[POLL] Is bigger block capacity still a taboo?

[DooMAD]

The question effectively becomes:  "What does it take to get everyone on the same page?"  

For the record (and before obnoxiousgasbag1 tries to put more words in my mouth), I'm not fully opposed to throughput increases.  I'd just rather any proposals are appropriately timed, measured, reasoned and that all the consequences are fully considered.

but you REKT proposals by you scripting to your flock silly exagerations.. not real technical reasons

For what must be the dozenth time, if you can't present a compelling argument, the failure is yours.  Weak proposals die.  Poorly considered proposals die.  Irrational and dangerous proposals die.  Don't offer proposals like that if you want a different outcome.  

Every time you cry "REKT" because you didn't get what you want, you are admitting to the world that your idea simply wasn't good enough.  It's not my fault every half-baked idea you've ever had is ridiculously easy to tear down.  Take some ownership for your myriad failures and stop blaming others.

Better yet, take a back seat and let the grown-ups talk.  In case you weren't aware, people generally find you to be insufferable and overbearing.  I, for one, would be genuinely reluctant to be seen on the same side of an argument as you, simply because you're so utterly repellent.  It wouldn't surprise me if others felt the same. You're a hindrance to your own cause.  Literally the best thing you could do to achieve your goal is to keep your idiot mouth shut.

but you dont beleive in the PEOPLE. you dont like consensus, you beleive there should be no consent of the people, you love the "backward compatibility" that bypasses the requirement of a consensus vote. you hate anyone not core adoring/affiliated. you love only core having the decision and development power..

None of this gibberish is worth my time repudiating.  Mostly because I've already done it countless times before, but also because literally no other living creature on the face of this planet has levied such accusations against me.  These notions exist nowhere other than your deranged imagination.

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[cryptosize]

But to be honest, after thinking for a while, I think we have another problem besides block size and they are miners. Mining is becoming way centralized, pools are collecting all the transaction fees and people are willing to join pools that don't share transaction fees. These pools are one of the biggest pools who can flood mempool with their resources and gain more profit. They can flood it easily because they confirm the blocks and fees go back to their pockets but increased block size should make it a little bit hard for them to do.

Actually it's the opposite.

If 4GB blocks become the norm (because that's what BSV folks envision), then FTTH would become mandatory. ADSL is still the most common (baseline) connection worldwide, hence why 1MB block size makes sense as a "baseline".

Hell, I would argue that the few remaining, hyper-competitive pools would be concentrated into a single geographical spot (maybe USA?) and they wouldn't even use FTTH.

They would just use LAN/Ethernet connections (1 Gbps symmetric) to sync with each other! Kinda like a LAN party if you will. BTC would turn from a permissionless network to permissioned (some pools already demand KYC).

You really like this scenario? This is not very different compared to fiat/central banking (i.e. ECB TARGET2 ledger).

I really wonder if big block fanatics are sincere good guys/idealists or government trojan horses/feds trying to hijack BTC, even though they pretend to preach "global adoption".

I sincerely hope we won't have to find out...

[pooya87]

I believe some of you might start going deeper into the argument for bigger blocks that you might also start to think Roger Ver and Bitcoin Cash made the right decision, and you might also start debating for Satoshi's original vision.

You should already know that the problem with bcash is not even Ver, nor was it the fact that it increased the block size to whatever MB. The problem with bcash and the reason why it is considered a shitcoin is that it is a contentious hard fork. In other words it was the minority making a change in consensus rules without having the majority's support.

The question effectively becomes:  "What does it take to get everyone on the same page?" 

We've managed to make a lot of changes in the consensus rules through over a dozen forks and all of them could get "everyone" on board (95%+ and I believe once was 75% threshold).

The problem is toxic people who also spread misinformation. As long as they don't muddy the development process and the community, it is not as hard as you'd think to get everyone on the same page.
So I'd say a better question is "how do we get rid of toxicity?"

Even under the pressure of Ordinals, we can't find agreement within a tiny sample of network participants.

Same. We still haven't been able to get rid of those who continue using the term "token" when referring to Ordinals. That's the simplest and most basic thing! As long as we fail to do that, we fail to move to the next level.

The damage of spreading such misinformation will remain in the Bitcoin community for years too. Like with SegWit that even today there are people who say "SegWit removes signatures from transactions" all because of misinformation similar toxic people spread about it in 2017.

