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Author Topic: Why the fuck did Satoshi implement the 1 MB blocksize limit?  (Read 2139 times)
dinofelis
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January 26, 2018, 08:50:45 PM
 #81

Most probably, it was with this in mind that Satoshi introduced his 1 MB block size.  When he introduced it, 1 MB was way larger than any reasonable block at that time, so it was a good "miner directive" to say that blocks larger than 1 MB should be considered as spam (given we measured blocks in KB at that time).  It was a "good miners' directive" not a "protocol standard".  The idea was most probably, in Satoshi's mind, to give a clear rule to the miners as what was to be considered "prohibitive spamming".  It could systematically be put a factor of 100 or so above the "usual block size".   It was a trivial formalization of the good practice "don't accept obvious spam in the consensus decision".

That's the soft limit... which could be set as a parameter, like 250k, 750k, etc... the 1mb was a consensus rule - and obviously he told garzik that this would make him incompatible with the network if he changed it => https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15139#msg15139

You're right.  Satoshi is very unclear here.  This is food for conspiracy theory  Grin  He's obviously hiding an agenda here.  It simply doesn't make sense and in complete contradiction to what he said before.  This could mean that "Satoshi" was different people, with different opinions.

Without knowing, I repeated cavenden's argument against such a limit.   Re-reading this thread, I think Satoshi had a hidden agenda, and was lying through his teeth here.  He put in a time bomb, that's clear to me now.  And some saw it immediately, but the "Great God Satoshi" was not to be contradicted if you read the priests.

I remember having read that thread, but in my memory, it was like Satoshi said it could be changed and was no big deal, while others told him it was recipe for disaster.  But now I read it again, it's obvious: he clearly knows this, that it is recipe for disaster.  Maybe the Satoshi of November 2008 is not the same person as the satoshi here...

"Don't use this patch, it'll make you incompatible with the network, to your own detriment."

It would be meaningless.  Clearly, Satoshi is dead afraid that his bomb would be removed.  Of course this is bullshit because jgarzik would, in practice, never mine a block above 1 MB.  So he wouldn't be "to his own detriment", be "incompatible with the network" most of the time.
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January 26, 2018, 09:03:56 PM
 #82

Most probably, it was with this in mind that Satoshi introduced his 1 MB block size.  When he introduced it, 1 MB was way larger than any reasonable block at that time, so it was a good "miner directive" to say that blocks larger than 1 MB should be considered as spam (given we measured blocks in KB at that time).  It was a "good miners' directive" not a "protocol standard".  The idea was most probably, in Satoshi's mind, to give a clear rule to the miners as what was to be considered "prohibitive spamming".  It could systematically be put a factor of 100 or so above the "usual block size".   It was a trivial formalization of the good practice "don't accept obvious spam in the consensus decision".

That's the soft limit... which could be set as a parameter, like 250k, 750k, etc... the 1mb was a consensus rule - and obviously he told garzik that this would make him incompatible with the network if he changed it => https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15139#msg15139

You're right.  Satoshi is very unclear here.  This is food for conspiracy theory  Grin  He's obviously hiding an agenda here.  It simply doesn't make sense and in complete contradiction to what he said before.  This could mean that "Satoshi" was different people, with different opinions.

Without knowing, I repeated cavenden's argument against such a limit.   Re-reading this thread, I think Satoshi had a hidden agenda, and was lying through his teeth here.  He put in a time bomb, that's clear to me now.  And some saw it immediately, but the "Great God Satoshi" was not to be contradicted if you read the priests.

I remember having read that thread, but in my memory, it was like Satoshi said it could be changed and was no big deal, while others told him it was recipe for disaster.  But now I read it again, it's obvious: he clearly knows this, that it is recipe for disaster.  Maybe the Satoshi of November 2008 is not the same person as the satoshi here...

"Don't use this patch, it'll make you incompatible with the network, to your own detriment."

It would be meaningless.  Clearly, Satoshi is dead afraid that his bomb would be removed.  Of course this is bullshit because jgarzik would, in practice, never mine a block above 1 MB.  So he wouldn't be "to his own detriment", be "incompatible with the network" most of the time.


very short answer... because it is cool to see those spikes 

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January 27, 2018, 05:54:15 AM
Last edit: January 27, 2018, 06:15:28 AM by dinofelis
Merited by actmyname (3)
 #83

To continue: Satoshi's narrative of "let's keep small blocks as long as we can, later we'll switch to big blocks, but first we have to trick people in this thing while it is small", and his code example, would have prompted, if he were honest, to indeed, include this if statement:
"small blocks until block number X".  The fact of not having included this, even while he was saying that one COULD do it that way, and given all comments, indicates he wasn't being serious here.  You can say: "hey, but Satoshi couldn't know how bitcoin would evolve, at what pace, so he didn't want to commit anything" ; but then, he didn't back away from programming an emission curve over 140 years, without knowing how it would evolve either.  If you feel secure enough to program an emission curve, you for sure can program a block size limit.  In any case, it doesn't hold water:  "a constant in the protocol one should change later" is not easier to change than "an if statement one could change later".  Both are protocol changes.  In as much as you claim that you put in the constant "only temporarily, and you guys should remove it later", you can just as well commit that "temporary" aspect in an if statement right away ("and if deemed still to early, you guys should modify it later"), putting your code where your mouth is.  He didn't.

