Thoughts on burner addresses

[o_e_l_e_o]

With bitcoin a bigger block size would lower confirmation time and therefore make it more usable in everyday live.

No, it wouldn't. It would simply reduce the fee you need to pay to secure entry to the next block at times when the mempool is full, but it would make absolutely zero difference to the average block time and therefore the expected time for that next block to be mined.

If you want to reduce the confirmation time then you need to change consensus to aim for a lower difficulty. This doesn't solve the problem of making bitcoin "more usable in everyday life", though, since to have a block time low enough for point of sale transactions (i.e. a few seconds at most), you end up with frequent stale blocks and chain re-orgs, necessitating that you would have to wait for many more confirmations anyway.

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[hZti]

With bitcoin a bigger block size would lower confirmation time and therefore make it more usable in everyday live.

No, it wouldn't. It would simply reduce the fee you need to pay to secure entry to the next block at times when the mempool is full, but it would make absolutely zero difference to the average block time and therefore the expected time for that next block to be mined.

If you want to reduce the confirmation time then you need to change consensus to aim for a lower difficulty. This doesn't solve the problem of making bitcoin "more usable in everyday life", though, since to have a block time low enough for point of sale transactions (i.e. a few seconds at most), you end up with frequent stale blocks and chain re-orgs, necessitating that you would have to wait for many more confirmations anyway.

You are right with what you say but I just meant that the average confirmation time would be quicker since many people just pay 1-2 sats/vByte and this transactions will also then get processed pretty quickly. Still it always depends of course on how crowded the network is and that at the moment is not a problem but could be one in the future. It was also planned to upgrade the block size by satoshi but since he disappeared it never happened.

[stwenhao]

It was also planned to upgrade the block size by satoshi but since he disappeared it never happened.

The networks need to have separate fates.  BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices.

I think in that last sentence, Satoshi correctly predicted that the max block size may never be increased. And I think the Bitcoin community will go that route, and if they will ever increase something, then it will be the max witness size, not the max block size. Also, you can see that the max witness size is just a parameter you can change in your node, everything is prepared for changing that, little tweaks here and there will do the trick, if the community will ever decide to do that.

[o_e_l_e_o]

You are right with what you say but I just meant that the average confirmation time would be quicker since many people just pay 1-2 sats/vByte and this transactions will also then get processed pretty quickly.

Sounds like you just want every transaction in the mempool to be confirmed in the next block, regardless of how many there are or what fees they pay. There are already various forks of bitcoin which do this if this is what you are looking for, although be prepared for your money to be worthless since they all constantly devalue against bitcoin since nobody actually uses them.

It was also planned to upgrade the block size by satoshi but since he disappeared it never happened.

It did happen. The limit on the block size was increased from 1 megabyte to 4 million weight units. This gives a theoretical maximum size of 4 megabytes, although the largest actual block we've had so far, block 682,482, was 2.4 megabytes.

[hZti]

You are right with what you say but I just meant that the average confirmation time would be quicker since many people just pay 1-2 sats/vByte and this transactions will also then get processed pretty quickly.

Sounds like you just want every transaction in the mempool to be confirmed in the next block, regardless of how many there are or what fees they pay. There are already various forks of bitcoin which do this if this is what you are looking for, although be prepared for your money to be worthless since they all constantly devalue against bitcoin since nobody actually uses them.

Yes of course the value goes down since nobody needs the 5th fork of bitcoin that has nothing else than a little bigger block size, but thats not the point. If you for example don't like the Bitcoin logo you could also create a fork with a better logo and nobody would use it. Still it would not mean that people are not satisfied with your new logo.

It was also planned to upgrade the block size by satoshi but since he disappeared it never happened.

It did happen. The limit on the block size was increased from 1 megabyte to 4 million weight units. This gives a theoretical maximum size of 4 megabytes, although the largest actual block we've had so far, block 682,482, was 2.4 megabytes.

Yes but if I remember correctly it was planned by satoshi to monitor the amount of transactions and then adjust the block size if it seems the mempool is to crowded. Not as a one time thing but maybe every few month or years. But I will research his posts to this.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Yes but if I remember correctly it was planned by satoshi to monitor the amount of transactions and then adjust the block size if it seems the mempool is to crowded. Not as a one time thing but maybe every few month or years. But I will research his posts to this.

But the mempool isn't too crowded. Yes, there are times when it fills up, but even then "high priority" fees only go up to a few dozen sats/vbyte which is hardly unreasonable, and it rapidly clears out again.

Here is a visual representation of the mempool over the last year: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),1y,weight.

The vast majority of the time the mempool is not overly full, and even a fee of 1 sat/vbyte will confirm within a couple of blocks. If we reach the stage where the mempool permanently has a large backlog of transactions, and nothing below 50 sats/vbyte ever confirms before being dropped, then sure, there might be an argument for further increasing the block size. But at the moment that is far from the case.

