Bitcoin 20MB Fork

[balu2]

1st: the limit isn't even reached
2nd: reaching the limit will not render bitcoin unuseable, instead there will be a healthy market for txs and fees and some txs will happen on altchains - so what?
3rd: no effort has been undertaken to get rid of all the spammy micro-stuff, if that would be done you wouldn't even need to talk about that for another year or two or even three

i can't see why it's needed to fork especially with all the risks involved and with the costs of bad press (you already have it), pushing out noobs (already happens), slowing adoption (happens), loosing trust from the user (happened).

Gavin is basically producing some horseshit and we are forced to discuss it until we can't hear it anymore. All the internet talking about this shit. Someone tell the man his priorities. He obviously can't identify them. Gavin is horrible PR. Hide him under a rock.

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[hdbuck]

im not getting the mining stake here..

if the massive mining ops switch to 20MB blocks, that will leave hobbyist miners (me) the ability to get their home miners out of their boxes to sustain the 1MB bitcoin, for which the hashrate would be 'bearable' again?

edit: how will the block rewards split between the two blockchains?

the longest or prevailing  chain will get the reward ,the other chain would get orphaned ?

if there were two forks and one was "easy" to mine and the other had current difficulty levels
then the coins would have to have differnt values

a gavincoin would be worth a btc  and the  MPcoin would be worth less ,maybe like a litecoin

how about the hodlers ? anyone who has a million coins in storage will spend them on the fork that is worth the most or is it not optional ?

No, they'd end up as two different coins, both rewarding miners with 25 coins every 10 min. Balances would be the same on both chains, if you have 100btc now you'd have both 100 gavincoin and 100 mpcoin.

Worth has no direct reference to a fork, that's fiat and so a dubious representation of value at the best of times but mining costs come into it so if both sides of the fork can continue to run smoothly the argument whether more transactions or less transactions get more in fees would play out for all to see.

ok but then regarding the 25coins rewards (+fees), one small miner can assume that it would be more profitable (BTC wise ofc) to go for the blockchain which has a lower hashrate and a higher transaction fees (ie. 1MB blockchain) right?

[adworker]

microtransactions can happen offchain. Why would they need to be on chain?
...
It's not your storage but the storage of the people on their systems. Maybe that's why you like to waste it?

You can save peer storage only if the microtransactions are done in some centralized service, but why you deny people to use cryptocurrency for their microtransactions?

If you cant afford to dedicate the harddisk space for blockchain, well you can run some lite client instead...

[amincd]

Bitcoin will not change the world by being conservative. Bitcoin will change the world by being bold. I vote 'pro'.

At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node.

The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction
would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be
broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion
transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day.
That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or
2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.

If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then,
sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.

[hdbuck]

Bitcoin will not change the world by being conservative. Bitcoin will change the world by being bold. I vote 'pro'.

At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node.

The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction
would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be
broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion
transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day.
That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or
2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.

If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then,
sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.

thank you for quoting this

[Crypto9er]

I voted pro because I am for increasing max block size. But IMO it's too early to jump to 20MB. Maybe less?

[inBitweTrust]

Not too sure but I think the reason we can't just do 2mb instead of 1 is because we would need to fork again
Throwing it at 20mb should resolve the issue for quite some time.

What I support most strongly is that we do substantially-delayed hard forks with conservative values. Then doing hard forks regularly isn't such a big issue.

For example, Bitcoin Core can be immediately modified to increase the max block size to 2 MB on a specific date 2 years from now. I think that pretty much everyone would be basically OK with this max block size (and even higher values might be widely acceptable). By the time the change actually takes effect in 2 years, everyone will already have upgraded because very few people use 2-year-old software. Businesses and users won't have to go out of their way to choose one fork over another, and so there will be less room for messiness.

Then if a really nice academic study convincingly arguing that 5 MB blocks are safe is published 1 week after the 2-year-delayed change is added, another 2-year-delayed change can be added right away with very little extra cost. After ~2 years, the max block size will increase to 2 MB, and then a week later change to 5 MB.

Yes, 2 years is a long time. But I'm confident that Bitcoin will survive that long with 1 MB blocks.

I think this is a good idea but slightly too conservative. Have all the changes implemented in Bitcoin core but have them set to initiate at some future block to scale up more naturally.

I think this would be very conservative-
In ~6 months = Increase to 2MB limit
In ~12 months = Increase to 4MB limit
In ~2 years = Increase to 8MB limit
In ~4 years = Increase to 16MB limit

Than we can re-evaluate the needs further at that time. It should also be a good idea to do more testing with 20MB and larger blocks as Gavin has been doing so if we need to do a sudden hardfork to keep up with transaction demands we always have a well tested option we can use.

