Permanently keeping the 1MB (anti-spam) restriction is a great idea ...

[lunarboy]

Really glad to see this stupid conversation laid to rest once and for all.

All trolls/ vested interests now please shut up..

Well said D&T .... Claps hands   

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[Lauda]

We still have people thinking that increasing the block size limit by a factor of 20 will increase the blockchain size by the same factor.
This is FALSE.
The blockchain will grow slowly over time. It could take us years before we reach this limit. Besides the cost per GB of storage is pretty low these days.
What would be very beneficial is including more options into the fork. If the fork happens, this could be our last one. Once we reach a few million users doing so will be almost impossible (it is hard already).

[altcoin hitler]

We still have people thinking that increasing the block size limit by a factor of 20 will increase the blockchain size by the same factor.
This is FALSE.
The blockchain will grow slowly over time. It could take us years before we reach this limit. Besides the cost per GB of storage is pretty low these days.
What would be very beneficial is including more options into the fork. If the fork happens, this could be our last one. Once we reach a few million users doing so will be almost impossible (it is hard already).

Thank you for going out of your way to not be deterred when they keep falsely stating it will grow to 20mb over night and centralize and to keep on posting the info. I know it has to have been posted at least 50 times now but I guess if each post teaches a person it's worth it.

Free (literally) space will be filled, no worries. Very fast. 

[CIYAM]

Whilst I am not against raising the 1 MB limit I do think that this idea that their should be "only 1 chain" is actually rather "stupid".

The very point of decentralisation is not to have a single point of failure - yet this is constantly what Bitcoin is trying to do (set itself up as the single point of failure).

I don't see the future as being just Bitcoin but in fact numerous blockchains that you'll use if you want (making this whole storage issue really a pointless argument).

Trying to have Bitcoin solve every single problem is just silly - it will never suit all purposes and this is why we will have many blockchains.

[CIYAM]

I agree but maybe the most important part of that is the links between them.

This is why I designed AT: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822100.0

(it allows "atomic" trustless transfers to occur across blockchains)

[CIYAM]

How should it work with 2 chains? A fork where everyone doubles their holdings for free? Which chain would merchants accept? Which chain do we use for exchanges? A dual chain seems like a terrible idea, an dual coin system with an altcoin is better than that.

I am not talking about forks but different blockchains.

[sickpig]

Whilst I am not against raising the 1 MB limit I do think that this idea that their should be "only 1 chain" is actually rather "stupid".

The very point of decentralisation is not to have a single point of failure - yet this is constantly what Bitcoin is trying to do (set itself up as the single point of failure).

I don't see the future as being just Bitcoin but in fact numerous blockchains that you'll use if you want (making this whole storage issue really a pointless argument).

Trying to have Bitcoin solve every single problem is just silly - it will never suit all purposes and this is why we will have many blockchains.

From the bitcoin dev mailing list quoting Wladimir van der Laan¹:

The block chain is a single channel broadcasted over the entire
world, and I don't believe it will ever be possible nor desirable to broadcast all the
world's transactions over one channel.

The everyone-validates-everything approach doesn't scale. It is however
useful to settle larger transactions in an irreversible, zero-trust way.
That's what makes the bitcoin system, as it is now, valuable.

But it is absurd for the whole world to have to validate every purchase of
a cup of coffee or a bus ticket by six billion others.

Naively scaling up the block size will get some leeway in the short term,
but I believe a future scalable payment system based on bitcoin will be
mostly based on off-blockchain transactions (in some form) or that there
will be a hierarchical or subdivided system (e.g. temporary or per-locale
sidechains).

¹ Bitcoin core maintainer

[amincd]

It turns out that Bitcoin handling a significant percentage of global transactions in a couple of decades isn't that far-fetched:

There is a clear path to scaling up the network to handle several thousand transactions per second (“Visa scale”). Getting there won’t be trivial, because writing solid, secure code takes time and because getting consensus is hard. Fortunately technological progress marches on, and Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth and Moore’s Law make scaling up easier as time passes.

