Small blocks, middle blocks or big blocks?

[DooMAD]

The point is that no coin has proven the viability of larger blocks because those coins that supposedly have them are totally unable to fill them on a regular basis. 

And my point is until you have affordable reliable ssd's and/or 3d cross point of certain size that people typically can have, which could in theory be used as a virtual memory, you need to pay attn to bandwidth, and storage; these advancements will come, but you need to gauge it over time.

But we have to keep in mind that "affordable" is something that will vary greatly by region.  People in developing countries should also be able to run a full node if they want to. 

and if a discussion needs to be had about this, it would need to take place with only one person

If I were to get in my spot, at some point, I will discuss the situation with the one person I would need to

Okay, I'll bite.  Who's your special friend, then?

[1714036599]

1714036599

[1714036599]

1714036599

[1714036599]

1714036599

[1714036599]

1714036599

[franky1]

But we have to keep in mind that "affordable" is something that will vary greatly by region.  People in developing countries should also be able to run a full node if they want to. 

but you should keep in mind that  "affordable" is something that will vary greatly by region.  People in developing countries should also be able to pay to make a real bitcoin transaction without it costing them an hour of labour

[squatter]

There is a strong contingent of Bitcoin users (and Core developers) that want higher fees. Small blocks are a means to force fees higher through a fee market, which makes the mining incentive much more viable. This way, we aren't completely dependent on growing to a billion users paying who hardly pay any fees at all per capita.

If we keep raising block size beyond demand, then miners can never account for fees in their revenue stream even as the block subsidy disappears because there will never be any fee pressure. Everyone will pay close to 0 and miners will continue subsidizing the entire network despite smaller and smaller revenue. This leads to a situation where we might see large swings in hashpower because mining would be so speculative and unsustainable. Big blocks simply make no sense from an economic standpoint unless you want to switch to a design where inflation continues forever -- i.e. increasing the supply of bitcoins.

i predicted a core defender would come out with the stupid 'core defenders want a fee war to benefit miners' .. it was tooo obvious it was gonna come up
again if MINING POOLS cared and wanted a fee war they would only accept transactions of X fee no matter what the blocksize was or transaction count was.

You don't get it. Who cares what mining pools want? The fee market is not some sort of gift to miners, any more than the original block subsidy was. The fee market exists to benefit Bitcoin users because it ensures a continuing honest mining incentive.

If block size always has a "buffer" beyond demand, everyone will pay ~zero. Why would anyone pay when there is free space?

In your vision, block rewards will eventually diminish to nothing and the entire mining incentive will cease to exist. That would make for an incredibly useless and insecure Bitcoin. No thanks.

[franky1]

You don't get it. Who cares what mining pools want? The fee market is not some sort of gift to miners, .......

because it ensures a continuing honest mining incentive.

mining incentive... wait. but you said you dont care about miners incentive

If block size always has a "buffer" beyond demand, everyone will pay ~zero. Why would anyone pay when there is free space?

In your vision, block rewards will eventually diminish to nothing and the entire mining incentive will cease to exist. That would make for an incredibly useless and insecure Bitcoin. No thanks.

firstly, fee's have nothing to do with security. paying extra does not make your tx any more valid/rule following than any other tx.
if pools decide to make blocks that dont fit the rules. they dont get archived by nodes. thus pools cant really break rules anyway. all a pool can do is choose which tx's to collate

in my vision a fee war proposing $20/tx now is stupid. we dont need to worry about fee's for decades. so concentrate on adoption now and actual bitcoin utility and let the fee's play out in decades.
after all if pools run out of funds in decades. they can always themselves refuse to include 'free tx'
a block does not need to be filled for a pool to only want to include the most expensive txs'.. a pool can ven with 20% filld blocks decide to only accept tx's of X fee

its like first class aeroplanes. half the seats are empty but the airline doesnt give away free tickets

[BitUsher]

If blocks are mostly empty and miners are not confirming 10 Sat / Byte and under fees because they choose to not accept low fee txs than another miner will come along and include those low fee txs as there is an incentive to do so.

If a fee market doesn't exist than there is no one paying a premium for priority block inclusion and much less is collected in fees. A fee market is precisely what allows lower fees to be included at a later time and higher security for those who want priority.

