Bitcoin 20MB Fork

[DeathAndTaxes]

Did the recent changes in Bitcoin core make it impossible to have a fork? If the core downloads headers and finds the best chain and at some moment it sees that block size is greater than 1 Mb - will it try to jump to a chain with lower cumulative difficulty?

No.  A client doesn't select just the longest (most work) chain.  It selects the longest (most work) chain which is valid.   Valid means the block meets all consensus rules which all existing clients interpret as having a size less than 1MB.  Future versions of the client could support a larger block.  If/when that happens older nodes would see the first >1MB as invalid and newer clients will see it as valid.  Header first doesn't change anything.  The newer blocks will contain a new version number (most likely v4).  If a v4 compatible client providers a header which contains a version 4 element then existing clients will provide a warning that a new protocol version may exist and recommend an upgrade.   As long as all the v4 blocks remain <=1MB existing client will be able to validate but will warn (because they don't know what v4 means).

Now the new version of the client will also contain the new block size rules currently deactivated.  One way to activate them is for the new client to look at the last 1001 blocks and count how many v4 blocks exist.  If it is above some predetermined number (say 901) and the blockheight is above a certain value (to provide a minimum upgrade time) then the new rules go into effect.  Once that happens and a block >1MB is created existing clients will be unable to validate that chain but via headers they will know an incompatible higher version of the protocol has MORE hashrate and that the user is in danger of losing funds so the client will warn that.  If the % of hashrate that builds v4 blocks never exceeds the cutoff then >1MB blocks never become possible.

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[Cryddit]

We might agree or disagree on both of those points, but we won't have a productive conversation if you can't say what problem you are trying to solve.

As one of the "cognitively different" I think far too literally to have deep discourse with normal human beings in realtime.  It takes a long-ish time for me to think through people's written communications to respond appropriately and productively.  And sometimes I still get it wrong.  I VERY MUCH identify with your above request, but long experience tells me it is unlikely to achieve your desired result.

In many cases the problems others are trying to solve are with the conversations themselves rather than the things the conversations are about.  A straightforward plea such as yours to state the problem is generally seen as irrelevant, and a direct answer would possibly be harmful, to actually achieving such goals.  Moreover, a direct answer in that case would require more insight into one's own motives than most normal people have.

As with most things involving normal people, it's far easier to be certain than right.  

To summarize my position: I see one big problem that need solving:

Supporting lots (millions, eventually billions) of people transacting in Bitcoin.
  Ideally at as low a cost as possible, as secure as possible, and in the most decentralized and censorship-resistant way possible.

It is hard to get consensus on HOW to solve that problem, because no solution is obviously lowest cost, most secure, and most decentralized all at the same time, and different people assign different weights to the importance of those three things.

That is an excellent statement of a goal I share and some of the values that a good solution must maximize.  I am in agreement with it.  

I think that there is sharp divergence of opinions in the community regarding the relationship between censorship-resistance and scaling to millions or billions of transactors.  Some seem to assume that absolute censorship-resistance and untraceability are necessary to future growth.  Others seem to assume that they would hinder future growth.  Some seem to assume that absolute censorship-resistance and untraceability are more important than future growth, and others that they are unimportant relative to future growth.  

Some seem to think that Bitcoin has ever had any kind of absolute censorship-resistance and untraceability, but this is a misapprehension.  It is 'cash-like' in that if you are very very careful you can acquire and spend it without someone knowing who you are.  That is IMO about the greatest degree of censorship-resistance and untraceability that realistically will not result in aggressive prevention of scaling the network by various law enforcement concerns.  

I would suggest an attempt to clarify the relationship, but any attempt to do so via open discussion and debate would as some say  "generate more heat than light."  It might be worth it, but bring hot dogs, marshmallows, and an asbestos suit if you plan to light that fire.

My bias is to "get big fast" -- I think the only way Bitcoin thrives is for lots of people to use it and to be happy using it. If it is a tiny little niche thing then it is much easier for politicians or banks to smother it, paint it as "criminal money", etc. They probably can't kill it, but they sure could make life miserable enough to slow down adoption by a decade or three.

