[POLL] Is bigger block capacity still a taboo?

[DooMAD]

The biggest hurdle remains that those running non-mining nodes carry the burden of helping to secure the chain while receiving no economic reward.  They gain benefits like privacy and not relying upon trusting others.  But, financially, there's no recompense for the service they provide.  As such, they will only offer to carry a greater burden at a time of their choosing and not merely when others complain about it.

Make all the arguments about decentralisation, propagation and politics you want, but all those points largely fall by the wayside the moment you start asking others to do more than they're already doing, just so it might benefit you and give you lower tx fees.

When the majority of nodes are willing, that's when it'll happen.  

[1714240090]

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[1714240090]

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[BlackHatCoiner]

Sha-256 miners earn about 32,400,000 in rewards daily plus whatever the fees are.

Which, as we speak, are really high. Most recent block - 817080 - was mined with 193 sat/vb median fee (!), gathering a total of 2.1 BTC (!!!) from transaction fees alone.

And it's funny how these days many people bring up sidechains and lightning as potential solutions to bitcoin's scalability issue

Their reasoning goes as following: whether we rise the block size or not, there will still be scalability problem. Even if the block size limit was 1 GB, the spam attack would cost nearly zero, and there would probably still exist a fee market (much less intensive than now of course). People would really take advantage of the 144 gigabytes of space every day. You can verify that on BSV blockchain, where they have saved whole movies. Needless to say that with 1 GB of block space, one mining pool can take advantage of the time it takes to verify the block and kill off the competition.

This is an indication that we need more than just one layer.

[alani123]

What makes BCH and BSV shitcoins is a plethora of reasons other than just having bigger blocks. Mind you, bitcoin was very close to having double the block capacity it has now when SegWit got activated. It was called SegWit2x. And in the end even without the 2x part, bitcoin went from 1MB blocks to 4MB. So it BTC a shitcoin as well?
No! Because bitcoin has a community, some fragments of democracy (unlike the two aforementioned coins that are self centered projects), the best developers, the biggest and most active community.

Sure, but this topic is strictly about the block size. No?

Should I also mention the sad fact about BSV implementing censorship/coin confiscation features?

There you go:

https://twitter.com/BobSummerwill/status/1577714409618931713
https://github.com/bitcoin-sv/bitcoin-sv/releases/tag/v1.0.13

I don't understand the point then. If you agree that BCH and BSV are shitcoins for reasons other than the blockchsize increase, what makes you be against block size increases then?
If bitcoin increases its block capacity it wouldn't make it lose all that makes it good, right?

The biggest hurdle remains that those running non-mining nodes carry the burden of helping to secure the chain while receiving no economic reward.  They gain benefits like privacy and not relying upon trusting others.  But, financially, there's no recompense for the service they provide.  As such, they will only offer to carry a greater burden at a time of their choosing and not merely when others complain about it.

Make all the arguments about decentralisation, propagation and politics you want, but all those points largely fall by the wayside the moment you start asking others to do more than they're already doing, just so it might benefit you and give you lower tx fees.

When the majority of nodes are willing, that's when it'll happen.  

If we are to examine the specs of those running a bitcoin full node right now, how many would 100% be unable to sync with a block size increase? And what would cause it? If let's say the block size goes from 4 MB now to 8 MB, maybe a concern would be CPU power. But bitcoin core already works great with even the weaker CPUs. The only requirement listed in bitcoin.org is for the CPU to be above 1GHz. These days it's actually hard to find a CPU that old for sale.

The other requirement might be disk space. Well with even the maximum expansion of 4 MB per 10 minutes, the BTC blockchain can't grow more than 210240 MB a year (525600 minutes in a year / 10 minute block time * 4 MB block capacity). So a 2 fold increase could generate 400GB blockchain files in a year at MAXIMUM utilization. Honestly it's not that bad. Disk space is very cheap when we talk about these sizes. A 1 TB HDD costs 20$ new now.

And also one does not need to store the full historical record of transactions to host a trustless node. A node without the full blockchain stored can still produce trustless network information so long as it's connected to the network.

