How does block size harm decentralization?

[franky1]

If we keep increasing block size, "more transactions" doesn't imply a requisite increase in fees. That all depends on how limited block space is. If we increase block size beyond demand because technology advancement allows it (Like Bitcoin Cash), fees will drop towards zero. We need full blocks and a constant transaction backlog, otherwise there is no fee pressure.

Now, what evidence do you have that "higher fees will kill Bitcoin?"

pools dont need fee's for decades
so drop that mindset of them needing fees now

causing a transaction backlog and fee pressure NOW kills off the desire and utility of bitcoin.
people dont and wont want a system which costs them more than other networks and still get delays (yes im using LN's promotion).
the very point that people love and want LN is the very point that proves that people are already angry and disliking bitcoin.
so why is bitcoin hated and detested. because fee's are too high and mempool backlogs cause bitcoin to be too slow.

if fee's were low and no backlog, people would love bitcoin and not care for LN... LN would then be seen as just the commercial service for business hubs to make money from by offering a banking system(counterparty authorised tranasactions)

[franky1]

Larger blocks cause propagation delays. This increases orphaning rates, which disproportionately hurts smaller miners

propagation is currently SECONDS.. so SCALING block sizes to atleast get passed the implied 600k transactions a day limit is not going to cause issues.

secondly nodes dont even need to receive the full block data in one lump. they can get blockheaders. and thn attach the transactions in their own nodes mempools to fill in the blanks and only request the few missing transactions that didnt get relayed to them. so again if nodes are only receiving block headers. the propagation is still low as the transactions element of a full block is not being sent with it.
a blockheader(~80bytes) of 2000tx includes TXIDs of 6bytes(compact/shortIDs) per tx =12kb
so instead of sending 1mb of a full block data blockheaders can be a little over 12kb
meaning a block of 4000tx =24kb (compared to 2mb)
meaning a block of 8000tx =48kb (compared to 4mb)

thirdly. "miners" dont care about blocksizes. get a screw driver and look inside an ASIC.. you will find no hard drive. asics do not store blockdata. they are just given a small piece of data and their job is to send back a hash. that is all

fourthly
bitcoin core has already dropped compatibility for xp/vista and so should drop minimum hardware specs of such outdated levels. we are not in the 1990's and should not be trying to keep bitcoin relevant to PC specs of a decade+ ago
average joe upgrades their PC's every 2-6 years.
imagine online gaming industry.. how innovative would they be if they had to keep specs down below millenium/decade old tech/spec..
the whole need to keep bitcoin functional for a raspi spec is just empty excuses.. because even on a raspi bitcoin is capable of more than 600k transactions a day processing

fifthly
scaling is not just about pure blocksize increases.. it is most definetly not about jumping to "gigabytes by midnight"
scaling can be done by
actually avoiding adding features that cause a byte per tx bloat.(sgwit actually uses more bytes per tx, but then hides the real bytes with its pseudo math of vbytes and witness scale factor and other wishy washy code)
core also STUPIDLY allow a block to be treated as filled by having just 5 transactions, with lots of sigops.. so reduce the sigops means more transactions, and less concern over any legacy linear sigop processing delays(yep core instigated the linear sigop delay drama by even allowing a transaction to have thousands of sigops.. all so they can sway people into accepting the LN gateway tx format called segwit)

in a peer-to-peer cash  system. a peer does not need transactions of 16k sigops. in most cases they only need 2-5
thus going to that kind of transaction format of low sigops would actually speed up transaction validation where by more than 2000tx under low sigop counts can validate FASTER than 200tx under the current ratio

sixthly
fee's do not need to be pressured by a fe war over a limited space. it can be done be RE-introducing a fee priority mechanism.
a mechanism such as if a users funds are only 1confirm aged. they have to pay 144 times more than someone that only spends once a day(144confirm age). that way it actually means the whole community do not get pressured to pay the same high amount due to just a couple of spammers filling blocks.. but instead the spammers pay the price of spamming and its the spammers who want to spend every 10 minutes that would then see the incentive of using commercialised service networks like LN. while more modest ethical users get to remain happily using the bitcoin network still paying a more acceptable fee amount where because they dont spend often they wouldnt have benefitted from LN anyways.
simply trying to push EVERYONE, including the modest spenders into LN with the whole fe war pressure helps no one

