Topic: BIP1xx DynamicMaxBlockSize (Read 4257 times)

Well, I'm actually sorry to hear that. I might have come off a little harsh in some cases in regards to this debate (anti-XT and such), however I always try to put genuine thought in discussions around here (but some people make this very hard at times).

Well I do not like the thought of Mike and Gavin either, I do however understand your view on the matter. So you strongly believe that an agreement can't be made between Core and XT? What about an agreement between only the Core developers and the 'industry'? We're kind of stuck at the moment, but let's hope that that changes in the future.
A compromise between BIP100 and BIP105 would be nice.

They don't need to, the "one-percenter" will. The herd, they follow.

Yes, I can't wait for you to get all excited over a 1 mb increase, if so.  

But frankly, have a look at Adam's proposal again and tell me this is not what we are both looking for.

Wow.  That's a pretty dramatic change of tone from your prior post.  It's almost as though I described your views in a way that would sound unappealing to a large number of people and you suddenly felt the need to adopt a more diplomatic approach to compensate.  I doubt anyone's going to buy it, though.


Realised I better quote that bit for posterity in case you feel the need to edit it out, like when you admitted miners want larger blocks.  Looking forward to the fork.  It's going to be glorious.

Are you under the impression that Bitcoin is some sort of wealth redistribution scheme  

Running full nodes benefits everyone because it is the only way to make sure any party you are involved with in a transaction respect the rules of the game. If the governance of the system is concentrated in a few datacenters all over the world it becomes trivial to screw with the protocol and rewrite the books.  

True it benefits directly mostly those who are rich yes since they can chose to transact directly on the Bitcoin blockchain without thinking twice about the price of doing so. Indeed, transactions fees are not a problem for a certain percentage   of the world's riches. These select fews are most interested in the censorship-free aspects of Bitcoin. Multi-billion dollars international bank settlements. Aggregated remittances worth millions of dollars. Darkmarket actors supporting trillion dollar economy. These entities have NEVER been deterred by bank fees, hell they are used to BRIBE everyone around. That's much more expensive than any number Bitcoin fees ever promise to be.

These benefits are, by the way, already available to the highest bidders under the current fiat economy. What Bitcoin stands to do, is not necessarily make it easier for them, although it will, but to descend this ability down to the most common man, should he care enough to pay for it. If he can't then yes he is likely be "shunted-off" to less secure options but ones that will be binded to a digital contract so as to respect the rules of consensus enforced by Bitcoin's sovereignty. Now whether or not he transacts with the Bitcoin blockchain does not mean he can't park his wealth there.

The block increase pressure you speak of will disintegrate as soon as these additional layers can be made available. One should not forget the pace of development we have witnessed in the past 2 years. I fully expect payment channels of different sort to be fully integrated to Bitcoin within the next two.

That is how Bitcoin will scale. This is what I refer to when speaking of building an economy, and not a worthless, centralized payment system.

This should absolutely liberate the Bitcoin chain from any pressure to grow anymore or at least do so while staying in bound with the most conservative hardware and network development. Again, doing so will allow us to commoditize access to full nodes and make them trivial to run. Under this design the smallest Bitcoin users have the power to interfere if someone attempts to change the rules for the worst. That is a much more important liberty than the one to freely transact on any arbitrary chain. 

The powerful idea behind this is that while not everyone will have the money or care to make direct interaction with the Bitcoin blockchain, they will all benefit by the trust it will shine on its economy.

So you freely admit your ultimate goal is to make it as easy as possible for everyone to run a full node to support a chain they can't afford to transact on?  Yeah, I guess I'll have to admit I don't understand how that benefits everyone.  Because it doesn't benefit everyone, it benefits whoever has the most coins.  Sure, let's disrupt the fiat monetary system, where everyone supports the system to provide tremendous benefit to a small, wealthy minority, with Bitcoin, where everyone supports the system to provide tremendous benefit to a small, wealthy minority?  Oh wait, that's the same outcome, why are we bothering to disrupt it at all? 

You're done taking ME seriously?   

It's simply not going to play out like that.  There are too many factors you don't have control over to dictate that particular direction.  Many of the people who are involved with bitcoin right now don't run a full node due to resource constraints, so it's not like new users are going to start running full nodes en-masse just so that they can be shunted off to less secure chains whenever they want to transact.  The pressure will never go away for a larger blocksize and there's nothing you can do to prevent it happening.  Keep dreaming.

 

I am DONE taking you seriously. Understand that inconsiderate, irresponsible and disingenuous proposals will continue to be "attacked, dismissed, ridiculed and torpedoed". I am not one to wear the pink glasses of "oh well it might be better than nothing".

I have offered you a compromise: you get whatever size block you like while we keep our 1MB chain WITHOUT the need for a hard fork. Of course you wouldn't understand it since it is painfully obvious you haven't actually "looked at the proposal".