[digaran]

If 4GB blocks become the norm

BSV, BCH etc are all irrelevant, talking about GB blocks is also irrelevant to Bitcoin block size discussions, no one is stupid enough to actually think about anything above 100MB by 2030. So I think bringing GB is bad, it makes mining centralized etc is a fallacy.
I don't know who you are but it seems you have a few pockets filled by recent spam attacks and you are trying to deviate from the actual concern, which is ; Bitcoin has to scale. I would say if we had 8MB blocks, we could hit the walls of $80,000 by now, but that's just speculation right?

[BlackHatCoiner]

a. thought that ASICS validate transaction data.. they dont .

No, I didn't. I'm just directly referring to mining pools as "miners".

heck your even wrong about the term miner

Cool it. I know what the terms mean, and all those stuff you mention. I'm just citing miners as those who broadcast the blocks for the sake of simplicity. No need to turn completely technical for every single thing we say, or we derail the thread. 

b. then went and exaggerated a 1gb scenario of extreme irrationalness

Wanna tell us what's the ideal block size limit according to you?

I would say if we had 8MB blocks, we could hit the walls of $80,000 by now, but that's just speculation right?

Right. 

[cryptosize]

I don't know who you are but it seems you have a few pockets filled by recent spam attacks

Right Mr. Sherlock, you've exposed the grand conspiracy behind the cryptosize alias!

Gosh, this forum never ceases to amaze me...

I would say if we had 8MB blocks, we could hit the walls of $80,000 by now, but that's just speculation right?

Not only it's speculation (that's fine), but it's totally unfounded.

We won't hit a new ATH by Dec 2024/Jan 2025 at the earliest, so 80k ain't happening any time soon, regardless of block size. Feel free to bookmark/screenshot my post.

BTC never reaches a new ATH, until at least 6 months have passed after the latest halving. Study the charts/patterns.

[franky1]

b. then went and exaggerated a 1gb scenario of extreme irrationalness

Wanna tell us what's the ideal block size limit according to you?

well you want to turn the debate into "gigabyte by 2024" much like your forum wife mentor used to be part of the 2016 script of anything but core design is "gigabytes by midnight"

there are many many many ways to increase transaction count
a. lean transactions where transactions cant take up full 4mb for one tx
b. not have the cludge of 1mb base 3mb witness. and just have full open access 4mb for transactions to fully utilise
c. charge (young confirm) spammers and non signing proof witness junk, multiples of base fee.. to deter such spam(using fee formulae)

and thats without even going beyond you fear of 4mb
as for going beyond. . its not about huge leaps to 1gb in hours/months.. its progressive increases.
these increases dont even need to be decided each time by dev politics of threats and blackmail. but using the blockdata to determine that things are getting congested over a reasonable period(once dev politics bothers to instigate it first and only time)

EG if 95% of blocks are >95% full and sat/byte >xxsat =peak demand over 13,104 - 26,208blocks (3-6 months)
that way its data driven not HUMAN "god" politics driven

[digaran]

Do the node owners ever ask this question: Why would I run a node and store irrelevant data, then when I want to send a transaction, I'd need to pay $10?  Imagine you want to send 1 TX per day, it would be $300 per month, mining pools better start running the nodes, right? Because they are so fond of these dust spams.

[franky1]

Do the node owners ever ask this question: Why would I run a node and store irrelevant data, then when I want to send a transaction, I'd need to pay $10?  Imagine you want to send 1 TX per day, it would be $300 per month, mining pools better start running the nodes, right? Because they are so fond of these dust spams.

actual node users do ask those questions.. they know transactions costs mean more then hardware costs.. thats why there are many transaction cost topics and not any "my PC burns out" topics
there are hundred of scaling topcs with thousands of people discussing SCALING BITCOIN. but only dozens of snake oil salesmen type topics promoting the solution as subnetworks.. you start to notice what the community care and want more

but if you look at the subnetwork promoting trolls exaggerating hardware costs, exaggerating 1gb block scenarios, want to do nothing about bloated junk transactions..
those people dont run full nodes.. their game is just to annoy actual bitcoiners to pretend nothing can/should be done and instead move over to their prefered network.. you just got to look at their post history to see their game plan and admissions they dont even full archive the blockchain themselves nor run nodes 24/7

[alani123]

But to be honest, after thinking for a while, I think we have another problem besides block size and they are miners. Mining is becoming way centralized, pools are collecting all the transaction fees and people are willing to join pools that don't share transaction fees. These pools are one of the biggest pools who can flood mempool with their resources and gain more profit. They can flood it easily because they confirm the blocks and fees go back to their pockets but increased block size should make it a little bit hard for them to do.

Actually it's the opposite.

