Bitcoin 20MB Fork

[iCEBREAKER]

I'd rather a Bitcoin that is both absurdly valuable, and cheap to use, because of high transaction volumes and adoption rates.

Cheap to use shouldn't mean mean free or almost free.

Bitcoin is now past the era of needing to give out free samples and rely on word-of-mouth marketing.

All the right people already know Bitcoin exists and what it can do.

At this moment, we need to stop subsidizing transactions and see what price the market will bear in a 1MB environment.

Innovations and substitutions will ensue, and we may find we requires less (or more) than 20mb.

Let's give it some time and observation before fixing what is already working spectacularly well.

[amincd]

^ It's not free. Transaction fee revenue has been growing with transaction volumes:



There was a slight decrease in average transaction fees recently due to the price decline in Bitcoin, but that should reverse itself if Bitcoin prices recover (and I think they will skyrocket if we raise the limit).

And I am very confident total transaction fee revenue will continue growing if the limit is raised. On the other hand, we have never had a situation where blocks are full for an extended period of time. There is a giant unknown as to what will happen. It's very possible people will move to an altcoin blockchain.

Given blocks could increase in size to 16.8 MB with a large subset of the population still able to host a full node on their consumer broadband, there is no reason to risk hamstringing adoption at such a low 1 MB limit.

[RoadStress]

Ok, but my point is still valid. Satoshi never had a block size limit!

Didn't he add one at some point?
The one you want removed?
Dumbass.

Oh good. Reverting to personal attacks just like the MP retard train. What about some decent reasoning? Or what about you answer me to this question:

On to the subject. Why are you against the fork and against raising the block size limit?

Instead of throwing shit like everyone else maybe we can have a decent talk. What do you say?

Let's give it some time and observation before fixing what is already working spectacularly well.

We gave it time for observation. The Lighthouse project is hindered by a 1MB block size limit so we already have a problem. Services will not be able to run smoothly on top of blockchain with a 1MB limit. It's that easy!

[davout]

I'm not interested in either of the "Satoshi willed it", and "but I want it sooooo bad" non-arguments.

I believe they are not as secure or distributed as Bitcoin main.

Please, explain to me how merged mining is insecure. Take your time.

Bitcoin has never been faced with an extended period of time when its blocks were full. That means we don't know if altcoins will suddenly take market share in the event that blocks start hitting the 1 MB limit on a regular basis. Your argument is therefore, with all due respect, another case of you being disingenuous in this debate.

My argument is perfectly fine, and you actually add to it.
For how could we come up with a sensible solution if we haven't actually experienced the issue?

[davout]

What about some decent reasoning?

"Roadstress says retarded shit, therefore Roadstress is an idiot".

Sounds like a decent syllogism to me.

[amincd]

I'm not interested in either of the "Satoshi willed it", and "but I want it sooooo bad" non-arguments.

So you're only interested in what code Satoshi put in. You've arbitrarily decided that the plan he communicated in writing is irrelevant, but not the code he wrote 5 years ago.

In the context of this debate, what Satoshi communicated in writing as to his intention for Bitcoin's future block size, is more important than what he coded 5 years ago as a temporary anti-spam measure.

I believe they are not as secure or distributed as Bitcoin main.

Please, explain to me how merged mining is insecure. Take your time.

Bitcoin miners can attack sidechains at very low cost to themselves, as they can earn BTC mining Bitcoin main chain WHILE doing the attack on the sidechain. Furthermore, a successful >50% attack on a sidechain is much more destructive than one on Bitcoin main, allowing the attacker to steal all of the BTC backing the sidechain. A sidechain is also likely to not have 100% of the network hashrate of Bitcoin merge-mining it, since it requires extra effort for a Bitcoin miner to merge-mine another chain, so it will be easier to >50% attack.

For all of these reasons, sidechains are not as secure. I recommend you read the sidechain whitepaper published by Blockstream to see the risks that sidechains face.

