Bitcoin 20MB Fork

[amincd]

Cliffs: if each bitcoin is worth unimaginable amounts of something (dollars?), we fucked up.

Each bitcoin won't be worth unimaginable amounts. We'll rename the 'bit' to 'bitcoin', and it will only be worth $1. Stop trying to stop progress. People want to use the blockchain, and consumer broadband allows nodes to host a higher bandwidth blockchain, so there's no need to make the temporary 1 MB anti-spam restriction into a permanent limit on Bitcoin's scalability. Change and progress is scary for humans. We prefer the familiar. But we're better off embracing it, and venturing into the unknown.

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[traincarswreck]

Cliffs: if each bitcoin is worth unimaginable amounts of something (dollars?), we fucked up.

Each bitcoin won't be worth unimaginable amounts. We'll rename the 'bit' to 'bitcoin', and it will only be worth $1. Stop trying to stop progress. People want to use the blockchain, and consumer broadband allows nodes to host a higher bandwidth blockchain, so there's no need to make the temporary 1 MB anti-spam restriction into a permanent limit on Bitcoin's scalability. Change and progress is scary for humans. We prefer the familiar. But we're better off embracing it, and venturing into the unknown.

Your communication protocol is a wreck, broken, and archaic.

And you are wondering why we cannot communicate efficiently and make wise decisions...

I am not at all trying to stop progress, your definition of progress is asinine (ie does not follow logical and reason)

[hdbuck]

if there was anything i've learn so far in real life, it is never to follow the masses. never ever freaking ever.

[traincarswreck]

if there was anything i've learn so far in real life, it is never to follow the masses. never ever freaking ever.

You are forced to because of design.

Please know I understand (to at least a non-insignificant degree) the importance and nature of markets and the players within them.  But it is not our end goal that we are at the mercy of less intelligent mass of society.  I want a "forum" or "protocol" (these words have different meaning to me in relation to past, present, future) in which me and amincd can argue to the death of it, in a sideways/tangent conversation.  One that is public enough that others can judge the validity of the result while being able to inspect the body, but NOT cluttering up this exact line of dialogue (thread).

Then they too can create a fork of that dialog and have discussions about that discussion.  Is that how this forum functions?  I get booted from social media sites for using them exactly like that, when it is is the obvious logic evolution of "forums" and discussions.  

Satoshi did not wake up and create bitcoin.  Bitcoin is an extrapolation of the history of mankind in relation to economics.  Trying to address the current issues without putting this "mechanism" in its proper relation to this observable reality is frustrating to watch.  And I blame each elite that thinks it important to disconnect the advent of bitcoin from the "clear" true story it emerged from.

All these people saying leave the truth alone, and let us bask in the mystery...are the religious nuts you created.

I want to deal with reality, and have a gigantic plethora of Satoshi-ists in my way.

[RoadStress]

I don't need to prove my crypto bone fides to some jerk who has only been here 7 hours longer than me.  My posting history, signature, and personal text (under the avatar) speak for themselves.

HashFast made ASICs to mine (IE process and secure) Bitcoins, not altcoins.  Could you possibly be more of a ridiculous assclown?  

Most of your posts are in the HashFast thread and they are supporting a company that has scammed tons of customers. You supported a company that was only able to push out one single batch of miners while making all pre-order money vanish. They secured the bitcoin netwowk like nobody else. Even BFL has secured the network better than the HashFail scammer company.

I suggest you look into Monero, which is refactoring I2P out of Java for eventual inclusion in the standard wallet.

Just another example of an anti-fork cheerleader preaching the altcoins. PLEASE move to an altcoin and spare the Bitcoin ecosystem of your shit.

So we don't have to fork next time, and we don't go x20 in one tine

If we go x20 in one time it will not make the used space 20x bigger instantaneously. If we had a 20MB limit right now it wouldn't matter because blocks will be filled by the same amount.

...

Welcome to life in my fishbowl, friend; they already know I'm a troublemaker, and now that I've hit this many keywords in one message, which they know you're reading, and which they know is a reply to your message?  They know you're a troublemaker too.  Have a nice day.