If 4GB blocks become the norm (because that's what BSV folks envision), then FTTH would become mandatory. ADSL is still the most common (baseline) connection worldwide, hence why 1MB block size makes sense as a "baseline".

Hell, I would argue that the few remaining, hyper-competitive pools would be concentrated into a single geographical spot (maybe USA?) and they wouldn't even use FTTH.

They would just use LAN/Ethernet connections (1 Gbps symmetric) to sync with each other! Kinda like a LAN party if you will. BTC would turn from a permissionless network to permissioned (some pools already demand KYC).

You really like this scenario? This is not very different compared to fiat/central banking (i.e. ECB TARGET2 ledger).

I really wonder if big block fanatics are sincere good guys/idealists or government trojan horses/feds trying to hijack BTC, even though they pretend to preach "global adoption".

I sincerely hope we won't have to find out...

I wonder why we have to keep conflating the discussion with BSV and BCH.
Already I've seen some BSV fans here (to clarify, I'm not one of them) that voiced their opinion saying that they're against a block capacity increase for BTC.
Obviously their reasoning is that they believe they can do it bigger and better... But why should that concern us?
Is the goal to improve BTC or not? Because obviously BSV as a ton of faults, and just because CSW is acting the way he does, it doesn't mean that bitcoin would have to fall in the same traps when implementing an improvement.

At this point I find these arguments quite counterproductive to be honest.
Bitcoin's development is supported by many scientists, if we all agreed that a slight block capacity increase is warranted, they'd find a way to implement it well enough so there are no fundamental issues.

[franky1]

I wonder why we have to keep conflating the discussion with BSV and BCH.

because the trolls who say it are stuck in their 6yo narrative thats been debunked but they dont have the brain power to do any research to actually realise how wrong they are about alot of things. so they just repeat themselves hoping if they can recruit one more idiot then it must mean they are right.

they lack actually making realistic and rational observations about data, code and mechanisms that can benefit bitcoin and instead they just want to pretend if someone is not following cores roadmap, they must be some old altcoin tribe..  to them its brand war clan fight. 'if your not with core, your against bitcoin' nonsense.. rather than actually discussing REALISTIC data requirements and plausible scenarios of realistic possibilities

[cryptosize]

But to be honest, after thinking for a while, I think we have another problem besides block size and they are miners. Mining is becoming way centralized, pools are collecting all the transaction fees and people are willing to join pools that don't share transaction fees. These pools are one of the biggest pools who can flood mempool with their resources and gain more profit. They can flood it easily because they confirm the blocks and fees go back to their pockets but increased block size should make it a little bit hard for them to do.

Actually it's the opposite.

If 4GB blocks become the norm (because that's what BSV folks envision), then FTTH would become mandatory. ADSL is still the most common (baseline) connection worldwide, hence why 1MB block size makes sense as a "baseline".

Hell, I would argue that the few remaining, hyper-competitive pools would be concentrated into a single geographical spot (maybe USA?) and they wouldn't even use FTTH.

They would just use LAN/Ethernet connections (1 Gbps symmetric) to sync with each other! Kinda like a LAN party if you will. BTC would turn from a permissionless network to permissioned (some pools already demand KYC).

You really like this scenario? This is not very different compared to fiat/central banking (i.e. ECB TARGET2 ledger).

I really wonder if big block fanatics are sincere good guys/idealists or government trojan horses/feds trying to hijack BTC, even though they pretend to preach "global adoption".

I sincerely hope we won't have to find out...

I wonder why we have to keep conflating the discussion with BSV and BCH.
Already I've seen some BSV fans here (to clarify, I'm not one of them) that voiced their opinion saying that they're against a block capacity increase for BTC.
Obviously their reasoning is that they believe they can do it bigger and better... But why should that concern us?
Is the goal to improve BTC or not? Because obviously BSV as a ton of faults, and just because CSW is acting the way he does, it doesn't mean that bitcoin would have to fall in the same traps when implementing an improvement.

At this point I find these arguments quite counterproductive to be honest.
Bitcoin's development is supported by many scientists, if we all agreed that a slight block capacity increase is warranted, they'd find a way to implement it well enough so there are no fundamental issues.

A slight capacity increase is not going to solve scaling issues (assuming mass adoption is the endgame) and still risks splitting the network in half.

People need to find more ingenious solutions (soft forks like SegWit).

Who knows, maybe if AI advances enough, it could do BTC R&D by itself (assuming people won't find a good enough solution).

It won't be easy to reach a consensus regarding the "ideal" block size. Who determines what's ideal? For what purpose?