They most assuredly can kill it, for all practical purposes.  They can make it illegal to be a Bitcoin-accepting merchant, prosecute unlicensed money transmitters dealing in Bitcoin and deny licenses to any money transmitters who plan to start.  That would be an effectively fatal blow.  Network effects and immediate mass dumping by the 'get-rich-quick' speculators would do the rest.  We could be back to that ten-thousand-bitcoin pizza within a few months if the IMF and a few nations signatory to global anti-money-laundering treaties  decide to ban it.  

As you point out, our most effective strategy is to get big enough, fast enough, to disincentivize the delivery of that fatal blow.  Bitcoin needs to be a system that makes significant contribution to the economy - or at least one whose extinction would cost elected creatures substantial numbers of votes - before it can be seen as 'too big to fail.'

The simplest path to "get big fast" is allowing the chain to grow. All the other solutions take longer or compromise decentralization (e.g. off-chain transactions require one or more semi-trusted entities to validate those off-chain transactions). I'm listening very carefully to anybody who argues that a bigger chain will compromise security, and those concerns are why I am NOT proposing an infinite maximum block size.

Allowing larger block sizes is necessary.

In the future, there will be need for more than 1MB of tx per block.  When that happens, our choices are two: have a larger block size, or fail.  As blocks grow larger, the costs in bandwidth of running a full node become higher so there will be fewer full nodes.  That's bad for security, but unrelated to the block size limit as such.

Blocks will become larger, no matter which limit is in place above them, at the rate transactions grow.  The bandwidth costs of running a full node scale with the number of transactions, not with the limit on the number of transactions.  So full nodes will drop out as actual transactions scale up, not as the limit is raised.  The security question relevant to the higher block size limit then is whether it is better for security to fail or succeed when more than 1MB of tx per block are needed.  I say it is better for security to succeed.

Visa seems to get along fine with a peak tx volume that's about 12 times their average tx volume.  That seems like a reasonable margin to me, both for peak traffic and for sudden growth within a retargeting period, while remaining low enough to limit any DoS attack that could be executed via large block size.  So I would suggest a block size limit set once every 2016 blocks at the same time as difficulty retargeting, at 12 times the average for the previous 2016 blocks.  

My main concern with the proposal this conversation started with (20MB and %40/year) is that adoption of a new technology, if and when it happens, is not that gradual.  This is another reason I advocate a plan capable of growing by up to a factor of 12 in successive 2-week periods; if this happens, the timing will surprise all of us and the speed with which the change happens and the size to which it grows will surprise almost all of us.

That scenario is also why I think that just scaling up the blocks is not adequate.  Bigger blocks would get us through a crisis, but security depends on every user having a manageable set of data that allows them to independently verify transaction validity, and a block chain that grows linearly relative to a userbase that grows exponentially does not make a manageable set of data.  So, IMO, the most important scalability/security job after block size is not side chains - it is blockchain pruning.

[NewLiberty]

This is where my conversation with Gavin fell apart.  He was not able to acknowledge the concept of a too-high limit.  His reasoning was that since the limit was only one-sided (blocks with size above it are prevented) that it couldn't be too high.

Huh what?

I am not proposing infinitely sized blocks, so I obviously acknowledge the concept of a too-high limit as being plausible.

If you want to continue the conversation, please be very explicit about what problem you think needs solving, and how whatever solution you're proposing solves that problem.

We might agree or disagree on both of those points, but we won't have a productive conversation if you can't say what problem you are trying to solve.

To summarize my position: I see one big problem that need solving:

Supporting lots (millions, eventually billions) of people transacting in Bitcoin.
  Ideally at as low a cost as possible, as secure as possible, and in the most decentralized and censorship-resistant way possible.

It is hard to get consensus on HOW to solve that problem, because no solution is obviously lowest cost, most secure, and most decentralized all at the same time, and different people assign different weights to the importance of those three things.

My bias is to "get big fast" -- I think the only way Bitcoin thrives is for lots of people to use it and to be happy using it. If it is a tiny little niche thing then it is much easier for politicians or banks to smother it, paint it as "criminal money", etc. They probably can't kill it, but they sure could make life miserable enough to slow down adoption by a decade or three.

"Get big fast" has been the strategy for a few years now, ever since the project became too famous to fly under the radar of regulators or the mainstream press.