[amincd]

I voted pro because I am for increasing max block size. But IMO it's too early to jump to 20MB. Maybe less?

It's actually about 16.8 MB, and it's very unlikely the block size will grow to anywhere near 16 MB immediately. Consider that it took 6 years for Bitcoin to go from 0 to 0.5 MB, despite the fact that the block size limit has allowed 1 MB blocks for the entire time. For one, there's limited demand for transactions with fees, and limited UTXOs with enough CoinAge to be spent for free. For another, miners have their soft limit, that caps the average block size.

But agree. I'd prefer a limit lower than 16.8 MB, but I don't think it's a big enough deal to ask for a different limit. We need consensus around one proposal, and Gavin's is the one that has the strongest chance of getting the support. And it might end up being beneficial to increase the limit by a substantial amount now, and give space for a major spurt in adoption.

I think this is a good idea but slightly too conservative. Have all the changes implemented in Bitcoin core but have them set to initiate at some future block to scale up more naturally.

Consider that consensus gets harder as the community gets larger. Also consider that relying on hard forks leads to the Bitcoin community having to centralize itself to some degree in order to achieve consensus on which hard fork to adopt. By making the block limit dynamic and not reliant on political consensus, we give Bitcoin the space to become more decentralized as a community, and reduce the risk of a hard fork going wrong. I'd rather just have one hard fork to set a dynamic block size limit, and get it over with, then have these debates, and risky hard forks, every four years.

[balu2]

microtransactions can happen offchain. Why would they need to be on chain?
...
It's not your storage but the storage of the people on their systems. Maybe that's why you like to waste it?

You can save peer storage only if the microtransactions are done in some centralized service, but why you deny people to use cryptocurrency for their microtransactions?

If you cant afford to dedicate the harddisk space for blockchain, well you can run some lite client instead...

certainly don't deny people to use crypto for micro stuff, but maybe the bitcoin chain isn't the right place for that. Reddcoin or dogecoin comes to mind ...

I don't want a lite-version. Why should i use a liteversion and get centralised network and a cartel so that everyone can send their 5cent transactions?

Your argument (in case it was one) is invalid.

[balu2]

Bitcoin will not change the world by being conservative. Bitcoin will change the world by being bold. I vote 'pro'.

technocrat astroturfer detected

[RoadStress]

microtransactions can happen offchain. Why would they need to be on chain? What percentage of txs are micro? I guess most.

Gavins' approach is:
-alienating
-wasteful with recouces (storage)
-inefficient
-lowers security
-brings in more centralisation
-causes trouble because it's very controversal

i have no idea how anyone in their right minds can vote for this without even demanding alternative proposals

It's not your storage but the storage of the people on their systems. Maybe that's why you like to waste it?

Who are you to chose where microtransaction happen? I thought Bitcoin is all about decentralization and free market. Why are you trying to impose your point?

I voted pro because I am for increasing max block size. But IMO it's too early to jump to 20MB. Maybe less?

It's actually about 16.8 MB, and it's very unlikely the block size will grow to anywhere near 16 MB immediately. Consider that it took 6 years for Bitcoin to go from 0 to 0.5 MB, despite the fact that the block size limit has allowed 1 MB blocks for the entire time.

Exactly! Blocks will not reach 20MB the day we hard-fork. It will take a lot of time and transactions to get there.

[amincd]

Mpcoin supporters have announced that they will sell their gavincoins and buy mpcoins instead. Gavincoin supporters have not announced anything. So one can suppose that, at the beginning, the price of gavincoin will tank.
This will attract more people who had no opinion but who want to earn easy money, especially if at least one Bitcoin/fiat exchange exists on both chains.
This will also send a signal to miners : if Mpcoin has more value than Gavincoin, some miners will have an incentive to switch back to Mpcoin.
During the whole time of the operation, the chain with the lower hashrate will be vulnerable to 51% attacks.
The fiat price of both will probably tank also, because people will not know if any of them will survive.

In the end, if MP wins, there will probably never be another hard fork proposal.

That's despicable. Bitcoin was never meant to be a permanent 1 MB block size network. Caveden's warning from 2010 sounds prescient now:

Hello all,

Recently I just posted on another thread to express my concern about this subject, but I thought it might deserve a topic of its own.

This block size rule is something really "dangerous" to the protocol. Rules like that are almost impossible to change once there are many clients implementing the protocol. Take SMTP as an example. Several improvements could be done to it, but how? It's impractical to synchronize the change.

And, well, if we ever want to scale, such limit will have to grow. I really think we should address this problem while there is only one client used by everyone, and changes in the protocol are still feasible, because in the future we may not be able to.

