Topic: 2MB Pros and Cons - page 11. (Read 9735 times)

Con: network latency will increase, potentially forcing some full node clients with high latency or low bandwidth connections from participating. (think small African village in bum fuck nowhere for instance)
Con "less adoption" <--see what I did there?

It would be lovely if we avoid hardfork altogether and do simple Segwit, make the signatures to not count towards limit and put on some LN.
At this point Bitcoin can pretty much stop evolving, having unlimited transactions due LN, decent capacity for settlement.
Extra settlement capacity (like during crisis), going to the moon, marketing, hype, decrease of shitcoin value to stimulate spending can be covered by altcoins.

same way Bitcoin = digital gold
altcoin = digital fiat

"spam is OK"  Wut?
"Business can operate with less fear of being outed" Wut?
"More adoption" Wut?
"BTC value will rise" Wut?
"We maintain the positive correlation between price and volume" Wut?


Your clearly padding the pros column with unfounded speculation and whimsical fantasies.  Daydream on your own time.

visa's capacity is only based on 60 years of slow growth to 800million users.
why does there have to be equal capacity by 2017??
bitcoin doesnt have 800 million users. i dont think it will get 800million users in 16 months or less

so lets base it on bitcoin users (2mill) and make rational judgement of perceived growth slowly

at the moment visa stats say that their users do approximately 40 transactions a year (some daily some only monthly) per user
http://www.statista.com/statistics/279275/average-credit-card-transaction-volume-per-card-worldwide/

so bitcoin has 2million users. making it 80mill transactions buffer needed as a minimum
bitcoin does ~2000tx a block, 144 blocks, 365 days a year = 105,120,000tx a year

so 1mb can handle 2million people doing an average 50 transactions.
or reworded
bitcoin at 1mb can handle 2.5million people doing similar transactions as on visa

which means 2mb can handle 2mill people doing 100tx each or 5million people doing similar visa card uses.

now lets think about 2mb+segwit (2million people 200tx or 10million people doing similar visa trend transactions.)

and thats probably going to be available in 2017

then we can calmdown and know over 15 years we can slow grow more (it doesnt need to be visa comparable by 2017)

to put it into prospective by 2017 (2mb+segwit) we will be at 10% of paypal or 10% of visa US or 1.25% of visa world wide.

which if we had lets say 4mb+segwit in 2020 20%paypal, 20%visa US, 2.5% visa worldwide.

then we can look at LN which meant to be 15x more possibilitys (take that number loosly as its based on lauda's numbers)

meaning
2mb+segwit+LN = 150% paypal, 150% visa USA and 18.75% visa world wide.
4mb+segwit+LN = 300% paypal, 300% visa USA and 37.5% visa world wide.
8mb+segwit+LN = 600% paypal, 600% visa USA and 75% visa world wide.

so atmost
12mb+segwit+LN = 900% paypal, 900%visa USA and 112.5% visa world wide.

now we all know 12mb+segwit is actually more like 24mb real data so dont expect to grow to that by 2018-2020. but i can see it easily happening before 2030.. very easily

Pro.   Shows that devs DO sth for the commons
Pro.   Is a step closer to Satoshis initial no limit design

Cons. Has the risk any change has.

I believe the point is that it wouldn't be a final solution and more work and optimisation would still need to be done in order to achieve similar scalability to other payment methods.  Otherwise we're just going to have the same issues later down the line.

Doubling bloc size to 2mb?
And your listing that as a con, cos it's not better than visa?
FFS.

what about the bloat cost - 2mb will be full of spam anyway from the start. so chain will grow 2x faster and the bloat need to be archived forever

catch up cost - an independent remote, home or mobile user trying to catch up will need 2x faster connection and download 2x more data to catch up from the same time.

AFTER:  users having internet slower than 2MB / 10 minutes (27.9 kbps) will never catch up
BEFORE: users having < 13.9 kbps will never catch up. At 1MB blocks slow dial up users have no problem!

this is very important because dialup (similiar situation for sattelite interntets) speeds are   24 ~ 48 Kbps. With large blocks, slow dialup will never catch up anymore.

