Topic: Bitcoin Blocksize Problem Video - page 2. (Read 9491 times)

I don't think that it would be technically unfeasible to devise such a solution, nor do I believe that it is as trivial as you make it sound for a society to stamp out things that the leadership does not like.  If so, there would not be such a thing as 'contraband', and it is absurd to turn a blind eye to the existence of such things or to their value (which happens to often rise dramatically due to artificially straining the supply/demand curve.)

I don't know how prevalent CP is and I imagine that the problem is blown out of proportion for political reasons, but I am sure that it does exist.  This in spite of nearly universal negativity on the part of almost every society and strong support for enforcement it has not been stamped out.

In contrast to CP, efforts to interfere with a distributed crypto-currency would probably be seen for what they are by large segments of the population;  self-serving and unfair policies designed under a crony regime to benefit their well connected friends.  In short they are likely to receive much less public support and subject a much broader segment of the population to abuse.  This will impose some limit on the level of punishment that a state can impose on those caught participating in the economy.  Of course that will vary from state to state, but we are talking about a global phenomenon here.

I am speaking about a 'reserve' currency role.  Arguments about the ability of the state to interfere with Skittle purchases are in a different category.  Those are not the kinds of transactions inherent in a 'reserve' role, but I do not believe that value in a 'reserve' capacity is negated because an item has no realistic 'exchange' function.  Certainly it is not what we see in precious metals.

I do suspect that you are right that Bitcoin will simply not be the solution which ends up being a trusted reserve currency.  This is not because it is could not be.  Indeed, one has to work at it to make it NOT fall into this role.  It is more that much of the development team simply sees no value or role for such a solution and if anything seems to consider it an undesirable thing and something to be actively avoided.

Block size will be raised when it's economically profitable. And at some point it will be for almost everyone.

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/49174658108/economically-limited-resource

Ask Gregory Maxwell about his excellent solution to the malicious data problem. Sadly it can't stop timestamping, penny bets, tips and many other abusive uses though.

As for fidelity bonds they're only useful if the bad behavior being punished can be evaluated in an automated fashion.


You probably missed the many discussions we've had about having transactions provide proof that their transaction inputs exist in the UTXO set so validating nodes don't have to store any blockchain data at all. (albeit with the serious risks that UTXO proof implementations have for many other reasons) But that just makes the bandwidth problem even worse, and it's anonymous censorship resistant bandwidth that is the limiting factor for scalability.

I'm amazed this still comes up. The idea that Bitcoin can survive in a country where the state wants to wipe it out is naive and attempting to actually design a system with that constraint is a poor use of time.

I suspect at some point China will forcibly demonstrate this fact. After all Tor is already banned there and VPNs are regularly disrupted. So, ban port 8333, block websites of exchanges and web wallets, forbid banks from wiring to the primary exchanges, announce that anyone who advertises acceptance of non-licensed currencies will be jailed. Done. All of those things are easily within the abilities of the Chinese government and some of them are quite easily done by other governments too (there's already a large financial sanctions infrastructure in place in the west).

You can't have a currency which people are afraid to advertise acceptance of because the utility of a currency is the square of its participants. An outlaw currency isn't even useful to outlaws.

If you want to build a currency that can operate in a world where accepting it leads to immediate punishment then go right ahead and try, but it won't be easy and block sizes are the very least of the problems you'll have to solve.

i guess i should rephrase that.

instead of assuming that tens of thousands of full nodes would result from keeping server costs below $100, we could measure the outcome of a specified block size increase by determining full node density on a per sq mile or per sq kilometer basis and attempt to model that density after a militarized internet.

i think it should be done on a geographical basis like that as opposed to just # of full nodes in the US b/c i assume ISP's are geographically distributed; something like (and i don't know this for a fact) Verizon having a stronger presence in the Northeast vs Cox Southwest vs Comcast Midwest.  i'm totally making that up but if i'm right, the point being that some ISP's might be more susceptible to being influenced to shut down Bitcoin nodes than others.

this would be great but i also think that going forward we should develop a way to measure the square mile or square kilometer density of full node operation and perhaps compare it to how the military has structured the internet to withstand an attack from their perspective.  especially since that data should be relatively available.

Network bandwidth is currently growing about 20% per year, or roughly doubling every four years.

Satoshi's original code had a 32MB block size limit, which he dropped to 1MB as part of a bunch of band-aid fixes to make denial-of-service attacks harder.

RE: density of full nodes:  In my opinion, if it is affordable to run a full node (less than, say, $100 per month in server costs-- that is a trivial monthly cost for most businesses and some individuals) then we'll continue to see tens of thousands of full nodes.

