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

[marcus_of_augustus]

We obviously need a bigger block size if we want to challenge the big payment electronic systems. My main concern is that the people running nodes could be severely decreased due the blockchain being bigger than ever.

This is my issue as well.  If the blockchain.. when the block chain reaches 1 TB.. there will be issues with everyone running a node..

IT would appear the size of the blockchain is out pacing the upgrade in harddrives...

No. No. And just no, stop saying this if you don't want to be seen as a intentionally misinforming.

The size of the blocks is, and has always been, bandwidth limited.

[1714159614]

1714159614

[justusranvier]

We obviously need a bigger block size if we want to challenge the big payment electronic systems. My main concern is that the people running nodes could be severely decreased due the blockchain being bigger than ever.

This is my issue as well.  If the blockchain.. when the block chain reaches 1 TB.. there will be issues with everyone running a node..

IT would appear the size of the blockchain is out pacing the upgrade in harddrives...

No. No. And just no, stop saying this if you don't want to be seen as a intentionally misinforming.

The size of the blocks is, and has always been, bandwidth limited.

One bitcoin buys about 6 TB of hard drive.

[marcus_of_augustus]

We obviously need a bigger block size if we want to challenge the big payment electronic systems. My main concern is that the people running nodes could be severely decreased due the blockchain being bigger than ever.

This is my issue as well.  If the blockchain.. when the block chain reaches 1 TB.. there will be issues with everyone running a node..

IT would appear the size of the blockchain is out pacing the upgrade in harddrives...

No. No. And just no, stop saying this if you don't want to be seen as a intentionally misinforming.

The size of the blocks is, and has always been, bandwidth limited.

One bitcoin buys about 6 TB of hard drive.

I'm not sure if you are kidding, being disingenuous or just a simple smart-ass trolling. Buying a hard-drive doesn't get you more bandwidth (did I really just need to say that??) .... now would you like to quantify 'about' how much bandwidth 1 bitcoin buys you?

[justusranvier]

We obviously need a bigger block size if we want to challenge the big payment electronic systems. My main concern is that the people running nodes could be severely decreased due the blockchain being bigger than ever.

This is my issue as well.  If the blockchain.. when the block chain reaches 1 TB.. there will be issues with everyone running a node..

IT would appear the size of the blockchain is out pacing the upgrade in harddrives...

No. No. And just no, stop saying this if you don't want to be seen as a intentionally misinforming.

The size of the blocks is, and has always been, bandwidth limited.

One bitcoin buys about 6 TB of hard drive.

I'm not sure if you are kidding, being disingenuous or just a simple smart-ass trolling. Buying a hard-drive doesn't get you more bandwidth (did I really just need to say that??) .... now would you like to quantify 'about' how much bandwidth 1 bitcoin buys you?

My reply was actually directed at spazzdla but I quoted your post too since I couldn't tell if you were serious or sarcastic.

[Peter R]

.... now would you like to quantify 'about' how much bandwidth 1 bitcoin buys you?

Here in British Columbia, and according to these numbers from 2013 ($0.45 / GB), 1 bitcoin buys you about half a TB of bandwidth.

[marcus_of_augustus]

.... now would you like to quantify 'about' how much bandwidth 1 bitcoin buys you?

Here in British Columbia, and according to these numbers from 2013 ($0.45 / GB), 1 bitcoin buys you about half a TB of bandwidth.

Unfortunately not all bitcoin nodes are located in British Columbia, as lovely as it is.

[Peter R]

.... now would you like to quantify 'about' how much bandwidth 1 bitcoin buys you?

Here in British Columbia, and according to these numbers from 2013 ($0.45 / GB), 1 bitcoin buys you about half a TB of bandwidth.

Unfortunately not all bitcoin nodes are located in British Columbia, as lovely as it is.

Does anyone know of a comprehensive summary of bandwidth costs across the world, as well as typical upload and download bit rates?

[marcus_of_augustus]

.... now would you like to quantify 'about' how much bandwidth 1 bitcoin buys you?

Here in British Columbia, and according to these numbers from 2013 ($0.45 / GB), 1 bitcoin buys you about half a TB of bandwidth.

Unfortunately not all bitcoin nodes are located in British Columbia, as lovely as it is.

Does anyone know of a comprehensive summary of bandwidth costs across the world, as well as typical upload and download bit rates?

Well that would be the real research that needs to be done wouldn't it ... so probably not, at least I haven't seen it. And you would then need to see how that translates into real bitcoin data being passed around on the real bitcoin network.

[Peter R]

.... now would you like to quantify 'about' how much bandwidth 1 bitcoin buys you?

Here in British Columbia, and according to these numbers from 2013 ($0.45 / GB), 1 bitcoin buys you about half a TB of bandwidth.

Unfortunately not all bitcoin nodes are located in British Columbia, as lovely as it is.

Does anyone know of a comprehensive summary of bandwidth costs across the world, as well as typical upload and download bit rates?