Some people want BTC to be the be-all and end-all cryptocurrency and no alts to exist (such as LTC, DOGE, XMR).

I get it, it sounds noble, but I'm afraid this is not going to happen. It hasn't happened to Linux distros AFAIK (tons of debates about the ideal distro, libraries etc.)

There's a reason so many Linux distros exist. Same with cryptocurrencies.

ps: A BTC hard fork will happen only when a real threat arises (such as mainstream quantum computing).

[digaran]

Do you know any of the core devs coming here and officially address the community about their road map, future plans, emergency plan B to mitigate such situations? I wonder why is that? Maybe they don't consider this forum as a part of community or maybe it's beneath them to interact with us normies, or maybe they are already here in disguise, who knows all we see here are 4-5 usual shills as always, and a few unknown individuals popping up from time to time to shill their own agenda.

It's extremely rare to see genuine concerned long standing and respectful members that could convince people with reasoning.

And if there are any, they have the "troll" label, so it dismisses the respectful and long standing notion. 

[Synchronice]

Why didn't you calculate this for 10 MB blocks? After all, we are talking about this increase now.

For increase to 10 MB, I'll right as well vote in favor, and maybe a little higher than that. I have clarified before that I'm not strictly against anything beyond 4 MB, I'm just not of the opinion that it's going to solve the problem; it's only delaying it.

Yes, it doesn't solve the problem but it's clear that current block size is not enough and it's not just a temporary case. What if bitcoin becomes popular and millions of people want to make transaction each day? They'll move on altcoins and this is a very serious threat.

I read many posts and to be honest I can't understand how increased block size can make bitcoin less secure. Is 1MB any standard for security?

I have explained in this post.

I missed that post, sorry.
I like your question: what's the ideal block size? Ideal size doesn't exist but size has to be chosen. Something flexible would be great, like, block size adapts to number of transactions, i.e. one block gets mined every 10 minutes and includes 5% of all transactions. If number of transactions increase, block takes more transactions and block size increases and if number of transactions decrease, so does the block size. But that's probably not possible.

Also, I want to say that it's not a problem today to store bitcoin blockchain on hard drive.

Not on 4 MB blocks. Maybe neither on 10 MB or 20 MB, but if you arbitrarily increase it to something like 100, then that will also be a problem at some point.

10MB is not a problem today but it was a problem years ago, right? 100MB is a problem today but it won't be a problem years later. I'm afraid, we may have to gradually increase block size but it's not the best solution to the problem. This problem is not easy to deal with. After all, block size increase really looks like delaying the problem but that doesn't mean we should stop on current limit even if it means delay.

[Casdinyard]

initially I don't really care much about the block size of bitcoin, since in my opinion decentralization runs deeper than just bytes and bits in this industry. But as I grew older and wiser, I realized that there's more to this than just block size and decentralization.

We haven't even broken the code just yet, we're still at a 1mb limit if I'm not mistaken and we're already getting large companies that invest large amounts of bitcoin to themselves for profit or security, just this year Tesla sold theirs which caused a decline in bitcoin's price, followed by a mini domino effect within the market that persisted until the whole situation subsided. This says to me that we're either in the dark times, where we're fucked either way, since capitalism will still take what it could take, or that the blocksize war's motives are becoming more real as time goes by.

[DooMAD]

b. not have the cludge of 1mb base 3mb witness. and just have full open access 4mb for transactions to fully utilise

This reeks of potential technical debt.  It's something you've proposed on numerous occasions for the last few years now, but have never fleshed out.  How, exactly, do you propose enacting this?  Don't just give us the wishlist, tell us step by step what this option actually entails.

Something flexible would be great, like, block size adapts to number of transactions, i.e. one block gets mined every 10 minutes and includes 5% of all transactions. If number of transactions increase, block takes more transactions and block size increases and if number of transactions decrease, so does the block size. But that's probably not possible.

I'd also rather see something adaptive and dynamic.  In the past I've advocated for such an approach.  It likely is possible, but the primary challenge is that it has to stand up to game theory.  If there are ways to manipulate or rig the system to an outcome which suits an attackers goals, then it's no good.  We can't inadvertently introduce that kind of weakness.

[philipma1957]

If 4GB blocks become the norm

BSV, BCH etc are all irrelevant, talking about GB blocks is also irrelevant to Bitcoin block size discussions, no one is stupid enough to actually think about anything above 100MB by 2030. So I think bringing GB is bad, it makes mining centralized etc is a fallacy.
I don't know who you are but it seems you have a few pockets filled by recent spam attacks and you are trying to deviate from the actual concern, which is ; Bitcoin has to scale. I would say if we had 8MB blocks, we could hit the walls of $80,000 by now, but that's just speculation right?

and it needs to scale better than the ltc/doge 12x tx capacity edge.