[c_atlas]

core also STUPIDLY allow a block to be treated as filled by having just 5 transactions, with lots of sigops.. so reduce the sigops means more transactions, and less concern over any legacy linear sigop processing delays(yep core instigated the linear sigop delay drama by even allowing a transaction to have thousands of sigops.. all so they can sway people into accepting the LN gateway tx format called segwit)

in a peer-to-peer cash  system. a peer does not need transactions of 16k sigops. in most cases they only need 2-5
thus going to that kind of transaction format of low sigops would actually speed up transaction validation where by more than 2000tx under low sigop counts can validate FASTER than 200tx under the current ratio

I haven't really seen any tx's with a large amount of sigops, here's a tx with lots of outputs yet relatively few sigops. Could you reference some transactions where the # of sigops is very large? I can't really imagine what types of transactions could come remotely close to MAX_SIGOPS (except for attempts to flood the network/overwork transaction verifying nodes).

[hxtop]

This kind problems are predictable and can be solved by technological developments. e can give many examples for this situation: just before a few years ago, we were wating so much to download even for "one minute video" but now we watch movies online.  Don't worry about it because there are many people who works on blockchain technology in order to make it faster and safer.

[franky1]

I'm surprised people don't mention about Compact block when we're talking about block propagation, block size and scaling. But it's not applied for nodes that just went online though

1. Block propagation is very fast as compact block have very small size (AFAIK about 10-30KB for 1MB block size)
2. Block verification time is fast as all transaction inside block already confirmed when it's broadcasted
3. AFAIK both block propagation and verification time should take less than 20 second (based on a presentation/conference video i've seen few years ago)

Regardless, few things such as Initial sync is serious concern as it took few days to few weeks (depending on internet speed, storage speed, etc.)

the main irritation about the initial block sync is not actually "cost".. but the time.
and when actually poking deeper at the irritations the main rebuttal i hear again is not cost. but the fact that people cannot see their 'final balance' until the syncing is complete. which means they cant really easily see if imported their wallet correctly or even make a transaction until the syncing is complete.

this can easily be remedied.
imagine getting to see a 'unverified' balance within seconds of opening your node for the first time. via SPV methods(grab a rlatively fresh UTXO set from peers). and thus using a fresh UTXO set, then able to know you have imported the correct wallet by seeing aatleast a unverified balance and also then able to make transactions.. then the whole blockchain syncing becomes a background issue rather than a stare at the screen waiting issue

its like online gaming/phone apps these days. get to play with a small single level demo of a game whilst the whole game downloads in the background. people can the be instantly entertained and not be as concerned about waiting for the game to download, as that main download is treated as a background issue.

lastly the fee being more than a few hours of minimum wage labour for MILLIONS of people in third world countries deters more people than the cost of a hard drive or internet access

[c_atlas]

imagine getting to see a 'unverified' balance within seconds of opening your node for the first time. via SPV methods(grab a rlatively fresh UTXO set from peers). and thus using a fresh UTXO set, then able to know you have imported the correct wallet by seeing aatleast a unverified balance and also then able to make transactions.. then the whole blockchain syncing becomes a background issue rather than a stare at the screen waiting issue

its like online gaming/phone apps these days. get to play with a small single level demo of a game whilst the whole game downloads in the background. people can the be instantly entertained and not be as concerned about waiting for the game to download, as that main download is treated as a background issue

Why not just use a lightweight client then? If you just want to send transactions and see your balance then you can just import that wallet in an SPV client. The assurance you get from verifying all TX's via your full node isn't meant to be an annoyance, we shouldn't be taking a full node and downgrading it to some kind of hybrid; there's a reason SPV exists.

[franky1]

imagine getting to see a 'unverified' balance within seconds of opening your node for the first time. via SPV methods(grab a rlatively fresh UTXO set from peers). and thus using a fresh UTXO set, then able to know you have imported the correct wallet by seeing aatleast a unverified balance and also then able to make transactions.. then the whole blockchain syncing becomes a background issue rather than a stare at the screen waiting issue

its like online gaming/phone apps these days. get to play with a small single level demo of a game whilst the whole game downloads in the background. people can the be instantly entertained and not be as concerned about waiting for the game to download, as that main download is treated as a background issue