Median cost of a dedicated server with lots of bandwidth, disk and CPU is under $100/month these days, which would support a block size at least ten times the current maximum.

And all of THAT is before even starting to think about possible optimizations (e.g. figure out how to mitigate the "insert malicious data" problem-- maybe Peter Todd's security bonds would be helpful-- and a shared DHT storing all valid transactions combined with bloom filters on connections could make it cheap for any one machine to be a fully validating node).

Please, don't listen to all of the FUD being thrown around about raising the block size even before there is any solid proposal for what should be done.

Not many people are bringing up hard drive space because it is not an issue.  Access to the data on the media is a somewhat different story.  In any event, I've outlined my rational on this thread and it has little to do with anything you commented about.


A better question is "who's not?"  Everybody and their brother is coming up with an 'alternate crypto-currency' solution and a lot of them have some fascenating concepts.

Ultimately I expect to use a variety of currencies to which happen to best fill niches I need, or promote causes I believe in.  I don't expect that it will be much trouble to exchange between them.

As an overall store of wealth I'll probably use some combination of gold and the most robust and static crypto-currency solution which exists.  Likely there will be a strong correlation between robustness and simplicity for a successful reserve currency.  I may dip into it yearly so the usability requirements I have of it are highly secondary.

This is assuming what, today's hardware? 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png

The blockchain is growing at what pace now, about 10 gigs a year?  Commodity hard drive capacities are growing at 100 times that pace.  The blockchain cannot possibly catch up.  Storage is a made-up concern, as far as I can tell.

Network bandwidth is growing too, although probably not as fast.  So this is still a realistic concern.  Still, unless bitcoin explodes into prominence in the next few years, there seems little chance that it will surpass commodity hardware, especially if some block size limit is kept in place (can still be >1mb).  That limit only needs to be kept such that commodity hardware can handle it.
It will not be long before every transaction on the face of the earth can be very cheaply transmitted and stored.  I don't see the point in artificial scarcity of blockchain space.  The only reason to constrain it is to avoid overloading commodity hardware. 


And who is going to provide these solutions?  If the answer is not "bitcoin", then you've lost me.  Why would you want to create a half-assed solution and then stop and wait for someone else to finish it?

while true, if considering weaponry, manpower, homeland security yadayadayada, i'm only talking about from the perspective of maintaining military grade communications via node density of the Internet.  and as you know, it wasn't just the war guys who helped design it, the academic community had an equal role.

you know what they say; the best defense is a good offense.

I'd say that the military industrial complex is most proficient at sucking taxpayers dry, and that the likelihood that the US could have defended it's geographical borders with 1/100th the cost is very high.

But there are certainly lessons to be taken away from strategic (and tactical) military planers, many of the pre-dating modern US military doctrine.  Chief among these are the notion that it is rare to ever need to fight a war that one is prepared for and capable of winning.

i think we should design any future redundancy models after an industry that has done this before and has proven adept at disaster and attack modeling:  the military industrial complex.  

there must be readily available plans as to node density and capacity per square mile/kilometer that they put forth back in the 70's or even earlier required to withstand a nuclear attack.  any anticipated gov't interference in Bitcoin could be designed after this model in an effort to anticipate maximum damage and institute proper controls and response.

David Perry gave a good podcast talk the other night where he likened the crypto behind Bitcoin as military grade compared to even the stuff we see with RSA symmetrical encryption used by banks.  i'd never really thought about it that way before but from what i can tell after studying ECDSA public key cryptography, it sounds like he is correct.  

we should design any future blocksize expansion and calculate its effects with the goal of maintaining full nodes at a similar density to what maintains the structure of the internet in the US from a military defense perspective.

that should do it.

In this case 'do nothing' is the solution which, to me, makes the most sense.

The most rosy scenarios for scaling via block size increase get us up to 'as big as Visa' range.  I've argued for a long time that that is simply not enough to run a fair fraction of street-level transactions of the world on, and the cost of doing this is reducing the number of potential 'peers' down to a low number of well connected and well capitalized entities.  Even then it likely fails at some point anyway and we are back to the same problem but with a much less desirable Bitcoin solution.

An alternate solution is to embrace multi-tiered and loosely coupled set of solutions and attempt to retain Bitcoin as the top-most tier in the hierarchy.  Bitcoin could perform that role adequately with the configuration we have today and would allow a multitude of highly dispersed transfer nodes to exist in support of Bitcoin proper.  And to my main points of this thread, there is a high likelihood that they could communicate with one another efficiently even under significant attacks by network carriers.  Such a solution would be difficult to stamp out...and thus something which I and others could have a lot of confidence in.