My argument is perfectly fine, and you actually add to it.
For how could we come up with a sensible solution if we haven't actually experienced the issue?

Your argument is terrible. A large subset of the population can continue to host full nodes without upgrading their consumer broadband, with the block size limit that Gavin has proposed (16.8 MB with 40% growth per year). Given this fact, there's no reason to gamble Bitcoin's entire future on an experiment to see what happens when blocks fill up at a low 1 MB limit for an extended period of time. I don't want to give any altcoins an opportunity to take market share from Bitcoin.

[sgbett]

I'd rather a Bitcoin that is both absurdly valuable, and cheap to use, because of high transaction volumes and adoption rates.

Cheap to use shouldn't mean mean free or almost free.

Bitcoin is now past the era of needing to give out free samples and rely on word-of-mouth marketing.

All the right people already know Bitcoin exists and what it can do.

At this moment, we need to stop subsidizing transactions and see what price the market will bear in a 1MB environment.

Innovations and substitutions will ensue, and we may find we requires less (or more) than 20mb.

Let's give it some time and observation before fixing what is already working spectacularly well.

Cheap to use or almost free, only hurts miners if there is an artificial cap on the number of transactions.

If instead the number of transactions is based on supply and demand such that no artificial cap affects potential revenue then miners stand to make more money. The consumer does not care that the $3.50 coffee cost you, say $3.5001. The billion or so transactions that paid $0.0001 to be included in the next block mean the miner that solved it gets paid $100,000.

So it can be both 'almost free' for the end user, and incredibly lucrative for the miners. All at the same time.

I agree with your premise to let the market decide. If the protocol stops them selling goods (space in the next block) that's not really a 'free' market though is it.


(*all values converted to representative dollar values for illustration purposes - in a mass adoption scenario, everything would be in BTC anyway)

[davout]

In the context of this debate, what Satoshi communicated in writing as to his intention for Bitcoin's future block size, is more important than what he coded 5 years ago as a temporary anti-spam measure.

Lol no, fuck that, no appeal to authority will be tolerated as it is not a valid argument form.

all of these reasons, sidechains are not as secure. I recommend you read the sidechain whitepaper published by Blockstream to see the risks that sidechains face.

That's a very cool story, except I was talking about merged mining, not side-chains. Read what I write, you'll save us both time.

[amincd]

In the context of this debate, what Satoshi communicated in writing as to his intention for Bitcoin's future block size, is more important than what he coded 5 years ago as a temporary anti-spam measure.

Lol no, fuck that, no appeal to authority will be tolerated as it is not a valid argument form.

You're appealing to the authority of Satoshi coding the temporary anti-spam measure. My argument that if you're going to put credence in that, then it would be arbitrary and therefore disingenuous to claim what he communicated in writing as to his intention for Bitcoin's future block size has no authority.

all of these reasons, sidechains are not as secure. I recommend you read the sidechain whitepaper published by Blockstream to see the risks that sidechains face.

That's a very cool story, except I was talking about merged mining, not side-chains. Read what I write, you'll save us both time.

Then what, you want altcoins to handle the bulk of the transactions?

I reiterate:

A large subset of the population can continue to host full nodes without upgrading their consumer broadband, with the block size limit that Gavin has proposed (16.8 MB with 40% growth per year). Given this fact, there's no reason to gamble Bitcoin's entire future on an experiment to see what happens when blocks fill up at a low 1 MB limit for an extended period of time. I don't want to give any altcoins an opportunity to take market share from Bitcoin.

[tvbcof]

Firstly I'd like to say that I appreciate someone from the anti-fork side presenting a reasoned case, so thank you.  If the others had conducted themselves in this manner, perhaps I'd be more interested in listening to them.

Thanks for at least reading and considering it.  I've outlined my concerns in some detail here and there, but it's exhasting.  More fun to hurl invective sometimes, and depending on the audience, probably more effective as well.