Why not just use a lightweight client then? If you just want to send transactions and see your balance then you can just import that wallet in an SPV client. The assurance you get from verifying all TX's via your full node isn't meant to be an annoyance, we shouldn't be taking a full node and downgrading it to some kind of hybrid; there's a reason SPV exists.

its not about turning a full node into a SPV.. although. funnily enough core's prunned chain feature and stripped block featurs actually allow a core node to not be a full node.
its not about turning a full node into a SPV.. its about allowing users to still be full nodes. but also get some unverified upfront information to help them out straight away rather than waiting


the way i see it is that not everyone NEEDS to be a full node. so yea people can use lite wallets.
the way i see it if you only have balance to only b spending occassionally (once a week) you dont need to monitor every transaction there is all day every day, all you really care about is that your transaction exists. so being a full node is not an essential need.

where as businesses that NEED to monitor hundreds/thousands of transactions they are personally involved in have personal reasons to NEED to be a full node.

also those few people that have slow internet because they are home users actually bottleneck the propogation. and thus they are not helping the network. so just being a full node for the sake of thinking they are helping, is actually doing the opposite.

if people really want to be full nodes then they need to expect some sort of effort is needed by them by actually having hom broadband instead of borrowing starbucks wifi occassionally.

its like online gaming. wanting to play the latest game but not having the latest console to play it. if you really want to play the latest games then buy the latest console. rather than say that online gaming should be regulated down to only being sega megadrive(genesis)/n64 graphics purely to be universal

imagine it. the gaming community first saying online gaming should be regulated down to sega/nintendo specs.. and then saying that online gaming should then charge 20cents per 10 minute game round.. thus ruling out utility for the same group that only want sega/nintendo standards by way of fee's..

and then going further. having a special screen that offers HD standards but you need to sign a contract that locks your funds up with a custodian that then server streams you HD content to screen, purely so you can play hd games for sub-pennies without the need of a console.

there is just so much hypocrisy of flip flop arguements that it becomes amusing.
LN's design is for the fast microtransactions niche:
do you really think LN users will take their desktop computers running as masternodes to validate all the mainchains that are LN compatible into starbucks to LN purchase a coffee.. or just use a phone app linked to a LN factory/watchtower server..
as the answer will tell you that LN will be more centralised than people think

too many people think that the answer to bitcoin is just 2 debates
low utility high fee.. or gigabytes by midnight low fee
big server farms.. or everyone NEEDS to be fullnode

[squatter]

What's the largest contributing factor to increased propagation delay? Is it transaction verification, a bandwidth issue, maybe something else? Verifying more transactions would slow down block creation, but I don't think it would by too much. As for bandwidth, miners don't send out blocks to every node, they send them to their peers who then propagate them further, so I'm not quite sure I understand how bandwidth is a problem since there are plenty of nodes transmitting and receiving data.

Bigger blocks take longer to propagate to the network and they also take longer to verify. The latter is especially problematic at larger block sizes because for certain transactions, signature hashing quadratically scales. If it takes several minutes to verify a block, that's a real problem. If invalid, it'll be orphaned. If miners are doing validationless mining to sidestep the issue, this can result in orphaned chains. This means less secure transactions for users, and more expensive mining for miners. This encourages smaller miners to shut down and larger miners to scale up to account for these inefficiencies.

Segwit partially solved the quadratic sig hashing issue, but transaction data in the base block is still a problem.

Without inflation, the system needs fee revenue to continue incentivizing miners. The block size limit is the only means we have to enforce scarcity of block space, which guarantees fee revenue. Otherwise, Bitcoin's Byzantine fault tolerance may be threatened as block rewards decline in value. You can't have a network worth many billions or trillions of USD where miners have no incentive to secure the network.

Agreed, but why would users want to pay massive fees to cover the miners expenses, especially if they can use other networks for far cheaper (I know I know "they get a secure decentralized network" but still, does this limit the types of transactions that will be capable on the bitcoin network? Is this where LN comes in?). Is it fair to assume that up til now (and maybe for a few more years) miners have been taking the hit in terms of fees with the belief that their accumulated BTC will be worth more in the future than their current mining operation has cost them (i.e a net positive in the future)?