This isn't hypothetical, already Bcash sometimes has less security with Coinbase reward and their fees than Bitcoin fees alone at times. This is why Bcash has had to move away from the whitepaper and is principally using developer checkpoints and only using PoW at the chaintip due to being so insecure. As we have seen with BSV this doesn't stop reorgs or double spends occuring which will start to happen with Bcash too once their hashrate % drops from very low 3-4% to dangerously low 0.5-1%

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00951358/document

make the
block size irrelevant or not binding would lead to a too low level of security for Bitcoin...So is the limited size of blocks that allows the miner to sell a
scarce resource.

Delaying the fee market simply is a kick the can problem ,which would also delay the efforts to work on more efficient and more private 2nd layer solutions. We need to start the slow and gradual transition to fees paying for security vs Inflation. We always knew this transition had to occur. It has been proven that Bitcoin did not need more blockspace because the market of users and businesses still aren't using all the space from the last upgrade segwit(max 50% are segwit) and soon we will see another upgrade of 17-40% more txs per block onchain with signature aggregation.

Any programmer knows to scale efficiently it is better optimize the code first before throwing more resources at the problem and this is what Bitcoin is doing. Upgrades like segwit, taproot, schnorr sig aggregation are exactly what helps bitcoin be more securely scalable in the future when we choose to upgrade Bitcoin from 4 MB of weight to a higher number.

[franky1]

If blocks are mostly empty and miners are not confirming 10 Sat / Byte and under fees because they choose to not accept low fee txs than another miner will come along and include those low fee txs as there is an incentive to do so.

If a fee market doesn't exist than there is no one paying a premium for priority block inclusion and much less is collected in fees. A fee market is precisely what allows lower fees to be included at a later time and higher security for those who want priority.

1. yes another miner will come along and include those low fee tx. but that other miner would need to have adequate hashpower to win the race too

2. again theres no need for a fee market this decade

3. making a block capacity scarce does not = causing a fee premium. pools as you already said could choose to include low fee's because they see othr pools include high fee's.. pools can pick anything they like.
they do NOT need to fill a block. they could happily make a block with just 10tx of $1 each until peopl cotton on to pay $1. again you dont need to fill a block to make a pool only accept $1 fee's..

4. WHEN pools start caring more about fee's, THEY will adapt. but that is not any time soon

think about the economic lunacy of excuses core devs use just to tempt people to deburden bitcoin to use ln
left hand: paying $1+ to make 1 transaction a day is perfectly acceptable
right hand: paying $30 a month internet bill is unacceptable

[BitUsher]

1. yes another miner will come along and include those low fee tx. but that other miner would need to have adequate hashpower to win the race too

The incentives are such that they will gain adequate hashpower because other miners are leaving money on the table thus giving an incentive for competition to take a portion of the marketshare.

2. again theres no need for a fee market this decade

What is the math on this? Bitcoin drops to 6.25 BTC inflation next year. This is a huge security drop off.

3. making a block capacity scarce does not = causing a fee premium. pools as you already said could choose to include low fee's because they see othr pools include high fee's.. pools can pick anything they like.
they do NOT need to fill a block. they could happily make a block with just 10tx of $1 each until peopl cotton on to pay $1. again you dont need to fill a block to make a pool only accept $1 fee's..

The research paper I linked to goes into this specific assumption and directly addresses it and mathematically proves this to be untrue. Go ahead and read it, as your quickness of your response means you likely did not. Seems like you care more about propping up your altcoin than learning what the truth is if you are not willing to read the paper that directly addresses your incorrect assumptions

4. WHEN pools start caring more about fee's, THEY will adapt. but that is not any time soon

Pools don't care about fees? You are absurd.

[franky1]

1. yes another miner will come along and include those low fee tx. but that other miner would need to have adequate hashpower to win the race too

The incentives are such that they will gain adequate hashpower because other miners are leaving money on the table thus giving an incentive for competition to take a portion of the marketshare.

i was simplyfying ur scenario, but in actual fact a second pool does not even know what tx's a first pool is collating while its collating/hashing. so the second pool can equally be working on the same high tx fees.. as all that matters is who wins the race.
again while rewards are $62k pools dont care about ~3000 tx of current 20cents $600. they wouldnt care much about $1 fees ($3k) as the $62k reward is more important. again pools would rather 'empty block' to gain a few second advatage to get the $62k. than risk collating a list of high fee's that not only is only a couple % bonus. but also risks them not even getting the main $62k prize.

theres no point in wasting sconds to hope for a $3k bonus if your not gonna win the race to claim the $62k+$3k.. you might aswell just hope to get the $62k and not care about being fee picky

2. again theres no need for a fee market this decade

What is the math on this? Bitcoin drops to 6.25 BTC inflation next year. This is a huge security drop off.