The simplest path to "get big fast" is allowing the chain to grow. All the other solutions take longer or compromise decentralization (e.g. off-chain transactions require one or more semi-trusted entities to validate those off-chain transactions). I'm listening very carefully to anybody who argues that a bigger chain will compromise security, and those concerns are why I am NOT proposing an infinite maximum block size.

There is rough consensus that the max block size must increase. I don't think there is consensus yet on exactly HOW or WHEN.

Thank you for this additional insight into your thinking on the matter.
My impression was that you were not proposing "no block size limit" only because that would not be likely to attract the preponderance of consensus support, and that you were instead proposing as high as you thought you could get agreement upon.  I like the goal, I hate the method.

We (you and I and whomever else agrees) share the bolded goal you articulated above.  Where we diverge may be on the value of the "get big fast" bias and maybe the ordering of the criteria in the bolded goals.  Though I would be delighted to see "big fast" happen, if it is done at the cost of security, decentralization, censorship or transaction/network cost (which is also a type of censorship), then the cost of growth is too high.

My view is that the "mass adoption" isn't a short term goal, but an eventual fait accompli.  Getting the max block size out of the way as an impediment would be greatly beneficial.  

I like JustusRanvier's thought work on the matter, but as a proposal it is pretty far from where we are today and likely unreachable with Bitcoin internally.  If miners are induced to 'tip out' to nodes somehow, it may happen external to the protocol through groups like chain.com or apicoin.

Where the current proposals fail in my humble opinion is the risk/reward.

To go from a static block size limit, to one over an order of magnitude larger and adding a dynamic limit (with exponential growth) has risks to node centralization.  It invites spam transactions which create costs to the node maintenance in perpetuity.

Bitcoin has less than 10K nodes operating, if node running could be made to be 20x more expensive (in network and verification/storage/search) there are going to be less nodes, not more.  This is a loss in security, decentralization and cost (and where it loses decentralization and cost, it also creates censorship risks).  So a too-high cost-of-risk for the growth.  There is also the risk that it may be to low of a limit.  Maybe we get some event in the world that brings people to Bitcoin in droves.  Either too-high or too-low and we get a crisis induced change and are back to where we are today.

Other advancements may mitigate this somewhat.  Fractional/shard nodes may help long term by making the cost more granular, (what have we decided to call these?), but in the short term the total node count may fall as some currently full nodes become shards.  

Where does that leave me?
I'd support lower risk proposals:
1) A static but higher max block size.  This just kicks the can down the road until we can achieve...
2) A dynamic max block size that increases or decreases based on the needs of people to use Bitcoin, not on a current best guess of what the distant future may appear to be (as good as that may be).  and ultimately...
3) No block size limit, because the economics are in place to make it unnecessary

Lots of us have had ideas on how to get to (2) but the pieces are not all in place yet.  What we really need is a strategy to get from where we are now to (2).  This is the discussion I would like to see happening, and assist with to the extent possible.  A proposal to get Bitcoin protocol through the next handful of decades, rather than the Bitcoin software through the next handful of years.  (3) may be a problems for the next generation to handle, I'd like to give them the chance to get there.

[danielpbarron]

Visa seems to get along fine with a peak tx volume that's about 12 times their average tx volume.

STOP COMPARING BITCOIN TO VISA! THEY ARE NOT ANYWHERE NEAR THE SAME THING.

You use Visa. Bitcoin uses you.

IX. "Hard fork block size politics: do we want decentralized digital gold, or just another Visa? We want both. And there's no reason we can't have both."

Actually, there's a damned good reason "we" can't have both : one of them is nonsense. To grok this, tell me, whom do you know in Mali ?

No, not Bali, that island where preppy sluts go for spring break. Mali, the funny-shaped, landlocked West African nation.

Nobody ? Never even heard of anyone from there, never ate in a Mali restaurant, never bought a Mali anything over the mail, as far as you're concerned Mali could just as well not exist at all ? Well, bless you, the sentiment's exactly mutual! As far as they're concerned, the entire population of Mali couldn't give less of a fuck, and you might as well not exist.