That's a fair assumption. Miners are paying far more per transaction than users are. Rationally, this is because they are investors who are speculating on the future value of bitcoins. It's bad to assume that miner speculation on fiat value will sustain the system forever, especially if the block rewards get smaller and smaller due to lack of fee revenue. At some point in the future, Bitcoin's value should become less speculative (as it becomes an established asset class) and mining incentives should accordingly be more in line with actual usage. Mining can't remain entirely dependent on speculation. That was never Bitcoin's design and it's just not sustainable.

If Bitcoin is a settlement layer, it will probably limit on-chain transactions to those who need to transfer higher value, or those who have a specific need for Bitcoin confirmation -- like a Lightning commitment transaction.

If people aren't willing to pay high fees, then mining revenue will drop and mining security will therefore drop. This may be fine, and we will hopefully see an equilibrium form where mining security reflects what users are actually willing to pay.

[squatter]

causing a transaction backlog and fee pressure NOW kills off the desire and utility of bitcoin.

How do you know? Any evidence or just more empty conjecture?

Both transaction fees and price steadily rose from 2015 until the end of the run in December, 2017. Users were obviously willing to pay higher and higher fees. When Bitcoin has even more utility because of increasing adoption, a robust LN, sidechains, smart contract ecosystem, etc. I think that would justify higher fees yet.

Larger blocks cause propagation delays. This increases orphaning rates, which disproportionately hurts smaller miners

propagation is currently SECONDS.. so SCALING block sizes to atleast get passed the implied 600k transactions a day limit is not going to cause issues.

That's the best case scenario, and it's with a base block size of 1MB. Witness data is not a problem for the quadratic sighashing problem, but increasing the base block size is. Some contrast to your "data":

In essence, doubling the size of a transaction can double both the number of signature operations, and the amount of data that has to be hashed for each of those signatures to be verified. This has been seen in the wild, where an individual block required 25 seconds to validate, and maliciously designed transactions could take over 3 minutes.

[deisik]

This is not a post in support of a change in block size or for sidechains, I'm not qualified to take a side in that debate at all lol. What are the consequences of a block size increase and more specifically how it would be harmful for bitcoin's decentralization?

Disclaimer, I can't say that I'm qualified in this matter

But from what I heard, bigger block sizes (like 8-16M) are not good for the resilience of the network since they lead to excessive centralization of mining. Bigger blocks will propagate slowly, so small miners will be at a disadvantage. There are probably other reasons why big blocks are not good. Further, if we want real scalability, Lightning Network is the way to go, not increasing the block size

Regarding pruning the blockchain, I think it is also possible. For example, it might be possible to make a "cold reset", so to speak, i.e. switch to a new and empty blockchain with only initial balances set without the overhead of transactions which led to this state (and we can do so as many times as we need)

[franky1]

causing a transaction backlog and fee pressure NOW kills off the desire and utility of bitcoin.

How do you know? Any evidence or just more empty conjecture?

evidence... hmmm
how about people frustrated with bitcoin to such a point they are actively promoting LN....
how they are frustrated with waiting for bitcoin innovation that they are willing to losen their morals and principles and understanding of bitcoin to actively want to have a different network where funds are locked into counterparty management(banking).

every person that WANTS LN are people secretly pee'd off with bitcoin fee's and limited transaction ability... if they were not peed off, and happy with bitcoin. they would not be so hard nose about promoting LN as LN would not be something they would want/need
in essense. if there wasnt a problem then LN would not be a solution.. so those promoting LN are actually announcing and screaming there is a bitcoin problem.

but the 'problem' is not technology.. but political decision of devs' to not innovate bitcoin and instead stifle bitcoin to make LN a thing people desire

as for segwits stuff that core pretend are fixed
maleability.. has not been fixed. people can still malleate on the bitcoin network by using legacy
infact new opcodes for segwit allow segwit to be malleated too... yep core want/are reintroducing malleation into segwit.. (i know i laughed hard when that became public knowledge)
as for the legacy transaction s in regards to the "quadratic" verification.. that can be solved real easy... dont let a single transaction be allowed to have 16,000 sigops. this then solves 2 things
a. if a transaction is only allowed say 500sigops. then their wont be any issue with sighash validating.
b. blocks wont be filled by just 5tx's of such bloated crap.

funnily enough.. core when keeping the baseblock but then shifting to weight. didnt DECREASE sigop limit to eleviate the problem.. instead they increased the sigop limit
it was 20k blocksigop limit with a /5 for tx sigop limit... to then be a 80000k blocksigop limit with a /5 for tx sigoplimit
(4k to 16k sigops per tx).. which was an unbelievable foolish move.

at worse they could have done 80000 /20 to atleast stick to the old 4ktx limit.. or improved the situation by doing a 80k /100 to get transactions to only be allowed 800 (though i personally think 800 is still too much for a 'peer-to-peer' decentralsied currency)

[franky1]

causing a transaction backlog and fee pressure NOW kills off the desire and utility of bitcoin.

