What IF you could change one element of Bitcoins code what would it be and why?

[CryptoMobster]

A little bit of fun but also good to see what others think.

I know this is not possible to do but everyone is different and seeing Bitcoin differently.

For me, I'd change the mining algorithm so it is less power extensive 

[pushups44]

A little bit of fun but also good to see what others think.

I know this is not possible to do but everyone is different and seeing Bitcoin differently.

For me, I'd change the mining algorithm so it is less power extensive 

I wouldn't change a thing. I recognize that bitcoin's immutability is what gives it its value. I'll let the developers debate amongst themselves the proper direction of bitcoin, because they have insights I don't have.

I recognize that bitcoin has had scaling issues, but those issues will be resolved in time with the Lightning Network. Patience is key here.

[fiulpro]

I believe what you said is very true , it's something that needs to be done because to be honest, it is not only limiting ourselves at the same time it's actually degrading the environment.
Something that is not sustainable won't go for long term , therefore I believe even I would like to suggest some different method for mining that won't cost that much.
Also at the same time I would put a boundary on the price of Bitcoins so that it can't fall below this .
Since this would actually lure in more investors and make it worth something.
There is lot that could be changed.

[franky1]

an actual fee formulae
EG
if the spending UTXO is 1 confirm old then the fee is 144x more than a UTXO thats a day old. also people can then use locktimes to not let a UTXO get added to a block. thus become in full control of priority

EG
if tx is 1confirm aged. add a lock of 6blocks. meaning your happy to wait an hour. thus you only pay 138x instead of 144x

this then:
reduces spammers on the blockchain.
if people still want fast spamming but without the huge fee they can use alternate networks of pegged tokens like LN
the fee formulae give individual control of fee's rather than a wild west auctionhouse of everyon fighting each other for top bids and everyone still end up paying the same and getting disapointed as they didnt get priority even after paying reccomendation

fee war doesnt work

[BrewMaster]

i would start a new cryptocurrency from scratch with a new innovative idea. otherwise changing a "single element" of bitcoin has been done at least 8000 times in the past 10 years that created 8000 altcois (give or take) 6000 of them are already dead.

bitcoin is good the way it is. which means changing one thing in it will make it worse otherwise we would have changed it in bitcoin already.
which brings us to what i said, start from scratch and follow a new idea instead of trying to copy bitcoin

[franky1]

i would start a new cryptocurrency from scratch with a new innovative idea. otherwise changing a "single element" of bitcoin has been done at least 8000 times in the past 10 years that created 8000 altcois (give or take) 6000 of them are already dead.

bitcoin is good the way it is. which means changing one thing in it will make it worse otherwise we would have changed it in bitcoin already.
which brings us to what i said, start from scratch and follow a new idea instead of trying to copy bitcoin

starting a new crypto is how the 8000 altcoins are made.
bug fixing and upgrading bitcoin to actually do things the community want does not create an altcoin.
forks can happen but in a good community positive consensus the fork evaporates in hours if it occurs at all.
however if bitcoin was changed controversially (no big community will/desire) then the fork would continue

so having bitcoin getting a bug fix and an upgrade to something the community will actually applaud, wont end in controversy
but starting a new altcoin from scratch is just that creating an altcoin from scratch

people are too afraid to admit that bitcoin has lost its footing since 2015 in regards to its features and ethos
people are too afraid to admit that core devs went down the wrong roadmap thats just a signpost route to an alternate network of managed accounts requiring agreements
people are too afraid to tell devs to just be devs and stop pretending to be the whole community stop pretending to be economists

[BrewMaster]

starting a new crypto is how the 8000 altcoins are made.

you missed the important part: the innovative idea. the 8000 altcoins are just copying bitcoin and doing what OP is saying. if you look at his post again even his example is a trivial bug introducing change.

[CryptoMobster]

fee war doesnt work

This is important for a lot of chains not just Bitcoin.

I like.

[BitHodler]

I would increase the blocksize and while we're at it, try to push Schnorr through as well (if it was ready to be implemented). Segwit's block weight hasn't yielded much of an advantage so a base block increase is needed.

I would say a 3MB base block size would be sufficient to onboard more users. I'm not going higher than that because we shouldn't forget that this isn't a toy like Bcash and the rest of the scam forks are. 3MB + LN will do it.

Currently Bitcoin isn't growing that rapidly anymore when it comes to processing more transactions on a daily basis and that's because of the 1MB base limit. Segwit adoption isn't going anywhere with toxic entities blocking adoption.

[shield132]

A little bit of fun but also good to see what others think.

I know this is not possible to do but everyone is different and seeing Bitcoin differently.

For me, I'd change the mining algorithm so it is less power extensive 

I think it's very scary to post something here about changing things in bitcoin because once there was a fork of BCH were blockchain size was changed and now everyone blames them because of this (well, more likely they blame Roger Ver's propaganda).
Personally I would kill 10 years of inactive coins or maybe would do something similar because money don't has to be in stuck, it has to move. On another hand limitation (21M supply) is great idea because it can prevent implation and price will move depend on demand and in this situation demand is number of people. Also would implement lighting network and that's all at first. On more deep stage, I need some time to think.

[1Referee]

Nothing. Whatever you end up implementing in a rushed manner will work against Bitcoin.

I'm perfectly fine with the current roadmap and the price doesn't care about what's under the hood, so why change anything? Most people complaining about the high fees are either faucet farmers or those who don't transact much anyway. There are tons of altcoins available with "better" specifications on paper, yet no one is really using them.

