Bitcoin 20MB Fork

[acoindr]

"pro" widening its lead

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[inBitweTrust]

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

A majority of the transactions are not 1 million. If you are suggesting a sliding scale where 95% of transactions are 4 cents a peice than that also doesn't pay to secure the network.

You are being way too optimistic if you believe bitcoin can survive alone on many large wires transferring large sums of BTC for 10 usd a pop.

And no , I will not pay 10 usd to transfer 1 million dollars between my wallets or for every large purchase. I would rather sell all my bitcoin and work supporting an alt that offered reasonable fees.

Convincing others that 10usd fee is an improvement is going to be very difficult as well as most people don't care about security or privacy, but about saving money. I'm sorry that bitcoin is growing to become more popular than you prefer but that was always the plan ... go big or fail .

[pawel7777]

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.

But shouldn't the goal be to encourage activity and number of txs, so those small fees could cumulate into more significant rewards?

[davout]

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.

Using SWIFT, gold coins, or special drawing right to transfer 5 bucks isn't very smart.
But if you really insist on it for some ideological reason, it'll be 10 bucks thank you very much.

And no , I will not pay 10 usd to transfer 1 million dollars between my wallets or for every large purchase. I would rather sell all my bitcoin and work supporting an alt that offered reasonable fees.

So you're saying that there could be an alt that would allow you to benefit from the same advantages of Bitcoin, but none of its shortcomings. Please tell me how that magical alt coin might work.

But shouldn't the goal be to encourage activity and number of txs, so those small fees could cumulate into more significant rewards?

20 times epsilon is still not much bigger than epsilon, especially if you need to pay for 20 times the bandwidth and hard drive space.

If the blocks never fill up there can not be a sane transaction fee market supporting an abundant hashing power.

We're a long way from regular 5000btc transactions and we wont get there without 500btc, 50, 5... everyone seems to expect instant gratification these days, get things built up and the million dollar transactions will come but that wont happen if folks try to send $5 and have wait half a day for a confirmation, they'll give it up as a shitty little open source plaything and go elsewhere.

Nobody is expecting instant gratification, and certainly not those that are against some random change that supposedly will bring moar adopshun, more moons, more prices.

If dollars in miners pocket's is what you're really worried about then the exchange rate should be of more concern, how come $100 showed every sign of being sustainable but after all the good news and increased usage $200 is having a hard time? Those exchanges playing by the rules or are they trading fake coins? Not on the chain so no way of knowing.

I care about decentralization and security. Not about your inability to demand a proof of reserves.

[inBitweTrust]

So you're saying that there could be an alt that would allow you to benefit from the same advantages of Bitcoin, but none of its shortcomings. Please tell me how that magical alt coin might work.

Ahhhh ...so you think bitcoin is perfect and doesn't have any problems.
No use discussing change with you anymore as you are impervious to the discussion as you have already found perfection.

[davout]

Does your exchange have it? How do I know the coins on it are real? And is that decentralisation for all or just a select few with that need to move millions? Your not giving any constructive answers, thoughts on addressing the issues of a hitting a hard limit, thoughts on expansion, anything. Sounds like subterfuge.

If you're a customer, ask about it in a support request, if you don't like the answer, make the free market work.
Decentralization is a good thing, and like all good things it has a price tag, whether you come to terms with it or not is entirely up to you.
And no, I'm not going to give 'insight' on the imaginary issues that reside in your head.

So you're saying that there could be an alt that would allow you to benefit from the same advantages of Bitcoin, but none of its shortcomings. Please tell me how that magical alt coin might work.

Ahhhh ...so you think bitcoin is perfect and doesn't have any problems.
No use discussing change with you anymore as you are impervious to the discussion as you have already found perfection.

Didn't I mention "its shortcomings", like in the very text you quoted?
Aren't you the one that wants to avoid discussion by putting words in my mouth?

[Melbustus]

...
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, ...
...

Yeah, and when block reward shrinks enough that miners start getting squeezed, they'll stop including transactions with fees that are too small for the transaction-inclusion to be profitable to the miner.