How do you know? Any evidence or just more empty conjecture?

evidence... hmmm
how about people frustrated with bitcoin to such a point they are actively promoting LN....
how they are frustrated with waiting for bitcoin innovation that they are willing to losen their morals and principles and understanding of bitcoin to have a different network where funds are locked into counterparty management(banking)

every person that WANTS LN are people secretly pee'd off with bitcoin. if they were not peed off, and happy with bitcoin. they would not be so hard nose about promoting LN as LN would not be something they would want/need

This is ridiculous. I'm not pissed off at bitcoin, and I like LN because it can create great strides in scalability. Those who are truly pissed off at bitcoin have jumped ship and promote on-chain scaling like bcash and faketoshi's vision.

LN is not a bitcoin thing.
LN is a separate network for multiple coins. the onyl reason the words bitcoin and LN are currently inter-twined is purely for promotion and sponsorship stuff..

LN is just a thunderdome to let many coins IOU's(12 decimal payments) enter. and then have some coins soo expensive and so unable to manage millions of transactions a day, that people wont want to exit back out to those coins.
thunderdome 2 may enter one may leave..

its the old banking addage of gold is too heavy and costly to be a currency, so lock ur gold up with a counterparty and have them give you a promissory note(19th century banking promotion).. and if you want to convert the promissory note to coins, you may find taking silver or copper a better exit method.

LN does not scale bitcoin. it actually takes bitcoiners off the bitcoin network "to reduce the burden" (=reduce bitcoin utility)

[franky1]

LN is not a bitcoin thing.
LN is a separate network for multiple coins. the onyl reason the words bitcoin and LN are currently inter-twined is purely for promotion and sponsorship stuff..

LN is just a thunderdome to let many coins IOU's(12 decimal payments) enter. and then have some coins soo expensive and so unable to manage millions of transactions a day, that people wont want to exit back out to those coins.
thunderdome 2 may enter one may leave..

its the old banking addage of gold is too heavy and costly to be a currency, so lock ur gold up with a counterparty and have them give you a promissory note(19th century banking promotion).. and if you want to convert the promissory note to coins, you may find taking silver or copper a better exit method.

LN does not scale bitcoin. it actually takes bitcoiners off the bitcoin network "to reduce the burden" (=reduce bitcoin utility)

I realize arguing with you is pointless because you've never been wrong. But the difference between the 19th century and now is there were no smart contracts back then. You're purposefully talking around the point that the BTC is locked up by _nobody_ but programming language, and _nobody_ has to participate in the LN if they choose not to. I don't understand how you can continue to be so mad at a technology. If LN encourages mass participation of bitcoin, why be angry at it? Its nonsensical.

firstly no one HAS TO deposit gold into a bank vault... but if bank notes promote and encourage mass participation of gold why be angry at bank notes. its nonsensical........ is pretty much what your saying right?

a smart contract is just a buzzword for a vault that you yourself do not solely control.
in essense. IF you DID lock up bitcoin into a vault with only yourself. you are not creating a channel. you are just timing yourself and only yourself out of being able to do anything with your funds on the bitcoin network
LN users wont accept such a single control lock. as they have no control to prevent you from just running off and never paying them whats owed later.