Just some raw calculations for distant future:
script:
I can't see much difference for small mining pools between 1MB block with avg tx fee of $10 and 100MB block with avg tx fee $.1. Avg block revenue would be $42,000 in both cases. So even tiny mining pool that mines 1 block/day (0.3%) would make $150,000 a year with 1% fee. Full, reliable 100Mb/s connection (not shared with anyone) as of 2012 cost~ $30,000/year in Sao Paulo and 10 times less in New York/London - source. And the cost of 4TB/year is meaningless. Finally the revenue would be > 80% as opposed to ~99% for 1MB. And this is worst case scenario, since the pool can easily share 1Gb with 1000 other consumers and pay ~1% of the price (normally 1Gb is shared with 10,000 broadband connections)

Off chains tx are fine as long as people would like to pay less fee than $.1. Otherwise miner would want to claim the fee, as shown in the above scenario.

I believe the consensus may be reached and something between 1MB and unlimited size will be finally accepted.

Firstly, I agree.  Facilitating the inclusion of people with financial power to get some skin in the game is a powerful tool.

I dis-agree that this is the be-all-end-all solution to thwart against state sponsored attack.  Relatedly, people with financial power have their own struggles going on between themselves and Bitcoin's future could become one of the weapons they use against one another.

Lastly I wish to make it clear that I see the entire crypto-currency world as being a cat which has escaped the bag at this point.  There WILL be a healthy exchange currency solution, and probably many of them.  There also WILL be a functional 'reserve' currency as well.  These functions have many areas where their functions and logical focuses diverge, and some of them are mutually exclusive.

The only real question is how Bitcoin proper will wind it's way through the landscape which is yet to be explored.

tv,

this is what i think needs to be supported, not squelched:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/29/chris-dixon-plans-on-investing-in-more-bitcoin-startups-says-more-entrepreneurs-are-getting-involved/

""I think for a lot of people in tech, finance has been this very frustrating area," says Dixon. "We see what happens on Wall Street, it's very corrupt, and it's so highly regulated that, when you do try to start a company, you run into all these regulations. [Bitcoin is] this release for the pent-up frustration. Finally something is happening in finance tech....[We spent] years in the desert there."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-dixon-why-silicon-valley-is-obsessed-with-the-bitcoin-2013-4#ixzz2RsTBynQW

if Silicon Valley takes Bitcoin by the horns and rides this wave, it won't matter what the gov't thinks.

well then the other way to look at it is that if the masses are the ones driving up the blocksize bandwidth, then there will be just too many of us for TPTB to do anything about it from a political standpoint.  i'm not saying you're wrong, scrutiny of my bandwidth usage is the last thing i want, but what we're talking about here is a theoretical situation which is mostly unpredictable.

Yes, it is somewhat theoretical.  I have, however, dabbled with techniques of covert messaging over the years for the fun of it and am probably a bit more aware than most of the technical difficulties of cloaking data channels.  (DPI's Achillies heal is that it is processor intensive, and just as a hashing function acts like a valve using this principle, it is possible to make life hard on the analysis part of a DPI system.)

I do not think it is at all improbably to imagine a world where the Internet is much more controlled than it is (or appears) at this time.  It's not likely in the plan of those in power in the US, for example, to end up being "Mubarak'd".

I think it is a false hope to trust that the strength of Bitcoin will be promoted by adoption by Visa, PayPal, etc.  Firstly because it is unlikely.  Secondly because even if this were the case it would mean that they are extracting sufficient value out of the system.  That means value from the pockets of the users.  In that case there would likely be nothing worth trying to protect.

tv, this is a judgment call on your part.  there is no data to support it either way.

i could just as easily say that if and when blocks have grown to the size you're talking about, that would mean actors like Paypal, Visa, and MC would have climbed onboard Bitcoin making it politically impossible for any gov't to attack it.

I do not understand the "anonymity" objection to raising the block size.

"Trust a 3rd party" is a perfectly valid solution for doing low-value transactions, but it's not a solution for keeping anonymity?

I think retep's objection is the short-sighted one.  In the long-term, hardware capacity will vastly outstrip transaction growth.  In roughly a decade, storing and forwarding every transaction in the world will be trivial.  In 1995, it seemed impossible to stream and store 1000's of high-def movies.  Now it is done on cheap commodity hardware.

There is no reason whatsoever to keep the block size under 1mb.  There may be a reason to limit it somewhere, and it may not be easy to come up with a good scheme to limit it, but seems to me a permanent 1mb limit is "right out".