So the Satoshi in 2010 clearly wanted it to be a permanent thing, knowing that it would give huge problems at a certain point in time, totally contradicting his November 2008 statements, but claiming otherwise, that it is only temporarily and doing lip service to his 2008 statements at the same time.  Because the OBVIOUS response, in agreement with his own statements, and with all premonitory remarks, would have been to put an if statement in the code.  He even says so, and he doesn't.  He only shouts at the guy that wanted to remove it, he tells us that one should put an if statement, and he keeps a constant "to be modified by an if statement later".

As discussed above, you can always use a more severe soft limit during mining, than the hard limit in the protocol.  But you can't remove a hard limit in the protocol without "breaking compatibility with the network".  So if you're honest about admitting larger blocks later, you should foresee in the code to remove the protocol limit "later" already NOW.  If you don't, you're simply lying.  Especially if you explain it.

Also, in as much as hard protocol constants "could be changed on the fly", nothing stops you from modifying the constants that determine the emission curve, the difficulty adjustments, and so on.  It is totally incoherent to claim that a constant in the protocol can be modified at will later and think that you are going to make a system that is going to be accepted as immutable.  If you can modify the protocol parameter of hard block limit, you can just as well change the protocol parameter that gives the block rewards, or the halving blocks or anything of that kind.

So, yes, after re-reading that 2010 thread, it is now clear to me that Satoshi didn't "make a mistake".  He put a bomb in his system.  I only realized this now, but it seems evident after all.

One can say: maybe he realized that his 2008 scaling solution was going to "centralize" is system, so he simply put in something that would push people to invent an off-chain way of using it.  In other words, he put in this limit because he understood that block chain tech doesn't scale, contrary to his 2008 explanation, and considered that people should invent something that solves it in another way.  In other words, he did this to push people to invent the LN.

But that doesn't hold water either.  Given that he didn't know whether something like the LN could even be invented, and given that he didn't know when it would be invented, and what would have been its needs, crippling the only solution you have, of which you've explained how it would scale, would have been extremely dangerous.  If the LN would only have been invented in 2025, bitcoin would have been dead already by the time it could have been invented.  That's akin to jumping out of an air plane, and hoping you'll invent a parachute while falling.
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January 27, 2018, 12:22:59 PM
Merited by cr1776 (1)
 #84

Maybe the Satoshi of November 2008 is not the same person as the satoshi here...

"Don't use this patch, it'll make you incompatible with the network, to your own detriment."

It would be meaningless.  Clearly, Satoshi is dead afraid that his bomb would be removed.  Of course this is bullshit because jgarzik would, in practice, never mine a block above 1 MB.  So he wouldn't be "to his own detriment", be "incompatible with the network" most of the time.

The impression I got from that little exchange is that Satoshi thought Jeff didn't realise he'd be forking himself off the network unless everyone else used the patch as well and thought it would be a good idea to point that out.  It was probably a fairly sensible idea to avoid a situation where half the network would obliviously run the patch and half didn't run it, thereby splitting the network and making a complete mess.


To continue: Satoshi's narrative of "let's keep small blocks as long as we can, later we'll switch to big blocks, but first we have to trick people in this thing while it is small", and his code example, would have prompted, if he were honest, to indeed, include this if statement:
"small blocks until block number X".  The fact of not having included this, even while he was saying that one COULD do it that way, and given all comments, indicates he wasn't being serious here.  You can say: "hey, but Satoshi couldn't know how bitcoin would evolve, at what pace, so he didn't want to commit anything" ; but then, he didn't back away from programming an emission curve over 140 years, without knowing how it would evolve either.  If you feel secure enough to program an emission curve, you for sure can program a block size limit.  In any case, it doesn't hold water:  "a constant in the protocol one should change later" is not easier to change than "an if statement one could change later".  Both are protocol changes.  In as much as you claim that you put in the constant "only temporarily, and you guys should remove it later", you can just as well commit that "temporary" aspect in an if statement right away ("and if deemed still to early, you guys should modify it later"), putting your code where your mouth is.  He didn't.

So the Satoshi in 2010 clearly wanted it to be a permanent thing, knowing that it would give huge problems at a certain point in time, totally contradicting his November 2008 statements, but claiming otherwise, that it is only temporarily and doing lip service to his 2008 statements at the same time.  Because the OBVIOUS response, in agreement with his own statements, and with all premonitory remarks, would have been to put an if statement in the code.  He even says so, and he doesn't.  He only shouts at the guy that wanted to remove it, he tells us that one should put an if statement, and he keeps a constant "to be modified by an if statement later".