multisig is about multiple parties being involved. channels are multisig (multi/counterparty)
maybe instead of thinking what i say is about 'is franky right or wrong' but a point at which you should really look beyond the glossy hype of the promotion material and actually look at LN properly..
even LN devs will admit the flaws and issues with LN

but hey. if you think LN and bitcoin are the same thing.. just ask yourself the 'day one' question of "what is bitcoin" and then compare that answer to "what is LN"

heres an example
1. how many decimals does a bitcoin payment have []8      []12
2. can you pay bitcoiners when the recipient is offline []yes      []no
3. are bitcoin payments validated and confirmed by the community []yes    []no
4. do you need to pre-plan spending habits and lock funds []yes    []no
5. do you then need to search for routes that are online and funded to pass your payment []yes  []no

give your answer for bitcoin.. then ask yourself again for LN
then finally ask
was LN designed to be bitcoin compatible and a feature of bitcoin.. OR.. was bitcoin altered to include a new tx format to be a gateway to LN
.. then you will learn the difference


with all that said. LN not visioned as a "bitcoin solution" (because its not).. but envisioned as a commercial side service network. has a niche. but even to fulfill that niche the bitcoin network still needs to scale.
for instance knowing that bitcoin can only handle 600k lean legacy transactions daily. or ~400k LN gateway transactions.
knowing people to have a reliable LN experience will need 4-6 channels(gateway transactions)
thats only letting in 80k-100k users a day open LN channels.
which with people needing at some point to close them channels. and also people only funding and pre-planning spending habit for a couple weeks(average utility).
means every fortnight 80k-100k are using 2 days of bitcoin blockchain data(open and close). thus mathematically 2 days per fortnight = 700k users per fortnight spending habits.
oh i must stipulate these numbers are only if the bitcoin blockchain was utilised only for LN gateway transactions. because if normal bitcoiners were also doing normal bitcoin transactions inblocks. then thats less LN gateway transactions = less LN users

so, yea dont snap at me for going beyond the promotional material. instead try to yourself look beyond the over promise/over hype sponsorship stuff and look at LN fully an indepth.

[squatter]

causing a transaction backlog and fee pressure NOW kills off the desire and utility of bitcoin.

How do you know? Any evidence or just more empty conjecture?

evidence... hmmm
how about people frustrated with bitcoin to such a point they are actively promoting LN....
how they are frustrated with waiting for bitcoin innovation that they are willing to losen their morals and principles and understanding of bitcoin to actively want to have a different network where funds are locked into counterparty management(banking).

every person that WANTS LN are people secretly pee'd off with bitcoin fee's and limited transaction ability... if they were not peed off, and happy with bitcoin. they would not be so hard nose about promoting LN as LN would not be something they would want/need

That's obvious, though. Wouldn't you rather get something for free rather than paying the actual cost? Neither Bitcoin nor Lightning are perfect, but it's the closest we can get to having our cake and eating it too.

If you keep giving users more block space for free, they'll keep taking it, regardless of the long term costs. Raising the ceiling higher and higher means there is no mechanism to enforce fees. How's that going to work a few halvings down the road when block rewards are amounting to little more than 1.5 BTC? "Free transactions for all" sounds like a nice socialist paradise, but miners aren't in this for charity.

Every one of us has incentive to avoid paying fees. So, why do people like me still oppose bigger blocks and prefer the settlement layer approach? Because I also hold bitcoins, and I know that the block size limit is integral to guaranteeing the security of Bitcoin and thus the value of my coins.

[franky1]

If you keep giving users more block space for free, they'll keep taking it, regardless of the long term costs. Raising the ceiling higher and higher means there is no mechanism to enforce fees. How's that going to work a few halvings down the road when block rewards are amounting to little more than 1.5 BTC? "Free transactions for all" sounds like a nice socialist paradise, but miners aren't in this for charity.

Every one of us has incentive to avoid paying fees. So, why do people like me still oppose bigger blocks and prefer the settlement layer approach? Because I also hold bitcoins, and I know that the block size limit is integral to guaranteeing the security of Bitcoin and thus the value of my coins.

ever thought of actually having a fee mechanism
a fee priority formulae like what was available for several years before core removed it. but a better one that actually helps users and actually promotes fair usage and also makes a notible difference between those that wont benefit from LN and those that would.. rather than the treat spammers and ethical users with the same high fee rate purely to encourage pushing people off the network, which inevitably simply pushes the fee rate up more and utility/desires of bitcoin down

in the UK we are seeing hospitals reduce the amount of beds from 300k to 130k just to push 2 false agenda's
1. that 'immigration' is causing a backlog of hospital waiting times.
2. that people should move away from using the national health service and instead pay for a commercial private hospital to avoid waiting times.

the reality is that less people use a national health service than before and the national health service is left to be stifled stagnant and die out. all purely because those that love to be "conservative" prefer commercial services over a system thats open and barrierless for entry.

there is nothing stopping the system going back to 300k beds and then expending at a 5% bed count increase per year. but nah.. 'conservatives' dont like open borderless systems. they want capitalist commercialised systems

need you forget the whole point of bitcoin vs fiat.