If you can't understand that a 1MB chain favors the entire network and not only "a small minority" you are either being intentionally dishonest or outright ignorant. Let me spell it out for you: a 1MB block size guarantees access to the most open, private and secure chain.

Open: every users has an ability to trivially run a node and store their wealth on that chain

Private: relying on SPV means relying on a third-party to relay your transactions, there are considerable privacy risks.

Secure: an ultra conservative block size allows the number of independent nodes in the system to grow infinitely, considerably increasing the strength and decentralization of the network. it enables possibilities like the commoditization of hardware such as the existing Bitnodes (https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/hardware/)

Now your obvious complain is that not everyone will get to transact on this chain since it might be considerably pricier. If we're being honest, that's not a problem. A strong & decentralized protocol layer will work as a guarantee that third-parties involved in superficial layers are being kept honest provided that their actions can be checked against the one absolute truth layer. That's the role you should expect Bitcoin to play in the future:


As for you frankly tiresome and quite useless BIP100 blatter let me insist it will never be part of Bitcoin. The whole idea of having miners vote is broken beyond repair. I don't care if 100% of the miners get behind it the users will never let it happen since most of us know better than to leave them in control.

You are a danger to Bitcoin and your servility appals me. You are like an animal reacting only to fear without consideration for the impacts of your action.

A "one-percenter blockchain" is the only rational vision for Bitcoin, whether you like it or not. Fortunately for the first time ever you will be allowed a seat at their table. It will cost you some if you wanna trade with them but you will have other options to enjoy the security of your wealth.

Well I'm certainly not dismissing any of them as potential solutions.  Unlike some, I'm actually capable of looking at a proposal and thinking "It's not quite there in its present form, but if we modify this and a few bits here and there, then it might work".  Why can't you do that?  Why do you have to attack, dismiss, ridicule and torpedo every single proposal that alters an arbitrary 1mb cap?  I'm pretty sure in our little exchange here that ran on for several pages, there was a distinct theme of "you really need to compromise and work with the rest of the community to find something we can all agree on, rather than continuing to draw a line in the sand".  But I can't help but notice the block extension proposal still retains a 1MB cap and an inevitable asset-class elitist chain that only benefits a small minority.  I'm still not seeing a hint of compromise from you and I've still yet to hear your master plan of how you're going to prevent BIP100 when you've painted yourself into a corner and no one is any closer to agreeing with you.

You've already admitted that some miners will obviously want larger blocks, so BIP100 is going to be very tempting for them.  Again, I don't think BIP100 is the ideal solution as I would much prefer an algorithmic change based on demand.  But given the choice between an exclusive blockchain and an inclusive blockchain, I will always side with the inclusive one.  If you continue to reject any increase in blocksize until blocks are constantly overflowing into the mempool, then I will accept BIP100, because it's still infinitely more preferable than your asset class, elitist, one-percenter safe haven belief.

The problem you have, is that for all your talk of aligned incentives and claiming you understand them, the incentives for an inclusive blockchain will always outweigh the incentives of an exclusive blockchain.  The numbers are simply against you.

Have you considered the block extension proposal?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/39kqzs/how_about_a_softfork_optin_blocksize_increase/?sort=confidence

It might not be the most simple or easy to implement but certain from my point of view the one that satisfies most both sides, in effect creating a solution that respects consensus that there is no consensus. 

I certainly hope it's not too late, but fear you might be right.  I feel out of all the proposals, BIP100 is by far my least preferable, unless it's altered to add an algorithmic element.  Give me a simple piece of code over a central entity dictating monetary policy any day.  There's still a chance, but we need to get some momentum built up behind this proposal if there's any possibility of BIP106 being chosen.  Hopefully it'll be discussed at the scaling conference.

People were always talking about this, dont know why it was never proposed earlier as a BIP. But its very difficult now for any BIP proposal to get accepted regardless of if majority want it because miners will never vote for anything other than BIP 100 now its been suggested.

Unless you take a different approach and fork based on 90% or so of node majority rather than using hash majority, but you wouldn't want to do that without first confirming there was already a very strong consensus within the economy for the BIP.

So, there are three proper BIP right now on Bitcoin's Github repo.

BIP 101: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0101.mediawiki
BIP 105: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0105.mediawiki
BIP 106: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0106.mediawiki

Does not BIP 100 or 103 requires to follow proper BIP process ?

Good news here. You may now change BIP 1xx to BIP 106. It has been formally accepted in Bitcoin's Github repo for BIPs, i.e. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0106.mediawiki

It is equally valid to argue that the $3B market cap is a good reason not to put all of one's eggs in one basket.  Even if things were a zero-sum game (which I seriously doubt) then there is plenty of value to get several different basic strategies off to a running start.

You seem to think that the $3B will collapse to nothing if there is a fork.  I think it more likely that it will expand to a greater number as people have greater confidence that the fork they choose is on the right path.  The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and as I say, there is not plenty of slop by virtue of the $3B.  That was not the case back in 2011 when I got interested.