Ultimately it sounds as though your concern is that increased adoption and scalability can't happen in any beneficial way unless a significant proportion of Bitcoin's users understand the inner workings and run full nodes.  Sadly I have to say that, fork or otherwise, I don't think that's ever going to happen.  Regardless of the block size, I suspect a majority will always prefer a lightweight client.  While many of us are here because we're intrigued by the ideals of decentralisation, most of Bitcoin's potential future users may not be interested in that and will just want something that works and is easy to use.  While it's clear many in this thread would say it's best not to entertain such a lack of understanding (and I'm one of those who generally tries to discourage the use of web wallets, so I do sympathise), the question you have to ask is to what extreme do you take it?  If your chosen fork only has the technically-minded "power users" (for lack of a better phrase), then you're only going to be sending your transactions amongst yourselves.  For an ecosystem to truly thrive, I'm afraid to say you'll need at least some "idiots" for the sake of network effects.  It's a simple fact of life that not everyone will care enough to be fully educated about this stuff.  This would bring me back to the point I made in the other "fork off" thread about elitism generally not being helpful to the survival of the currency.

I just see no 'sweet spot' where some realistic threshold of 'Joe Sixpack' users can use Bitcoin for every day stuff and yet the system remains small enough to be sufficiently decentralized and defensible from subversion.  There is always going to be some point where there is exclusion.

Even back when I first started using the system I was so aware of the cost of doing transactions which remain forever the responsibility of infrastructure operators (including myself) to maintain that I moderated my usage out of consideration.  I find it highly irritating that people demand this level of security for day-to-day purchases.  Similarly, the argument that everyone somehow 'deserves' this level of security is absurd to me.  I don't request nor desire Bitcoin level security for any but the most critical transactions that I do.

I am a huge fan of 'sidechains' which should be on the near horizon.  Assuming they approximate the design goal, they offer all the advantages of both Bitcoin and alt coins.  With a properly functioning 2-way peg, a 'sidecoin' is for all intents and purposes a 'bitcoin'.  A sidecoin user must induce a lock-up of BTC which minimizes the economic impact on Bitcoin (though if sidechains are successful which I find very possible they could increase demand for Bitcoin significantly.)

Sidechains offer a theoretical and solid scaling potential to Bitcoin that make sense to me.  If people want to have a conversation about blocksize based on this solid scaling mechanism (or really any other one), I'm listening.  As I've mentioned several times on this thread, the current 20MB idea looks a to me a lot like some combination of a poorly considered hale Mary and a desperate and deceptive propaganda campaign.

People knock sidechains because they are 'not as secure' as Bitcoin.  That to me makes as much sense as knocking a bus shelter because it is not as secure as a nuclear bomb proof bunker.  That is a GOOD thing!  It simply does not need to be, and it just makes the bus shelter and expensive pain-in-the-ass to use.  And anyway, a properly implemented sidechain should be very close to Bitcoin's level of security anyway.  And it should help support Bitcoin in times of failure of mining support from simple economics to boot.

(FWIW, I have never had any interest in researching or obtaining alts.  I love the fact that many of them are exploring interesting ideas and have nothing against them in principle, but I've not yet given up on Bitcoin as something with the potential to be the solid core of a workable autonomous and solid crypto-currency solution.)

The trade off will be, if we carry on without change and start to regularly hit the block size limit and unconfirmed transactions start to pile up, the users who don't feel as strongly about decentralisation will change to a system that confirms their transaction first.  If we start haemorrhaging users, then the reputation of the network itself could suffer and the general opinion could propagate that Bitcoin is slow and doesn't scale well enough.  If the only people left still transacting are the ones who weren't prepared to compromise because of concerns over centralisation, however justified they might seem, then things could get pretty bleak.  To me, that's a more pressing concern than big business taking over and destroying fungibility.  

Most of the pro-fork camp aren't oblivious to the fact that we'll be making compromises too.  But scenarios about increased centralisation aren't enough to convince me that we shouldn't be raising this limit.  And in the event of such fungibility scenarios becoming likely, I'm pretty sure we'd all be rallying to fight against it.