6.25btc does not mean security drop off. 6.25 is not even inflation. its deflation.
security is the same. if a pool was to make a block thats not acceptable to rules. nodes reject it. it does not matter what fee's/reward were involved
pools are under no rule to include 3000tx a block. they can empty block. they can only do segwit, only do legacy, only do tx of 250byte. only do tx of 1000byte+.. pools are not forced to add tx's to a block

3. making a block capacity scarce does not = causing a fee premium. pools as you already said could choose to include low fee's because they see othr pools include high fee's.. pools can pick anything they like.
they do NOT need to fill a block. they could happily make a block with just 10tx of $1 each until peopl cotton on to pay $1. again you dont need to fill a block to make a pool only accept $1 fee's..

The research paper I linked to goes into this specific assumption and directly addresses it and mathematically proves this to be untrue. Go ahead and read it, as your quickness of your response means you likely did not. Seems like you care more about propping up your altcoin than learning what the truth is if you are not willing to read the paper that directly addresses your incorrect assumptions

4. WHEN pools start caring more about fee's, THEY will adapt. but that is not any time soon

Pools don't care about fees? You are absurd.

ok imagine it this way. imagin ur at the olympics, its the 100m race. prize is $62k for winning. but if when the race trigger fires there is a side bonus that if you change your shoes to wear nikes new brand sneakers and then run. nike will pay you $3k extra,, but you gotta win the race too..
so ur at the start line.. you can just run and have good odds of getting the $62k by just running when you hear the starter pistol.. or risk it and wait for the starter pistol and try to quickly swap shoes in the hopes you still win the race to get $65k
which do you risk... $62k easier or $65k harder........

now to pre-empt your reply
"but what happens when the $62k reward is gone"
my reply
"ask your grand children, as its something their generation would be involved in"
did you know that when rewards were 50coin, the fiat was under $50
did you know that when rewards were 25coin, the fiat was under $15,000
did you know that when rewards were 12.5coin, the fiat was under $250,000
did you know that when rewards will be 6.25coin, the fiat can be much higher than now

the coin decrease does not mean fiat reward decrease.

[BitUsher]

You are sure making a lot of assumptions that Bitcoin is going to keep appreciation more than the coinbase reward dropping off.

You also are refusing to read the research paper that proves your assumptions wrong.

Go ahead and read it and tell me what exact sentence is incorrect and where their math is wrong specifically.

[franky1]

You are sure making a lot of assumptions that Bitcoin is going to keep appreciation more than the coinbase reward dropping off.

You also are refusing to read the research paper that proves your assumptions wrong.

Go ahead and read it and tell me what exact sentence is incorrect and where their math is wrong specifically.

again the paper mentions that a blocksize limit is needed t cause a fee war.
airlines dont always fill their seats. but they would never give away their first class seats for free

ever been on a train and seen the first class cabin nearly empty but the economy class crambed.. same thing

having only X seats doesnt mean they will always be filled
charging XX fee doesnt mean people will always be willing to pay
there is nothing forcing a pool to fill or empty a block. there is nothing forcing a pool to add tx's while risking the delay causing risk of losing the race

a train is not gonna wait at a station until the first class carriage is filled before travelling. they would prefer to travel ontime and not risk a 'late penalty'

[BitUsher]

The paper specifically discusses miners creating set minimum fee per tx and why that cannot work , a point you keep ignoring

[franky1]

The paper specifically discusses miners creating set minimum fee per tx and why that cannot work , a point you keep ignoring

well you go treat that paper as your bible, and ill use my own research and stats and experience as the formation of what i will continue to go by.

by the way, that paper has lots of if's and assumptions too. so take it with a grain of salt.
just because someone puts a fancy title page and calls it a 'paper' doesnt mean its well researched

transactions having a fee does not guarantee acceptance in a block
transactions having a fee+x does not guarantee acceptance in a block before a transaction thats just fee-x
pools are free to choose a transaction to include for any reason they please. so fe's and blocksize are not things the network should mess with because it doesnt help/coerce a pool into doing what a network wants.