[hZti]

There are people that pay more than 500 USD worth of bitcoin just to get their transaction confirmed in a reasonable time if the network is crowded. How can you be a professional payment network if you have to delay your shopping or payment because in a few days the fee could 100 times lower.. but that’s already very far away from the topic.

[pooya87]

There are people that pay more than 500 USD worth of bitcoin just to get their transaction confirmed in a reasonable time if the network is crowded.

Anybody paying this much for a transaction fee either has no idea how bitcoin works and is grossly overpaying or has such a massive transaction that requires that much fee to be included in a block. $500 total fee with bitcoin @$30k is about 0.016BTC, assuming the tx size was 200 bytes that makes it a 8000 sat/byte fee. Never in entire bitcoin's history has fee gone up that much!

Here is an example of a massive transaction paying $480 fee for 270 kb (ie 1000 times bigger than regular transactions). The fee rate here is 11 sat/vbyte
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/4ab61b2aa6aa16b00a4e3bed62ce0c476b230e3b99198833720e2ad54d697a69

[o_e_l_e_o]

There are people that pay more than 500 USD worth of bitcoin just to get their transaction confirmed in a reasonable time if the network is crowded.

Then that is the fault of those people, not bitcoin, as pooya has explained above. I've used bitcoin for years and probably around 95% of my transactions pay 1 sat/vbyte in fees. Increasing the block size doesn't stop people paying ridiculous fees if they don't know what they are doing. The solution to that is either education or wallet software for newbies which enforces a hard upper limit on how high of a fee you can pay.

Also worth noting that many of the transactions in the mempool which pay far higher fees than necessary are exchanges or other centralized services which have a much lower incentive to pay low fees since their customers cover their costs, such as Binance charging an absolutely outrageous 50,000 sats per withdrawal, which should actually cost a few hundred sats at most.

How can you be a professional payment network if you have to delay your shopping or payment because in a few days the fee could 100 times lower.. but that’s already very far away from the topic.

Again, no block size or block time is sufficient for point of sale transactions. The solution to this is either zero confirmation non-RBF transactions for values the merchant is willing to accept, or the Lightning network. If you are paying for something online or making a large purchase like a car or a house, then whether you confirm in 10 minutes or a few hours is irrelevant.

[garlonicon]

The solution to that is either education or wallet software for newbies which enforces a hard upper limit on how high of a fee you can pay.

We have some upper limits in Bitcoin Core, you can mine 50 regtest BTC and test that. Putting for example 49 coins as a fee would be rejected by default, when the size of the transaction will be few hundred bytes or something like that.

[o_e_l_e_o]

The solution to that is either education or wallet software for newbies which enforces a hard upper limit on how high of a fee you can pay.

We have some upper limits in Bitcoin Core, you can mine 50 regtest BTC and test that. Putting for example 49 coins as a fee would be rejected by default, when the size of the transaction will be few hundred bytes or something like that.

The default limits for Bitcoin Core are here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/8be652e43964329c1f2dadd676916b53e5c40974/src/wallet/wallet.h#L106-L109

Essentially, you will return an error if you try to set a fee above either 0.1 BTC in total, or 0.01 BTC per kilobyte (which is 1000 sats/byte). Worth pointing out that these are simply local protocols for the Bitcoin Core wallet and are not consensus rules. High fee transactions are still perfectly valid and standard and will be relayed through the network just fine.

These are obviously absurdly high fees though. For newbies that don't know what they are doing and are paying $500 fees as suggested above, then they need to be shown a warning at much lower levels than this.

[LoyceV]

Also worth noting that many of the transactions in the mempool which pay far higher fees than necessary are exchanges or other centralized services which have a much lower incentive to pay low fees since their customers cover their costs, such as Binance charging an absolutely outrageous 50,000 sats per withdrawal, which should actually cost a few hundred sats at most.

It's now "only" 20,000 sats, while they pay 1 sat/byte and even use unconfirmed parents after which one of their users paid 10 LTC to accelerate it.
Just one of many reasons why I don't like the scam exchange.

I've used bitcoin for years and probably around 95% of my transactions pay 1 sat/vbyte in fees.

Me too, but the one transaction I made around 800 sat/byte (in 2017) seriously increased my average fee per transaction.

[death_wish]

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You are right with what you say but I just meant that the average confirmation time would be quicker since many people just pay 1-2 sats/vByte and this transactions will also then get processed pretty quickly. Still it always depends of course on how crowded the network is and that at the moment is not a problem but could be one in the future.

The average is still 10 minutes or higher though.