The biggest issue might be bandwidth. Currently bitcoin.org lists 15 GB/month as a requirement to run bitcoin core. Many parts of the world have slow internet but honestly 15 GB a month is nothing.
What connection speed translates to 15 GB a month. Let's see. 15 GB is 120000 Megabits. If you divide 120k to the seconds in a month, you get 0.04566 Mbits per second or 45.66 Kilobits. Speeds such low aren't even commercially available anymore. 2g and EDGE connections have been taken out of commision in most places for at least 3 years now and so has been ISDN/Dial up etc.. Anyone with signal or an internet connection to his residence should be able to run a bitcoin node reliably even if the bandwidth requirement was increased 10 fold.

And all that IF the blocksize increase is utilized fully (which is unlikely to happen imminently)


tl;dr my calculations show that even with a substantial block size increase at full utilization most hosting a bitcoin node won't need to upgrade their infastracture. And those that will probably will still be able to host a node by spending an extra 50$ maximum once.

[franky1]

The biggest hurdle remains that those running non-mining nodes carry the burden of helping to secure the chain while receiving no economic reward.  They gain benefits like privacy and not relying upon trusting others.  But, financially, there's no recompense for the service they provide.  As such, they will only offer to carry a greater burden at a time of their choosing and not merely when others complain about it.

Make all the arguments about decentralisation, propagation and politics you want, but all those points largely fall by the wayside the moment you start asking others to do more than they're already doing, just so it might benefit you and give you lower tx fees.

When the majority of nodes are willing, that's when it'll happen.  

you love fee's being $4-$20
you dont want fee's being $0.10-$0.50

but have you done the math
people that run a node 24-7 also are people that use bitcoin to transact regularly, so want it uptodated(synced) and ready to use..
now imagine a pc costing $400 that can store all historic data and the next 10 years.. (4tb hard drive is not even $100)
so how much is that computer again, yep $400 as said for 10 years utility (with alot of space left over for normal computer tasks)

now lets imagine tx's fees cost for 10 years of 1 tx a day
$0.10 = $365, ok reasonable it costs less to use bitcoin than it does to secure it
$0.50 = $1,825 hmm. well thats $185 a year. but still more then the PC price so more to use than to secure
$4.00 = $14600 hmm. well thats $1,480 a year. now thats alot to use it especially compared to securing it
$20.00= $73,000 .ugh.. do i even need to say it. $7.3k a year just to use it but only $40 a year to secure it

now if you want to cry that node users need to cover their $40 a year node costs.. how come you are happy to see tx fee's costing $7.3k for daily use..
.. oh wait you dont want people to use bitcoin daily..
.. but now the question becomes if people are only doing sessions 2 times a year to have $40 fee cost.. they are not going to run a node all year . they will just run it for a week per year to sync, transact shut down

making bitcoin harder to TRANSACT daily will be the reason normal users dont use full nodes.. it wont be due to hardware costs
all that will be left is commercial services running nodes and offering utxo data to lite wallets. and you love that idea. you love middle men services charging fee's and giving commissions

[alani123]

And it's funny how these days many people bring up sidechains and lightning as potential solutions to bitcoin's scalability issue

Their reasoning goes as following: whether we rise the block size or not, there will still be scalability problem. Even if the block size limit was 1 GB, the spam attack would cost nearly zero, and there would probably still exist a fee market (much less intensive than now of course). People would really take advantage of the 144 gigabytes of space every day. You can verify that on BSV blockchain, where they have saved whole movies. Needless to say that with 1 GB of block space, one mining pool can take advantage of the time it takes to verify the block and kill off the competition.

This is an indication that we need more than just one layer.

I think that the issue of anti-spam measures kind of solves itself when we have a deflationary and scarce coin like bitcoin.
The minimum on-chain unit is 1 satoshi, which with current prices is at 0.0003604 USD. Ste standard segwit transaction is 140 vBytes according to mempool.space. So even at fees of 1 satoshi per vByte one would have to pay at least 5 dollar cents per btc transaction. Of course, a block size increase doesn't have to completely decimate the fee market, which is a useful feature. A block-size increase could be dynamic and adjustable. There were such solutions presented even circa 2015 with the bitcoin XT and bitcoin classic clients. Under these measures, a spam attack could in par to how expensive it is now.