This is how it would play out if the blocksize had no limit at all. There'd be a genuine free-market for block space. Denial-of-service and propagation-time concerns are at least worth discussing, but the economic argument against the blocksize increase is silly.

https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/2015/01/21/economic-fallacies-and-the-block-size-limit-part-1-scarcity/

[inBitweTrust]

Didn't I mention "its shortcomings", like in the very text you quoted?
Aren't you the one that wants to avoid discussion by putting words in my mouth?

You are correct, I apologize.. The answer to your question would be a fork of bitcoin with some of the improvements we have been discussing. If we lived in a hypothetical parallel universe where our side was in the minority and fees increased to 10 usd and most miners stayed with your preferred fork than I would have to modify the fork to add a TaPoS layer ontop of PoW to prevent a 51 % attack.

[tvbcof]

sorry for the stupid question but if a block today is 1mb, after the hard fork, will it still be 1mb? or will they all be 20?
...

Depends on what fork you choose to follow...if you are sophisticated enough to choose one rather than having one chosen for you.

20MB blocks will be accepted by those who are running the 'gavincoin' fork.  1MB will be the maximum accepted by those running what some people would call 'bitcoin' and others would call 'mpcoin'.

If you are using an on-line wallet service like blockchain.io, or an SPV client like Multibit, it would be good to pay a little bit of attention to what sort of behavior one might expect.  Getting on the wrong fork (whichever it happens to be) could be costly if you are sending or receiving (or think you are receiving) BTC.  The hard fork promises to create some very 'interesting times.'

[davout]

Got to put some in there, there's not a whole lot coming out other than a network that can't work to its full ability is good because then only rich people can use it. How those rich people are going to be attracted to said crippled network and how long they'll stay when they realise its crippled and needs a major change to fix remains a mystery.

What is this "full capacity" magic number?
Are you saying that because I'm a meanie I don't want to share that Bitcoin goodness, that would be available to everyone to transact with, if only we increased the block size?
Do you genuinely think that I was somehow smart enough to go all-in on Bitcoin in 2010, and yet, too dumb to not keep my interests aligned with those of Bitcoin as a whole?

Yeah, and when block reward shrinks enough that miners start getting squeezed, they'll stop including transactions with fees that are too small for the transaction-inclusion to be profitable to the miner.

Not really, the thing that you fail to see, is that when deciding to include a transaction or not in a block, the miner is already working on a block.
He doesn't compute the gain from including the transaction by comparing its fees with the average cost of a transaction in that block, but with the marginal cost of including that particular one. Let that sink in for a minute.

The answer to your question would be a fork of bitcoin with some of the improvements we have been discussing. If we lived in a hypothetical parallel universe where our side was in the minority and fees increased to 10 usd and most miners stayed with your preferred fork than I would have to modify the fork to add a TaPoS layer ontop of PoW to prevent a 51 % attack.

That's not very clear... And I don't think it has that much to do with the discussion at hand anyway.
Betamax and VHS...

[hdbuck]

sorry for the stupid question but if a block today is 1mb, after the hard fork, will it still be 1mb? or will they all be 20?
...

Depends on what fork you choose to follow...if you are sophisticated enough to choose one rather than having one chosen for you.

20MB blocks will be accepted by those who are running the 'gavincoin' fork.  1MB will be the maximum accepted by those running what some people would call 'bitcoin' and others would call 'mpcoin'.

If you are using an on-line wallet service like blockchain.io, or an SPV client like Multibit, it would be good to pay a little bit of attention to what sort of behavior one might expect.  Getting on the wrong fork (whichever it happens to be) could be costly if you are sending or receiving (or think you are receiving) BTC.  The hard fork promises to create some very 'interesting times.'

but one is 'irreversible' right?
like you wont be able to go back to 'mpcoin' once you enter the 'gavincoin'.

[inBitweTrust]

It will be interesting to see how many of the 275 contributing developers to bitcoin core don't support the 20MB fork and I would certainly want to use the chain with the most competent and distributed dev community backing it.

Are there any of those 275 who have contributed to core willing to speak out against the fork?

[inBitweTrust]

...
Are there any of those 275 who have contributed to core willing to speak out against the fork?

+1 and it would be interesting to know the same for the lightweight client.

