Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 11. (Read 88438 times)

I don't expect to be easy.
LN is under used and doesn't seem to get a chance to mature because people are still expecting reasonable fees on-chain. (And yes, this includes me too, I know).


You won't like my answer, but, on the other hand, I think I've said it in the past that LN makes sense only for companies, i.e. as a service.
Yes, this means custodial, which is many will say "omg, never use custodial" when they are keeping their fiat in banks' hands. Of course, the bigger/consolidated amounts for long term storage have to go into self custody still, I am not idiot.


I didn't. I am as guilty as the most. The closest I can get is a consolidation I've waited for patiently for a couple of months and I've still ended up paying about 15$ in fees.
But the last 6+ months were more suitable for accumulating than spending, so it was no biggie to wait, not this time.


I've seen in may life too many temporary fixes remaining there forever...


Look at El Salvador, they are happily using Bitcoin, not really caring it's in most cases actually in others' custody.
And I would not be surprised other kinds of Bitcoin IOUs will catch on.


There can be the direction that anybody can still withdraw their bitcoin, but it's not really feasible due to fees, for example. That's where we are going now: Bitcoin as a reserve asset.
But the history of gold shows us that it's a dangerous direction (and I don't have a proper alternative; but imho bigger block size is not one).

*sigh* we may be the lucky ones who got to own actual Bitcoins (or satoshis) like the ones owning gold coins 100 years ago.

IIRC, there was an unofficial limit of 32MB and Satoshi capped it to 1MB to discourage spam attacks.

I don't remember if he had to hard fork the chain though. It was very early back then, very small network effect compared to today.

The majority of people don't know why Bitcoin is useful and important, so let's stop working and recommending it, please! There you go, am I clever now too?

So, let me get this straight. You believe we need to implement changes quickly and pursue vertical scaling (i.e., increasing block size), despite its obvious long-term flaws, instead of utilizing one of the many altcoins that have already adopted this approach?

Allow me to clarify. You believe we should quickly implement changes to a trillion-dollar asset, which serves as the cornerstone of a new monetary system, simply because you dislike waiting for alternative second-layer solutions to be developed. Could you explain why not using an altcoin instead?

Let's look at the closest evidence we have to verify this claim: altcoins.

- Bitcoin Cash is the Bitcoin fork I'd use if I was forbidden from using Bitcoin. Total transactions in the last 24 hours: 14,546. Block size limit: 32 MB, block interval: 10 minutes.
- Total Litecoin transactions in the last 24 hours: 181,694. Block size limit: 1 MB, every 2.5 minutes. (in 10 minutes: 4 MB)
- Total Dogecoin transactions in the last 24 hours: 62,270. Block size limit: 1 MB, once a minute. (in 10 minutes: 10 MB)

Total Bitcoin transactions in the last 24 hours: 862,464. If high on-chain capacity is what the world wants, then we should expect them to have migrated, and do more on-chain transactions there. It's clearly not the case, though.

It can be used. It's just not suitable for everyday transactions on the asset layer.

Who said they cannot have their own space in the chain?

It probably can't. You can't have the cake and eat it too. You either accept the tradeoffs of the fixed-sized block, or the ones of the dynamical-sized.

I'm not entirely sure if I remember every detail correctly, many years have passed. At the start of Bitcoin I think blocksize was actually flexible and could grow if there was a need for it (there was no need for growth but it was in the code). What I don't remember: which conditions triggered a blocksize growth and where there conditions (and code) to let it shrink again.

Somewhere I read that this mechanism allowed some sort of attack, but I never looked deeper and understood why this could be a problem. Not sure if for this reason or something else Satoshi decided to set a fixed upper limit of 1MB.

Blocksize war was probably during the period where I didn't pay much attention to Bitcoin for a significant time (I had temporary Bitcoin disinterest 2014ish to maybe midth of 2017) and didn't visit this forum for months and maybe even for years. All I know, there was a blocksize war but frankly I didn't care about the details. There are certainly arguments that I missed and am not aware of.

What I remember from winter 2017: fees where absurdly high, mempools highly congested, it was bananas if you needed to urgently make transactions. We had Segwit, yes, but transaction space wasn't the main reason for it, it was a bonus. And Segwit didn't prevent any of the fee madness in 2017.

Later on we had again periods of severe mempool congestion and terribly high fees that've hindered use of Bitcoin for "normal folks". Induced congestion by Ordinals shit and now Runes shit is maybe very nice for miners but less so for "normal folks" again. There's another thread where this attached data bullshit has been discussed/complained extensively.

In which blocksize camp am I? I feel like the fixed limit of 4M WU is simply sometimes too rigid. Without overseeing all consequences, I admit frankly, I would favour some flexible growth and shrinkage on demand, triggered by some clever conditions, maybe similar to how difficulty is flexible on demand, too (maybe not with such a long window of approx. two weeks as a consequence of the adjustment period every 2016 blocks). The trigger conditions of course shouldn't be exploitable. Don't ask, I've no idea how this could be implemented.

I acknowledge the issue that timely not important transactions then barely need more than the minimum fee of currently 1sat/vB. If there are clever rules/conditions to remedy this, I'm open to hear them.