See, I'm visualizing sidechains as a (frankly, near perfect) solution to give the masses (and their network effect) all of the power of Bitcoin and much more while not damaging it with pointless bloat which reduces the pool of potential infrastructure support.  I imagined some sort of a network of subordinate chains as a scaling mechanism very soon after I read the whitepaper and saw the scaling difficulties.  This is why your otherwise logical conceptions of the realities of 'network effect' are not swaying me an why I and so many others are at loggerheads.

Alts are not 'subordinate' chains.  They are entirely independent.  They are competition, and that's fine and good, but I'd much rather see a solution which works in a symbiotic manner with Bitcoin.  I see some real difficulties with the simplistic conception of support for stand-alone native Bitcoin as we move forward and feel that sidechains can not only resolve the 'scaling' issues, and not only provide vastly better access for the masses, but also provide a support backstop in times when miners cannot make a dime (other than by exploiting the userbase.)

[amincd]

It just seems like having this debate is about repeating the same points over and over again. Case in point:

Assuming they approximate the design goal, they offer all the advantages of both Bitcoin and alt coins.

As I mentioned to davout:

Bitcoin miners can attack sidechains at very low cost to themselves, as they can earn BTC mining Bitcoin main chain WHILE doing the attack on the sidechain. Furthermore, a successful >50% attack on a sidechain is much more destructive than one on Bitcoin main, allowing the attacker to steal all of the BTC backing the sidechain. A sidechain is also likely to not have 100% of the network hashrate of Bitcoin merge-mining it, since it requires extra effort for a Bitcoin miner to setup to merge-mine another chain, so it will be easier to >50% attack.

For all of these reasons, sidechains are not as secure Bitcoin main. I recommend you read the sidechain whitepaper published by Blockstream to see the risks that sidechains face.

[gustav]

For how could we come up with a sensible solution if we haven't actually experienced the issue?

THIS is how a healthy mind works.

The pro-forkers are all neurotics in my opinion.

There isn't a problem so what da fuck is everyone on about?

[RoadStress]

What about some decent reasoning?

"Roadstress says retarded shit, therefore Roadstress is an idiot".

Sounds like a decent syllogism to me.

English is not my main language if that's your problem with me.

Still not a single reason (besides bloatchain) of why we shouldn't fork. Just like everyone else that it's anti-fork. Simply saying "no no no" without bringing anything new to the discussion isn't constructive at all. Ok. Since you are out of arguments and you refuse to answer to the question of why shouldn't we increase the block size limit should we revert to calling names each other?

See, I'm visualizing sidechains as a (frankly, near perfect) solution to give the masses (and their network effect) all of the power of Bitcoin and much more while not damaging it with pointless bloat which reduces the pool of potential infrastructure support.

I am a big fan of the sidechains too, but do we know how much space in a block will the 2-way peg need? I don't remember seeing a reference to this.

[homo homini lupus]

Is Gavin still hiding in his basket?

[RoadStress]

Is Gavin still hiding in his basket?

Is MP still pumping your ass?

[tvbcof]

It just seems like having this debate is about repeating the same points over and over again. Case in point:

Indeed.

Assuming they approximate the design goal, they offer all the advantages of both Bitcoin and alt coins.

As I mentioned to davout:

Bitcoin miners can attack sidechains at very low cost to themselves, as they can earn BTC mining Bitcoin main chain WHILE doing the attack on the sidechain. Furthermore, a successful >50% attack on a sidechain is much more destructive than one on Bitcoin main, allowing the attacker to steal all of the BTC backing the sidechain. A sidechain is also likely to not have 100% of the network hashrate of Bitcoin merge-mining it, since it requires extra effort for a Bitcoin miner to setup to merge-mine another chain, so it will be easier to >50% attack.

For all of these reasons, sidechains are not as secure Bitcoin main. I recommend you read the sidechain whitepaper published by Blockstream to see the risks that sidechains face.