Well that would be the real research that needs to be done wouldn't it ... so probably not, at least I haven't seen it. And you would then need to see how that translates into real bitcoin data being passed around on the real bitcoin network.

I found some excellent data.  Ookla has been empirically measuring upload and download speeds for over a decade and from all over the world, based on its speed test results:

http://explorer.netindex.com/maps

The pricing information is lacking, however.  

[BitUsher]

I found some excellent data.  Ookla has been empirically measuring upload and download speeds for over a decade and from all over the world, based on its speed test results:

http://explorer.netindex.com/maps

The pricing information is lacking, however.  

Price hasn't changed much over the years once people transitioned from dialup to broadband in many places.

Here is a breakdown I did elsewhere -

http://explorer.netindex.com/maps?country=United%20States

1/2008      5.86 Mbps
12/2008    7.05 Mbps
12/2009    9.42  Mbps
12/2010    10.03  Mbps
12/2011    12.36   Mbps
12/2012    15.4   Mbps
12/2013    20.62   Mbps
12/2014    31.94  Mbps

Except, keep in mind those speed are the total combined upload and download speeds so 31.94 Mbps average means 21.88MBps download and 9.86MBps upload in 12/2014 thus the situation is worse than what you are even suggesting.

When you look at many other countries the growth is much slower as well. I was deliberately taking one of the better case scenarios to be generous.

all these numbers I am citing are only considering Broadband as well, and not mobile which is much slower and with much lower soft caps.

[marcus_of_augustus]

I found some excellent data.  Ookla has been empirically measuring upload and download speeds for over a decade and from all over the world, based on its speed test results:

http://explorer.netindex.com/maps

The pricing information is lacking, however.  

Wow, nice find. Interesting to see some of the 'backwaters' are the leaders and wonder what that will do for their economic prospects. e.g. Kansas, MO is leader in the USA!

Edit: There is some pricing info there, you can select "Value" (or Upload) as your metric.

[BitUsher]

Wow, nice find. Interesting to see some of the 'backwaters' are the leaders and wonder what that will do for their economic prospects. e.g. Kansas, MO is leader in the USA!

Google fiber started rolling out in Kansas primarily after a small test run in Standford. Kansas was selected for multiple reasons but primarily to avoid regulation and redtape and because legislators indicated they would expedite permits and get out of the way .

[2112]

I found some excellent data.  Ookla has been empirically measuring upload and download speeds for over a decade and from all over the world, based on its speed test results:

http://explorer.netindex.com/maps

The pricing information is lacking, however.  

The data are far from "excellent". They are mostly bullshit numbers measured using short-term bursts. I checked several markets that I'm very familiar with and those all were successfully gamed by the DOCSIS cable providers using the equipment with "powerboost" (or similar marketing names).

"Powerboost" is a ultra-short-term (few to few-teen or sometimes few-ty seconds) bandwidth increase made available to the modems of the customers that haven't maxed out their bandwidth in previous minutes.

The configuration details are highly proprietary and vary by market and by time of day&week. But the overall effect is that that the DOCSIS modem seriously approaches 100Mbps LAN performance for a few packets in bursts.

On some markets that I know the VDSL2 competitors (that optimize average bandwidth over periods of weeks) didn't even rank on the "TOP ISPS". In reality of the non-burst-y loads the VDSL2 providers outperform DOCSIS providers, especially on the upload side as the VDSL2 technology is a fundamentally symmetric technology that's being sold as asymmetric only for market-segmenting reasons.

I'm not even going to delve into further restrictions on consumer broadband where the providers explicitly limit number of packet flows that can be handled by the customer's equipment. OOKLA (and almost everyone else) measures a 2-flow single-tcp connections, which have really nothing in common with peer-2-peer technologies like Bitcoin or Bittorrent.

Executive summary:

Bullshit marketing numbers, divide by 3-5-10 to get real number achievable with P2P technologies and continuous operation.

[Peter R]

I found some excellent data.  Ookla has been empirically measuring upload and download speeds for over a decade and from all over the world, based on its speed test results:

http://explorer.netindex.com/maps

The pricing information is lacking, however.  

The data are far from "excellent". They are mostly bullshit numbers measured using short-term bursts. I checked several markets that I'm very familiar with and those all were successfully gamed by the DOCSIS cable providers using the equipment with "powerboost" (or similar marketing names).

"Powerboost" is a ultra-short-term (few to few-teen or sometimes few-ty seconds) bandwidth increase made available to the modems of the customers that haven't maxed out their bandwidth in previous minutes.

The configuration details are highly proprietary and vary by market and by time of day&week. But the overall effect is that that the DOCSIS modem seriously approaches 100Mbps LAN performance for a few packets in bursts.

On some markets that I know the VDSL2 competitors (that optimize average bandwidth over periods of weeks) didn't even rank on the "TOP ISPS". In reality of the non-burst-y loads the VDSL2 providers outperform DOCSIS providers, especially on the upload side as the VDSL2 technology is a fundamentally symmetric technology that's being sold as asymmetric only for market-segmenting reasons.