Yet your proposal here is that we take everything of everyone : each pair of underwear, each box of notebooks left over from highschool, each car and set of car keys, each coffee mug, each old printer cartridge, each and every single item of everyone, worldwide, and dump them all into a huge warehouse in San Francisco. And then, you say, you'll give everyone receipts to keep track of their stuff. Obviously the receipts will be rather lengthy and complicated an affair, but all the inconvenience, confusion and sheer effort is worth it, you say. Because why ? "Because there's no reason we can't have both". Orly.

I get it, you're a centralist at heart, you want this globalisation thing where everyone's stuff is locked up in Fort Knox so the misfortunate indigents of Mali get to curse the day your pasty ass showed up forcing "democracy" on them. I don't particularly like this outlook, but who am I to tell you how to live your life.

Nevertheless, there's a damned good reason why you can't have both at my expense. You can't ask demand me and my friends and my business partners run complicated, expensive and ultimately pointless computer systems that are required to distinguish our transactions from Mali bound transactions, avoid double spends and all of that simply because you want the world to be a centrally-planned, single-core thing because you're too intellectually lazy and too mentally simple to accomodate the actual variety of the world in your barren skull. I get it, it'd be much simpler for you to think of "everything in Bitcoin".

This simplicity for you has actual costs in the world. If large classes of transactions among which there is no possible cross-ambiguity remain limited to their own context, there's less hassle for everyone involved. Imagine the common occurence of someone sitting in your seat on the airplane. Fortunately, the tickets carry a seat number, which can be compared, and there you go. Imagine instead the Gavinairport where Gavintickets require everyone in the whole airport get out of their planes, single file to the tickets checking office, and have their tickets checked. Every single time someone sits in someone else's seat. And what'd the TSA say to this ? I can almost see them, "there's no reason we can't have it". Of course there isn't, if nobody gives a shit about people or their legitimate interests.

There's no benefit to making everything wait on everything else if large swaths can be readily isolated that'd absolutely never meet. If my blockchain doesn't have to wait for Mali blocks to propagate, and if it doesn't have to to check against Mali doublespends of transactions nobody in Mali could ever be conceivably involved in under any circumstances, then my blockchain is easier to run, to maintain, to debug and so it can provide for the citizens of Mali exactly the only thing they actually want me to provide : a backup value.

They don't perceivably want nor do they conceivably need main chain transactions for every single quarter of cent / West African CFA franc transaction they undertake. What they clearly need and possibly even want is the ability to turn a pile of however many of these they've saved into a few Satoshi. So they can save that, so they can buy Trilema credits, so they can do the few and precious things where they actually interact with the world at large. There's absolutely no need to make every single move they take dependent on the actions of far removed parties that couldn't care less about their interests, needs or proclivities.

Yeah, yeah, you're thinking "but Bitcoin is decentralized". Sure, it's a decentralized implementation. But it is an implementation of a centralized concept. Bitcoin is universal money, and that's quite by definition central. Even if implemented in a decentralized manner, as all usable money always has to be implemented, it nevertheless is a centralized thing, by the very nature of what money has to be in order to be money. Now why marry to this an obligation that's burdensome on everyone and not really useful to anyone ?

[sed]

I wish I knew were to look for an alternative discussion thread on this topic.  This one is too long and flamey, imo.  I read the original blogposts, but I haven't seen any blogposts since.

The discussion is over. There will be no hard-fork. This thread serves only to create the illusion that the matter is unresolved.

I see.  I had that feeling (not that there would be no hard-fork, but a feeling that it was already decided one way or another).  Where did the actual discussion take place?  Where did Gavin relent?

It took place in #bitcoin-assets, and he relented here.

Thanks, I should have known there would be IRC logs with the actual discussions.  Cheers!

[Cryddit]

It took place in #bitcoin-assets, and he relented here.

Thanks, I should have known there would be IRC logs with the actual discussions.  Cheers!

Reading IRC logs makes my brain bleed, but I went and read it because of the extraordinary claim.  As usual for IRC, the  "discussion" amounted to abuse and posturing.  And as usual for extraordinary claims, the evidence does not support it. If you think that Gavin committed to making or not making a hard fork in that log, you have wilfully misinterpreted it.