Lots of nice info. Thanks. Sucks to be in the most free and democratic country in the world where the government is spending so much money and time to protect from its own citizens instead of providing them a better lifer overall.

[VectorChief]

To anybody who thinks maybe they weren't being monitored before my outburst above and are being monitored now?  

That's crap.

There is absolutely no way this forum is not being closely monitored.  I presume that everyone participating here, including those participating via Tor, are fully aware (or at least should be aware) that this is true.  My 'educational' post above changes nothing.  

Cryddit

You mean, all these years of typing here they always knew it was me!?!?!?
Sigh... I should have picked nicer words and watched my tone, but you know what?
When you feel lonely sometimes, you can always smile at your phone's camera and know that somebody out there knows about you, cares about you, and maybe just maybe even smiles back!

We should all know that we're never alone and those hard-drives far far away are patiently collecting information about our entire lives making us a part of what can be called a digital blueprint of humanity, even when we're gone.

[traincarswreck]

Am I truly the only one in the world that recognizes the observable reality of this lecture, that is 20 years old (almost nearly perfectly the same year szabo's blog started):

   Starting with the idea of value stabilization in relation to a domestic price index associated with the territory of one state, beyond that there is the natural and logical concept of internationally based comparisons. The currencies being compared, like now the euro, the dollar, the yen, the pound, the swiss franc, the swedish kronor, etc., can be viewed with critical eyes by their users and by those who may have the option of whether or not or how to use one of them. This can lead to pressure for good quality and consequently for a lessened inflationary depreciation in value.”

    “It seems possible and not unlikely, however, that if two states evolve towards having currencies or more stable value as measured locally by national CPI indices that then also these distinct currencies would tend to evolve towards more stable comparative relations of value.

    Then the limiting or “asymptotic” result of such an evolutionary trend would be in effect “ideal money” but this as a result achieved without the adoption of anything like an ICPI index as a basis for the standard of value.”

None of you function in reality.

http://sites.stat.psu.edu/~babu/nash/money.pdf

Is there anyone that such words do not read like gibberish to? Should we not consult the very literature that created bitcoin?  How long must we continue amidst this insanity?  If none of you understand what is going on and the truth and reality of it, are you sure that makes me the illogical crazy idiot of the bunch?

YOU CANNOT SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS OUTSIDE OF THEIR ORIGINAL TRUE CONTEXT!!!

[hdbuck]

Who controls Bitcoin?

[amincd]

None of you function in reality.

Another anti-forker with his own ideas about "reality", a lot vague appeals to first principles and ideology, but no concrete arguments for why Bitcoin should deviate from the vision set out for it from the beginning, in the Bitcoin white paper and in Satoshi's description of the protocol, for an electronic cash that can be transacted peer-to-peer without financial institutions acting as intermediaries, and of a network that handles thousands of transactions per second, when we can get there without sacrificing decentralization, by simply tracking block size limit to the capabilities of technology, which grow over time (e.g. Moore's Law).

[RoadStress]

So we don't have to fork next time, and we don't go x20 in one tine

If we go x20 in one time it will not make the used space 20x bigger instantaneously. If we had a 20MB limit right now it wouldn't matter because blocks will be filled by the same amount.

The 1MB was antispam mesure, so growing the limit slowly can be good for same reason.

and mostly, as the limit would be calculated by the software, that would mean no need to fork again when 20x will not be suffiscient anymore.

I read somewhere the issue is most with bandwith, I didn't even think of it because where I live, I have fast unlimited cheap connexion

So raising the limit slowly will stop the blockchain spammers? That makes no sense. If they can spam at 2MB then they can spam at 1MB and at 20MB. We can find measures to live with the spam, but limiting the block size at 1MB isn't a valid solution for this.

[Brewins]

why not find ways to detect and block spammy transactions without need of a hard fork?

They can block email spam and DDOS attacks without changing the internet protocol, I think with BTC it might be possible to do the same.