So are we at 4mb right now. 12x that is 48mb

maybe it tries 32mb blocks and 0.0001000 as a minimum dust send with 0.00001 as a minimum fee.

See what that does for ordinal prevention.

[franky1]

b. not have the cludge of 1mb base 3mb witness. and just have full open access 4mb for transactions to fully utilise

This reeks of potential technical debt.  It's something you've proposed on numerous occasions for the last few years now, but have never fleshed out.  How, exactly, do you propose enacting this?  Don't just give us the wishlist, tell us step by step what this option actually entails.

the technical debt already exists.. its the cludge they already put in it to get segwit working

the code sipa added when rewriting bitcoin core to make segwit work (the cludge) reeks of technical debt because it is.. however not having the cludge and getting back to simpler straight forward block sizes, proper coding, proper byte counting, proper validation.. lessens/undoes the technical debt

if you dont thing core screwed up and introduced a open door to let junk in.. explain the ordinal inscription junk that abuses cores unconditioned opcodes due to segwit/taproot

as for the cludge,
yes there are many lines of code in different sections that deal with the legacy*witness and serialised / witness.. and all the other cludge of vb and weight unit manipulations of byte counting..  but thats cores own fault for creating the cludgy way of trying to slide segwit in..

getting back to clean code where its a unified 4mb where both legacy and segwit can be side by side under a unified single merkle to allow more transactions in the full 4mb space will require undoing the cludge (technical debt)

for instance in 2016 when core was a simple blocksize=1000000
it was much easier to move to blocksize=2000000 blocksize=4000000 blocksize=8000000 without affecting other area's of code much

but the way they patched segwit together with the max block weight = 40000000 witness scale factor = 4
(1mb base 3mb witness=4mb)
its not simple to go to: max block weight = 80000000 witness scale factor = 4
(2mb base 6mb witness=8mb)
because the cludge of the other parts of the code then has to be changed too, in many places..

however undoing the cludge to have a unified, simplified blocksize=4000000 which yes will take rewriting lots of area's.. will later make it easier to go to blocksize=8000000.. but before even going to 8mb will help more transactions utilise the 4mb space in the unified blocksize=4000000

and yes while they are at it cleaning the code up. they can put conditions on the opcodes to not allow full blocksize wastage per script(witness)

[digaran]

to stand up to game theory.  If there are ways to manipulate or rig the system to an outcome which suits an attackers goals, then it's no good.  We can't inadvertently introduce that kind of weakness.

Friendly fire! Friendly fire!, lol. Are we still talking about future upgrades here? Because despite my lack of understanding about the entirety of taproot, I am pretty much certain that what you just described is happening right now, I swear I'm not lying or trolling, you can check to see those orange blocks turning to red and are about to explode on mempool.space.

Believe it or not, I'm an extremist in regards to have a central and united team of development, because despite it being the central point of failure, it keeps strangers hands off the changes in the code, and because if they start showing any signs of incompetency, we could replace them by persuading the whole community, my concern is that I can see some  yellow flags, and don't wanna wait to see the obvious red ones.

I'm confident that anyone who wants micropayments will adopt LN one way or another, sooner or later, and scaling the network to make room for non-micro transactions is begging to happen.

[franky1]

t anyone who wants micropayments will adopt LN one way or another, sooner or later, and scaling the network to make room for non-micro transactions is begging to happen.

LN subnetwork is too flawed and even proven and admitted so by LN devs themselves..
im sure for the niche that want microtransactions should start afresh and build a subnetwork that can meet its promises and learn from LN mistakes.. but users wanting microtransactions should not be looking towards LN as their saviour.. its not the solution that was promised. not matter how much they utopian dream advertise it is

millions of users have looked at LN seen its failures and decided to use other subnetwork bridges for microtransactions.. its time LN devs go back to the drawing board and learn from the mistakes

just look at DCG who was a big sponsor of blockstream(core+LN devs) to do what they did(segwit as gateway key to LN) to push to create LN. but now 6 years later if you look at DCG portfolio of sister companies and look at how LITTLE of them actually advocate and use LN. just shows even they dont see it as a ready to use product they paid for. EG  if you need to ask why coinbase(dcg sister) doesnt use LN.. you already know the answer