Again, the "narrative" of keeping blocks small wasn't Satoshi's.  Satoshi merely went along with the idea after hearing what must have been some pretty convincing arguments.  In many ways, it's a shame we'll never get to see all the communications exchanged between Satoshi and Hal Finney, given their historical significance and the tremendous impact those conversations had on how this has all unfolded over time.  It's also likely Satoshi didn't envision themselves withdrawing from the community when they did, effectively exiling themselves and going into hiding.  There's no way they could foresee the WikiLeaks donations thing in advance, which was clearly a catalyst in prompting Satoshi's decision to leave.  So it's entirely possible Satoshi did have plans to alter it later, when it became the contentious issue it eventually did.  When Satoshi left, blocks were still nowhere near their full capacity, so it could well have been something "on the back burner".  But sadly we'll probably never know for sure.

I certainly don't get the impression it was anything malicious on Satoshi's part, though.  That's a bit of a stretch.

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dinofelis
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January 27, 2018, 01:12:03 PM
Last edit: January 27, 2018, 01:22:11 PM by dinofelis
 #85

Maybe the Satoshi of November 2008 is not the same person as the satoshi here...

"Don't use this patch, it'll make you incompatible with the network, to your own detriment."

It would be meaningless.  Clearly, Satoshi is dead afraid that his bomb would be removed.  Of course this is bullshit because jgarzik would, in practice, never mine a block above 1 MB.  So he wouldn't be "to his own detriment", be "incompatible with the network" most of the time.

The impression I got from that little exchange is that Satoshi thought Jeff didn't realise he'd be forking himself off the network unless everyone else used the patch as well and thought it would be a good idea to point that out.  It was probably a fairly sensible idea to avoid a situation where half the network would obliviously run the patch and half didn't run it, thereby splitting the network and making a complete mess.


That's obviously not the case, as I tried to point out.  First of all, Satoshi couldn't know what would be the fraction of the network that would apply the patch.  So by applying the patch, Jeff might just as well get the majority behind him, and it would be to the detriment, not of Jeff, but of those that didn't apply the patch.  The fact that Satoshi assumes that Jeff would automatically be in minority - or at least, wants Jeff to be afraid to be in the minority - is telling.

But secondly, assuming that Jeff himself wouldn't mine, himself, a lot of big blocks (one can hardly think of Jeff wanting to spam the network himself), and assuming that the rest of the network WOULD filter out the big blocks, and only make a small block chain, Jeff wouldn't, at all, "make himself incompatible with the network".  Jeff would accept ALL the small blocks made by the network.  Most probably, Jeff would mine, himself, also only small blocks and get them accepted by the others.  The only difference between Jeff's code and the rest of the network, under the assumption that they don't follow Jeff's patch, is that Jeff's node is more permissive.  So he won't be incompatible with the network.

Satoshi is telling bullshit here. And I can't imagine that he doesn't know.  At no point, his phrase, that it would be "detrimental to Jeff", is true. It would ONLY be true in those rare circumstances that Jeff wants to mine a big spam block, and the majority of the network doesn't follow him.  And it would only be detrimental for Jeff's PoW on that sole block. Jeff's node would accept the fact that his block was orphaned, and that another chain with smaller blocks took over.  From then onward, Jeff wouldn't be "incompatible with the network" any more.

So this is simply utterly wrong.

The only "dangerous" situation is when Jeff is in majority !  When Jeff-like majority miner nodes mine a chain with big blocks, and the minority Satoshi-like nodes don't accept this, and mine their own prong - or adapt.  At no point, anything is "detrimental to Jeff".

Quote
Again, the "narrative" of keeping blocks small wasn't Satoshi's.  Satoshi merely went along with the idea after hearing what must have been some pretty convincing arguments.  In many ways, it's a shame we'll never get to see all the communications exchanged between Satoshi and Hal Finney, given their historical significance and the tremendous impact those conversations had on how this has all unfolded over time.  It's also likely Satoshi didn't envision themselves withdrawing from the community when they did, effectively exiling themselves and going into hiding.  There's no way they could foresee the WikiLeaks donations thing in advance, which was clearly a catalyst in prompting Satoshi's decision to leave.  So it's entirely possible Satoshi did have plans to alter it later, when it became the contentious issue it eventually did.  When Satoshi left, blocks were still nowhere near their full capacity, so it could well have been something "on the back burner".  But sadly we'll probably never know for sure.

I certainly don't get the impression it was anything malicious on Satoshi's part, though.  That's a bit of a stretch.

I have a hard time imagining that Satoshi didn't understand what he was saying, but nevertheless said it.  I have a hard time thinking that Satoshi:
1) didn't understand the arguments of the danger in the long term of locking in the 1MB limit
2) didn't understand that not applying this limit didn't exclude you from the network at all
3) was capable of suggesting how it could be done safely with an if (blocknumber < ...) {limit} but didn't do so
4) but nevertheless said that it was dangerous to remove his constant as it would exclude you !

except of course if Satoshi was just a sock puppet of Hal Finney and didn't understand zilch himself of this stuff.

It simply doesn't fit together.
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January 28, 2018, 02:25:00 AM
 #86

except of course if Satoshi was just a sock puppet of Hal Finney and didn't understand zilch himself of this stuff.
You cannot talk about our great leader like that because without him we would not have mining coins using CPU-Wars
so that "Big oil" sells more to big electric corporations and where would Intel and AMD be today with out all that
wasted processing power.