As far as I understand, one of the purposes of this block size limit was to avoid flooding. Another purpose as well, as mentioned here, is to keep the transaction fees not "too small" in order to create an incentive for block generation once the coin production isn't that interesting anymore. (if only a limited number of transactions can enter a block, those with the smallest fees won't be quickly processed...)

So, if we really need a block size limit, and if we also need it to scale, why not making such limit so that it adjusts itself to the transaction rate, as the difficulty of generation adjust itself to the generation rate?

Some of the smart guys in this forum could come up with an adjustment formula, taking in consideration the total size of all transactions in the latest X blocks, and calculating which should be the block size limit for the next X blocks. Just like the difficulty factor.This way we avoid this "dangerous" constant in the protocol.
One of the things the smart guys would have to decide is how rigorous will the adjustment be. Should the adjustment be done in order to always leave enough room to all transactions in the next block, or should blocks be "tight" enough to make sure that some transactions will have to wait, thus pushing up the transaction fees?

Okay, I do realize that it would allow flooders to slowly increase the limit, but, what for? As long as generators aren't accepting 0-fee transactions, a flooder would have to pay to perform his attack.

So, what do you think?

Anyway, I'll use the real Bitcoin, that doesn't try to make permanent a temporary anti-spam measure, no matter what.

[pawel7777]

...

certainly don't deny people to use crypto for micro stuff, but maybe the bitcoin chain isn't the right place for that. Reddcoin or dogecoin comes to mind ...
...

So basically if I want to use bitcoin ("use" not just "hold") I'd need to use DOGE as well. Then why would I need bitcoin at all?

[amincd]

Anyone who claims that transaction volume moving to another blockchain won't destroy the value of Bitcoin is either delusional or lying.

Bitcoin's status as digital gold is backed by the demand for it as a transactional currency. All of the speculative demand for Bitcoin right now is based on the potential it has to carry on it a substantial portion of global finance. Bitcoin won't survive as an expensive to use competitor to SWIFT. It needs to be extremely cheap, and have space for millions of people.

[inBitweTrust]

Mpcoin supporters have announced that they will sell their gavincoins and buy mpcoins instead. Gavincoin supporters have not announced anything. So one can suppose that, at the beginning, the price of gavincoin will tank.

We don't need to announce anything. People will typically follow what is in their economic self interest and will definitely be arbitrating both ways. Expect equal sell pressure on MP coins, if not more.

I'd rather just have one hard fork to set a dynamic block size limit, and get it over with, then have these debates, and risky hard forks, every four years.

That is what Theymos and I are talking about. One hard fork now that sets a block/~time dependent dynamically staggered block size limit.

Anyone who claim that transaction volume moving to another blockchain won't destroy the value of Bitcoin is either delusional or lying.

Bitcoin's status as digital gold is backed by the demand for it as a transactional currency. All of the speculative demand for Bitcoin right now is based on the potential it has to carry on it a substantial portion of global finance. Bitcoin won't survive as an expensive to use competitor to SWIFT. It needs to be extremely cheap, and have space for millions of people.

Yes.

[dancing altcoin shiva]

it gets interesting when an exchange offers gavincoin/mpcoin pair
(but don't expect anyone to participate in your madness)

[amincd]

If you want an one world currency for everything you are in the wrong club, I heard they are meeting in a caribbean island soon.

I want a new digital gold, not a government backed one-world currency. Gold was once an international currency, free of political control. Satoshi modeled Bitcoin after gold, and in his writings, talked about a Bitcoin that handled Visa level transaction volumes.

[amincd]

and Bitcoin will be that if this mad fork do not realize, I may be wrong but if so I still cannot see it.

Now I'm confused. It seemed like you agreed with me that Bitcoin can only become a digital gold if it's a transactional currency:

Anyone who claim that transaction volume moving to another blockchain won't destroy the value of Bitcoin is either delusional or lying.

or both! maybe they all want Bitcoin to die so an alt can take its holy place

And do you realize that Satoshi was always planning to do a hard fork, and that he wanted Bitcoin to handle thousands of transactions per second?

[balu2]

microtransactions can happen offchain. Why would they need to be on chain? What percentage of txs are micro? I guess most.

Gavins' approach is:
-alienating
-wasteful with recouces (storage)
-inefficient
-lowers security
-brings in more centralisation
-causes trouble because it's very controversal

i have no idea how anyone in their right minds can vote for this without even demanding alternative proposals

It's not your storage but the storage of the people on their systems. Maybe that's why you like to waste it?

Who are you to chose where microtransaction happen? I thought Bitcoin is all about decentralization and free market. Why are you trying to impose your point?

I'm not choosing where microtransactions happen. They happen where they happen. And who are YOU to try to impose your hardfork on me?


Gawd, this discussion is some toxic bullshit.
I'm out. F*** you all.

[altcoin hitler]