I'm not even going to delve into further restrictions on consumer broadband where the providers explicitly limit number of packet flows that can be handled by the customer's equipment. OOKLA (and almost everyone else) measures a 2-flow single-tcp connections, which have really nothing in common with peer-2-peer technologies like Bitcoin or Bittorrent.

Executive summary:

Bullshit marketing numbers, divide by 3-5-10 to get real number achievable with P2P technologies and continuous operation.

The statistical data is based on all the users that run http://www.speedtest.net/ .

According to your explanation, if one were to run speed-test over and over, they should begin to get worse results, as the "powerboost" wouldn't be available [because they've been maxing out their bandwidth in previous minutes].  Is this correct?

I'm not doubting you.  Just wondering if we can test this somehow, because there's a lot of comprehensive data that I hope we can learn from there (http://explorer.netindex.com/maps).

[tvbcof]

...
Executive summary:

Bullshit marketing numbers, divide by 3-5-10 to get real number achievable with P2P technologies and continuous operation.

...
I'm not doubting you.  Just wondering if we can test this somehow, because there's a lot of comprehensive data that I hope we can learn from there (http://explorer.netindex.com/maps).

This guy and I have had our run-ins over the years, but I am confident to say that he knows his shit in these matters better than almost anyone around these parts, and probably better than most of the core Bitcoin developers.  Absolutely better than the 'chief scientist' of Bitcoin who seems only slightly more knowledgeable than the average consumer.

[2112]

The statistical data is based on all the users that run http://www.speedtest.net/ .

According to your explanation, if one were to run speed-test over and over, they should begin to get worse results, as the "powerboost" wouldn't be available [because they've been maxing out their bandwidth in previous minutes].  Is this correct?

I'm not doubting you.  Just wondering if we can test this somehow, because there's a lot of comprehensive data that I hope we can learn from there (http://explorer.netindex.com/maps).

Speedtest (and other similar sites) are primarily marketing tools. They are indeed applicable if somebody does non-p2p things like:

• streaming video/audio
• downloading/uploading files
• multiplayer gaming on a centralized server

If you really want to advance Bitcoin (or other peer-2-peer technologies) you'll have to learn to filter the marketing misinformation and simplifications.

In particular, I understand that speedtest was explicitly designed using Flash application such that the user experience precludes you from triggering out of powerboost. It intentionally slows down your interaction by displaying complex screens and prompting you to inform others about your results. It makes it really hard to reliably repeat the test until stable results are achieved.

The only true peer-2-peer results that I have ever seen were collected using Bittorrent. In the past I used to do a lot of torrenting, now I just occasionally help people with their problems.

The true information about the performance of consumer broadband is extremely proprietary. Even the ISP's employees don't have access to the detailed technical information. There are two reasons:

• obvious one: it is a source of competitive advantage and allows them to play various games with customers and competitors
• non-obvious one: modern high-performance hardware-accelerated routers used by ISPs are actually layer-3 switches that are dynamically reprogrammable per packet flow. This is rather fiendishly complicated technology, even the professional networking engineers are surprised by their limitations

See for yourself: lookup on the web discussions about Cisco IOS commands e.g. "show ip cache flow" or "show ip cef" and see when you start losing the plot.

I've recently moved and I'm no longer directly involved in infrastructure details. But from few years ago I remember having a discussion with some students using Bittorrent and other P2P tools. Quite common observation was that overall stable bandwidth can be significantly increased by using a SOCKS proxy server, or trivial (non-encrypting) VPN connection (PPTP, L2TP, etc.) to a machine in some data center or even a dorm room. The consumer ISP then sees only a single pair of packet flows which they can handle more efficiently on their equipment.

[meono]

bump because this is worth a read to the " noobs "

[hdbuck]

bump because this is worth a read to the " noobs "

no, its not.

[iCEBREAKER]

bump because this is worth a read to the " noobs "

no, its not.

If nothing else, it's worth showing the noobs that people have been setting their hair on fire over the supposed 'ZOMG RAISETHELIMIT OR ELSE DOOOM' issue for months, and Bitcoin keeps working just fine, heedless of their chicken little ultimatum/manifesto antics.

At least D&T had the good graces to bugger off after being proven to be yet another boy who cried wolf.  That's more than I can say for the current 'I hate thermos but I'll still participate in his forum' crowd.

[meono]

bump because this is worth a read to the " noobs "

no, its not.

If nothing else, it's worth showing the noobs that people have been setting their hair on fire over the supposed 'ZOMG RAISETHELIMIT OR ELSE DOOOM' issue for months, and Bitcoin keeps working just fine, heedless of their chicken little ultimatum/manifesto antics.

At least D&T had the good graces to bugger off after being proven to be yet another boy who cried wolf.  That's more than I can say for the current 'I hate thermos but I'll still participate in his forum' crowd.

You need to find another "HashFast" group to join seriously.

You're just too good and letting that talent to waste is a sin.