I see the need for merge-mining on a sidechain as only necessary to interact with and support it's backing store (Bitcoin.)  That is, what I would call their 'backing store layer'.

Bitcoin mines because POW is it's only backing store.  Fiat has the power of government for backing.  Gold has {n} Avogadro's numbers of difficult to synthesize atoms.  Bitcoin has sha256 hashing.

Sidecoins have Bitcoin as backing.  Thus, they do not need to use POW (sha256 or otherwise) to handle the internal accounting, and all manners of fairly secure and verifiable options exist here.  I'll expect to see many such options explored.  People who think that POW mining on a blockchain is the only way to achieve this, I believe, only know a hammer and thus see every problem as a nail.

You also clearly didn't read my statement on where I do and do not need 'military grade' security.  I keep some excess fiat in PayPal, but not my lifes' savings.  If they fold and/or steal my money I'll be pissed and I'll try to get it back, but it won't hurt me much because I balance my risk.  Indeed, I do the same for fiat in banks.  That will be very much the case for sidechains.  I'll mainly choose to use sidechains based on my desire to support a particular effort which sponsors them.  I'll not put much money into any particular sidechain for some time, if ever, so I simply don't need high level security.  I'll use native Bitcoin for my deep storage of real value...unless the bloatchain guys win the war that is.

[tvbcof]

For how could we come up with a sensible solution if we haven't actually experienced the issue?

THIS is how a healthy mind works.

The pro-forkers are all neurotics in my opinion.

There isn't a problem so what da fuck is everyone on about?

Speaking only for myself, I don't really want a fight (though I've almost got myself convinced otherwise.)  The response is mostly a mirror of what other higher vertabrates do when they are threatened:



The creature is saying  "I've got my kill and/or my group to support...don't expect to roll me over without a fight and do expect some collateral damage even in the best of circumstances."

[smoothie]

is there a TL;DR?

[RoadStress]

For how could we come up with a sensible solution if we haven't actually experienced the issue?

THIS is how a healthy mind works.

The pro-forkers are all neurotics in my opinion.

There isn't a problem so what da fuck is everyone on about?

There IS a problem. Lighthouse project is hindered by the 1MB block size. The fact that you and everyone else is ignoring it will not make it go away.

And this is just one project. We could have additional projects/services that will be hindered by the small block size limit.

[iCEBREAKER]

I'd rather a Bitcoin that is both absurdly valuable, and cheap to use, because of high transaction volumes and adoption rates.

Cheap to use shouldn't mean mean free or almost free.

Bitcoin is now past the era of needing to give out free samples and rely on word-of-mouth marketing.

All the right people already know Bitcoin exists and what it can do.

At this moment, we need to stop subsidizing transactions and see what price the market will bear in a 1MB environment.

Innovations and substitutions will ensue, and we may find we requires less (or more) than 20mb.

Let's give it some time and observation before fixing what is already working spectacularly well.

Cheap to use or almost free, only hurts miners if there is an artificial cap on the number of transactions.

If instead the number of transactions is based on supply and demand such that no artificial cap affects potential revenue then miners stand to make more money. The consumer does not care that the $3.50 coffee cost you, say $3.5001. The billion or so transactions that paid $0.0001 to be included in the next block mean the miner that solved it gets paid $100,000.

So it can be both 'almost free' for the end user, and incredibly lucrative for the miners. All at the same time.

I agree with your premise to let the market decide. If the protocol stops them selling goods (space in the next block) that's not really a 'free' market though is it.


(*all values converted to representative dollar values for illustration purposes - in a mass adoption scenario, everything would be in BTC anyway)

Is it worth self-exile from TOR and other low-bandwith networks just so Bitcoin can attempt to track every coffee bean/bus ticket and be a single point of failure for all transactions great and small?

The market usually prefers different mediums of exchange for transactions of very different size, and associated costs/fees/friction increase according to value transferred:

[Joe Schmoe] coins<bills<plastic<check<ACH<wire<gold [central banks]