[squatter]

If you keep giving users more block space for free, they'll keep taking it, regardless of the long term costs. Raising the ceiling higher and higher means there is no mechanism to enforce fees. How's that going to work a few halvings down the road when block rewards are amounting to little more than 1.5 BTC? "Free transactions for all" sounds like a nice socialist paradise, but miners aren't in this for charity.

Every one of us has incentive to avoid paying fees. So, why do people like me still oppose bigger blocks and prefer the settlement layer approach? Because I also hold bitcoins, and I know that the block size limit is integral to guaranteeing the security of Bitcoin and thus the value of my coins.

ever thought of actually having a fee mechanism
a fee priority formulae like what was available for several years before core moved it.

Fee priority didn't solve this problem. It was actually just a way for users to pay less fees!

It was miners who took it upon themselves to remove transaction priority because it was node policy, not part of the protocol. Transaction priority was losing them revenue so they stopped enforcing it. It made no sense to keep using priority in Core's fee calculations if no miners were actually using it. There's some good discussion of the issue here, including this bit:

After blocks started getting full, many miners, out of the interest of getting as much income as possible, chose to stop reserving this space for priority. There is more money to be made by choosing a few hundred transactions that paid more fees than it was to choose a few hundred transactions that didn't but had priority. Since no one miner was actually using priority, Bitcoin Core removed priority from its fee and confirmation estimations so that the given values would be more realistic and the code would be simpler.

The following pull requests and the issues linked within them contain some of the discussions that the Core devs had when removing priority: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/9602, https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7022, https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7008.

[franky1]

squatter what you are quoting about what miners removed was not the fee priority formulae. but a dedicated x% of blockspace for zero fee users that 'aged out' of the fee formulae.. in essense if you havnt spent your funds for x confirms then your transaction doesnt need to pay fee's because it wont be calculatable by the fee formulae. plus it makes pools not get anything.
what miners did had nothing to do with the formulae itself.
pools cant change bitcoin rules. only devs can when devs make node upgrade options. so it was the devs that removed the fee formulae
....
however a better more effective fee formulae that does give pools fee's but does it fairly where spammers get punished more. helps everyone.

a system of stifling bitcoins blocksize and utility helps no one. and once users are over burdened by the bitcoin networks fee's due to the stifled/stagnancy of no onchain scaling.. and instead use LN to remove themselves from that burden and stay within LN using factories.. what would be left on the network to pay the pools.... nothing.
pools would then need to find new streams of revenue..
and guess what. if they are not getting paid to solve blocks and users are not putting transactions into blocks. pools will just stop mining "empty blocks". thus stalling out the bitcoin network. again helping no one.

services would just use factories to redeploy channel funds withot touching the bitcoin network. after all who would want to pay the inevitable $2-$50 per tx if a factory on LN would do it for pennies.
thus going back to the whole old age banking system that dont use blockchains.

again think about the whole point of bitcoins. the whole revolutionary uniqueness of blockchains
..
i digress
who would want to exit LN to the bitcoin network if it cost $2-$50 to do so, yet things like litecoin could be an exit far cheaper for those wanting to get back to a blockchain of sole control of funds(sovereignty)

seems people are not looking at the whole economic gameplay. and just thinking that somehow if they promote LN hard enough some how they will get rich quick by being an LN hub..
but as logic and running scenarios will show. not everyone will. and those that will would be the commercial services not average joe..

but hey you keep pushing how bitcoin network needs to remain crippled just to pay some company big money.

[DooMAD]

Those who are truly pissed off at bitcoin have jumped ship and promote on-chain scaling like bcash and faketoshi's vision.

It's also worth pointing out that it's not just the BCH/SV crowd who appear to have jumped ship.  I often wonder what happened to some of the militant hardcore "1mb forever" fanatics who used to post here frequently but now stay silent?  Some of them clearly weren't happy with the capacity increase provided by SegWit.  You can tell it's probably the right course of action if the extremists on both sides of the debate didn't like it.  

seems people are not looking at the whole economic gameplay. and just thinking that somehow if they promote LN hard enough some how they will get rich quick by being an LN hub..