Don't?

[solex]

So raising the limit slowly will stop the blockchain spammers? That makes no sense. If they can spam at 2MB then they can spam at 1MB and at 20MB. We can find measures to live with the spam, but limiting the block size at 1MB isn't a valid solution for this.

Correct. Let's say the block limit becomes 20MB and some spammer was capable of filling up three of them in a row, delaying confirmations for 1/2 an hour. In which case, the same spammer could right now, fill up 60 blocks at 1MB, and delay confirmations for 10 hours!  Worse, once the 1MB blocks are normally 75% full, any spammer with that capability could probably cripple tx confirmations for a whole week!

[davout]

Correct. Let's say the block limit becomes 20MB and some spammer was capable of filling up three of them in a row, delaying confirmations for 1/2 an hour. In which case, the same spammer could right now, fill up 60 blocks at 1MB, and delay confirmations for 10 hours!  Worse, once the 1MB blocks are normally 75% full, any spammer with that capability could probably cripple tx confirmations for a whole week!

Transaction fees. Duh.

[theymos]

I haven't read this thread much at all, so maybe this has already been said, but I've been noticing a lot of people saying things like, "If the block size isn't raised, then that would be bad because ..." But just wanting larger blocks isn't a good argument for increasing the max block size. By far the most important issue is what the network can support. We're just going to have to learn to deal with the fact that the network's capacity is limited and fees will probably always be larger than many people want.

Exactly what block size the network can support is very much debatable. I currently think that 10 MB would be fine and 50 MB would be too much, though these are mostly just feelings. There should be more rigorous study of the actual limits of the network. (Gavin's done some nice work on the software/hardware front, though I'm still worried about the capabilities of typical Internet connections, and especially how they'll increase over time.)

[smoothie]

why not find ways to detect and block spammy transactions without need of a hard fork?

They can block email spam and DDOS attacks without changing the internet protocol, I think with BTC it might be possible to do the same.

Don't?

Because yes your solution may help in the short term but longer term the 1 BTC block size will need to increase for legitimate transactions that start to push that limit as bitcoin gains popularity.

[traincarswreck]

Who controls Bitcoin?

Here, from the article:

The real issue is not precisely how a Bitcoin fork could actually be implemented, but merely the understanding of how events would play out in such a situation. Hypothetical situations affect reality today. When two armies meet, if they can determine who would win without actually fighting one another, then the battle is over without having begin. This is a similar situation. If a Bitcoin upgrade were known to be unpopular to investors, then its proponents, knowing who would win if push came to shove, would tend to back down before causing that much disruption. Thus, the investors are still in control even for real-life Bitcoin upgrades that never reach the point of creating such contention.

And now we must be suggesting this has nothing to do with game theory, nothing to do with Nash equilibrium, and not so relevant to the one person who understand the role of games the best in relation to technologies implication on our society.

Another anti-forker with his own ideas about "reality", a lot vague appeals to first principles and ideology, but no concrete arguments for why Bitcoin should deviate from the vision set out for it from the beginning, in the Bitcoin white paper and in Satoshi's description of the protocol, for an electronic cash that can be transacted peer-to-peer without financial institutions acting as intermediaries, and of a network that handles thousands of transactions per second, when we can get there without sacrificing decentralization, by simply tracking block size limit to the capabilities of technology, which grow over time (e.g. Moore's Law).

This person is my exactly point.  Let it be known I couldn't care less what the decision on this issue is.  I simply point out people like this that are unknowleadgeable are leading these conversations, and eventually one would expect rather we could have some dialogue that functions with knowledge and logic as a basis.  Satoshi is a religion and not the reality of how bitcoin was created.  Anyone that can't see the obviousness of this needs to be removed from any conversations that peoples wish to not be born and based on religious belief.

