Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 126. (Read 378996 times)

They're on Amphitheater Parkway.

[email protected] loves this trend.

Consolidating the diverse, freewheeling email ecosystem into a manageable monoculture proved extremely profitable for his shitlord puppet masters on Sand Hill Road.

http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-landscape/

Mathematics is not my specialty, so please correct this calculation if you think you can do it better. Like I said before I have a background in political philosophy not mathematics and computer networking. It would be valuable for all of us here to have a better understanding of the actual situation based on empirical evidence.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/38fym5/20mb_block_sizes_requires_at_most_26_mbps/

I based my calculation on the discussion on this thread. As you can see my calculation was much more conservative then the OP. If anyone could show how to best calculate what the actual numbers are in regards to blocksize and bandwith I would love to see those numbers, a link or explanation would be great.

In the context of this discussion this image might be helpful



It is interesting to consider that more or less half of the rural US population don't have access to upload speed of 6 mbps or more.

You're not making sense. What's your point?

Absolutely everything is off up there, I'm not going to even bother. You are seriously measuring the downloading of 1 block to do your calculations, which says it all.

^from above, so far i'm counting:

~ 8 opinions
~ 4 fallacies
~ 4 misinformations
~ 3 approximations
~ 4 sophisms
~ 3 fud attempts
~ 1 irrelevant comparaison
~ 4 appeal to authorities

have i miss something?

it is tricky since we could get both if not three at a time of the above listed fraudulent arguments in one.
the guy surely masters the n00bish dialectic c0mb0s.

This is true, that most domestic grade connections globally today can not run full nodes, however in the developed world most people can still run full nodes. Of course when you refer to most connections in the world you are talking about the developing world which predominantly do use mobile 3G/4G connections, however smart phones can not run full nodes anyway. Not sure if dial-up is still even used, HAM radio? I understand using a Satellite connection if you are in a remote location, however again this is not necessarily a critical group of people for running full nodes.

If you are referring to the entire world then this is true, however in the developed world it is not. Saying that almost no home users in the whole world will remain with eight megabyte blocks is also just not true, I have even looked up some numbers to prove my point.

20 MB = 160 Mbit
120 seconds to download the block = 120
160 / 120 = 1.33 Mbps downstream
1.33 * 2 = 2.66 Mbps downstream

98% of the US has at least 6mbps. Source: http://www.broadbandmap.gov/blog/

So under the BIP101 schedule more then ninety eight percent of the people in the US will be able to run full nodes on their home connections that they have today for at least the next four years. It is also good to keep in mind that just because we raise the blocksize limit it does not mean that the blocks will become consistently full, after all the limit is one megabyte today and yet we do not have one megabyte blocks.

I do not think it is true that Gavin and Mike said that domestic users users should not be nodes, they might have said that most domestic users might eventually not be able to run full nodes anymore but that is a position that I accept as well, which is different to saying that there should not be any domestic nodes.

If you really think that is the case then a split is justified. I would like to point out here though that the path towards larger blocks is the original vision of Satoshi and I do question whether such a radical diversion from this original vision should not be implemented in an altcoin instead, considering the promise of the social contract. However the ability for our community to split is of course a justified action under such a scenario, were there are fundamental ideological differences that can not be resolved. I urge you to consider whether it would not be better to adopt a more comprised position, a middle ground like what I would favor. A conservative fixed scedule or dynamic block size limit, so that we do not need to split Bitcoin which according to my prediction would most likely delay global adoption by at least a decade. Think of all the good Bitcoin could do, it can save more peoples lives, if we could just work together and find a middle way.

If enough people take the extreme position to not increase the blocksize or even scale it down then I believe splitting Bitcoin will be inevitable. I prefer to follow the original vision for Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto, any divergence from that vision should be implemented in an altcoin instead, in that sense I am rather conservative in regards to Bitcoin. I do actually think that Bitcoin splitting in this way is inevitable over the long term, it is off political necessity, however I was hoping that this blocksize debate would not lead to that.

Well, we don't even need to torture your logic in order to expose the hypocrisy of your position: you argue on one hand that you're in favour of responsible scaling solutions, and simultaneously behave as if the number of ordinary users with the resources to contribute to scaling up the network isn't a consideration.
 