Discussion between Gavin, Peter Todd, and Amir...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2e1ijs/gavin_andresen_explains_how_bitcoin_is_very/

Most developers have a very nuanced view of this hard fork so while amir seems like he is against it here Peter Todd is arguing details and implementations.

[tvbcof]

sorry for the stupid question but if a block today is 1mb, after the hard fork, will it still be 1mb? or will they all be 20?
...

Depends on what fork you choose to follow...if you are sophisticated enough to choose one rather than having one chosen for you.

20MB blocks will be accepted by those who are running the 'gavincoin' fork.  1MB will be the maximum accepted by those running what some people would call 'bitcoin' and others would call 'mpcoin'.

If you are using an on-line wallet service like blockchain.io, or an SPV client like Multibit, it would be good to pay a little bit of attention to what sort of behavior one might expect.  Getting on the wrong fork (whichever it happens to be) could be costly if you are sending or receiving (or think you are receiving) BTC.  The hard fork promises to create some very 'interesting times.'

but one is 'irreversible' right?
like you wont be able to go back to 'mpcoin' once you enter the 'gavincoin'.

That's an interesting theoretical question.  Best I can tell, it might be possible to play some games with transactions until the transactions start to be mixed with the post-fork coinbase (the per-block mining reward) on the respective fork.  If this no-coinbase double-play thing were to occur there would probably develop a pretty interesting bunch of fungibility issues.  And again, some transfers of wealth could be expected.  Understanding how and how not to formulate a spend could be a good skill to have...normally it is done by the code in one's wallet.

It always seemed to me that there may be some utility in making some previously illegal addresses legal and/or making some previously legal addresses illegal when doing a hard fork to allow certain kinds of optional spends.  Of course the 'other fork' could 'embrace and extend' the construct with a patch fairly quickly, but then one loses the advantage of not making legacy users deploy.

Another thing I've been concerned about is that one fork or another could code in some sort of a 'forced spend.'  Then I and a great many others would have to dig out our deep storage wallets.  I'm sure that in a lot of cases these wallets are extraordinarily difficult to deal with.  I've heard that some of them are etched in glass and stored in a cave vault or some such.  I never felt the need to get that extreme, but it would take a fair bit of doing to get access to most of my stash.  That in and of itself would be incentive to favor a fork which did not force a spend (as well as simply finding it loathsome on principle.)

[hdbuck]

...
Are there any of those 275 who have contributed to core willing to speak out against the fork?

+1 and it would be interesting to know the same for the lightweight client.

Discussion between Gavin, Peter Todd, and Amir...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2e1ijs/gavin_andresen_explains_how_bitcoin_is_very/

Most developers have a very nuanced view of this hard fork so while amir seems like he is against it here Peter Todd is arguing details and implementations.

ha i was about to ask what amir thinks of it..

[waaat?]

I thought Gavin was intelligent but after reading he's intending to make it inaccessible basically unuseable and centralised aswell as seeing how he has not the slightest idea about consensus principles i had to reevaluate.
He certainly lacks a ton of skills and knowledge outside his professional field.


We should change the titel of the thread to 'turning Bitcoin into clusterfuck'

[ArticMine]

The reality of this debate is that we need to step back and consider the impact of technological change over a period of say 25 years, 50 years, 75 years, 100 years etc.

Consider the early credit cards issued by Diner's Club and American Express in the early 1950s. The data processing technology of the time was tabulating machines and punch cards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine This technology was invented in the 1890s and marketed for the most part by IBM.  Does anyone seriously believe that the transaction volumes of Visa and MasterCard today could be supported using 70 year old data processing technology? Limiting Bitcoin's scalability today based on recent technology is equivalent to limiting the total number of credit card transactions to the data processing capabilities of tabulating machines and punch cards in 1945.

Suffice to say I voted in support of Gavin's proposal, but I must add the caveat that it does not go far enough! By the way it was possible to send 1 MB of data over the telegraph network in 1913, if one had the finances of J. P. Morgan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Morgan

[Gavin Andresen]

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

What's wrong?

Lets say those million dollar transactions are 250 bytes.  That is 4,000 of them in a 1MB block.

So $40,000 total reward to the miner -- about eight times current block reward.

