Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Zarathustra]

LOL. And where were those morons sponsored from? Petrochina, Exxon, Gazprom et al.?

No. If anything the large corporations are supporting the establishment which is fabricating the false data. You've fallen for the "Good Car Salesman, Bad Car Salesman" trick.

There is absolutely nothing factual I can say or write which will change the minds of people who are stuck in their pet delusions. That is why the best course of action is implementation and not talk.

Then why are you talking all the time? No work?

[justusranvier]

Somebody made a video describing the effect of a block size limit back in 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVq5oh3-JXc

[bassclef]

Because I really must discipline myself to focus where I can make the most impact, which is coding and not talking.

Yes, please. Your ego has inflated well beyond the walls of this humble thread. Time to start your own.

Here's a working title: Anonymint's pedantic pontifications.

[cypherdoc]

interesting.  stress test confirm times falling off already:

https://bitcoinfees.github.io/#1m

[necrita]

Peter Todd's bearish posturing.

, similar to how it might be years, if ever, before you'll be able to buy 1BTC for $1 again.

https://gist.github.com/petertodd/8e87c782bdf342ef18fb

I wish every core dev had a substantial BTC position.

[cypherdoc]

ouch:

[cypherdoc]

interesting.  stress test confirm times falling off already:

https://bitcoinfees.github.io/#1m

fascinating.  what a dud.

[cypherdoc]

interesting.  stress test confirm times falling off already:

https://bitcoinfees.github.io/#1m

fascinating.  what a dud.

lotsa full blks tho:

[cypherdoc]

yes, there is no NWO or mass conspiracy.  banksters can't trust each other:

http://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/innovation/safello-and-barclays-partner-on-poc-bitcoin-payments-for-donations/

[cypherdoc]

that's interesting.  anyone have an idea why the blocks are coming so quickly after the dud stress test?:

[macsga]

that's interesting.  anyone have an idea why the blocks are coming so quickly after the dud stress test?:

Routed altogether after the bottleneck maybe?

[cypherdoc]

that's interesting.  anyone have an idea why the blocks are coming so quickly after the dud stress test?:

Routed altogether after the bottleneck maybe?

i think related to this is the zero tx blocks that came within 1 min after large blks during the first stress test.  i never got an explanation for why that was either altho to me it is somewhat similar to this.

[Adrian-x]

Smooth, you've made a good point about spam however how do we weigh up the trade offs between limiting money velocity and spam?

I think you may have slightly misunderstood my point. It isn't that spam itself needs to be limited, it is that the system is vulnerable to a sort of denial of service from having too much data (whether that happens to be spam or "real" data, although obviously spam is less desirable) stuffed into it. Satoshi made a judgement at one time that 1 MB was an appropriate limit based on that vulnerability, considering the state of the technology, storage, propagation, etc.. What is the evidence for that vulnerability being sufficiently smaller now or in the near future that a 8x or 20x or 1000x is appropriate instead?

I'm sorry but I just see a lot of wishful thinking going on. Of course, we all want it to scale, but instead of actually improving how it scales, the proposal today is to simply push back the safety limit and change not much else. (A bit like ripping out the airbags and safety belts from a car to cut weight and make it go faster.)

I like the car analogies they've worked well for me. So "spam " just being a term for denial of service or an overload of inappropriately priced transaction data, leaves me thinking it isn't quite wishful thinking making room for it.

Reflecting on the  issue has lead real smart people to find solution that I think are nonsense (picking on Sidechains here) in my experience sometimes jumping in the deep end and being overwhelmed leaving one focused on solving the issue as they happen necessity is the mother of invention and I think allowing it is a great way to do RnD, something I feel is partly in keeping with the spirit of Bitcoin.

I mean heck, if the "spam" is paying full TX fees, how can you fault that? How do you even tell it's spam? Either way the miners will be made healthy.

"full TX fees" is a meaningless concept given that there is no set fee, it can be arbitrarily low. Just paying enough to motivate one (who happens to be the most accommodating) miner doesn't cover the entire cost to everyone on the network. Vitalik wrote about this once. Let me find it...okay here you go:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/02/01/on-transaction-fees-and-the-fallacy-of-market-based-solutions/

Adrian-x: I'll agree there is some merit to your idea of jump into the deep end and then figure out how to swim. Dangerous as fuck, but definitely a strong motivation to Get It Done.

I will agree that market based fees are a fallacy while block subsidies are so high, but we're talking Bitcoin not just the situation today.  Vitalik isn't the best free market economics annalist I've ever read.  Bitcoin fees are set up to be a market system and its not a fallacy. Miners today can ignore the market because there reward is subsidized by 25BTC, but once this diminishes significantly the fees become all important. I've also pondered long and hard as to why fees are a monetary unit and not a percent, and I've come to the same conclusion as satoshi that it needs to be a free market fee ranging from 0 to the total value of the economy. 