FWIW, I'm surprised and delighted to see you (specifically) putting some genuine thought into these things.  I'd not really expected it from some of your earlier writings.  Anyway...

I believe that my 'never' terminology still stands.  There is just to much diversity and the philosophical poles are to far apart.  One of the main tools an attacker can use is to divide their enemy.  With fundamentally different ideas about an end-state for Bitcoin it makes such an attack against distributed crypto-currencies in this manner very easy.  Indeed, one might not need to provoke it at all as the phenomenon is likely to occur spontaneously.

I would also note that a 'unified and harmonized' Bitcoin has the dis-advantage of being a single-point-of-failure.  Several somewhat autonomous forks each with a different focus lessens this weakness.  Even a Bitcoin which looked a lot like today's e-mail and had a lot of centralization and black/white-listing has some advantages over most other financial instruments.  Specifically, no 'counter-party risk' (by virtue of key control.)  I fight hard against Mike and Gavin because I don't want to see that as the future of Bitcoin, but it really is a viable strategy to enlist the google-class players to be on Bitcoin's side (with the hope of monopolizing it) because they have political sway.  This strategy is a distant second behind working on a defensible 'subordinate chains proxy' strategy (which is what I see Blockstream doing) but I see value in having both strategies in gestation.  Forking could achieve this.

I also cannot think of a way, but tracking technological progress is not a separate issue; it is the issue. It's a case of coming up with the right metrics convolved in the right algorithm. And it is not an easy problem to solve. We will have to see what can be conceived, the issue is only being more widely discussed as of only a few weeks ago, previously confined to the developers who are directly involved


I am aware, and under such circumstances, it is highly important that users transacting on the network are paying commensurately for the resources they consume on it.



I think so, but your conclusion does not necessarily follow that proposition.



Even the previous Coinwallet attack didn't quite manage that, but it's possible the one that's currently building up could do so. It is very disappointing that they are carrying out their threat. Hopefully the mempool resizing pull will get ok'ed and we'll get it in 0.11.1 during this month.



Not everyone shares that view, it should not be presented as unimpeachable. Estimate is an estimate.

I'd very much prefer to determine an appropriate block size limit algorithmically.  Unfortunately, I cannot think of a way of doing this.  There do exist several dynamic limit proposals but none of them do the work of tracking technological progress.


Block subsidies are not necessary to make mining viable.  Even with no subsidy and no limits, transactions would be processed.  It is true that this situation could well lead to extremely low difficulty but this is a different matter.  It is far from clear that this calamity can only be solved by a blocksize limit or that such an approach would even work.

The real problem to an overestimation is that full nodes could well become progressively more expensive to maintain.  This would reduce the number of nodes (including mining nodes) and drive us towards centralisation.  This would require intervention and is a major strike against the proposal.  Fortunately, the growth rate of the BIP101 is rather conservative (not compared to other proposals, but compared with projections of technological growth).


If the blocksize limit is far below what humanity is capable of accommodating with a highly decentralised network then yes, we'd be in a situation similar to the one we have today (hopefully without the node crashing concerns).  This problem applies to all of the proposals.


It's not the conservative solution, it's a solution which follows a conservative estimate of future technological growth.

Never is a strong word, so let's not use it. As it currently stands, an agreement is a unlikely scenario (yet). However, I would not agree that such a fork is the right way to proceed. Requiring 75% means that they are going to cause a split. A split that will damage both Bitcoin Core and XT. One of the main reasons for which I do not support XT (aside from Hearn) is this. If they required 95% to fork, that would be a different and safer scenario.

Let's just hope that the two planned workshops actually yield with a compromise and that we can move forward afterwards.

With this kind of approach, bitcoin will be doomed. The economy wouldn't be able to decide which is which. You can't go your 'merry way' if you choose between the three different bitcoins because it will only confuse those who are in business and those who uses the coins. This is not your common trial-and-error math problem that you will first try out different methods before coming up with the best result. $3 billion dollars is at stake here, you can just play with that by forking it in three ways.

That's not going to be difficult, lol, what support


Why not adjust to demand algorithmically at any given time? Trying to predict demand or supply of network resources, decades into the future, is not a sensible approach at all.

If at any stage the blocksize is too much, the fee market is dead, and mining begins to looks unviable without an effective subsidy. Another blocksize change fork (+ debate)? Great.

If at any stage the blocksize is too little, the fee market could becomes so expensive that everyday transactions are priced out. Another blocksize change fork (+ debate)? Great.

If the average blocksize tracks the BIP101 increase schedule very closely, everything will be OK. How likely is this outcome!



I don't support any of the other static limits for the same broad reasons, it's just that under BIP101, "too big for viable mining" is eminently more likely than under any other proposal. It just cannot be portrayed as the "conservative" solution, it's radical, and in completely the wrong way.

I like BIP1xx but don't think we should double or half the blocksize in one go. Maybe consider plus or minus 20% in one go so there is not so much of a sudden change.