The map gets fuzzy if we start thinking about how to scale faster than the 50%-per-increase-in-bandwidth-per-year of Nielsen’s Law. Some complicated scheme to avoid broadcasting every transaction to every node is probably possible to implement and make secure enough.

But 50% per year growth is really good. According to my rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, my above-average home Internet connection and above-average home computer could easily support 5,000 transactions per second today.

That works out to 400 million transactions per day. Pretty good; every person in the US could make one Bitcoin transaction per day and I’d still be able to keep up.

After 12 years of bandwidth growth that becomes 56 billion transactions per day on my home network connection — enough for every single person in the world to make five or six bitcoin transactions every single day. It is hard to imagine that not being enough; according the the Boston Federal Reserve, the average US consumer makes just over two payments per day.

So even if everybody in the world switched entirely from cash to Bitcoin in twenty years, broadcasting every transaction to every fully-validating node won’t be a problem.

Combined with the added scalability and functionality that sidechains would provide, we really can have a universal apolitical currency. The market will ultimately decide. I believe the market wants a common apolitical digital currency for international trade and commerce.

[CIYAM]

Couple of quick questions, does it allow trades between one chain and another to be bundled together into single transactions? I'm thinking to allow large amounts of transactions on low cost chains to be carried out as a single transaction on a busy chain. And does it allow something like a meshnet of chains? Transaction fees for incentivisation is another but I'll have a read through first.

I think the ATs could fairly easily be modified to do the sorts of things you want (they are Turing complete after all and are in charge of their own funds).

[MrTeal]

We still have people thinking that increasing the block size limit by a factor of 20 will increase the blockchain size by the same factor.
This is FALSE.
The blockchain will grow slowly over time. It could take us years before we reach this limit. Besides the cost per GB of storage is pretty low these days.
What would be very beneficial is including more options into the fork. If the fork happens, this could be our last one. Once we reach a few million users doing so will be almost impossible (it is hard already).

Thank you for going out of your way to not be deterred when they keep falsely stating it will grow to 20mb over night and centralize and to keep on posting the info. I know it has to have been posted at least 50 times now but I guess if each post teaches a person it's worth it.

Free (literally) space will be filled, no worries. Very fast. 

What makes you think that? Miners won't include spam transactions without fee's or dusting.

Miners include transactions without fees right now because there isn't a huge disincentive to leave them out, and some pools include a certain number of free ones just because they want to.
I would imagine that charity would not extend past the fork to 20MB blocks, and miners would stop including no-fee low priority transactions in their blocks as the increased risk of an orphan without a similar increase in reward wouldn't be worth it.

However, if the network did immediately balloon out to 20MB/block with 30,000 transactions paying the minimum 0.1mBTC fee the reference client uses, that would still be 3BTC in fees, which is still more than an order of magnitude more than we are currently seeing.

[grau]

you just assume all miners will allow a low fee, but that simply won't be the case.

because it's not sustainable.

Unfortunately behaviour that is wrong for the community as a whole can make sense individually and can wreck the entire ecosystem.
Economist call this the "Tragedy of the commons" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

In absence of block size limit individual miner are rational to include every transaction with any greater than zero fee. This however
disables pricing power of miner to the extent that they become unprofitable and go out of business, in effect reducing utility and security for all.

Are you really this stupid or are you just trolling?

by the way if miners dont make the rules, who do?

I am not trolling.

You are not neccesarily stupid, but uninformed if you think miner set the rules.

A miner who violates a rule that is enforced by the majority of miner locks himself into an alternate reality (a fork) that no one else cares of.

The majority of miner can enforce new stricter rules than currently in existence, this is called a soft fork. Enforcing a minimal fee by a cartel would be in effect a soft fork.

Not even the majority of miner can introduce a rule that is not a subset of those already in existence, without getting most of ordinary user upgraded.
An increased block size is not subset but extension of the current rule, therefore it falls into this cathegory, also called hard fork.

