Topic: AntPool, BTCChina Pool, 21 Inc., BW Pool and KNCMiner support 8MB (Read 1978 times)

I support larger blocks, but I do not support XT.  I see it as an attempt at a hostile take over of the blockchain.  If XT "wins", then the firm of Hearn and Andresen basically takes ownership of the entire blockchain, as they retain the sole power to say what's in and what's out of XT.  That doesn't sit well with me at all.

Satoshi never intended to a limit to exist, so what was his solution?

Satoshi never intended to a limit to exist, so what was his solution?

I really have 200mbps upload speed. And it's just a commercial ISP with a cheap and flat price, and I'm not from USA. And I have not doubt we are going to see soon much faster speeds with the new technologies: http://www.androidauthority.com/5g-network-speed-20-gbps-618192/

5G will be defined as a network “capable of transmitting data at up to 20 gigabits-per-second”

I have today 200mpbs upload speed. 10 years ago I had 56kbps.

10 years ago, the average hdd was 1GB of capacity, today is close to 1TB! How can he proposes a 4MB limit in 10 years? Where is the logic for that?

and sidechains / lightning need bigger blocks too. so where is the point? maybe XT is too much but 1 MB is too little.

The concerns of most devs has nothing to do with hard drive space but propagation time, bandwidth limits(especially upload) and mempool problems created by larger blocks.

Selfish miners

Selfish mining, is one such attack which was clearly explained in Satoshi’s paper as a possible weakness of Bitcoin.  This entails a miner, who has a significant amount of hashing power, mining blocks but not publishing them, thereby creating a secret longer chain that the rest of the network does not know about, with the intent of broadcasting it later, and in doing so will reverse some transactions that may have already been confirmed on the public (but shorter) chain.  This is the infamous double spend attack.  Normally this can only be accomplished reliably when one possesses over 51% of the hashing power of the network.  What most people don’t know is that network propagation is also a factor here.  Satoshi admitted that his calculations on the percentage of hashing power in order to be able to pull off a 51% attack reliably assumes no significant network propagation delays.  Indeed the danger of allowing block size to increase to the point where the expected delays in block propagation through the network has been discussed ad infinitum in the past, and the reason why the block debate has been ongoing since at least 2011.

In this regard, I can understand why Gavin feels that he must do something drastic to force the issue.  The attack goes as follows: If blocks were allowed to be ‘too big’ (big enough to add plausible delays to propagate to all nodes) then a miner would be incentivized to stuff the block they are mining full of txns that pay himself (or a cohort), up to the allowable block limit.  They do not broadcast these transactions to the network unless they solve the block themselves, removing the possibility of paying miner fees to some other miner.  If they manage to solve the block, they immediately broadcast all their spam txns and block solution.  The other miners would have to drop what they are mining, and start downloading the new (very large) block (which may take some time) and verify it, which involves checking the validity of all contained transactions (which will take some more time).  All this results in a appreciable head start that the attacking miner can enjoy in mining the next block.  So what he has successfully done is increased his ‘effective’ hashing power giving him a slight edge over his competitors.  Of course this is a game-theoretic problem, so we can assume that once one miner starts doing this, then either all miners will start doing this, as well (and make orphan blocks and double spends a lot more common) or band together to share high bandwidth connections/nodes (and push the system more towards a centralized one) both situations are bad for Bitcoin.  So everyone can agree that too big of a block size would open up bitcoin to a certain type of fragility that has up until now, not been a problem.

10 years ago, the average hdd was 1GB of capacity, today is close to 1TB! How can he proposes a 4MB limit in 10 years? Where is the logic for that?