[danielpbarron]

It took place in #bitcoin-assets, and he relented here.

Thanks, I should have known there would be IRC logs with the actual discussions.  Cheers!

Reading IRC logs makes my brain bleed, but I went and read it because of the extraordinary claim.  As usual for IRC, the  "discussion" amounted to abuse and posturing.  And as usual for extraordinary claims, the evidence does not support it. If you think that Gavin committed to making or not making a hard fork in that log, you have wilfully misinterpreted it.

He relented by just joining. The fact that the great asciilifeform was able to !up him is proof of our victory. The concession is this: you need MP's permission in order to do anything in bitcoin. Gavin admitted this by showing up. Do you see MP on the forum? Nope, didn't think so. The funniest part is that Gavin waited until MP was out to lunch before showing his sorry face.

[NewLiberty]

It took place in #bitcoin-assets, and he relented here.

Thanks, I should have known there would be IRC logs with the actual discussions.  Cheers!

Reading IRC logs makes my brain bleed, but I went and read it because of the extraordinary claim.  As usual for IRC, the  "discussion" amounted to abuse and posturing.  And as usual for extraordinary claims, the evidence does not support it. If you think that Gavin committed to making or not making a hard fork in that log, you have wilfully misinterpreted it.

He relented by just joining. The fact that the great asciilifeform was able to !up him is proof of our victory. The concession is this: you need MP's permission in order to do anything in bitcoin. Gavin admitted this by showing up. Do you see MP on the forum? Nope, didn't think so. The funniest part is that Gavin waited until MP was out to lunch before showing his sorry face.

Isn't this is a bit silly, unless your goal is being ignored?   (If communicating with you is equivalent to agreeing with you and also submitting to you, the only other choice is to ignore you.)   I like #bitcoin-assets also.  Some very interesting things happen there precisely because not everyone is thinking the same thing.  Why encourage groupthink?

It is to Gavin's credit that he is seeking diverse inputs and points of view, and to yours for engaging in that discussion.

[Cryddit]

Visa seems to get along fine with a peak tx volume that's about 12 times their average tx volume.

STOP COMPARING BITCOIN TO VISA! THEY ARE NOT ANYWHERE NEAR THE SAME THING.

You use Visa. Bitcoin uses you.

Seriously.  Quoting yourself, quoting Mircea Popescu?  That's supposed to convince me of anything?  

Why am I even bothering to answer?  

Okay.  Visa and Bitcoin, ideally, are both used by people anywhere to pay people anywhere.  As such, they have to deal with many of the same engineering problems.  

The specific problem under discussion - transaction capacity vs. transaction load - is one of the ones they have in common.

I look at real information from Visa because they have a working system.  If you want us to look at real information from some different working system, present the information; it will be useful.  If you don't want us to look at real information, get the fuck out.  We NEED to be looking at real information.  

If somebody in Mali wants to buy Alpaca socks from somebody in Chile, and can't because there's no data-set that Chilean merchant can use to verify the validity of his Malian unspent txouts, that is what we call a failure of the system.  Maybe you don't like the existence of this large data-set.  That's okay; it works whether you like it or not.   Anything that would be as effective at avoiding failures will also work whether you, or anyone else, likes it or not.  In fact working whether anyone likes it or not is ESSENTIAL to avoiding failures.  

Make a proposal that there is less reason to dislike, or reason for fewer people to dislike, but which will still work whether or not anyone likes it, and it may be valuable.  But if you don't have a better idea, then please shut up.

[danielpbarron]

Make a proposal that there is less reason to dislike, or reason for fewer people to dislike, but which will still work whether or not anyone likes it, and it may be valuable.  But if you don't have a better idea, then please shut up.

I don't have to give you a better idea.

If somebody in Mali wants to buy Alpaca socks from somebody in Chile

Yeah let's compromise the soundness of our money so that people can buy socks internationally. As per the my point linked above, your argument has not convinced me that a change should be made. Keep trying, I guess.

[sed]

It took place in #bitcoin-assets, and he relented here.

Thanks, I should have known there would be IRC logs with the actual discussions.  Cheers!