I mean Satoshi developed a system so unemployed miners could become full nodes and provide transactions
services so they could pretend the current "Block" is so valuable that people are willing to pay $20 or more just
to have 250 bytes of data written to it.

No sir you fail to understand Satoshi contribution to the world where 20,000 miners do PoW (Waste more CPU power)
and seek to put men out of jobs (Like 95% of miners) and should seek redemption and "Buy on the dip" because your
blasphemy endangers the maga-carter or was that the word word here  Cheesy

Quote
It simply doesn't fit together.
More than just me and you have started to work it out and if you take an objective look at the lighting Network
then the long term goal become obvious that bankers own the Bitcoin network and want a bigger cut of the profit
 

Mining is CPU-wars and Intel, AMD like it nearly as much as big oil likes miners wasting electricity. Is this what mankind has come too.
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January 28, 2018, 04:04:14 AM
 #87

To sum up, :

1) The wisdom of keeping block size at 1MB has yet to be realized.
2) It currently sucks though.
3) There are several strange and plausible theories as to why it could
be genius/intentional, and if any of them turn out to be true we are
probably all going to go a little bit crazy.
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January 28, 2018, 05:56:41 AM
 #88

To sum up, :

1) The wisdom of keeping block size at 1MB has yet to be realized.
2) It currently sucks though.
3) There are several strange and plausible theories as to why it could
be genius/intentional, and if any of them turn out to be true we are
probably all going to go a little bit crazy.

I think that sums it up quite well  Grin
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January 28, 2018, 06:12:49 AM
Last edit: January 28, 2018, 07:28:07 AM by dinofelis
 #89

except of course if Satoshi was just a sock puppet of Hal Finney and didn't understand zilch himself of this stuff.
You cannot talk about our great leader like that because without him we would not have mining coins using CPU-Wars
so that "Big oil" sells more to big electric corporations and where would Intel and AMD be today with out all that
wasted processing power.

In fact, Intel and AMD didn't profit a lot in this.  If there's one company that even has production problems because of PoW, it is Nvidia, and not for bitcoin, but for ethereum and a few others !  Also, I don't think it is Big Oil that profits, it are the Chinese charcoal mines.  Mining is to be seen quite more literally  Cheesy

What is startling in this story, is that one almost has the impression that Satoshi's intellect is waning.  His premonitory views in November 2008 were much more to the point than his "incomprehension" in 2010.  Is this because Satoshi was bright, but easily influenced by a dumb ass big mouth that talked him into nonsense ?  Is it because the Satoshi of 2008 was not the Satoshi of 2010 ?  Was Satoshi ill ?  Was he consuming drugs ? Did he get hit on the head ? Or is this the obvious impression that you get from someone trying to trick you into something (a set of lies always look less smart and coherent than a truly brilliant idea) ?

You can't be smart to a point of foreseeing, without one single working system in nature, how thing would evolve in 2008, and be obtuse to the point of failing to see the obvious when it is even spelled out for you by other people in 2010, unless you are someone else, or you were hit on the head, are ill, or are lying.

This is what occurred to me recently ; until now, I simply thought: "well, a big mistake in 2010, but everyone makes mistakes, Satoshi was a bright guy but not a genius".  But now, as I said, the pieces just don't fit together.

What is remarkable, even though nobody ever said it, is that bitcoins' system itself has an indicator of the necessity of the block size: the difficulty !  The difficulty measures the market value, the size of the user community, the technological advances, and the investment mining nodes make in PoW (and the rewards in value they get).    It is quite obvious that things like storage costs and network burden, and their economic cost, are going to be proportional to this.  So it would have been rather obvious to scale block size with difficulty.
The bigger and more valuable the network gets, the more NEED there will be for transaction room, and the more MEANS there are to afford storage and network capacity.  It would also solve the "end problem" of no coin emission, to a point: if fees are too low, and finance PoW, difficulty falls, the blocks shrink to a point where the fee market kicks in, until an equilibrium is reached where the block size allows for a reasonable fee, paying for a reasonable amount of PoW, giving rise to a reasonable difficulty, as a function of demand for transactions, and market price of BTC.


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January 28, 2018, 09:01:25 AM
 #90

How could satoshi nakamoto have known this maasive scalability might hit bitcoin? Dont forget that bitcoin was the first and foremost cryptocurrency, and other coins have only tried to perfect themselves only based on limitations of bitcoin and learning from it. If bitcoin had not been there,  there would not be these better solutions we are seeing now either
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January 28, 2018, 10:09:04 AM
 #91

How could satoshi nakamoto have known this maasive scalability might hit bitcoin?

Because he wrote it in November 2008 maybe ?  http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/
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January 28, 2018, 03:15:26 PM
Last edit: January 28, 2018, 03:26:36 PM by AlexGR
 #92

How could satoshi nakamoto have known this maasive scalability might hit bitcoin?