What I would like to see is people adopt Segwit and enjoy much lower fees, and stop using services that haven't upgraded yet.

[Ayiranorea]

What's been there with bitcoin at present is good and I don't find anything that is a flaw or a changeable element, because the core team will be thinking beyond us after various analysis. To my understanding if one element is changed that will surely lead to change of various other elements which is a must to be done. Just a single element change will never make a big difference in the bitcoin working ecosystem.

[Artemis3]

How about... Changing its crypto algorithm at around every halving or so, to defeat asics?

[hatshepsut93]

How about... Changing its crypto algorithm at around every halving or so, to defeat asics?

It won't defeat ASIC's, they'll just create ASIC's for new algorithm, and in quite short time. It will probably do more damage than good, because you'll be shaking the mining industry and hashpower during transaction periods, leading to uncertainty and instability in the network. Mining is centralized, even Satoshi in early days predicted that it is bound to happen, so this is something that is taken into equation in Bitcoin's protocol - it's main defense against attacks is the PoW mechanism, which creates negative incentives for attackers, and decentralized network of nodes, which makes mining only one part of the network, instead of the network itself.

[pixie85]

I like it the way it is but if I had the power to give or take a feature I'd try to make it more anonymous. Lack of real anonymity that some coins like monero are providing is probably the greatest weakness of bitcoin.

Mining isn't bad. It's adding to the economy. Why should anybody care that you take baths in milk as long as the farmer is paid enough to keep breeding cows and supplying you.

[thecodebear]

I would have a scaling blocksize feature, if the blocksize limit is reached for 100 blocks in a row the block size increases by .1 Megabyte. If block 99/100 isnt a full block the counter starts over.

This would keep blocks small but would have a small increase when it's actually needed. It would be wildly expensive to fill 100 blocks and even more to try and force increase the blocksize by any massive amount.

If lightning and other second layers take over then the 100 blocks will only be filled later when actually needed.

I'd do the obvious thing and implement some scaling method for bitcoin. Right now bitcoin's transaction capacity is a huge block to future growth, even with the LN being fully used. With the current tx capacity hardly anyone is even going to be able get onto the LN - it'd realistically take a few years to onboard 100 million users onto the LN at current transaction sizes, if we pretend like there would be one tx left over each second for someone to onboard (and in real life it would probably be less than that since blocks will be full already just from onchain non-LN related txs).

I like the quoted idea of the blocksize increasing if the blocks are full - well probably like >=95% full makes more sense - for 100 blocks in a row. I'd even change it to be if say 95 of the past 100 blocks have been 95% or more full then add .1 mb (or whats that like 400,000 block weight I guess), and I'd add that another increase can't happen for at least another 100 blocks. With this approach at times when everyone is FOMOing like Nov/Dec 2017 the blocksize would gradually alleviate the tx pressure and slowly bring fees down, while also providing future room for growth once the FOMOing period ends. This is the biggest issue for Bitcoin and something as simple as this solution would solve the problem in a measured and reasonable way.

[figmentofmyass]

unpopular opinion: i'd prefer an inflation/supply design similar to monero rather than the 21m hard cap that bitcoin has. the most essential part of the monetary design IMO is that inflation is low, predictable, and transparent---not necessarily that the supply is fixed.

monero's tail emission guarantees some honest mining incentives in the future. with fees only, the future is a bit more unclear. if bitcoin had a similar tail emission, increasing the block size limit would probably be less contentious.

[coolcoinz]

I like it the way it is but if I had the power to give or take a feature I'd try to make it more anonymous. Lack of real anonymity that some coins like monero are providing is probably the greatest weakness of bitcoin.

Mining isn't bad. It's adding to the economy. Why should anybody care that you take baths in milk as long as the farmer is paid enough to keep breeding cows and supplying you.

The anonymity of Monero and other coins are it's biggest downfall, that's why they won't receive institutional investors.

Does a coin really need institutional investors to succeed? IMO bitcoin had succeeded long before the institutions became interested. A fairly unknown Internet currency called the money of geeks and nerds went from a few cents to 1000 dollars in 2013, without institutions! Isn't it a huge success? I'd rather be interested in mainstream adoption or bitcoin being widely used as a store of value and a way to transfer big capital around the world. I'm talking money that's being used every day to purchase sky scrapers, large pieces of land, whole companies. This is more important than futures or backed exchanges. Not saying that they are unimportant, but adoption and value can be achieved through many different means. With or without investors.

[figmentofmyass]

The anonymity of Monero and other coins are it's biggest downfall, that's why they won't receive institutional investors.

Does a coin really need institutional investors to succeed? IMO bitcoin had succeeded long before the institutions became interested.

for some bitcoiners, how high the price goes is the primary measure of success.

ironically, institutional investment may not be the boon for price many are expecting. many people believe it's the massive leverage, commingling, and rehypothecation in the london bullion and comex gold markets that allows institutions to suppress the price. maybe the same thing is possible once physically settled bitcoin derivatives become popular on wall street.

i also think people underestimate the need (among companies and even governments) for private/anonymous currency. there is a lot of regulatory uncertainty right now but that may change in the future.

[jseverson]

I see some people mentioning an adaptive block size limit solution, and I'd just like to point out that satoshi has floated something of the sort in the past:

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

Not saying I necessarily agree, as I don't believe massive block sizes are not good for the long-term health of the network, but at the same time, block size increases probably shouldn't be this contentious. A block size increase will be necessary as the userbase grows anyway, so it shouldn't hurt to increase it a little to alleviate some of the short-term confirmation issues.