[cryptosize]

I don't understand the point then. If you agree that BCH and BSV are shitcoins for reasons other than the blockchsize increase, what makes you be against block size increases then?
If bitcoin increases its block capacity it wouldn't make it lose all that makes it good, right?

It's not that simple, it's more complicated.

Propagation time would increase, orphan blocks would increase, centralization would increase.

And what about people storing 4K pedo pr0n inside the blockchain? Why make it so easy?

Who the hell would wanna run a node that stores pedo pr0n? Unless you wanna destroy the BTC blockchain (to promote CBDC or whatever), it makes zero sense.

[alani123]

I don't understand the point then. If you agree that BCH and BSV are shitcoins for reasons other than the blockchsize increase, what makes you be against block size increases then?
If bitcoin increases its block capacity it wouldn't make it lose all that makes it good, right?

It's not that simple, it's more complicated.

Propagation time would increase, orphan blocks would increase, centralization would increase.

And what about people storing 4K pedo pr0n inside the blockchain? Why make it so easy?

Who the hell would wanna run a node that stores pedo pr0n? Unless you wanna destroy the BTC blockchain (to promote CBDC or whatever), it makes zero sense.

From a theoretical standpoint, anyone can post whatever imagery in the Blockchain even now, no matter how expensive. Ordinals tech which utilizes Taproot along with SegWit discount make that even easier to happen on bitcoins chain.

As of orphan blocks, I think miners will be able to handle having access to decent latency internet... Even most miners connect to pools these days and let them handle block propagation so this affects very few parties which are big enough to work on it I think. They were complaining about going above 1MB blocks then but handled 4MB well...

Can anyone tell me if the data I see on Blockchain.info is true? Is it true that there hasn't been a single orphan block since 2017 or did they just stop counting?

[DooMAD]

you love fee's being $4-$20
you dont want fee's being $0.10-$0.50

What I love is how you literally can't post in a topic without proclaiming what I supposedly do or don't want.  Get it through your sociopath skull, what I want or don't want is wholly immaterial.  I'm not the network.  It's what all the other participants want which matters.  Obsess over me all you like, as you appear to be my number one fangirl.  But try to understand, in the grand scheme of things, I don't matter in the slightest.

It's as though you don't grasp the fact that other people exist and have thoughts and opinions of their own.  There always has to be some boogeyman with you.  Some nefarious characters pulling the strings.  And only franky1 can save us all from the horrors.  You're fucking insane.

[pooya87]

Your poll can not be answered because it is missing the important part about "time". In other words it is unclear when you ask "What are your thoughts on increasing bitcoin's block capacity?" when do you mean?
For example if it is a hard fork to increase block size in the future when the need arises, then my answer is a big fat YES. We definitely need to increase the on-chain capacity at some point but the important part is the "at some point" part.

Right now we do not need a block capacity increase. The reason is pretty simple: the adoption hasn't grown enough for the current block capacity to not-be enough for the legitimate usage. Since I have to dot all the eyes and cross all the tees: Legitimate use is anything that is not a spam attack, meaning where people use bitcoin to transfer money or in other words when Bitcoin is the "peer to peer digital cash system" that it was intended to.
When it is used as "cloud storage" it is considered abuse and the transactions are spam. Meaning right now that the congestion is caused by abusing the protocol to perform an attack on bitcoin, this is not natural and the exploit should be fixed instead of increasing the capacity to let bigger spam in.

P.S. I don't think increasing block capacity has ever been a "taboo" as some like to exaggerate it. HOW it is increased has been the source of a lot of disagreement.

[stompix]

I'll start by dedicating this thread to stompix (honestly, no hate, debate with him is enjoyable even though we sometimes disagree) who dared me to make this thread.

Well, congratulations, you took the bait challenge!
Unlike in my topic which I timed to the situation, I did make a big mistake with this challenge, and I realized it too late, my bad
You asked this question when fees are high, so it's pretty obvious the army of pitchforks will not dare to come in the open to stone you to death for proposing something only Roger Ver would do /s
Yup messed up this whole opportunity of having a bloody blockwar, that's on me!