Reading IRC logs makes my brain bleed, but I went and read it because of the extraordinary claim.  As usual for IRC, the  "discussion" amounted to abuse and posturing.  And as usual for extraordinary claims, the evidence does not support it. If you think that Gavin committed to making or not making a hard fork in that log, you have wilfully misinterpreted it.

He relented by just joining. The fact that the great asciilifeform was able to !up him is proof of our victory. The concession is this: you need MP's permission in order to do anything in bitcoin. Gavin admitted this by showing up. Do you see MP on the forum? Nope, didn't think so. The funniest part is that Gavin waited until MP was out to lunch before showing his sorry face.

Isn't this is a bit silly, unless your goal is being ignored?   (If communicating with you is equivalent to agreeing with you and also submitting to you, the only other choice is to ignore you.)   I like #bitcoin-assets also.  Some very interesting things happen there precisely because not everyone is thinking the same thing.  Why encourage groupthink?

It is to Gavin's credit that he is seeking diverse inputs and points of view, and to yours for engaging in that discussion.

I agree here.  Gavin shouldn't be seen as throwing in a towel because he goes on IRC to chat about things.  In my opinion we need folks to work together to create consensus, not try to turn each other into outcasts or whatever.

[hdbuck]

It took place in #bitcoin-assets, and he relented here.

Thanks, I should have known there would be IRC logs with the actual discussions.  Cheers!

Reading IRC logs makes my brain bleed, but I went and read it because of the extraordinary claim.  As usual for IRC, the  "discussion" amounted to abuse and posturing.  And as usual for extraordinary claims, the evidence does not support it. If you think that Gavin committed to making or not making a hard fork in that log, you have wilfully misinterpreted it.

He relented by just joining. The fact that the great asciilifeform was able to !up him is proof of our victory. The concession is this: you need MP's permission in order to do anything in bitcoin. Gavin admitted this by showing up. Do you see MP on the forum? Nope, didn't think so. The funniest part is that Gavin waited until MP was out to lunch before showing his sorry face.

from: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=21-01-2015:

Code:

02:27:01mircea_popescu:;;sell 1000 Gavin Scamcoins @750 Bitcoin Future delivery. Larger amounts will get you an even better deal. Smaller amounts may be considered.

02:27:02gribble:Error: 'Scamcoins' is not a valid price input.

Code:

02:31:52mircea_popescu:;;sell 1000 "Gavin Scamcoins" @ 750 Bitcoin Future delivery. Larger amounts will get you an even better deal. Smaller amounts may be considered.

02:31:52gribble:Order id 21920 created.

Code:

03:29:15Luke-Jr:decimation: also, Gavin is no longer the final word for any git repo

03:29:26mircea_popescu:when did that happen ?

03:29:32Luke-Jr:a few months ago IIRC

Code:

03:26:10Luke-Jr:(ugh, I'm being unclear: I mean the onus is on him to convince you, and you shouldn't have to convince him)

Code:

03:34:44mircea_popescu:Luke-Jr anyway, inasmuch as everyone actually wants bitcoin to prevail, divergence of opinion isn't much of a problem. 
however, the conservative rather than the progressive approach must be observed. change doesn't happen just for the sake of changing things. 
this isn't a fad or an ipad gizmo. if consensus can't be reached for whatever reason, whoever doesn't like it leaves and starts over, rather than pretending the opposite.

03:36:35Luke-Jr:mircea_popescu: I'm definitely in favour of taking a conservative approach, and I'm pretty sure most of the Bitcoin Core team is as well. 
I think Gavin was probably frustrated earlier when it came up in #bitcoin-dev because nobody could give him a straightforward "way to convince everyone"

Code:

03:38:10Luke-Jr:mircea_popescu: If Gavin wanted to force the hardfork, he wouldn't be frustrated at his inability to convince people ;)

03:51:48Luke-Jr:I find it very hard to believe MPEX is even 1% of bitcoin business

03:52:46mircea_popescu:it's so far 100% of the bitcoin " told the usg to get fucked "  party.
once you digest that you might be in a better position to evaluate who matters and who doesn't,

Code:

17:59:50asciilifeform:!up gavinandresen

18:00:01gavinandresen:howdy y'all

edit:

Code:

gavinandresen:Pierre_Rochard: what do you think of my argument that hash rate and fees are apples and oranges?