Quoted as evidence that you can't even understand people, let alone LN.  When you say stuff like this, it just goes to show that you're either making this shit up, or, you genuinely believe the stuff you write, which means that your brain doesn't seem to be wired up the same way as the average person here.  That's the only reason I can think of why you are completely incapable of understanding what people repeatedly tell you.  It's just one wild accusation after another with you.  It couldn't possibly be that ordinary people would have legitimate reasons for wanting LN.  There has to be something nefarious at play because that's the only way you can make sense of it with your unique mind.  I appreciate it can't be easy to understand people if you are on the spectrum, or whatever it is with you, but please, just stop pretending you know what the rest of us are thinking when you evidently haven't got the slightest clue.  There are positives to the Lightning Network.  It has support from users, so it's happening.  

every person that WANTS LN are people secretly pee'd off with bitcoin fee's and limited transaction ability... if they were not peed off, and happy with bitcoin. they would not be so hard nose about promoting LN as LN would not be something they would want/need

Said the person in the topic who is most pissed off at Bitcoin because they can't respect the direction Bitcoin users have chosen.  You are the one who is pissed off.  That's why you dedicate so much time and effort to your misguided little crusade.  

And while you have your ineffective little crusade, we have the code we run, which enforces the rules we want.

Code > Crusades

You've made it abundantly clear how you think Bitcoin should work.  Come up with better code if you want users to join you on your (currently imaginary and entirely non-existent) network that's apparently so much better than what we're currently doing.  

If you don't have code to enforce what you want, then you can't have what you want.  It's that simple.

i digress
who would want to exit LN to the bitcoin network if it cost $2-$50 to do so, yet things like litecoin could be an exit far cheaper for those wanting to get back to a blockchain of sole control of funds(sovereignty)

-digress  +derail  

And why don't you just wait to find out?  Then you can ask all the LN users who don't atomic swap to other currencies.  Not that you'll listen to them, of course.  They'll give you an honest answer, but instead you'll cry conspiracy and make up some other nonsense that better suits a narrative that will only ever make sense in your head.  

[franky1]

doomad..
seriously
all i see is ur insults

and then ur final summary. of:
"And why don't you just wait to find out?"
is basically  let it play out let bitcoin centralise let it get expensive

lol, again
"And why don't you just wait to find out?"

is like theres a tsunami warning that can wipe out a town....
doomad. let it play out and see what happens

typical UK conservative mindset.

as for me not listening. your the one that has one mindset.
i travel the world and speak to many people i get a DIVERSE(you'll need a dictionary as its new word to you) understanding. i do my research. yes my opinions are strong. and yea i dont just run off and bite my lip as soon as the echo chambers chime in to yammer about their love and desire to de-burden bitcoins network of utility to hand it off to other commercial networks.

my mindset is LN is a niche service and a separate network for a few people that need it.
but you and your echos endlessly think LN is a bitcoin solution. and then you flip flop.. all for your ultimate goal of wanting everyone to just use LN and then realise the thunderdome they entered, purely because you hope ull be one of the get rich quick LN hubs that just want a repeat of the whole 18th-21st century banking.. while ignoring the whole point of bitcoin

[jerrison]

From what I understand, a larger block size would mean more transactions (or data in general) can be included in each block effectively increasing the number of transactions the network can handle in a finite time frame (at least 1 block long). Consequently, the size of the blockchain will increase at a greater rate since more data is being added everytime a block is accepted. Eventually, this would mean the blockchain would be too large to store so only dedicated companies will be able to have full nodes, resulting in the centralization of mining.

Wouldn't that happen eventually anyway? Sure it'll take longer but unless the chain is pruned how will people be able to store it?

The only people running full nodes now are enthusiasts who like verifying everything themselves (though it's getting harder since the blockchain is already pretty big), pool operators, and mining farms or services like NiceHash/Blockchain.com

This is not a post in support of a change in block size or for sidechains, I'm not qualified to take a side in that debate at all lol. What are the consequences of a block size increase and more specifically how it would be harmful for bitcoin's decentralization?

i do not see it as a threat to decentralisation, the larger the size of the block the more data it accumulates or stores and that has little to do with the miners as it works with the design of the blockchain and and miners only works with the conditions of the blockchain design and whatever comes is within the network design so little of it only concerns the miners.