Bitcoin 20MB Fork

[ujka]

   I suppose the first piece of bloat which will be seen will be in the unspent transaction outputs as everyone begins to spam the blockchain with pennies to include their junk data in the feed.
  

Why will there be that spam? There is a dust limit, and a fee that must be paid for such a small transactions.  Miners can still ignore and not process them.

[davout]

Don't fix what isn't broken.

[inBitweTrust]

Don't fix what isn't broken.

Another way of suggesting , don't plan or prepare for the future and allow Bitcoin to become slow and obsolete.

[davout]

Don't fix what isn't broken.

Another way of suggesting , don't plan or prepare for the future and allow Bitcoin to become slow and obsolete.

No. One simple way to state that one should not fix what is not broken.
Sure, with a bit of imagination any derp can come up with a ton of imaginary issues that require immediate attention.

[inBitweTrust]

No. One simple way to state that one should not fix what is not broken.
Sure, with a bit of imagination any derp can come up with a ton of imaginary issues that require immediate attention.

Something discussed for years, and slowly tested and vetted for 6 months doesn't qualify as immediate.

I get that you don't want it to change, and you prefer tx fees were much higher... but don't mislead people into believing this is a rushed change.

Let me remind everyone that this is already happening right now:





... and becoming more prevalent. Do you want to have to wait 2-3 times longer for confirmations?

[inBitweTrust]

Why would you want to artificially limit the networks capabilities? Its an obvious and unnecessary bottleneck and the longer its left the harder it will be to correct, fixing it now and putting a 1MB imposed limit in place would leave things exactly as they are except allow a soft rather than hard fork later. Is that unrealistic?

He posted a long discussion link to his reasoning and the gist of his argument with Gavin is he wants all the blocks to be full to insure that Tx fees are much higher because that is the best way to secure bitcoin. He believes that TX fees are too cheap and we should be willing to pay 4-20usd per transaction to support the network because transferring bitcoin is like transferring gold.

If bitcoin went in this direction it would surely become slow, obsolete, and overtaken by an alt. The idea is so crazy that I am beginning to suspect that he wants bitcoin to fail.

 

[Lauda]

I'm still not seeing any valid arguments against the fork?
People have to realize, that this will be much harder to do, the more time passes.

[davout]

Let me remind everyone that this is already happening right now:

Sure. Remind everyone of the current average block size.

Why would you want to artificially limit the networks capabilities?

Do you remember the CoinValidation derps?

Long story short: random nobodies don't pay for their starbucks using SWIFT, so what?

Bitcoin is the backbone, not reddit's pocket change. I'm not going to buy an extra hard-drive every year to store changetips.
And no, consumer hard-drive space isn't "growing exponentially", consumer hard-drive space is going towards SSDs.

I'm still not seeing any valid arguments against the fork?
People have to realize, that this will be much harder to do, the more time passes.

I'm happy with Bitcoin as it is. And if something is hard to change that usually means the change is not justified.
If changing is really necessary for miners, don't worry, you'll hear about it.

[DooMAD]

Made my arguments in the last thread, which they locked because they knew the debate wasn't going in their favour.  The anti-fork crowd mostly consists of a small minority of ego-maniacal, 1% wannabees who want to keep Bitcoin as a niche market for elitist whales because it suits their vested interests.  The good news is that the anti-fork crowd have effectively painted themselves into a corner now, so all they can do is carry on down the path they've chosen.  A path of stagnation, isolation and dwindling support.  While everyone else heads off together in the opposite direction, where there will be updates, scalability and the potential of mass adoption.  

[inBitweTrust]

I'm still not seeing any valid arguments against the fork?
People have to realize, that this will be much harder to do, the more time passes.

Many of the arguments being presented are so poor that I feel compelled to argue against my position for the sake of elevating the discussion.

My best attempt to argue against the 20MB fork:

Although some of the 1MB blocks are being filled this is still a rather rare occurrence and thus we have no reason to make this change now. Rather than increasing the block size our efforts should be focused on finishing and testing merkle tree pruning and other ways of reducing blockchain bloat and than we can discuss the merits of increasing the blockchain. It is good that Gavin has done some preliminary tests and research so we should be ready to implement a last minute hard fork if we see an explosion in transactions. When or if this happens we will be better prepared to implement the right changes whether they will be using sidechains, reducing confirmation time or increasing blocksize to increase TPS.

I can argue against the position above as well , but this does come close to a more reasonable objection to the hard fork.

[MakingMoneyHoney]

Isn't there a theory out there, that the more space you have, the more you use. The more that's available, the more that will be used in the future, and you'll always fill it up at some point, so you always need more?

That's just one of the reasons I would think would be used in an argument against making it bigger... versus figuring out another way to get done what has to be done (such as using an alt coin specifically for large transactions).

[Buffer Overflow]

I'm happy with Bitcoin as it is. And if something is hard to change that usually means the change is not justified.

