Gavin Andresen Proposes Bitcoin Hard Fork to Address Network Scalability

[jabo38]

Finally good news, even Satoshi told the 1MB limit is temporary.

But easier would be double maxblocksize every block reward halving, to make Bitcoin simple...

50 BTC = 1 MB
25 BTC = 2 MB
12.5 BTC = 4 MB

and so on.

This is not far from what gavin had proposed.His proposal would involve a higher rate of block size increases due to more frequent compounding. Your suggestion would make it very easy to remember when the max block size will increase and would likely require much smaller changes to the code then what gavin is proposing

I wouldn't call that a fork, but an improvement. And it's quite elegant. I support it too...

looks good to me, but it is more of just a cool little ratio.  I think Gavin made his by looking at Bitcoins past needs, drawing a line to what the future is, and then trying to meet those needs.  Probably more realistic that way even if it is more complicated. 

That said, either way is better than what is happening now. 

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[Cryddit]

For the people who think exponential growth is NOT a good model for this, I'd like to point out something.... 

640k ought to be enough for anybody.  -- Bill Gates

[tvbcof]

For the people who think exponential growth is NOT a good model for this, I'd like to point out something.... 

640k ought to be enough for anybody.  -- Bill Gates

Accusing Satoshi of pulling a Bill Gates when he put in the 7 TPS cap is funny and all that, but it simply doesn't map to the concept of exponential growth very well.  It does, however, illustrate what I was talking about when I said that most human minds are simply not wired to register it adequately.

[cbeast]

For the people who think exponential growth is NOT a good model for this, I'd like to point out something.... 

640k ought to be enough for anybody.  -- Bill Gates

Accusing Satoshi of pulling a Bill Gates when he put in the 7 TPS cap is funny and all that, but it simply doesn't map to the concept of exponential growth very well.  It does, however, illustrate what I was talking about when I said that most human minds are simply not wired to register it adequately.

Yo Dawg, I hear you like side chains so I put side chains inside your side chains. Now you have 7⁷TPS.

[tvbcof]

Are you suggesting that it makes more sense to fork bitcoin so that microtransactions can be processed and ultimately repatriated in a separate decentralized sidechain?
...

Huh? No, not really.

I'm saying that I'd be very willing to shake some of my BTC out of cold storage and peg them on various side-chains which server various purposes if I could ultimately repatriate them on the (hopefully decentralized) non-sidechain.  That is to say, Bitcoin.  That's kind of the point as I understand things.

In practice, ya, I'd lock some BTC value to super-micotipping sidechain (as an example) and micro-tip to my heart's content.  If the super-microtipping sidechain maintainers turned out to be dicks (and I was paying attention) I'd repatriate whatever I had left on that sidechain back to the Bitcoin blockchain.  Of course it is expected that the recipient of micro-tips would be repatriating their micro-tips to Bitcoin blockchain from time to time as well.

Basically sidechains just open up a new universe of use cases (market) for Bitcoin with almost zero downside.  At least not one which I've seen enunciated very effectively.  They do, however, solve almost all of the problems which cause so much risk to Bitcoin when it comes to development progress.  Sidechains seem to be as close to a win/win as I can remember in the ecosystem.

[The00Dustin]

Huh? No, not really.

I'm saying that I'd be very willing to shake some of my BTC out of cold storage and peg them on various side-chains which server various purposes if I could ultimately repatriate them on the (hopefully decentralized) non-sidechain.  That is to say, Bitcoin.  That's kind of the point as I understand things.

In practice, ya, I'd lock some BTC value to super-micotipping sidechain (as an example) and micro-tip to my heart's content.  If the super-microtipping sidechain maintainers turned out to be dicks (and I was paying attention) I'd repatriate whatever I had left on that sidechain back to the Bitcoin blockchain.  Of course it is expected that the recipient of micro-tips would be repatriating their micro-tips to Bitcoin blockchain from time to time as well.

Basically sidechains just open up a new universe of use cases (market) for Bitcoin with almost zero downside.  At least not one which I've seen enunciated very effectively.  They do, however, solve almost all of the problems which cause so much risk to Bitcoin when it comes to development progress.  Sidechains seem to be as close to a win/win as I can remember in the ecosystem.