As for me, I was just this week shown how it's physically impossible to have blocks larger than 4MB because only nodes that own a Titan computer and their own private global fiber optic cables would be able to cope with larger blocks!

Well well well... This is an age old arguement.

As I see Franky going on a rampage here, normal people do understand that there was a truckload of sarcasm in that comparison, right? Right?!!

you love fee's being $4-$20
you dont want fee's being $0.10-$0.50

but have you done the math
people that run a node 24-7 also are people that use bitcoin to transact regularly, so want it uptodated(synced) and ready to use..
now imagine a pc costing $400 that can store all historic data and the next 10 years.. (4tb hard drive is not even $100)
so how much is that computer again, yep $400 as said for 10 years utility (with alot of space left over for normal computer tasks)

now lets imagine tx's fees cost for 10 years of 1 tx a day
$0.10 = $365, ok reasonable it costs less to use bitcoin than it does to secure it
$0.50 = $1,825 hmm. well thats $185 a year. but still more then the PC price so more to use than to secure
$4.00 = $14600 hmm. well thats $1,480 a year. now thats alot to use it especially compared to securing it
$20.00= $73,000 .ugh.. do i even need to say it. $7.3k a year just to use it but only $40 a year to secure it

now if you want to cry that node users need to cover their $40 a year node costs.. how come you are happy to see tx fee's costing $7.3k for daily use..

And now I think I will have to make a trip to the emergency room since obviously by the end of the day I will have to butcher the mouse and chop the hand I've used to give franky merit for this..

It's not that simple, it's more complicated.
Propagation time would increase, orphan blocks would increase, centralization would increase.

ETH was pushing over 1 MB blocks every 30 seconds and if we look at the times it was POW the hashrate and the nodes were far more decentralized than BTC, so no, the whole thing holds no water. Dogecoin does so over 60 seconds, only for BTC would those pose problems, because...no reason!
If 1MB was small enough to achieve decentralization in 2009 I can hardly see why an increase of an order of magnitude would be hard now.

[Wind_FURY]

Circa 2014 the block size wars took bitcoin by storm.
Eventually after a lot of drama that has been well documented elsewhere (I made my own attempt documenting a time line of the blocksize wars, its outcomes and conclusions here).

But I'm starting this poll in hopes of getting the community's opinion. So for this post I'll not go through my opinion in the OP.

Please feel free to answer the question in the poll and even better if you can also explain your answer.

Back in 2015, and after the adoption of a compromise in the form of SegWit, [/b]the topic of the block capacity was very taboo[/b].

It wasn't "taboo", ser. It was because there were some people in the community, like Roger Ver, who were trying to turn it into a philosophical debate, and there were developers, like Mike Hearn, who were spreading FUD and disinformation, when it was merely a technical debate.

Well, we're in 2023 now, and for different reasons congestion is still an issue. Increasing the capacity of bitcoin blocks could potentially be a solution to the issues of high fees and congestion.

So I think it's worth exploring what people think about this issue. Please share your thoughts below.

That's true, but DYOR. Change one parameter on-chain, and it will definitely affect other parameters that could be used as attack vectors against the network.

[HmmMAA]

Since I have to dot all the eyes and cross all the tees: Legitimate use is anything that is not a spam attack, meaning where people use bitcoin to transfer money or in other words when Bitcoin is the "peer to peer digital cash system" that it was intended to.

If the sole purpose of bitcoin was just to transfer money what's the role of OP_pushdata ? And especially OP_pushdata4 ?
Seems that the creator had a different view than yours .

[BlackHatCoiner]

The reason is pretty simple: the adoption hasn't grown enough for the current block capacity to not-be enough for the legitimate usage.

And how do you measure that? Even if we were to follow that route, and have a block size limit that corresponds to the "legitimate usage", how do we begin? In my opinion, the adoption has grown a lot since the last time the Bitcoin community had had this debate.

ETH was pushing over 1 MB blocks every 30 seconds and if we look at the times it was POW the hashrate and the nodes were far more decentralized than BTC, so no, the whole thing holds no water. Dogecoin does so over 60 seconds, only for BTC would those pose problems, because...no reason!