Yeah but the 1MB limit was always going to be a temporary measure from the start. You knew that.
So you not happy with Bitcoin the way it is then are you?

This also begs the question why you stayed involved in bitcoin for years when you knew eventually the limit would be removed as the original plan which you didn't like?

[inBitweTrust]

Isn't there a theory out there, that the more space you have, the more you use. The more that's available, the more that will be used in the future, and you'll always fill it up at some point, so you always need more?

That's just one of the reasons I would think would be used in an argument against making it bigger... versus figuring out another way to get done what has to be done (such as using an alt coin specifically for large transactions).

Perhaps , given enough time(keep in mind that it doesn't hold true now with 15-20% fill avgs) ... but that is the whole point. We want transaction fees to slowly start to cover the cost of network security as block rewards drop every 4 years.

Your choice is to do that with extremely expensive fees on a network that can handle 7tps or for the same price or cheaper on a network that can handle 140 tps.

So what do you think is more attractive 4.00 usd per tx or 0.02 usd per tx? What would you be willing to pay and what would others be willing to pay?

Despite all my involvement and investment in Bitcoin if fees grew to that high I would sell all my stake and start using an alt overnight.

[newIndia]

Bitcoin is the backbone, not reddit's pocket change.

You said it man... those who can read this message knows where the money is

[MakingMoneyHoney]

Isn't there a theory out there, that the more space you have, the more you use. The more that's available, the more that will be used in the future, and you'll always fill it up at some point, so you always need more?

That's just one of the reasons I would think would be used in an argument against making it bigger... versus figuring out another way to get done what has to be done (such as using an alt coin specifically for large transactions).

Perhaps , given enough time(keep in mind that it doesn't hold true now with 15-20% fill avgs) ... but that is the whole point. We want transaction fees to slowly start to cover the cost of network security as block rewards drop every 4 years.

Your choice is to do that with extremely expensive fees on a network that can handle 7tps or for the same price or cheaper on a network that can handle 140 tps.

So what do you think is more attractive 4.00 usd per tx or 0.02 usd per tx? What would you be willing to pay and what would others be willing to pay?

Despite all my involvement and investment in Bitcoin if fees grew to that high I would sell all my stake and start using an alt overnight.

Changing the fees to be higher for Bitcoin, is going against what people like to say are some of the best things about Bitcoin, it's like changing what Bitcoin is.

Example: Those ads around Christmas against Western Union for having $5 fees, and saying Bitcoin has $0.02 fees. If you change Bitcoin to $4.00 fees, it's not much of an incentive to use Bitcoin over Western Union. Yes, if fees got too large, Bitcoin wouldn't be the same Bitcoin that others were applauding over Christmas... 

[davout]

True but Bitcoin simply wont scale to the kind of volumes needed to cover every transaction globally and that's only likely to rise with the convenience of programmable money. There's plenty of options to cover it, alts, sidechains, some kind of parallelism and as the need arises it will be covered, open source will likely find solutions and if that's slow happening its a commercial opportunity.

We're back at square one. Bitcoin is fine.

[inBitweTrust]

Changing the fees to be higher for Bitcoin, is going against what people like to say are some of the best things about Bitcoin, it's like changing what Bitcoin is.

Example: Those ads around Christmas against Western Union for having $5 fees, and saying Bitcoin has $0.02 fees. If you change Bitcoin to $4.00 fees, it's not much of an incentive to use Bitcoin over Western Union. Yes, if fees got too large, Bitcoin wouldn't be the same Bitcoin that others were applauding over Christmas...  

If you are against the Fees increasing than you should be for the hard fork increasing the blocksize to 20MB.

How do you plan on securing the network once we have to depend upon Tx fees and we are capped at 7tps? Is 12k dollars a day going to be able to pay for all the security? No, of course not... Tx fees will start to increase once blocks get fuller.

[davout]

How is 1/20th of the potential capacity fine? And that's a very lowball figure.

You seriously fail to see the massive trade-off?

[davout]

Yes. We had an imposed 250KB limit for ages that was raised to 1MB with a soft fork, the same can happen with a 20MB or more limit with a 1MB imposed limit.

There's 3 priorities, enough from fees to secure the network, an efficient and uncongested network and incentive for the network to grow. Imho that needs dynamic limits but the limits have to be reached to see how that would work in the real world.

There was no soft-fork for the 250kB default block-size limit.

Currently the fees are very, very, very far from being anywhere near of an amount sufficient to secure the network.
We're all having a free lunch right now, due to coins still being minted, but if that was to stop tomorrow, the network would be in an extremely shitty state.

What's the problem with paying 10 bucks instead of 10 cents to securely transfer a million dollars?

[Buffer Overflow]

What's the problem with paying 10 bucks instead of 10 cents to securely transfer a million dollars?

Nothing. The problems start when you try to securely transfer 5 bucks paying 10 bucks instead of 10 cents.