Yeah, it sounds great in theory, but what makes you think it can be done without a fork?  Currently, bitcoins exist on the blockchain and they are controlled by the private key.  They can't magically disappear from the blockchain and come back later as it currently stands.  Even when they are sent to addresses that aren't revealed yet, the owner of the relevant private key still controls them and the blockchain is still tracking them.  That having been said, my understanding of what you are describing is that either you still have the bitcoins and still control the private key, in which case they aren't moving on a sidechain and you are issuing IOUs on the sidechain, or you've given the bitcoins away, trading them for IOUs in the sidechain while trusting someone to reimburse you in the future for the ones you didn't spend.  Clearly one of us is understanding something wrong.

That having been said, even if a decentralized system that we could trust to manage our private keys existed so that we could send bitcoins to the "sidechain" (by giving up a private key or sending to an address assigned to us but controlled by the "sidechain" [this example wouldn't actually be a chain, it would be off-chain, which is already possible if you don't mind IOUs from a centralized party]), you'd still have to trust that "sidechain" to properly allocate the bitcoins in the blockchain at some point, and for it to be any more efficient when someone "repatriated" (really "withdrew") their microtips (from your example), it would have to behave as a mixer of sorts, maybe taking the sum of the microtips from the private key you "deposited" to and repatriating your leftover bitcoins to an address you control from someone else's "deposit".  This is in no way simpler than the proposed fork, and it doesn't necessarily resolve the underlying problem.

Cryddit puts my mangled thoughts from above into much better words two posts down.

[Cryddit]

Accusing Satoshi of pulling a Bill Gates when he put in the 7 TPS cap is funny and all that, but it simply doesn't map to the concept of exponential growth very well.  It does, however, illustrate what I was talking about when I said that most human minds are simply not wired to register it adequately.

Don't be silly.  Satoshi knew darn well that one or more hard forks to address scalability would eventually be needed.  He said so back in 2008-2009. 

[Cryddit]

Side chains last I looked, if we want to do them in a trustless network, require several important bits:

First, coin can be created "ex nihilo" on the side chain by a transaction that locks up BTC on the main blockchain.  This much, at least, is easy.

Second, the side chain can handle transactions of side chain coins going back and forth between users of that side chain.  This is also easy.  

Third, the secret/s necessary to unlock that BTC gets transmitted through the side chain to the recipients of the side chain coins.   And simultaneously the secrets held by the former owner of the side chain coins become unusable for releasing the BTC on the main chain when the side chain coin is transmitted. I don't know a good way to do this other than constructing parallels of every side chain transaction on the main chain, which makes having a side chain rather pointless.

Fourth, when someone on the side chain redeems his side chain txouts onto the main block chain, he has to be able to repatriate -- probably taking only parts of the BTC  locked up by the locking transactions, which means 'spending' that locked BTC and creating a new main-blockchain txout to hold "change".  But this has to be done in such a way that the other side chain coin holders whose coins represent  claims on that locked BTC can still redeem their coins from that same lock, for remaining coin now in the "change" txout.  

I have not seen a good solution to the above problems.  

All 'side chain' schemes I have seen involve trusting someone to exchange BTC and side-chain coins, and having the secrets to release the BTC on the main chain.  I don't think a person we can trust to be that exchanger exists.

[BitMos]

sorry for this noobish question but what is a TPS? thx

[tvbcof]

Yeah, it sounds great in theory, but what makes you think it can be done without a fork?

To the extent that sidechains need a fork for efficiency, I'd support it fully.  Meaning that I'd accept it, and it's very possible that I'd start running a full node again (and maybe at home behind my satellite connection if certain other 'good ideas' don't make it into the codebase.)

Currently, bitcoins exist on the blockchain and they are controlled by the private key.  They can't magically disappear from the blockchain and come back later as it currently stands.  Even when they are sent to addresses that aren't revealed yet, the owner of the relevant private key still controls them and the blockchain is still tracking them.  That having been said, my understanding of what you are describing is that either you still have the bitcoins and still control the private key, in which case they aren't moving on a sidechain and you are issuing IOUs on the sidechain, or you've given the bitcoins away, trading them for IOUs in the sidechain while trusting someone to reimburse you in the future for the ones you didn't spend.  Clearly one of us is understanding something wrong.

That having been said, even if a decentralized system that we could trust to manage our private keys existed so that we could send bitcoins to the "sidechain" (by giving up a private key or sending to an address assigned to us but controlled by the "sidechain" [this example wouldn't actually be a chain, it would be off-chain, which is already possible if you don't mind IOUs from a centralized party]), you'd still have to trust that "sidechain" to properly allocate the bitcoins in the blockchain at some point, and for it to be any more efficient when someone "repatriated" (really "withdrew" their microtips (from your example), it would have to behave as a mixer of sorts, maybe taking the sum of the microtips from the private key you "deposited" to and repatriating your leftover bitcoins to an address you control from someone else's "deposit".  This is in no way simpler than the proposed fork, and it doesn't necessarily resolve the underlying problem.