When Ethereum supported Proof-of-Work, it had so called "uncle blocks" (the respective stale blocks in Bitcoin), but that came with additional economic complexity (I wouldn't suggest comparing Bitcoin with Ethereum as they are different in almost everything). As for Dogecoin, lol. If you believe anyone takes this seriously, then I don't know what to say.

[stompix]

As for Dogecoin, lol. If you believe anyone takes this seriously, then I don't know what to say.

Then you should start saying that to everyone on this board who suggests using dogecoin instead of Bitcoin for small purchases, and there is a ton of them trust me, you'll be done by the time the mempool is empty. And if you don't believe it:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-doge.html#6m
This happens every single time Bitcoin fees spike, thousands move to doge!
Is LTC also laughable, or does it simply work ?

Common this is so 640k RAM will be enough for everyone is getting old!
People torrent TB of data every day on their home computers and we're scared of 1TB of storage over a year for a thing that is supposed to threaten a trillion fiat-based economy. Seriously? Latency, data transfer, FML, you have tens of thousands of ....models.....live streaming in 4k but somehow it's magically impossible to push 10MB in 10 fucking minutes to every single hole in this world.
But Bitcoin is going to replace banks while serving 600k customers a day!  

And furthermore, when some other coins manage to do the impossible, it's laughable! We're going to colonize Mars in 2240 and while beaming in one split second an entire cargo from planet to planet some will still say more than 4MB in 10 minutes it's technically impossible!

When Ethereum supported Proof-of-Work, it had so called "uncle blocks" (the respective stale blocks in Bitcoin), but that came with additional economic complexity (I wouldn't suggest comparing Bitcoin with Ethereum as they are different in almost everything).

Weird..
Block 817,119 was mined at 04:44:31
817,118 at 04:43:10,
817,117 at 04:42:19
3 blocks in 2 minutes, how was that possible if 1MB blocks over 60 seconds is such a danger?

Oh, maybe a one in a year event, let's go just 30 blocks further over last night:
817,089   2023-11-16 23:49:47
817,088   2023-11-16 23:47:59
817,087   2023-11-16 23:47:34

Did I miss the news on the blockchain breaking down and bitcoin becoming unusable last night when those 3 blocks in under 90 seconds happened?

We constantly mine blocks under 60 seconds from each other for years by the thousands and there has been no problem whatsoever, how could one even think this would be a threat?

[vapourminer]

When Ethereum supported Proof-of-Work, it had so called "uncle blocks" (the respective stale blocks in Bitcoin), but that came with additional economic complexity.

yeah stales happened so often that you could get rewarded some amount of eth for submitting stale blocks and i cant see bitcoin doing that.

[franky1]

P.S. I don't think increasing block capacity has ever been a "taboo" as some like to exaggerate it. HOW it is increased has been the source of a lot of disagreement.

the great thing about the blockchain. is that there is piles of data to accumulate statistics from

over X period
XX%+ of blocks are XX%+ filled
blocks total fees are >X sats per byte  (block total fees / block total byte)
transaction count vs sat/byte fee

heck you can even formulate if blocks are prefering "batch" vs "individual"
EG individuals usually only do a couple outputs.. (destination+change) so if transactions have too many outputs it shows users are prefering to batch up transactions or use centralised services that batch

..
it does not have to be a political decision done by devs. it can be a programmed trigger based on the data

[franky1]

Weird..
Block 817,119 was mined at 04:44:31
817,118 at 04:43:10,
817,117 at 04:42:19
3 blocks in 2 minutes, how was that possible if 1MB blocks over 60 seconds is such a danger?

Oh, maybe a one in a year event, let's go just 30 blocks further over last night:
817,089   2023-11-16 23:49:47
817,088   2023-11-16 23:47:59
817,087   2023-11-16 23:47:34

Did I miss the news on the blockchain breaking down and bitcoin becoming unusable last night when those 3 blocks in under 90 seconds happened?