again a pool could develop its own fee rationale and cause users to adapt.
EG pools could stop accepting segwit transactions unless they pay the same price a legacy tx pays
EG pools could stop accepting legacy transactions priced at a 4x segwit comparative and only accept legacy tx's with cheap fees at a 1:1 comparative

pools can decide to ignore certain transaction formats like LN CLTV's

you and your papers assumptions that pools automatically will grab the highest tx and aim to fill blocks is the biggest empty assumption of all

[Wind_FURY]

But we have to keep in mind that "affordable" is something that will vary greatly by region.  People in developing countries should also be able to run a full node if they want to.  

but you should keep in mind that  "affordable" is something that will vary greatly by region.  People in developing countries should also be able to pay to make a real bitcoin transaction without it costing them an hour of labour

That's the value proposition of altcoins like Dogecoin or Litecoin. Cheaper transactions. It's also the value proposition of Bitcoin Cash, your "other Bitcoin". Wouldn't it work out well for those cryptocurrencies if Bitcoin's block size is small?

[alevlaslo]

Bitcoin obviously needs big blocks. It is quite a bit worrisome to me that no blocksize increase was made during the "slow" period in late 2019 or early 2019. The down part of the market would be the least contentious time to implement a hard fork to give bitcoin room to grow on the next bitcoin boom. Looks like we are going to head into the next boom with the same transaction capacity (well a tiny little bit higher thanks to greater segwit adoption) as what was hurting bitcoin during the last boom. This is a serious problem.

Bitcoin doesn't need to go crazy and have 32mb or 128mb blocks or whatever the bitcoin-altcoin-forks have, but it very clearly needs to increase its transaction throughput capacity, and soon! I really thought there would be a concerted effort to increase that during the downtime of the market this cycle. Sadly there was no effort whatsoever.

Even if you think LN is gonna be the main use for everyday transactions in the future for bitcoin, that future is not now, and bitcoin needs more space in its blocks right now, and especially in the next couple of years as the bull market heats up. No amount of segwit adoption or exchange transaction batching is gonna keep blocks open and fees low during this bull run. Again, even if you are of the mind that LN is THE answer for bitcoin, the blocksize puts a severe restriction on getting money into the LN. For LN onboarding alone bitcoin needs larger blocksizes, and even if LN is the vast majority of transactions in the future, bitcoin txs need more blockspace NOW and even later when LN takes over normal on-chain non-LN-onboarding/offboarding txs will still be around of course, for moving between wallets or moving around large amounts of money or just one offs so even during LN non-LN associated onchain txs will need more space.

The only answer is to increase blocksize. The number of hard forks of bitcoin should be limited to a very small number very close to one, so bitcoin doesn't become some absurd untrustable constantly changing thing like BCH. I think either there needs to be a single hard fork that implements some automated blocksize increases or a very small number of increases in the future.

I haven't ever heard of an automated blocksize increase discussed, I've only ever heard of one-offs bitcoin discussed, but I think the automated increase is the way to go. That way only one hard fork is ever needed and blocksize increases become a stable thing that doesn't need to be debated anymore. I think the way to do it would be at every halving there is also some blocksize increase, perhaps starting at a 4x this next halving, and then each halving the blocksize increase itself halves, so it'd be 400% increase, 200%, 100%, 50%, 25%, 12.5%, and so on. Or adjust these numbers however you see fit, the numbers I put in here would have bitcoin blocksize (blockweight) reach a limit at around 19x the current capacity, though it should probably be a bit higher than that if bitcoin is going to become globally used in the decades to come. This would also allow blocksize to increase as network speeds increase so that propagation wouldn't be a problem so bitcoin would never be in danger of not being decentralized, and it would also storage tech time to keep up so that the bitcoin blockchain continues to be relatively small compared to a reasonable cost of storing the blockchain.

Mastercard 56000 tps
BTC 8 tps
BCH 80 tps
BSV 800 tps now, 14000 tps st July and 3000000000 tps if future

[Wind_FURY]

The paper specifically discusses miners creating set minimum fee per tx and why that cannot work , a point you keep ignoring

well you go treat that paper as your bible, and ill use my own research and stats and experience as the formation of what i will continue to go by.