Because he wrote it in November 2008 maybe ?  http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/

He kind of expected time to solve the bandwidth/storage issue, and he was correct: In this issue it's time that makes the impossible => possible. Because over time, network and computing technology evolves. The impact of 100gb/day will be different on the networks and PCs of 2008 compared to those of ....2028 or ....2038.

He could fast-forward scaling by changing the network topology from p2p to client-server, but that's not a novelty. Visa does that, Swift does that, etc etc. The novelty is doing it on a peer-to-peer basis, because as he pointed elsewhere in his writings, governments are pretty efficient in shutting down alternative payment systems that operate in a centralized manner.

Quote
Satoshi is telling bullshit here. And I can't imagine that he doesn't know.  At no point, his phrase, that it would be "detrimental to Jeff", is true.

Garzik would fork off and mine orphans... you can call that detrimental.

Quote
To continue: Satoshi's narrative of "let's keep small blocks as long as we can, later we'll switch to big blocks, but first we have to trick people in this thing while it is small", and his code example, would have prompted, if he were honest, to indeed, include this if statement:
"small blocks until block number X".  The fact of not having included this, even while he was saying that one COULD do it that way, and given all comments, indicates he wasn't being serious here.

When I first tried to download the bitcoin client and set it up on my linux box, it started downloading... and I waited, and waited, and waited, and was hearing my hard disk going crrrrr-crrrrr-crrrr from all the seeking and writing, etc etc... after waiting for quite a while and seeing no usable program that I can play with, I got angry. I said "what the fuck is this doing for so long? what the hell is this?".... And I erased the entire folder condemning bitcoin for the bullshit that it was.

In other words I was prevented from even trying it out by the problematic user experience of having to download a lot, and the associated problems of hard-disk seeking which was making my system crawl.

Big blocks, spamming, etc, definitely had a real potential to significantly reduce user adoption. I speak from experience (it prevented me at an earlier stage compared to when I eventually got in).
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January 28, 2018, 03:47:43 PM
 #93

If a genius mind invented such a game-changing technology, it doesn't mean it was part of the CIA or any other government entity.

Bitcoin was probably just an experiment, Satoshi probably never thought it'll get this far and maybe it was not even what he wanted. If BTC would've NOT been an experiment but a cryptocurrency meant for the everyday use, I think he would have written a completely different code. On the other hand, even genius minds sometimes make mistakes. Genius doesn't mean 100% perfect. Look what Satoshi said in early 2009 regarding the scaling of Bitcoin (source https://pastebin.com/Na5FwkQ4):

Quote
The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide.  Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost.  It never really hits a scale ceiling.  If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size.
 
By Moore's Law, we can expect hardware speed to be 10 times faster in 5 years and 100 times faster in 10.  Even if Bitcoin grows at crazy adoption rates, I think computer speeds will stay ahead of the number of transactions.

My question to everyone saying it was not just an experiment is: if that's true, why did he ask coders for help? I understand BTC is open-source and all that stuff, but if he would've considered it perfect, there would've been no need for help from his side.

However, this is only a kind of speculative thing. Unless he comes back and answers every single question, we will only predict the answers but nobody will ever know which one is true and which isn't. But I do not think he'll ever come back again. He left us alone with a reason. Remember what he said regarding WikiLeaks (source https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2216.msg29280#msg29280):

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It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context.  WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.

He was afraid of something, or hiding from somebody. I wouldn't deny the fact that he is most likely still around here on our forums, maybe even reading this thread though.
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January 28, 2018, 07:57:07 PM
Last edit: January 28, 2018, 08:07:14 PM by dinofelis
 #94

How could satoshi nakamoto have known this maasive scalability might hit bitcoin?

Because he wrote it in November 2008 maybe ?  http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/

He kind of expected time to solve the bandwidth/storage issue, and he was correct: In this issue it's time that makes the impossible => possible. Because over time, network and computing technology evolves. The impact of 100gb/day will be different on the networks and PCs of 2008 compared to those of ....2028 or ....2038.

He could fast-forward scaling by changing the network topology from p2p to client-server, but that's not a novelty. Visa does that, Swift does that, etc etc. The novelty is doing it on a peer-to-peer basis, because as he pointed elsewhere in his writings, governments are pretty efficient in shutting down alternative payment systems that operate in a centralized manner.

His solution of November 2008 was perfectly alright:  there would be a class of "specialist mining nodes with farms of specialized hardware", and these nodes would be keeping the block chain in full.  They would also act as SPV servers for the light wallets of the millions of users.

Given the investment that "specialist mining nodes" make in their mining hardware, the extra cost of storage and bandwidth, to serve the normal, non-mining users and their SPV wallets, is relatively small.  The "specialist mining nodes" would be small (or big) data centres.  They could serve of course all the normal, non-mining users.

The network and storage load of an SPV wallet is much, much lighter, as Satoshi explains.  So normal users are not concerned with big block chains. It is good enough to autonomously verify that one isn't telling you jokes, and that the transactions you see ARE part of the block chain.  For Satoshi, you only run a full node (with all the data and network burden) if you also "try to make coins" (that is, mine).   A full non-mining node was an absurdity for Satoshi.

