

The point is.. increasing the blocksize is just a short-short-term-solution.
Its the easiest way of 'handling' this problem. Just double the blocksize every X years, when fees get too high.
You can double the blocksize now.. but in 1-2 years you will have the same problem again and your 'increase it not too much' is totally gone.
The only, real, way to reach mass adoption and an extremely massive scaling is by introducing a second layer to BTC.

[Anti-Cen]

Anyone can open a Lightning channel with anyone else, and anyone can also open as many channels as they like. But I guess you're going to call anyone with more than 1 channel a bank

Yes and what happens when you close the channel after Alice sends Bob $2 does it result in

1. Next to no fees
2. Bob having to pay $30 to miners as his Tx hits the block
3. Both Bob and Alice having to pay the Bitcoin miners $30 each

You've had it explained to you many times already, but it seems you're resistant to learning and just want to shout about everyone being a bank instead. You can use the same logic for Bitcoin mainnet, it's absolutely full of banks.

Wallets and Hubs are not the same thing at all and not only have I tried to explain this many times myself here
but others are saying just the same as me outside the church

One of the original taglines to promote Bitcoin was, in fact, "be your own bank"

And it went on to say "Virtual free transaction fees" so maybe "you're resistant to learning" when it comes
to hubs keeping balance, semi centralized and they charge fees just like banks do

[Anti-Cen]

People forget that IF they start to actively use the lightning network, there will be far less on-chan-transactions.
Most TX's will be handled on the LN. There won't be the need to close a channel immediately. Your coins can 'remain' there without any problem.
This, compared with exchanges adopting segwit, would lower the fees to make it 'payable' again.

People forget that Bitcoin came to fame because of the block-chain and LN takes everything "Off block"
until you settle up with various hubs that may or may not have good channels to other hubs/banks

Sorry but they are trying to have their cake and eat it

Block-Matrix is whats needed, not hub/banks so the scaling that's going on is at the wrong level and
miners will be queuing up to host major hubs and we know what they can do with fees already so yes
they might allow you to keep a channel open to them for a month but what account charges will we
be getting from them for this service.

Outside this church that i find myself in other people are having the debate
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7njeph/the_lightning_network_is_a_scam_it_has_nothing_to/
125 comments and the jest of the answers basically acknowledge that it can is more economical if
you don't use the car and take the bus which is basically whats going on with Lightning 

[Carlton Banks]

what happens when you close the channel after Alice sends Bob $2 does it result in

1. Next to no fees
2. Bob having to pay $30 to miners as his Tx hits the block
3. Both Bob and Alice having to pay the Bitcoin miners $30 each

There's no advantage to closing the channel having used it once. So

4. Channel stays open, 0 fees

Wallets and Hubs are not the same thing

Anyone can become a Bitcoin bank, just open a wallet or a Lightning channel

And it went on to say "Virtual free transaction fees"

Lightning will be free. Or virtually free.

And my Lightning node won't charge fees, alot of people will do this to encourage the network to be better connected. Probably alot of traffic will get routed through free Lightning nodes (why pay?). Someone trying to charge high fees is gonna have a hard time competing with that.

You don't know how it works, basically. Please learn, you sound crazy.

[Anti-Cen]

There's no advantage to closing the channel having used it once. So

so if we P2P channel so I buy a car from you placed auto advert then I just keep it open ?

4. Channel stays open, 0 fees

or unless the other side closes the channel which hub/banks will do when they need paying so that
they too can meet running costs of closing channels with other hubs/banks. Settlement needs real BTC
that are on the BC and fake copy will not do.

Lightning will be free. Or virtually free.

The miners will host the big hubs and we had this story already about fees that were more or less zero
two years ago.

And my Lightning node won't charge fees

Nodes are just relays and my argument concerns LN hubs and inter bank settlement and fees on top of BTC Tx fees  
[/quote]

You don't know how it works, basically. Please learn, you sound crazy.

I can always tell when I am winning and the other side resorts to insults but you did
not answer my points and want to talk around them so please let me know what
specific point you would like to disagree on and also note that I am not against
Segwit which kinds of brings file compression to the blocks using "Extended blocks" to
store data in BC because short term it is a good fix