The mean blocktime is 10 minutes.  In the exponential distribution, the mean is meaningless to everyday life.  Median blocktime is about 7 minutes; lowest quartile is <= ~3 minutes; upper quartile is >= ~13 minutes.  IMO, it means much more to everyday usage that half of blocks are much faster than 10 minutes (but the average is dragged up to 10 minutes by the long exponential tail).

Running a bitcoin node is intensive.

So why do you want to remove the ability for people to run a pruned node if they cannot manage to run a full node?

He explicitly wants to force others to pay a cost that he explicitly refuses to pay.  I was correct when I accused him of being “actively malicious”.

The funny part is, his understanding of Bitcoin is so poor that he doesn’t even know what node pruning does and does not do.  He believes that node pruning affects his view of block explorers, and make his own transactions unavailable.  Say what!?  Node pruning is strictly opt-in, and it only affects local data availability for those who choose to prune their own nodes.

Last week, I began writing a post to split this misunderstanding off to Beginners & Help, where it properly belongs and where the discussion may help others.  (Interrupted by personal circumstances 13 June; no time for it now.)

no one made the ethereum devs and node operators angry and look what happened to their fee situation

Because they want that. They chose high fees by choosing Turing completeness and executing complicated contracts on-chain. They chose large scripts, instead of making things simple, and adding new single opcodes as needed. I think it is better to introduce OP_DO_SOMETHING as a new opcode, than to force developers to write "2 2 OP_ADD 4 OP_EQUAL OP_IF ...". There is no reason to include long programs on-chain. There is no reason to execute everything on-chain, that makes it costly, when you want to write a simple game, and each move is executed on-chain, as a contract. They made it more complicated than needed, and they pay for that in fees, just because that's how they constructed their consensus.

I disagree.  I think that they suffered some application of the Law of Intended Consequences, and then realized how profitable it is to rip everyone off for gas.

There exist Ethereum competitors who attain Turing completeness at much lower cost; and I think that it could be done even better!

Nowadays, most gas is burned.  That reduces the supply of ETH.  After they started the gas-burning thing, something like $5 billion worth of ETH was burned in the latter part of 2021.  How does this work in practice?  Speaking from experience:  I myself wound up paying about $2,000 for gas with ETH at $3.8k–$4k, just because I needed to make a relatively small number of contract invocations; thus, I had to bid up ETH at high prices to burn most of what I bought, with the rest going to miners.  (I currently hold no ETH but dust.)

I think they like that situation just fine.

[larry_vw_1955]

There are already various forks of bitcoin which do this if this is what you are looking for, although be prepared for your money to be worthless since they all constantly devalue against bitcoin since nobody actually uses them.

Well to be fair, bitcoin itself isn't tied to anything of value. So it really has no value other than perceived value - the value people attribute to it in their own head. That is one of its weaknesses. Creating bitcoin and then trying to layer value on top of it by hooking it up with stablecoins is not an ideal solution. As we can see, stablecoins have their own issues. One of them being they are not trustless. So the value bitcoin has can't be considered trustless if bitcoin is ever based on one.

Yes of course the value goes down since nobody needs the 5th fork of bitcoin that has nothing else than a little bigger block size, but thats not the point. If you for example don't like the Bitcoin logo you could also create a fork with a better logo and nobody would use it. Still it would not mean that people are not satisfied with your new logo.

That's a minor issue with bitcoin is that someone can make a duplicate copy of it and the only difference between their copy and the real bitcoin is the popularity of one of them.

[death_wish]

Well to be fair, bitcoin itself isn't tied to anything of value. So it really has no value other than perceived value - the value people attribute to it in their own head. That is one of its weaknesses.

That’s a common myth.  Bitcoin’s price is not directly caused by subjective perceptions:  It is a result of the market, based on supply and demand.  Perceptions are one factor in the “demand” side of that.  There are other factors to demand; and perceptions do not alter supply.

Ultimately, Bitcoin’s fundamental value derives from its facilitation of productive economic activity, which would be costlier, infeasible, or impossible without Bitcoin.  I know that I have done productive non-Bitcoin, non-market business with Bitcoin, which I could not have done without Bitcoin.  That’s not extraordinary:  It is being an ordinary Bitcoiner who uses Bitcoin as money, rather than a purely speculative buyer who just wants “number go up”.  The more such people they are, the higher the organic, non-speculative demand for BTC.

This discussion of economics is far off-topic for the development forum.  I feel obliged to answer something that is more usually nocoiner FUD or newbie confusion.  If you have further questions about this, I refer you to Bitcoin Discussion or Economics.

Yes of course the value goes down since nobody needs the 5th fork of bitcoin that has nothing else than a little bigger block size, but thats not the point. If you for example don't like the Bitcoin logo you could also create a fork with a better logo and nobody would use it. Still it would not mean that people are not satisfied with your new logo.