As such, even today, his solution can perfectly scale to VISA levels.  The only caveat is that it shows the de-facto centralization in bitcoin.  Satoshi was thinking of hundreds or thousands of "mining nodes".  In reality, we have a handful of mining pools.  


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Satoshi is telling bullshit here. And I can't imagine that he doesn't know.  At no point, his phrase, that it would be "detrimental to Jeff", is true.

Garzik would fork off and mine orphans... you can call that detrimental.

Of course he wouldn't, most of the time.  At that time, there weren't enough transactions to fill a block near to 1 MB, and even if he did, he would only make an orphan, not "fork off".  There's nothing dramatic by having an orphaned block.  Until the middle of last year, miners regularly had blocks orphaned.  It is only when bitcoin mining centralization was complete, that no orphans are made any more (since June 2017 more or less).

The limit was way way higher than the size of needed blocks back then, so there wouldn't be any sensible reason to make such blocks.  So limit or no limit, a normal, well-behaving miner (I count Garzik amongst them) wouldn't, ever, make a block larger than 1 MB.  And if you don't make such blocks, you are going to make blocks that are compatible with the others.  And you accept all blocks by the others.  

Again, the only problem would have been if Garzik's patch were majority adopted, and the problem would then be for those that kept their minority hard limit.  At no point it would have been detrimental TO GARZIK:

- Garzik in minority: accepts still all blocks by others ; will normally only make blocks also accepted by others if reasonable ; if not reasonable, will only make a single orphan monster block.  --> not really detrimental to Garzik

- Garzik in majority: everybody is making big blocks and having fun, except for a minority that keeps the hard limit: they will make a small minority chain that has forked off the rest.  --> also not detrimental to Garzik and his majority.


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To continue: Satoshi's narrative of "let's keep small blocks as long as we can, later we'll switch to big blocks, but first we have to trick people in this thing while it is small", and his code example, would have prompted, if he were honest, to indeed, include this if statement:
"small blocks until block number X".  The fact of not having included this, even while he was saying that one COULD do it that way, and given all comments, indicates he wasn't being serious here.

When I first tried to download the bitcoin client and set it up on my linux box, it started downloading... and I waited, and waited, and waited, and was hearing my hard disk going crrrrr-crrrrr-crrrr from all the seeking and writing, etc etc... after waiting for quite a while and seeing no usable program that I can play with, I got angry. I said "what the fuck is this doing for so long? what the hell is this?".... And I erased the entire folder condemning bitcoin for the bullshit that it was.

That's because you should have used a light wallet like electrum.  Electrum is a SPV wallet, like Satoshi proposed for normal users in November 2008.  If your idea was not to mine, there's no reason you download that huge block chain (unless, like me, if you want to look at it with a hex editor...)

I started out in bitcoin with electrum for my own coins.  I only installed, for fun, a full node during a few years, but I never used it for anything else but to look at the blockchain.  As a wallet, it wasn't great.  I didn't want to use a non-HD wallet.  Using a non-HD wallet is very dangerous, because there's a point in time, when you do a transaction, that the very single only place where your private key resides, is in the wallet.dat file.  If at that moment, your disk scratches, you've lost potentially all your funds.  Even if you made a backup 4 minutes earlier.  Very dangerous. 

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In other words I was prevented from even trying it out by the problematic user experience of having to download a lot, and the associated problems of hard-disk seeking which was making my system crawl.

I could also say: Youtube is bullshit.  I wanted to download the entire datacenter serving Youtube, and it took me a month and a truckload of hard disks.  And I only wanted to look at a single video.  What bullshit, Youtube.  But people don't download all of Youtube to look at a single video.  They connect to a Youtube server, and take what they need.  

As a bitcoin user, you are only interested in a very small part of the block chain: those transactions that you are concerned with (to you, and from you).  That's what a light wallet downloads, together with the cryptographic proof that it is indeed, part of the block chain.  That's what Satoshi already said in that November 2008 mail.
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January 29, 2018, 01:22:48 AM
 #95

How could satoshi nakamoto have known this maasive scalability might hit bitcoin? Dont forget that bitcoin was the first and foremost cryptocurrency, and other coins have only tried to perfect themselves only based on limitations of bitcoin and learning from it. If bitcoin had not been there

The master of deception brought us the block-chain but also CPU-Wars for mining and then the development team spent years
making everything complicated and now we are at a stage where we have 20,000 miners trying to synchronize 200gb of data and fees
hitting silly levels as a way to deal with scaling of the block that they knew from day one would not scale.

"would not be these better solutions we are seeing now either"

We are seeing much better solutions and they are gaining ground on Bitcoin and will do 25,000 per second on-block apparently
without introducing banking hubs like is happening with the Lightning network.

Mr satoshi nakamoto solved one problem and gave us ten more and he forgot the missing link
that I believe that I have found but here is not the place to go into detail or any tom, dick or harry
will say that they came up with it first.

The mans a legend because it is a legend and he looks like double crossing CIA agent to me for the reasons
that I have listed.