We constantly mine blocks under 60 seconds from each other for years by the thousands and there has been no problem whatsoever, how could one even think this would be a threat?

also it didnt break the tor nodes that relay/propagate at very slow internet speeds.. so the "speed" drama risk is also a myth,

its also worth noting that CORE stop supporting windows versions when windows stop supporting their old versions
windows 7 bbecame unsupported in 2020 so windows 8 is min standard core devs find viable for bitcoin now
windows 8 was first released in 2012. and 3TB hard drives in 2012 were only $150 back then.
thus the cost myth of running a ~$400 pc from 2012 being unable to handle bitcoin for next 10 years is a myth

[BlackHatCoiner]

Then you should start saying that to everyone on this board who suggests using dogecoin instead of Bitcoin for small purchases

Can you point me to who does that? You know, who actually installs a Dogecoin full node and lets it sync. Because, you know. Cryptocurrency is about eliminating the third party, and last time I used Dogecoin, it was more like peer-to-CEX-to-peer cash.

And furthermore, when some other coins manage to do the impossible, it's laughable!

It is laughable to pretend that the same levels of security and decentralization exist in BSV, Solana, etc. If other coins "manage to do the impossible", how come they are still shitcoins? Has it ever crossed your mind that there is much less activity in both Dogecoin and Litecoin? Have you considered the fact that these are pretty much prone to the same problem? It's just that only 1% of the userbase uses them to transact.

And for once more, the problem isn't the storage requirement for running a full node. It's part of the problem. The greatest problem is the time that it'll take to verify the entire chain, there will be great concern in breaking backwards compatibility, you make spamming costing less, and in the end, you don't solve the problem. You're just delaying it.

[apogio]

Has it ever crossed your mind that there is much less activity in both Dogecoin and Litecoin? Have you considered the fact that these are pretty much prone to the same problem?

That's exactly the thought I have for Monero.

I mean, the only chain I like apart from Bitcoin is Monero. I own some XMR too. I know that monero has a dynamic block size, depending on the congestion, which I also think is not the best idea.

But if you  look into Monero's average block size against Bitcoin's average block size, you will see Monero's is lower. Why? Bexause the traffic / activity in Monero is much smaller than the traffic in Bitcoin's blockchain.

[cryptosize]

As for Dogecoin, lol. If you believe anyone takes this seriously, then I don't know what to say.

Then you should start saying that to everyone on this board who suggests using dogecoin instead of Bitcoin for small purchases, and there is a ton of them trust me, you'll be done by the time the mempool is empty. And if you don't believe it:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-doge.html#6m
This happens every single time Bitcoin fees spike, thousands move to doge!
Is LTC also laughable, or does it simply work ?

Common this is so 640k RAM will be enough for everyone is getting old!
People torrent TB of data every day on their home computers and we're scared of 1TB of storage over a year for a thing that is supposed to threaten a trillion fiat-based economy. Seriously? Latency, data transfer, FML, you have tens of thousands of ....models.....live streaming in 4k but somehow it's magically impossible to push 10MB in 10 fucking minutes to every single hole in this world.
But Bitcoin is going to replace banks while serving 600k customers a day!  

And furthermore, when some other coins manage to do the impossible, it's laughable! We're going to colonize Mars in 2240 and while beaming in one split second an entire cargo from planet to planet some will still say more than 4MB in 10 minutes it's technically impossible!

When Ethereum supported Proof-of-Work, it had so called "uncle blocks" (the respective stale blocks in Bitcoin), but that came with additional economic complexity (I wouldn't suggest comparing Bitcoin with Ethereum as they are different in almost everything).

Weird..
Block 817,119 was mined at 04:44:31
817,118 at 04:43:10,
817,117 at 04:42:19
3 blocks in 2 minutes, how was that possible if 1MB blocks over 60 seconds is such a danger?

Oh, maybe a one in a year event, let's go just 30 blocks further over last night:
817,089   2023-11-16 23:49:47
817,088   2023-11-16 23:47:59
817,087   2023-11-16 23:47:34

Did I miss the news on the blockchain breaking down and bitcoin becoming unusable last night when those 3 blocks in under 90 seconds happened?

We constantly mine blocks under 60 seconds from each other for years by the thousands and there has been no problem whatsoever, how could one even think this would be a threat?

What's your opinion about the blockchain trilemma? Is it BS?