Since 2023, the problem moved the other way: there's much less blockspace being used for normal transactions.

I remember the end of 2017: blocks were full, and fees were crazy. Even back then, I felt like Bitcoin can't grow if it's too expensive to use. I'd like to make much more transactions than I do now, but the price is too high. Who's going to accept Bitcoin as a payment if it costs too much to transfer it again? I just paid my VPN, which I could have done with Bitcoin, but I used Monero.
You're saying there may not be enough demand to fill 10 MB blocks. I'm saying the lack of demand may be because it's currently impractical to use. As they say: "fix the money, fix the world"!

The only "worry" is for the amount being transfered. That's the part that can be replaced in a 51% attack. There's no moment all 19 trillion is at risk at the same time.

Gooood! Since we're on the consolidate to save$  topic, I feel so happy that you finally agree with me that bigger blocks will drop the average fees! At least here we're on the same page!


I can't help myself and I can't stop saying things the way I feel, sorry if you feel offended by this but
Die wunderwaffe!!!

Let's be completely honest about this, you talk about people moving to second chains, when
-the majority here, here on bitcointalk!, doesn't know what a spv wallet is, how fees work, how to use damn coin control, and you believe..
- again right here on this forum, so one of the cores of the community, people are advising to use altcoins, to batch signature campaigns to monthly payments, to use direct payments to cex account, and even started dealing more with usdt and stable coin in the marketplace

This is exactly wunderwaffe material, you're not seeing the reality from your bunker, and there will be no usage left whatsoever if things don't get done fast!


There is a more problematic math at work here, every time Bitcoin grows the amount guarded grows, with Bitcoin at 1 million there is 19 trillion in wealth there ( for comparison GDP of USA), that will be guarded by gear worth the budget of Houston, that is if everyone agrees to pay $50 per tx, if not, the budget of Ulft  .
But everything will be fine!!!!!

That's a bold hypothesis. We're 15 years after the creation of Bitcoin, and how many users actually do "legitimate" transactions? Like, transactions where they don't just store trash using tapscript. 'Cause I remember before Ordinals, I was paying 1 sat/vb and had it confirmed within the next few minutes.

And as I already said, I'm not arguing that a subtle block size increase will destroy the fee market competition completely. It's just not going to resolve the scalability issue. It'll be a temporary solution. If 1 BTC = $1M, then 1 sat/vb will still be $1.40 for an average segwit native transaction. That still is expensive and unappealing for when making lots of transactions every day, let alone larger in size.

To be honest, I'm worried about the future because Bitcoin is the foundation of the future of money. My concerns are more about what will happen in 20, 50, or 100 years from now.

This may sound a bit anti-Bitcoin, but after four years of exploring Bitcoin, I've come to an important conclusion: Bitcoin is not meant for buying coffee or conducting other low-value transactions, at least not on-chain. It represents the best monetary standard we can have, and using it for such purposes undervalues its true potential.

If you want a peer-to-peer cash system with low on-chain fees, excellent privacy, and a similar level of decentralization, then Monero is the ideal choice. It functions exactly as desired. Its dynamic block size is superior to any fixed size if your sole goal is to maximize the number of on-chain transactions.

You are only partly right imho. Yes, Bitcoin has to grow. But increasing block space doesn't solve this properly, only move the problem for a bit later.
On the other hand, innovation tends to come when there's a need for it. And we do need innovation, for a proper scalability solution.

Yes, I know, it may sound a bit harsh. On the other hand we start getting used to use on-chain transactions only when it's meaningful (hence worth paying even 50$+ for it). For the rest, for small amounts like for example the signature campaigns or paying for VPN, sorry, but LN, no matter how imperfect it is, is the solution we should really consider. At least until the proper solution is discovered and implemented.

In 20 years, Bitcoin could be worth far above $1M. That puts 0.1 Bitcoin per block at 15 million dollars per day. If blocks are ten times larger (and still full), just 1 sat/vbyte is enough to double that. I'm much more worried about the current damage done to the Bitcoin ecosystem: if people can't make transactions, they can't use Bitcoin. If Bitcoin can't be used, it can't grow. I'm not worried about block rewards 20 years in the future, I'm worried about the current status.

What about the halving after that? Or the second after that? In less than 20 years from now, the block subsidy will be less than 0.1 bitcoin. Block space has to be valuable.

That's a good comparison. Solutions that group users in a single UXTO are in very early stages, and will probably never be implemented without softforks. You can check out CoinPool, it's one of them. It can work more efficiently and privately than LN, at the cost of high interactivity.

Another cool L2 is this: https://arkdev.info/docs/learn/intro. Its focus is fast, cheap and confidential transactions. Requires a softfork as well. There are more ideas, and it'll probably be just one L2 which will reach mass adoption, if any. Each one comes with its own tradeoffs, the market will decide which tradeoffs are the best to have.

It's not a contrarian argument to suggest that a block size change (increase AND decrease) would initiate a hard fork/altcoin with unforeseen consequences.