Imagine a remote mining or retail facility. It's trivial to bring there usb disk with blockchain, but the node must keep up-to-date via the slow dialup only, nobody will waste their time by bringing new blockchain all the time.

altcoin hostility. altcoins existed since litecoin, and are the original scaling mechanism envisioned by Satoshi. Simply start 2000 Bitcoin clones with 1MB blocks each and you have 2GB worth of blocks (visa scale) - instantly!  limited bitcoin capacity allows altcoins to innovate, experiment and explore novel concepts. If Bitcoin actually becomes challenged by an alt (it won't), it can adopt

Hark fork is not a con. bitcoin has hard forked several times. Many altcoins have hard forked to change features. If you give a few months notic, there is no problem.

updated OP and added a new Con


"2MB is still not nearly enough block space to compete with other payment processors like VISA"

2) Improved user experience,
( no more threads about a TX taking a long time to get confirmations )
temporary effect, when usages increases we will eventually be back to full blocks faced with this same issue

Yeah, eventually we will be back to full blocks.
Maybe we could be ready to hard fork again by then.
Maybe it would be more comfortable 2nd time.

The filling of blocks has been a nice steady climb.
First full 1mb block I saw yesterday.
Now they 998.8 a lot.
Its been smooth and steady.

2 mb hard limit, fuck segwit. It don't really care who implements it. I trust none of them anymore.


Let the miners slowly, or quickly raise their block sizes to 2 mb, as has happened so far at 1mb.
Perfect.

Pro: Maintain the positive correlation between price and volume, now if you suddenly cap the volume, that relationship is unknown

"The Bitcoin experiment, as invented by Satoshi, has been running successfully for 7 years now - and may also be showing a strong correlation between price and volume, as suggested by this graph:



Any scientist, economist (or investor!) would simply favor continuing to let the experiment run unchanged."

Anyone change that radically change the experiment (by constraining block size to a long-term artificial limit of a 1 MB, against Satoshi's plan) is actually proposing a "side fork" - and will result in much higher risk"

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/49kazc/a_scientist_or_economist_who_sees_satoshis/

i'm going to try to break it all down to single point items with some red or green text below each highlighting  poeple thoughts on each item.
for example Con #2 ( processing power ) i do believe there is some software improvments which will mitigate this.
OP needs to reflect all of these little details.

This is all directly or indirectly a result from (or is related to) pro #1 or pro #2. Listing these separately does not make sense (this is why I grouped the resource usage).

I don't think it would have any effect on threads about a TX taking a long time to confirm.

That is caused by small fees, not a lack of room with the current blocksize.

That can be fixed by clients intelligently choosing a TX fee, it seems many clients do not do so. Core does but it seems many other clients do not.

Pro : Business can operate with less fear of being outed from the network because high fees 
Pro : Renewed trust in the development process and in the network scalability capacity
Pro : More adoption
Pro : BTC value will rise



i will try to consolidate and/or add these points to OP ASAP.

you can add that as a consequence of the capacity increase, more merchants will be willing to accept bitcoin, like amazon

Renewed trust in the development process and in the network scalability capacity, business can operate with less fear of being outed from the network because high fees or no transaction capacity, merchants can accept bitcoin knowing their transactions will confirm, at least for a while.

With the above scenario bitcoin value will probably rise and the halving/mining apocalypse scenario does not happen.

i think it's worth noting all of this in OP.

---

Pro: lower TX Fees! 

I don't think we can be sure of this (as we don't know how the fee is going to change; this moment the recommended is 30 satoshis/byte). What if the fees per TX drop by two and the amount of TX's increases by two? The amount of collected fees would remain the same in this case. What I'm saying is that we don't have enough experience nor are things as simple as people think (e.g. some think that a 2 MB block size limit == 1 line of code changed). Sounds simple, but the change isn't.