Mining is CPU-wars and Intel, AMD like it nearly as much as big oil likes miners wasting electricity. Is this what mankind has come too.
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January 29, 2018, 03:23:49 AM
 #96

Satoshi can't decide the implications of his random choice. Maybe happiness and luckiness come with him!
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January 29, 2018, 04:20:47 AM
Last edit: January 29, 2018, 06:10:39 AM by dinofelis
 #97

How could satoshi nakamoto have known this maasive scalability might hit bitcoin? Dont forget that bitcoin was the first and foremost cryptocurrency, and other coins have only tried to perfect themselves only based on limitations of bitcoin and learning from it. If bitcoin had not been there

The master of deception brought us the block-chain but also CPU-Wars for mining and then the development team spent years
making everything complicated and now we are at a stage where we have 20,000 miners trying to synchronize 200gb of data and fees
hitting silly levels as a way to deal with scaling of the block that they knew from day one would not scale.

The real danger of this thing is actually that bitcoin really becomes secure with PoW only when its proof of work consumes demonstrably more than half of the world's electricity supply.  Maybe bitcoin is the first
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

It turns essentially everything into mining equipment.  First, it enslaved humanity's greed as its work horse.  Now it wants them to make mining equipment.  Maybe between 2008 and 2010, Satoshi realized this, and wanted to stop that madness with a finite block size ?    Grin

One can estimate (I did it elsewhere) that if all world financial investment put 1% of their holdings in bitcoin, we will be forced to consume 1/3 of world electricity production for mining.  Give or take a rough factor of a few.   Maybe between 2008 and 2010, Satoshi did this simple math too.  I'm surprised nobody else did.  It's quite simple.  Here is the outline.

The state of the art mining is the S9 antminer, consuming 0.1J/GH.  (Joule per Giga Hash).
The current hash rate of bitcoin is of the order of 20 billion GH/s right now (that is proved proof of work).  So the very minimal energy consumption of bitcoin right now is 2 GW.  
But right now:
 - bitcoin's miners are most probably a mix of newer and older technologies, consuming more
 - with the very recent price increase, right now mining is very, very profitable (cost of mining much lower than block rewards+fees in the market).  One roughly estimates this a factor of 5.  This is why hash rate is strongly rising, even if price is dropping: hardware installation hasn't caught up yet.

==> at about $10 000 / BTC, we can roughly estimate the equilibrium power consumption at 10 GW (5 times the lowest possible one right now).

Now, what is bitcoin's maximum "success" market cap ?

If bitcoin is a currency, it will eat away the fiat market, which is several tens of trillions of dollars.  ==> factor of several x100 from now.

If bitcoin is a speculative asset (most likely), it will eat away at the speculation finance market.  That's 2 quadrillion world wide (the derivatives market).  ==> factor of 10 000.  If bitcoin represents 1% of all investment in this market, ==> factor of x100 from now.

So everything points to a factor x100 if bitcoin is a total success story: "most of currency" or "1% of speculative assets".  Personally, I think everything points to speculative asset, but that doesn't matter here.

If x100 in market cap, also x100 in mining power consumption.  Not 10 GW, but 1 TW.  World electricity production: 2.8 TW.

QED.

Very funny to see discussions about scaling whine about *disk space* if you realize this.
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January 29, 2018, 06:08:52 AM
Last edit: January 29, 2018, 06:43:26 AM by dinofelis
 #98

The mans a legend because it is a legend and he looks like double crossing CIA agent to me for the reasons
that I have listed.

I don't think so.  I've been pondering such, but there are too many things that indicate that he wasn't a 3-lettre agent.  I rather think of the following.  "When an honest man realizes he made a mistake, there are two possibilities: he stops making the mistake, or he stops being honest".

I think Satoshi was "real and honest" in 2008.  Maybe he realized there were severe mistakes in the principles of his system later, but didn't want to stop it openly.  Maybe his 1MB block limit sneaked in was his last attempt to save the world from his Frankenstein paperclip maximizer.
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January 29, 2018, 07:03:51 AM
 #99

I think 1MB is arbitrary, and just happens to be the status quo.

As I understand it, the people who want to keep blocksize as is want to maximise the odds of someone from a developing/under-developed country being able to eventually afford running a full node. Bitcoin is not just meant for us in developed nations, but the world.

Ironically, right now, transaction fees are such that these very people won't be able to use bitcoin. So that is a bit sad.

However, there are supposed to be scaling solutions in the works that don't require increasing the block size.

Personally, I'd rather have these scaling solutions put in place before we exclude a whole bunch of unbanked individuals just because we're impatient and want to play with our new toy.

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January 29, 2018, 08:33:58 AM
Last edit: January 29, 2018, 10:27:20 AM by dinofelis
 #100

As I understand it, the people who want to keep blocksize as is want to maximise the odds of someone from a developing/under-developed country being able to eventually afford running a full node. Bitcoin is not just meant for us in developed nations, but the world.