I think it would have been better if Satoshi had implemented a gradual block size increase along with halvings every 4 years (there's a post of him about that), but now it's too late, Bitcoin parameters are ossified as much as IPv4's 32-bit limit.

I don't know why he didn't implement it... maybe he eventually thought it was a bad idea (due to fee market concerns), or maybe he didn't have enough time. We'll never know, but now we're stuck with what we have.

BTC is not a regular commodity.

It's not like wheat or oil where you can increase the production... most commodities don't have a supply cap.

If someone initiated a successful hard fork with a 21 billion BTC supply cap, then for sure it would become more affordable for the masses (everyone would be able to be a wholecoiner).

If the fee market alone is not enough to sustain the mining activity long-term wise (2140+), then you realize that the fixed 21 million BTC limit is not ideal, right?

Would you suggest a tail emission hard fork (like XMR did)?

Every BTC hard fork has a huge risk to split the community in half, you gotta realize that.

Cars/jumbo jets/hotel are not meant to be scarce, unlike Bitcoin ("boring grey metal").

LOL, the planet does not have enough resources to sustain 200 billion people (not to mention the CO2 emissions/climate agenda) and in case you meant space colonies in other planets, then Bitcoin would be pointless, since TCP/IP is a latency-intolerant protocol, so Bitcoin wouldn't work on an hypothetical interplanetary internet.

Mars is like 20 minutes away in terms of light speed, so good luck syncing a blockchain with 10-minute block intervals.

If they achieve that, it would be akin to RFC 1918 (NAT) in IPv4 -> lots of computers sharing the same 32-bit address.

Plan B will be a slower increase in hashrate after the next halving, that's all. That's not such a bad thing: it will still be improssible to do a 51% attack, and the miners' energy consumption may drop a bit. Bitcoin will just keep working.

Great. Block subsidy is dropping, so let's drop some more to 0 by eliminating the fee market competition!

I wasn't even talking about forks. And my "opinion" is just basic economics. If you rise the block size limit, there's more supply of a block size with demand remaining the same. As a consequence, the block reward declines.

Second layers isn't "praying for a magical fix". It's a work in progress. Here's a list of promising second layer solutions: https://l2.watch/. "Doing something", which might turn out a terrible decision, merely for the sake of a temporary solution is not the ideal approach for shaping the future of money.

More complaining here, as usual.

Layer 2, with careful OP code activation through softforks. This could allow solutions such as sharing one UTXO with multiple users to be implemented.

What's plan B in the plausible scenario that the people that use it as currency don't do a 10x?

With 10 times bigger blocks, fees still won't be zero. There will be more transactions and more people could use Bitcoin. That means more people pay fees, so the total fee will still pay millions to miners.

I've already said it a hundred times, doubling capacity at every halving!


Nope, that's your opinion, not a certainty, and please don't start comparing again with forks it's like saying that Acombolofulo payments doesn't need worldwide servers for their business 


At least it's doing something other than praying for a magical fix.


Yup just like Ford destroyed car manufacturing, like jumbo jets destroyed air travel, like huge chain hotels destroyed tourism and so on..
It's just funny that no matter what no matter how many people use bitcoin, no matter how much they use it we should stick to this 1MB block because that will do it no matter what, good that the world population is not going up because I would envision 2500 with 200 billion people all competing to get their tx in the same 1 MB block.


I've already said it, there is only one, and I am also all ears what do you think the solution would be?

That's not what I said nor meant, though. 

To be honest, I would love if you could propose a solution to the problem other than complaining about it forever. Bigger blocks is not a solution, that's one thing for certain. If you still think it is, then you're delusional. If you rise the block size limit, then you're destroying the fee market competition, which is your only source of income as time goes by. And that's without even mentioning other issues that arise with that decision.

- "B-b-but, isn't 10 or 20 MB enough to sustain the fee market while alleviating the scaling problem?" Maybe, but that's what you do: you alleviate it, you don't solve it. It will still be expensive and extremely slow for point-of-sale.

So, I'm all ears. What's the solution since merely changing a block size limit constant won't resolve the issue?

Then we should reduce the space to 10kb, allowing only $10k+ tx because buying coffee with bitcoin is pointless, right?   

To be honest I would love for the ones being against bigger blocks would make up their mind and form a group so they don't go against each other cause I keep hearing contrarian arguments
- fees won't go down because blocks are bigger, but the miner's revenue won't increase
- just bigger blocks won't make more transactions, but bigger blocks would somehow still be full and still, pay less

Every single thing in this world from air travel to superstores has become attractive because of scaling, driving prices cheaper, and making it more affordable for everyone driving more customers and revenue than you could do with a premium product and this hope in the future that users will actively pay $50 for a simple tx to keep the same level of the security as we have now is just daydreaming.

If you want usage, make it affordable!
If you want security, someone has to pay!
Both can be achieved only one way!

It's been years since I tried, but back then (not with Kraken) the well-connected nodes still didn't solve the problem.

What stops you from creating a channel with a well-connected node (like Kraken for example)?

This is another reason why I like custodial LN wallets (for small amounts): in my experience, they're much better connected than my own channels.