Miners that ignore the macro economic data will not optimize and will either go bankrupt here are just the obvious ways fees will be optimized:  mining no free transactions (blocking free transactions = less velocity and lover value fees), or mining too many free transactions (subsidizing the Bitcoin velocity = less income and marginal benefit in value of fees) or mining block with insufficient transactions (over priced transaction fees = blocks too small) or mining blocks with too many transactions (under priced on average = blocks too big and orphaned) the market will find an equilibrium and it will happen at a pace that miners can plan and test, basically miners have a constant view of the situation as the urgency for planing is kept in sight by the forced block halving every 4 years.

[justusranvier]

I will agree that market based fees are a fallacy while block subsidies are so high, but we're talking Bitcoin not just the situation today.  Vitalik isn't the best free market economics annalist I've ever read.  Bitcoin fees are set up to be a market system and its not a fallacy. Miners today can ignore the market because there reward is subsidized by 25BTC, but once this diminishes significantly the fees become all important. I've also pondered long and hard as to why fees are a monetary unit and not a percent, and I've come to the same conclusion as satoshi that it needs to be a free market fee ranging from 0 to the total value of the economy. 

Miners that ignore the macro economic data will not optimize and will either go bankrupt here are just the obvious ways fees will be optimized:  mining no free transactions (blocking free transactions = less velocity and lover value fees), or mining too many free transactions (subsidizing the Bitcoin velocity = less income and marginal benefit in value of fees) or mining block with insufficient transactions (over priced transaction fees = blocks too small) or mining blocks with too many transactions (under priced on average = blocks too big and orphaned) the market will find an equilibrium and it will happen at a pace that miners can plan and test, basically miners have a constant view of the situation as the urgency for planing is kept in sight by the forced block halving every 4 years.

The block subsidy really does distort mining, just like every other subsidy does in its respective market. The economics of Bitcoin mining are going to make a lot more sense once the block reward shrinks to negligable levels, or once the transaction volume grows large enough to render the reward negligable and thus the distortion insignifigant.

The first criteria is something over which we have no control - we just have to wait.

The second is something we can do something about.

[sickpig]

gavin has just posted a bip on the btc dev mailing list

  BIP: ??
  Title: Increase Maximum Block Size
  Author: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>
  Status: Draft
  Type: Standards Track
  Created: 2015-06-22

https://github.com/gavinandresen/bips/blob/blocksize/bip-8MB.mediawiki

[Peter R]

gavin has just posted a bip on the btc dev mailing list

  BIP: ??
  Title: Increase Maximum Block Size
  Author: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>
  Status: Draft
  Type: Standards Track
  Created: 2015-06-22

https://github.com/gavinandresen/bips/blob/blocksize/bip-8MB.mediawiki

Nice! 

Cypherdoc: did you capture an image of the last poll prior to changing it?  It seems that approval for the increase is higher than ever now.

[molecular]

Because I really must discipline myself to focus where I can make the most impact, which is coding and not talking.

Yes, please. Your ego has inflated well beyond the walls of this humble thread. Time to start your own.

Here's a working title: Anonymint's pedantic pontifications.

tbh: I would probably subscribe. It'd be nice to read his ramblings (which contain many intersting things) concentrated in one thread, not copy-pasted all over the place.

[thezerg]

Satoshi made a judgement at one time that 1 MB was an appropriate limit based on that vulnerability, considering the state of the technology, storage, propagation, etc.. What is the evidence for that vulnerability being sufficiently smaller now or in the near future that a 8x or 20x or 1000x is appropriate instead?

The evidence is the 3.5 billion market cap as compared to 0 back then (or the most optimistic estimate maybe 5M).  The network can support a LOT more "spam" today and still be considered valuable and useful by its users.

And also experience has shown us that there is not much spam.  If there was, blocks would be 100% full all the time.  When we switch to 8, 20 MB or whatever blocks, its going to be much ado about nothing.  If the network was going to use that bandwidth right away, it would be using the full 1MB now.  

And unlike the case of email, blockchain spam is not even read by human beings so the inconvenience to the network per message is very small (esp. when pruning, etc starts).  You are trading the promise of a worldwide currency against the fear that some people might issue some frivolous txns!  Bitcoin is unlikely to stay at its current adoption level.  It is in a grow or die situation.

Someday there WILL be a fee market.  When there are 100x more users and 1000x more txns.

[cypherdoc]

gavin has just posted a bip on the btc dev mailing list

  BIP: ??
  Title: Increase Maximum Block Size
  Author: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>
  Status: Draft
  Type: Standards Track
  Created: 2015-06-22

https://github.com/gavinandresen/bips/blob/blocksize/bip-8MB.mediawiki

Nice! 

Cypherdoc: did you capture an image of the last poll prior to changing it?  It seems that approval for the increase is higher than ever now.

no, unfortunately i forgot to do that but iirc the yes was around 73% before the switch to current poll

[cypherdoc]

gavin has just posted a bip on the btc dev mailing list

  BIP: ??
  Title: Increase Maximum Block Size
  Author: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>
  Status: Draft
  Type: Standards Track
  Created: 2015-06-22

https://github.com/gavinandresen/bips/blob/blocksize/bip-8MB.mediawiki

so is this a BIP to Core?  giving current core devs an opportunity to adopt into Core?