As Satoshi explained in November 2008, and as I outlined here and on several other occasions, there's strictly no need "for poor people to run a full non-mining node".  You run a full node only if you're a mining pool (you have to), or if you have a very large vested interest in bitcoin and in the ability for a lot of people to connect their light wallets to you.  Also if you're a geek, and want to analyse aspects of bitcoin's system on your own.  But running a full node doesn't add much to the power decentralization aspect of bitcoin.   To be a bitcoin user, and to be secure, you only need a SPV wallet (like electrum).   An SPV wallet proves that all transactions you're looking at, are part of the one and only block chain out there, produced for you by an industry of miners.  You cannot screw someone with an SPV wallet in thinking that a transaction was part of the block chain while it isn't.  That's all you need, and Satoshi explained that already in November 2008.

Given the stakes of the bitcoin system, big players can afford big blocks and big block chains.  Small players have in any case nothing to say concerning the actual block chain, they can only VERIFY that they are using the "right" one.  An SPV wallet does that perfectly for them.

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Ironically, right now, transaction fees are such that these very people won't be able to use bitcoin. So that is a bit sad.

Yes, but that is the idea.  Bitcoin is a very highly speculative asset, and a dangerous unstoppable paperclip maximizer.  It is not a currency at all.  So poor people have nothing to do in bitcoin in any case.  This is deadly finance, not "money on the internet" in any case.

There was a very lucid analysis posted here long ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57.msg390#msg390

However, what that person failed to see is that bitcoin continues to bubble.   It doesn't die.  It goes from one bubble to the next, bigger and bigger ones: 2011, 2013, 2017.  Bubble -crash - bubble -crash - bubble - crash.  Of course, this will run out of greater fools and once all potential greater fools have been in the game, it is over, as the poster suggested.  What he didn't realize is that if there's a multitude of such systems in competition, you don't have a single greater fool game, but a "speculative market".  A speculative market can continue to bubble and burst indefinitely.  That's called "finance".

The 1 MB limit in bitcoin, that harmed it sufficiently last year to lose its monopoly position it held until then (rarely less than 80% of whole of crypto), opened up the market.  If bitcoin would have been on its own, it would have ended in a big final bubble as that poster explained, once we've run out of greater fools.  But if there's a market, where one asset rises while the other falls, the game can be played indefinitely.

So the 1MB limit, destroying bitcoin's monopoly, has also made this giant paper-clip maximizer indestructible, by turning it into a highly speculative market no big player will be able to resist.

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Personally, I'd rather have these scaling solutions put in place before we exclude a whole bunch of unbanked individuals just because we're impatient and want to play with our new toy.

Bitcoin has nothing to do with the "unbanked".  It's not money.  It could have been, if the suggestions in the post I quoted, had been followed.

Ask yourself the question: suppose that I was an evil genie wanting to destroy the world with a paperclip maximizer, but I only have myself and my  computer, how could I possibly do it ?  

I could spend my modest savings into trying to build a robot doing so, but I would be ruined, the army would come in, and bomb it.  Game over.  No.  I have to invent something that will trick people into putting themselves a lot of resources in making paperclips.  How ?  I could try to make people make "paperclips" (that is, something totally useless that eats up economic resources), and reward them for it.  But I don't have the world's finances to reward them for it.  I'd be ruined before doing any bit of damage.    I can't ask them to sell there useless stuff to ME.  But if I can trick them in selling their useless stuff BETWEEN THEM, it might work.  

However, how to trick people into thinking they can sell useless stuff to their neighbour ?  By letting them think it is going to grow in value !  If I can trick people in using more and more resources to make something that is useless, but which they can sell to their neighbour for a higher price than the cost of what they made, I'm done !  Now, what could that useless thing be ?  It can't be something physical.  This has already happened, gold rushes did happen, and did a lot of damage, but not enough.  Something virtual then.  How can I have people use a lot of resources to make something virtual ?  It must be the result of a difficult calculation.  If I could trick people in selling one another results of a difficult calculation, in such a way that people need more and more resources to do those calculations, and can sell these results for a higher and higher price, I'm done. But how can I get people to get to think that the results of there difficult calculation will be worth more than the price of the resources they put into it ?  If I could present those results of difficult calculations as a kind of rare jewel that, for the moment, is still a bargain, that might work.  I can bootstrap people's greed into using more and more resources, to make less and less of these rare jewels.  I only have to find a regulating mechanism so that people will always get rewarded sufficiently for the resources they use up.  How can this be done ?  By organizing a competition of difficulty of calculation of course.  If I can have people compete, and bid up in resources, to solve more and more difficult calculations, using more and more resources, their competition will always be such that they spend almost as much value on the calculations as they expect to obtain by selling them.  In return, if they use more and more resources to make less and less of these jewels, the first holders of these jewels that got it against very little expenses, will now be rich.  That will inspire more and more people to join the rat race, because they also want to be rich.  This will only stop if we're running out of resources to make these rarer and rarer jewels.  I'm done.

Now let's invent a story that sells this to idealists that will do the honest mouth-to-mouth service in the beginning and who are above all suspicion.  Mmm.  We could say that we want a "freedom money".  Ok, here we go:
  
"I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party..."
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