Yes, Bitcoin does not have to be "peer to peer digital cash". It has moved on from Satoshi's "original vision". I'm glad we can agree on that.

by the way, that paper has lots of if's and assumptions too. so take it with a grain of salt.
just because someone puts a fancy title page and calls it a 'paper' doesnt mean its well researched

transactions having a fee does not guarantee acceptance in a block
transactions having a fee+x does not guarantee acceptance in a block before a transaction thats just fee-x
pools are free to choose a transaction to include for any reason they please. so fe's and blocksize are not things the network should mess with because it doesnt help/coerce a pool into doing what a network wants.

Your assumption is that pools will always do what they please, that's impractical because game theory.

again a pool could develop its own fee rationale and cause users to adapt.
EG pools could stop accepting segwit transactions unless they pay the same price a legacy tx pays
EG pools could stop accepting legacy transactions priced at a 4x segwit comparative and only accept legacy tx's with cheap fees at a 1:1 comparative

pools can decide to ignore certain transaction formats like LN CLTV's

you and your papers assumptions that pools automatically will grab the highest tx and aim to fill blocks is the biggest empty assumption of all

That's a very huge assumption that all pools, together, will ignore the transactions that they don't like, together. But if that happens, that's censorship, then Bitcoin has failed.

[Pursuer]

Mastercard 56000 tps
BTC 8 tps
BCH 80 tps
BSV 800 tps now, 14000 tps st July and 3000000000 tps if future

all of them are inferior to my fork called Bitcoin Pursuer. I have increased the block size to 100 TB so my bitcoin (which I claim to be the real bitcoin) has a TPS of 166000000000000. the roadmap is to increase the blocksize to 100000 TB so that we can increase the TPS to 166000000000000000 and be able to handle more transactions.

[sehoon]

I really don't think that I will be able to choose any of these. There is a particular use in every type of block you are going to use. The best things you can do with a middle block can some times not work with big blocks. I think you should be more specific in this thread.

[Indamuck]

Its very rare that the blocks are full.  Sure it can happen sometimes when the price surges but that is not common.  In the future we may need more scaling if lightning network doesn't work out as planned.  I'm not against those big block coins entirely and it may be worth holding some.

[Wind_FURY]

The paper specifically discusses miners creating set minimum fee per tx and why that cannot work , a point you keep ignoring

well you go treat that paper as your bible, and ill use my own research and stats and experience as the formation of what i will continue to go by.

by the way, that paper has lots of if's and assumptions too. so take it with a grain of salt.
just because someone puts a fancy title page and calls it a 'paper' doesnt mean its well researched

transactions having a fee does not guarantee acceptance in a block
transactions having a fee+x does not guarantee acceptance in a block before a transaction thats just fee-x
pools are free to choose a transaction to include for any reason they please. so fe's and blocksize are not things the network should mess with because it doesnt help/coerce a pool into doing what a network wants.

again a pool could develop its own fee rationale and cause users to adapt.
EG pools could stop accepting segwit transactions unless they pay the same price a legacy tx pays
EG pools could stop accepting legacy transactions priced at a 4x segwit comparative and only accept legacy tx's with cheap fees at a 1:1 comparative

pools can decide to ignore certain transaction formats like LN CLTV's

you and your papers assumptions that pools automatically will grab the highest tx and aim to fill blocks is the biggest empty assumption of all

Funny , people always seem to forget the miners control the fees structure.
Miners could raise the price of transacting in segwit alone,
so it compensated them for the lost transactions revenue stolen by LN from the normal onchain fees.
That would be some cosmic humor.  

How? By flooding the mempool?

LN offchain fees would be higher than BTC onchain fees in such a scenario.    
Flaws created by using a soft fork instead of a hard fork.  
Cough Cough, I mean Features.  

That doesn't make sense. In that "scenario", blocks would be empty, and Lightning would be in-demand to its maximum limit.

FYI:
So as a miner, I know a segwit address allows say 200 extra transactions offchain in LN,
so I automatically charge 200X more for segwit transactions than a normal transaction to compensate.
Well, I bet no one saw that one coming.  

You assume ALL miners will be cooperating together to undermine the system. But if that happens, then Bitcoin has failed.

[ðºÞæ]

Size does matter