I've always visualized sidechains (before they were named) as efforts which are not free of work.  People involved in a sidechain effort would have basically the same set of responsibilities that the people involved with Bitcoin have in order to make me wish to use (or participate in) the effort.

The SC whitepaper anticipates some not insignificant latency involved in securely moving between the bitcoin blockchain and the sidechain.  I've always imagined such transfers as being aggregated operations which would add somewhat to the latency.  Say, for instance, once an hour adjustments to the backing store were performed.  I'm fine with that as long as I can have confidence that my value on the sidechain is protected in a reasonably sound and unexploitable manner, and this seems technically quite doable to me (though hardly trivial!)

In practice I would probably almost never do an actual proper Bitcoin transaction.  It would be an event like going to my safe deposit box which I maybe do once per year.  I would, however, likely be transferring from one sidechain to another sidechain on a very regular basis, and behind the scenes a variety of aggregated operations would be doing the heavy lifting.  Many of them probably need not even result in one actual Bitcoin transaction.  Obviously I would only be using sidechains which are operated in a manner which is on par with Bitcoin in terms of the confidence I have against exploit.

In the manner so described I would in fact be using Bitcoin fully insofar as I acquired some fraction of the Bicoin currency base and maintain unique control over that fraction, but I would be doing so with minimal burden on the actual blockchain.

[tvbcof]

sorry for this noobish question but what is a TPS? thx

Transactions Per Second.  Spends.

The block size is a function of the TPS and the size of each transaction which can very depending on complexity.  At the current 1MB the ballpark average number of transactions per second is traditionally considered around 7 transactions per second.

This is the thing which Gavin wants to change to be growing exponentially which means to me that the future-value of Bitcoin is fairly closely approximates my confidence in the endurance of 'Moore's law'.  That is to say, not very high.

[solex]

For general info, Gavin's 50% per year comes from observing the long-term trend in high-end home user bandwidth speed.



http://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/

The trend will level off, but probably after the 2020s.

[The00Dustin]

To the extent that sidechains need a fork for efficiency, I'd support it fully.  Meaning that I'd accept it, and it's very possible that I'd start running a full node again (and maybe at home behind my satellite connection if certain other 'good ideas' don't make it into the codebase.)

OK, but why is a complicated fork to make sidechains work better than a simple fork to allow bitcoin to process a meaningful number of transactions?

I've always visualized sidechains (before they were named) as efforts which are not free of work.  People involved in a sidechain effort would have basically the same set of responsibilities that the people involved with Bitcoin have in order to make me wish to use (or participate in) the effort.

The SC whitepaper anticipates some not insignificant latency involved in securely moving between the bitcoin blockchain and the sidechain.  I've always imagined such transfers as being aggregated operations which would add somewhat to the latency.  Say, for instance, once an hour adjustments to the backing store were performed.  I'm fine with that as long as I can have confidence that my value on the sidechain is protected in a reasonably sound and unexploitable manner, and this seems technically quite doable to me (though hardly trivial!)

In practice I would probably almost never do an actual proper Bitcoin transaction.  It would be an event like going to my safe deposit box which I maybe do once per year.  I would, however, likely be transferring from one sidechain to another sidechain on a very regular basis, and behind the scenes a variety of aggregated operations would be doing the heavy lifting.  Many of them probably need not even result in one actual Bitcoin transaction.  Obviously I would only be using sidechains which are operated in a manner which is on par with Bitcoin in terms of the confidence I have against exploit.

In the manner so described I would in fact be using Bitcoin fully insofar as I acquired some fraction of the Bicoin currency base and maintain unique control over that fraction, but I would be doing so with minimal burden on the actual blockchain.

As I've said about all your posts, it sounds great, but we can increase the size of blocks now.  We may or may not be able to come up with a solution to the problem with these theoretical sidechains that is better described by Cryddit shortly after my post (and linked to my post apparently as you were typing this) at all.  So, for sidechains to be a viable option, you need a trustless method of transfer from and to bitcoin, and for what you describe, you also need a trustless method of transfer between multiple sidechains.  In addition to that, you need motivation for the workers that run each sidechain.  In the sidechain described by Cryddit, it proably can 't be mining rewards (since coins are created and destroyed on the fly to represent bitcoins), if it's fees, then why do you need to get out of the bitcoin blockchain to begin with?