Bitcoin's value rests on the consensus of its user of the rules. The rules are practically constant as it is very hard to convience all user to upgrade.

In case of block size interest of ordinary user and miner are not aligned. Ordinary user just want lower best zero fee. Miner have to protect pricing power.

[amincd]

^ The OP never advocated for there being no limit so you're criticizing a straw man proposal:

The problem isn't a limit in general but that 1MB is so low that under any meaningful adoption scenario it will push all individual users off the blockchain to rely on trusted third parties.

A limit with thousands of tps will undoubtedly produce more fees for miners than a limit capping the network at 3 tps.

[grau]

A limit with thousands of tps will undoubtedly produce more fees for miners than a limit capping the network at 3 tps.

This is only true if the per transaction fee is not zero.
In absence of a block size limit, there is no incentive to pay fee. Any positive fee would have to be enforced by a cartel of miner.

[CIYAM]

The problem isn't a limit in general but that 1MB is so low that under any meaningful adoption scenario it will push all individual users off the blockchain to rely on trusted third parties.

This statement is just *wrong* (and is itself a straw-man argument).

With other blockchains that also work trustlessly why on earth is anyone being pushed to rely on trusted 3rd parties?

Of course they are not (OP should fix that IMO).

[homo homini lupus]

A limit with thousands of tps will undoubtedly produce more fees for miners than a limit capping the network at 3 tps.

that needs to occure those txs first

[Nancarrow]

In absence of a block size limit, there is no incentive to pay fee.

Yes THERE FUCKING IS.

READ, god damn you.

 

[RoadStress]

A limit with thousands of tps will undoubtedly produce more fees for miners than a limit capping the network at 3 tps.

This is only true if the per transaction fee is not zero.
In absence of a block size limit, there is no incentive to pay fee. Any positive fee would have to be enforced by a cartel of miner.

There will be lots of services/people that will want to include fees for various reasons.

[Nancarrow]

YOO HOO! GRAU!!! HELLO THERE, GRAU!

The OP gives a valid technical argument for raising block size limit, but is neglecting a financial argument against it.

The miners' income has to be greater than the cost of their work. Miners' income is inflation now, but is expected to be replaced by fees,
since inflation halves every four years. Purchasing power of new coins might be sustained for a while but must converge to zero in the limit.

Transaction fees exist only because there is a competition for block space. Eliminating that competition eliminates the fees and with that mining.

Therefore block space has to become and remain a scarce asset.

Your second and third paragraph contradict each other.

Transaction fees don't ONLY exist because there is a competition for block space. They ALSO exist to pay the miners to secure the network, as you clearly understood before you implicitly denied it. Fees are not an either/or thing. It absolutely ISN'T a case of lifting block limit->eliminates fees->eliminates mining.

We have instead a *feedback* process. LOWER fees (not ZERO fees) means LESS mining (not NO mining) which in turn means LONGER confirmation times (not COMPLETE COLLAPSE) which leads to MORE FEES which leads to mining power switching back on. It's what engineers call a negative feedback loop, designed to keep the hashing rate broadly stable, or at least oscillating within a fairly narrow range.

People really must stop thinking of all the causes and effects in the world as being ON/OFF switches. They aren't. They're analogue dials.

[If you're on board with the idea of bitcoin, you've probably had to deal with people saying a deflationary money supply can't work because NOBODY would ever spend ANY MONEY AT ALL. Same problem. "Less" is not the same as "none". Especially when "Less X" induces "Less Y" which induces "More X".]
 

[uvt9]

can someone put on a TL;DR of original post for a lazy and non-technical reader like me  

[amincd]

A limit with thousands of tps will undoubtedly produce more fees for miners than a limit capping the network at 3 tps.

This is only true if the per transaction fee is not zero.
In absence of a block size limit, there is no incentive to pay fee. Any positive fee would have to be enforced by a cartel of miner.

But the OP is not proposing an absence of a block size limit. This is a straw man argument, and the fact that it's the second time you've made it, means you're being disingenuous.