[NewLiberty]

Consensus is the result of quality, not the other way 'round.

[Cryddit]

I don't have to give you a better idea.

You're so right.  And I don't have to ignore you either.  But I'm feeling generous, so I probably will anyway.

Yeah let's compromise the soundness of our money so that people can buy socks internationally.

And if I wasn't convinced before that you need to be ignored, I think that will do it.  Seriously?  You don't want people to be able to use Bitcoin to make purchases, but you're still referring to it as money?  You want it to be decentralized, but you want to exclude people who aren't somehow 'local' to each other from making transactions?

You have any idea how much nonsense you're making?

[sed]

I thought that the most interesting idea in that log was the one about implementing the fork with a ttl of 2 years.  By the time those two years have passed, everyone will have forgotten that this was such a big issue.

[danielpbarron]

Yeah let's compromise the soundness of our money so that people can buy socks internationally.

Seriously?  You don't want people to be able to use Bitcoin to make purchases, but you're still referring to it as money?

Dollars are considered money despite the fact that I can't use them to make international purchases over the internet. Ditto gold.

When I bought my OpenBSD CD set, some third party converted my USD into CAD.

[inBitweTrust]

I thought that the most interesting idea in that log was the one about implementing the fork with a ttl of 2 years.  By the time those two years have passed, everyone will have forgotten that this was such a big issue.

Well this has been in discussion for almost 2 years anyways, so a hard fork is due about now, but the way the fork is going to be rolled out will probably take some time for miners to get to 95% consensus. So once we decide upon a course of action and deploy the code in the next month or 2 it may take 6 months to 1 year for 95% of miners to upgrade to the newest version anyways.

A simple dynamic solution is sounding better and better (Thus far the discussed cap varies from 3x to 12x average volume) and thus we could see the cap remain the same or only go up to 2MB for the next year simply because there is no need for the transaction volume. The problem I see is some are being stubborn and ignorantly believe that it is a good thing having the network at 99% capacity most of the time which would prove to be a very unstable and unreliable system with consequences IMHO.

[danielpbarron]

I thought that the most interesting idea in that log was the one about implementing the fork with a ttl of 2 years.  By the time those two years have passed, everyone will have forgotten that this was such a big issue.

Well this has been in discussion for almost 2 years anyways, so a hard fork is due about now, but the way the fork is going to be rolled out will probably take some time for miners to get to 95% consensus. So once we decide upon a course of action and deploy the code in the next month or 2 it may take 6 months to 1 year for 95% of miners to upgrade to the newest version anyways.

A grep of my debug.log says otherwise. Looks like this "version 2" thing got up to 5% for a time, and then dropped back down to 1%.

And LOL @ "we've been flapping our hands about this for 2 years, so give us our way already!" Go to your room! You're grounded.

[NewLiberty]

I thought that the most interesting idea in that log was the one about implementing the fork with a ttl of 2 years.  By the time those two years have passed, everyone will have forgotten that this was such a big issue.

The ttl of a future block height was the method proposed by satoshi years ago as part of the method of increasing the maxblocksize:

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

[danielpbarron]

The ttl of a future block height was the method proposed by satoshi years ago as part of the method of increasing the maxblocksize

The WWSD argument has been refuted already.

IV. Satoshi himself envisioned much larger blocks.

The discussion of what "Satoshi himself" did or didn't do, meant or didn't mean, so on and so forth is about as interesting and discussing the Mormon "bible".

This is called "arguing to authority", and it tries to give pecuniary value to that only truly worthless article of all times and places : the esteem of the mob. This may work well in electing United States presidents, ensuring that "while the voting public knows best what it wants, it deserves to get it long and hard". Bitcoin specifically and deliberately does not work in this way.

Bitcoin is not a reflection of your hopes and aspirations, but a check on them. Bitcoin isn't here to make it easier for you to do what you want to do ; Bitcoin is here to make it trivial for others to prevent you from doing what you want to do every time that's stupid. The sooner you comprehend this fundamental difference between Bitcoin and "technology" especially in the "revolutionary & innovative" subsense of that nonsense, the better, for you.

Satoshi probably doesn't even know what's in his code, let alone how to improve it.