That's a minor issue with bitcoin is that someone can make a duplicate copy of it and the only difference between their copy and the real bitcoin is the popularity of one of them.

You talk like a Bcasher with Bitcoin Envy.  If you suppose that the only difference is popularity, your gross ignorance is showing (again).

Bitcoin forks often retain design flaws that Bitcoin has fixed, such as the transaction malleability fixed by Segwit.  (Part of my wrath at Bcashers is anger about how by opposing and FUDding Segwit, they sought to preserve a security flaw.)  Many of them are ill-maintained.  None of them has Bitcoin’s network security against double-spends (and indeed, some of them have been 51%-attacked).  This list of differences could be much continued; but I think most people with the knowledge level to post in the development forum are already very well aware of the diffrences.

[o_e_l_e_o]

IMO, it means much more to everyday usage that half of blocks are much faster than 10 minutes (but the average is dragged up to 10 minutes by the long exponential tail).

To be pedantic: 63.2% of blocks are faster than 10 minutes.

Still, the point still stands that increasing block size does nothing to reduce block time or make bitcoin more suitable as a point of sale currency. For this, you need second layer solutions.

Creating bitcoin and then trying to layer value on top of it by hooking it up with stablecoins is not an ideal solution.

That is a problem for people who are using stablecoins, and not for bitcoin. Bitcoin had value long before stablecoins existed. Bitcoin will have value long after the last stablecoin has imploded, as seems to be the trend. I have never once owned a single cent of a stablecoin or ever so much as thought about the value of my bitcoin in terms of stablecoins. If your tie your bitcoin in to some stablecoin and that stablecoin collapses, then that's a problem for you, but bitcoin will continue on unchanged.

That's a minor issue with bitcoin is that someone can make a duplicate copy of it and the only difference between their copy and the real bitcoin is the popularity of one of them.

If you believe that to be the case, then why haven't heavily advertised forks which are bankrolled by centralized parties taken the top spot? There is much more bitcoin has over useless forks than its popularity.

[death_wish]

IMO, it means much more to everyday usage that half of blocks are much faster than 10 minutes (but the average is dragged up to 10 minutes by the long exponential tail).

To be pedantic: 63.2% of blocks are faster than 10 minutes.

Pedantry is good.  I spoke imprecisely.  I was thinking of the median.  Statistically, exactly 50% of blocks arrive within about 6:56 m:s or less; that is >= 30.7% faster than 10 minutes, “much faster” in my book.

Although this is tangential to the context in which it was raised, I miss no opportunity to help address a common error.  Most Bitcoiners get this wrong—even most regulars in Development & Technology.  Most blocks take nowhere near 10 minutes to arrive; the average of the exponential distribution is almost meaningless to everyday-life usage questions of “how long will this take?”, and the exponential distribution generally defies human intuition.

People also tend not to understand that in a memoryless system, the statistically expected arrival time starts “right now”—whenever “now” is.  Without checking when the last block occurred, I know that at the moment I make this post, the next block has a 25% chance of arriving within about 2:53 from now, a 50% chance of arriving within 6:56 from now, a 75% chance of arriving within 13:52 from now, and a 25% chance of arriving >= 13:52 from now.  The arrival time of the last block is irrelevant.

Still, the point still stands that increasing block size does nothing to reduce block time or make bitcoin more suitable as a point of sale currency. For this, you need second layer solutions.

Increasing the block size to reduce confirmation time would be like purposely becoming obese to become a better marathon runner.  Say what?  It won’t work, and it’s unhealthy.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Pedantry is good.  I spoke imprecisely.  I was thinking of the median.  Statistically, exactly 50% of blocks arrive within about 6:56 m:s or less; that is >= 30.7% faster than 10 minutes, “much faster” in my book.

Which is 0.693 of 10 minutes, with 0.693 of course being the natural logarithm of 2. Isn't math fun!

Most Bitcoiners get this wrong—even most regulars in Development & Technology.

I have saved a rough draft of a post I've been meaning to polish up and post for a while regarding Poisson processes, because as you say, they are generally poorly understood even by more experienced users. It was inspired by this post and the discussion which followed: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5368838.msg58369934#msg58369934

Most blocks take nowhere near 10 minutes to arrive; the average of the exponential distribution is almost meaningless to everyday-life usage questions of “how long will this take?”, and the exponential distribution generally defies human intuition.

This is important, as we seen not infrequently people proposing to reduce the block time to 1 minute (or something similar) in an effort to allow bitcoin to be used for point of sale transactions, not realizing that even with such a short average block time a not insignificant number of blocks will still take far too long to be found to make point of sale transactions reliably quick (without even mentioning the other problems which accompany a reduced block time, such as increased stale blocks and chain re-orgs).