[solex]

I haven't read this thread much at all, so maybe this has already been said, but I've been noticing a lot of people saying things like, "If the block size isn't raised, then that would be bad because ..." But just wanting larger blocks isn't a good argument for increasing the max block size. By far the most important issue is what the network can support. We're just going to have to learn to deal with the fact that the network's capacity is limited and fees will probably always be larger than people want. (However, I do believe that the network could very likely support 10 MB blocks right now, though probably not 50 MB blocks, for example.)

Indeed. Which is why Matt's relay system and IBLT are needed, and will massively improve the situation for block propagation. People arguing for 1MB forever ignore this, yet when 20MB blocks finally appear they will take less than 1MB to broadcast through the network. It will only be bootstrapping new nodes and re-sync which will need the full blocks transmitted.

Bandwidth is the limiting factor, disk space less so.

You proposed increasing the limit to 2MB in 2 years. This is what should have been done in Feb 2013 when this debate last came up in earnest. Unfortunately, this is now too little too late. IBLT was not considered at that time, but it is something we are aware of now.

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

Exactly what block size the network can support is very much debatable. I currently think that 10 MB would be fine and 50 MB would be too much, though these are mostly just feelings. There should be more rigorous study of the actual limits of the network. (Gavin's done some nice work on the software/hardware front, though I'm still worried about the capabilities of typical Internet connections, and especially how they'll increase over time.)

Exactly. 30 kBps upload is common in Australia, and you sure should be able to run a full node in a typical internet connection in Australia, or Brazil, or Philippines, or whatever. The block size needs to be useful for the (lowest reasonable) common denominator, not the median.

IMO 10 MB is too much, maybe 5 MB.

[theymos]

Indeed. Which is why Matt's relay system and IBLT are needed, and will massively improve the situation for block propagation. People arguing for 1MB forever ignore this, yet when 20MB blocks finally appear they will take less than 1MB to broadcast through the network. It will only be bootstrapping new nodes and re-sync which will need the full blocks transmitted.

Those things help, but all full nodes still need to download all new transactions. Even with all proposed optimizations, you'll still need to download about 20 MB and upload 20*x MB (where x is some number that depends on but is probably less than the number of peers you have) for every 20 MB block you receive. This is better than the current network, which probably requires more than twice as much bandwidth for both download and upload. But it's not a magic bullet.

You proposed increasing the limit to 2MB in 2 years. This is what should have been done in Feb 2013 when this debate last came up in earnest. Unfortunately, this is too little too late. Of course IBLT was not considered at that time.

If 2 MB is all that can be agreed on now, then it's better to schedule that hard fork ASAP rather than agree on something marginally higher in 6-12 months. I personally think that 10 MB would probably be fine, though I know that there are many people who would disagree with me.

[RoadStress]

I haven't read this thread much at all, so maybe this has already been said, but I've been noticing a lot of people saying things like, "If the block size isn't raised, then that would be bad because ..." But just wanting larger blocks isn't a good argument for increasing the max block size. By far the most important issue is what the network can support. We're just going to have to learn to deal with the fact that the network's capacity is limited and fees will probably always be larger than many people want.

Exactly what block size the network can support is very much debatable. I currently think that 10 MB would be fine and 50 MB would be too much, though these are mostly just feelings. There should be more rigorous study of the actual limits of the network. (Gavin's done some nice work on the software/hardware front, though I'm still worried about the capabilities of typical Internet connections, and especially how they'll increase over time.)

It's not just wanting bigger blocks. There is a reason behind that. The bigger blocks are needed if we want a bigger bitcoin net-worth overall. That brings a lot of good things to the ecosystem in form of development and innovation.

What the network can support is subject to technological development and innovation. This is not a mechanical issue where you try to fit a square into a round hole. While technology also has its limitations, there is a lot of room for improving it. Just a few years ago we were all watching low quality youtube clips, while now we can watch 1080p videos. Playing heavy 3d graphics games on our smartphones is another example of technology that is developing and that hasn't hit its cap.

Also since I'm also a hobbyist miner please give me full 10MB blocks right now and I will invest part of my earnings in setting up full nodes with tons of HDD space available

Not raising the block limit because of a technical reason which can be solved is simply wrong in my view.