;tldr Why against blocksize increase? + Nevermind that trustless sidechains don't exist, what are such a sidechain's benefits?

[tvbcof]

To the extent that sidechains need a fork for efficiency, I'd support it fully.  Meaning that I'd accept it, and it's very possible that I'd start running a full node again (and maybe at home behind my satellite connection if certain other 'good ideas' don't make it into the codebase.)

OK, but why is a complicated fork to make sidechains work better than a simple fork to allow bitcoin to process a meaningful number of transactions?

Speaking only for myself, the current rate is very confidence inspiring because I can see it being defensible even if all governments decided to go to war on Bitcoin simultaneously.

I would also point out that the kinds of things that might help sidechains be efficient in a hard or soft fork are very low risk to bitcoin proper.  The key element of sidechains is that they are highly independent of bitcoin which isolates it from risk.

To me (and probably to very few others) changing the transaction rate (a hard-fork) is on par with changing the total currency base (the 21-million) in terms of the risk to the system.  At the beginning of the year I liquidated a not insignificant amount of my BTC holdings and it was the constant threat of this eventuality which was a big factor.  The threat alone and the traction it is getting very much damaged my confidence in the solution.

;tldr Why against blocksize increase? + Nevermind that trustless sidechains don't exist, what are such a sidechain's benefits?

As I described in my last missive, sidechains would allow genuine real 'use' of Bitcoin while preserving the defensible nature of it.  In fact it would promote the robust defense of Bitcoin since it would be the core upon which everything else rests.

It could be legitimately argued that in order for Bitcoin to thrive it needs to become compliant with the demands which the governments would like to place on it.  'Bitcoin licenses' and such.  This very well may be the case, but it completely kills my interest in the solution.  Not that I don't see the concerns that governments have and agree that there are potential problems with an uncontrolled currency solution, but I see the dangers of abuse of such control as being an even bigger threat.

[The00Dustin]

It could be legitimately argued that in order for Bitcoin to thrive it needs to become compliant with the demands which the governments would like to place on it.  'Bitcoin licenses' and such.  This very well may be the case, but it completely kills my interest in the solution.  Not that I don't see the concerns that governments have and agree that there are potential problems with an uncontrolled currency solution, but I see the dangers of abuse of such control as being an even bigger threat.

I would be very disappointed if bitcoin were forked/modified solely for the purpose of complying with any such demands.  It is outlandish to suggest that bitcoin needs to be controlled anymore than cash when it is already less anonymous than cash.  Most regulation in the pipelines is about people/corporate entities and does not (many would argue can not) tell the protocol or asset what to do.  Most said regulation also refers to virtual currency as a catch all, meaning that side chains would not be immune from the same set of rules.  I have to assume your concern is about blockchain bloat at this point, but that seems to me like a more expensive and less effective point of attack than the current limited transaction rate.  Regardless, if all transactions are being blocked by an attack consuming the entirety of the available transaction rate, then it is difficult to believe that sidechains won't be negatively affected even if still functional.

[Velkro]

Hard fork is always risk for whole bitcoin project. If something will go bad, some critical bug will occur, we are doomed.

[tvbcof]

It could be legitimately argued that in order for Bitcoin to thrive it needs to become compliant with the demands which the governments would like to place on it.  'Bitcoin licenses' and such.  This very well may be the case, but it completely kills my interest in the solution.  Not that I don't see the concerns that governments have and agree that there are potential problems with an uncontrolled currency solution, but I see the dangers of abuse of such control as being an even bigger threat.

I would be very disappointed if bitcoin were forked/modified solely for the purpose of complying with any such demands.  It is outlandish to suggest that bitcoin needs to be controlled anymore than cash when it is already less anonymous than cash.  Most regulation in the pipelines is about people/corporate entities and does not (many would argue can not) tell the protocol or asset what to do.  Most said regulation also refers to virtual currency as a catch all, meaning that side chains would not be immune from the same set of rules.  I have to assume your concern is about blockchain bloat at this point, but that seems to me like a more expensive and less effective point of attack than the current limited transaction rate.  Regardless, if all transactions are being blocked by an attack consuming the entirety of the available transaction rate, then it is difficult to believe that sidechains won't be negatively affected even if still functional.