BUT YOU ARE SECURING TRANSACTIONS WORTH SOMETHING LIKE 2,000 TIMES MORE VALUABLE THAN TODAY'S TRANSACTIONS (estimated average transaction USD value for today's average transaction is about $380). And I GUARANTEE that attackers would have a much easier time pulling off a double-spend of one million-dollar transaction than 1,000 $1,000 transactions.

The math for "large value transactions will generate enough fees to secure the chain" just doesn't work.
The math for "lots of small transactions will generate enough fees to secure the chain" might.

Also:

I still haven't heard a coherent argument on why large value transactions are necessarily also high-fee transactions.

I'd suggest you go research existing high-value-payment networks and see what typical fees are for multi-million dollar transactions. FEDWIRE is running at 6 transactions per second, average transaction value over $6million, with fees per transaction UNDER ONE DOLLAR.

Why? Because if you are giving somebody one million dollars for something, you almost certainly have built up real-world trust, and probably have a longstanding relationship, signed contracts, etc etc.

If you think Bitcoin is different, please explain the scenario where I send a stranger who I don't trust (so have to rely completely on the blockchain) $1million for something.

[inBitweTrust]

Suffice to say I voted in support of Gavin's proposal, but I must add the caveat that it does not go far enough! By the way it was possible to send 1 MB of data over the telegraph network in 1913, if one had the finances of J. P. Morgan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Morgan

It doesn't go far enough but is a prudent step in the right direction and buys developers some time to focus on blockchain bloat and implementing sidechains.
Perhaps 20MB is the limit and we can find other ways to fund security and payment channels like Garzik's proposal impulse begin to take off.

I do empathize with many of the opposition being an anarchist myself , but don't believe that raising the block is that big of a deal because :

1) It may not have much of an immediate impact if at all and by the time blocks start exceeding 1MB , 20MB will be as insignificant as 1MB to us now
2) While the hard fork may add a slight amount of centralization, it may do the opposite as well with cheaper transactions moving from off the chain to on the chain
3) Centralization fears are exaggerated and can be reversed in the future. Mining pool centralization is a much bigger fear regardless. I'm not to comfortable with what essentially amounts to a 3 of 5 multisig to secure us against a 51% attack.

If you think Bitcoin is different, please explain the scenario where I send a stranger who I don't trust (so have to rely completely on the blockchain) $1million for something.

The only possible purpose I can come up with to fit such scenario is illicit high stakes transaction payment rail to facilitate drug lords, covert organizations like the CIA,corrupt banksters, kingpins , mobsters and dictators who need to transfer wealth in the millions between each other.

Isn't exactly what I had envisioned for bitcoin to solely be a tool for. Additionally, there aren't enough of them in the world to perform a continuous 7tps to support the network security if bitcoin was used for that purpose.

[RoadStress]

A mix between pro and DGAF as I don't care but it will need to happen eventually so why not now?

Not a tech-dude here, but i, on the contrary, feel that this is somehow of a crucial matter.
Personally I like bitcoin the way it is now.

I just started reading this thread, but let me show you my point of view regarding this.

In order for bitcoin to succeed as a protocol, not as a currency it needs services running on top of it. Either centralized or decentralized bitcoin is here for everyone(not only for those paying the higher fees)! A first service would be the Lighthouse project which is supposed to be a decentralized way of raising funds Kickstarter-style but which is already limited by the 1MB block size cap (see https://www.vinumeris.com/lighthouse/faq#max-pledges). Having a 1MB block size limit hinders innovation and tech development in my view and don't forget that I'm also a miner, but I agree and support Gavin in this matter. I view the blockchain as a decentralized and neutral informational highway. Let data flow freely if you want a higher value of the whole ecosystem. Let's find solutions to the potential problems like blockchain bloat by innovating, not by rejecting and imposing limits.

Consider bitcoin as the internet. Everyone is using it whether he is poor (free wi-fi) or wealthy (Google, Facebook etc). There are a lot of great things built on free services (twitter, instagram, facebook etc). I bet that you wouldn't like it if your ISP would have a 100MB/s download speed and would action it for the highest bidder. Forcing fees hinders evolution!

So please let's fork already so we can see some real services coming to life!