One of the cool things about sidechains is that some of them could be perfectly compliant with all the regulations that the government wants, and entities who would like to use Bitcoin but are finding it difficult due to judicial and legislative difficulties (e.g., PayPal) could still use Bitcoin...just under the cover of a sidechain.  And I would happily use such sidechains for a lot of stuff because I've already got to practically give such entities a DNA sample to do business under their umbrella anyway.  But they would still have visibility into what *I* want them to have visibility into and not everything I might choose to do in financial-land.

It would be much more difficult (though not impossible) to make a case that a Bitcoin-backed sidechain itself was non-compliant because Bitcoin remains uncontrolled.  One way or another it would throw a giant monkey-wrench into any plans to bring Bitcoin under control (via, say, red-listing or simply ballooning the system to such an extent that only large-ish corporations are able to do real verification.)

[tvbcof]

Accusing Satoshi of pulling a Bill Gates when he put in the 7 TPS cap is funny and all that, but it simply doesn't map to the concept of exponential growth very well.  It does, however, illustrate what I was talking about when I said that most human minds are simply not wired to register it adequately.

Yo Dawg, I hear you like side chains so I put side chains inside your side chains. Now you have 7⁷TPS.

Ya, well I wouldn't notice since it would impact the sidechain I happened to be using in the same way a sidechain would impact Bitcoin: not at all.

But say I did notice and didn't agree with the direction (e.g., somehow supporting pedocoin or some similar disagreeable thing and not able to shake it.)  I may switch half of my sidechain holdings to a different sidechain which had more promising management and half back to Bitcoin which I send to a cold storage wallet.

Anyway, and very key, "Bitcoin not affected."

  ...though in this case some lucky miner picked up a transaction fee or two from me for my rare native Bitcoin transactions.

[tvbcof]

...
I've always visualized sidechains (before they were named) as efforts which are not free of work.  People involved in a sidechain effort would have basically the same set of responsibilities that the people involved with Bitcoin have in order to make me wish to use (or participate in) the effort.
...

How long is 'always' I asked myself?  Looks like around the time of my first posts in this forum and I joined within a month or two of when I first compiled Bitcoin:

My vote (if this were a vote and I had any voting power) would be 'XC0' for 'Chain #0'.

...

I think ultimately we will have to make a competing client that breaks the 21 million limit and uses a more practical value scale and rate of inflation.

The more the merrier in my opinion.  People can choose which one suites them and exchanges can do a good business automatically adjusting for people so they won't need to care that much, though they could save the exchange fee by operating within their chosen block-chain.  My hope is mostly that each alternate chain is backed by value in the 'satoshi block-chain'.

Almost literally my first thought upon understanding Bitcoin was "that will never scale" and I tried to imagine ways that it could.  The fundamental economic and basic mechanical theories behind sidechains popped into my head immediately though I never had the technical abilities and dedication to think up some of the ideas and finer points that the blockstream guys have.

Even back in the early days (pre Satoshi-Dice) I was conscientious about polluting the blockchain.  I was also miffed that talking paperclip class development efforts were prioritized above blockchain pruning as described in the original paper.  These developments never did materialize making it extra galling that the solution is three years later to just to grow the block size without bound and rely on the tender mercies of the corporate network providers and the conjectures of Dr. Moore to backstop the solution on out into infinity.

[BitMos]

sorry for this noobish question but what is a TPS? thx

Transactions Per Second.  Spends.

The block size is a function of the TPS and the size of each transaction which can very depending on complexity.  At the current 1MB the ballpark average number of transactions per second is traditionally considered around 7 transactions per second.

This is the thing which Gavin wants to change to be growing exponentially which means to me that the future-value of Bitcoin is fairly closely approximates my confidence in the endurance of 'Moore's law'.  That is to say, not very high.

thank you a lot, you are very kind and clear! I clearly don't think to have the necessary level to participate in this discussion. So thank you all, I will read you from the sideline, and wish you all well. My last stupid comment, as this topic seems more mature :

There are in my limited knowledge only 6 options to scalability :

1. with the fees, it will be adjusted automatically (don't pay enough to be in the 7 tps, no tx for you) / BEST OPTION
2. bigger blocks
3. faster blocks
4. alts
5. data compression (it will fit in those 640ko btw)
6. dynamic blocks (everything change depending of the usage)

6. being a little bit complex and that with alts no need to fork! maybe the global payment system is just a pipe dream... but a global payment system (which is the case right now) why not...

And a big thank you to the People of bitcointalk.org for letting speech be free here.

(Astalavista baby, I will be back)