We already destroyed the chances of most possible domestic grade connections to run their own nodes (3G/4G mobile, dial-up, HAM radio, most Sat, etc).

Currently only the top home broadband connections can realistically keep up at 400~700KB with 1MB peaks. Multiply it by 8 like BIP101 proposes as soon as January and almost no home users in the whole world will remain. Maybe in a couple jurisdictions. Also 8MB is the minimum, doubling up to 8GB is a fixed scaling scheme based on zero real information and pure speculation.

This whole discussion is pointless if we don't agree to what is acceptable in this regard. This seems to be the case, because people like Gavin or Hearn think domestic users should not be nodes and have said so in numerous occasions. On the other hand most Core devs think it's essential.

There is no possible reconciliation between these two positions, as I've said many times. The trade-offs vary wildly between them and the endgame of each of them is a completely different Bitcoin to the other.

This is why I don't consider this to be a debate, the positions are clear and they are irreconcilable.

Personally I side with Luke, at the far end that believes we should either freeze or scale down to allow tech to catch up so more people not less can afford to run their own nodes and control their transactions fully.

This seems like an untenable position, I suppose if you had a 56k dial up connection then the whole Bitcoin network would need to downscale so that you can run a full node?

There can be multiple factors that can make up the trend, different forces pushing and pulling. It is completely logical to think that when more people discover Bitcoin there will be more people running full nodes. I even know people that have discovered Bitcoin recently that are now running full nodes. Increasing the block size does apply pressure to reduce the node count, however increased adoption does conversely also increase the node count. Therefore it would be counter productive to hamper adoption if our objective is to maximize decentralization and financial freedom.

I don't think it's a joke.  When it was recognized that there was to be a hard-fork in association with the BDB mis-config, some decisions had to be made very quickly.  I'm pretty sure that certain people seemed to be lobbying to nix the 1MB block limit at that time because it was a convenient time to do so.  Even by that time it had been a source of heated debate for at least a year.

I was not (and am not) and 'insider' so my visibility into things is limited and based somewhat on intuition and reading between the lines, but I'm pretty sure I remember things this way, and I'm pretty sure that it was the likely suspect who wanted to use the event as the excuse to bloat things.  The event and decisions ultimately made had several main impacts on me:

 1) It gave me to much confidence in Gavin's disposition and judgement and it took longer than it might have for this to wear off.  It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall when some of these decisions were being made in the heat of battle.  Perhaps I mis-estimated how much impact he had and/or on which side of the equation.

 2)  I've felt very strongly about the bloat issue since I got hooked in in 2011.  The bloat attempt associated with that event was so upsetting to me that I bought a couple of domain names and expended some effort imagining how Bitcoin might scale without killing it, and in the event that the 'dark side' won the battles and the rest of us had to try to do some sort of a salvage operation and make the best of a bad situation.

I laughed hard, thank you

We could all careless about your own node experience. The only important node is the one I run.


So first you recognize the negative trend in the context of major historic growth in adoption then you go on to propose the exact opposite, that node count will increase with adoption when all signs point to the opposite.

Hampering decentralization in order to further adoption is not counter productive?

 

I do not have any issues with running my nodes now in terms of bandwith, surfing, netflix, gaming, streaming ect. Everything works fine with the full nodes that I have setup and they do not interfere with the rest of the things I use the internet for in my home. I can also predict that eight megabyte blocks would also personally not be a problem for me. However like I said I am in the minority in terms of the quality of my connection here in the Netherlands, I can download over two hundred gigabytes overnight using bit torrent while still allowing enough bandwidth for my full nodes to operate.

There has indeed been a trend in the reduction of full nodes over the last few years, which was to be expected from the introduction of simplified payment verification and the existence of custodian type services like Coinbase. Fortunately however recently at least it seems like it has stabilized somewhat most likely in part due to the existence of competing implementations, in this sense at least having competition on the implementation level can give people more reasons the run full nodes.

It is also good to keep in mind that node count will increase with adoption, since when more people discover Bitcoin there will be increased numbers of people that have reasons to run full nodes, whether it is a business requiring independent full validation or it is individuals running full nodes for altruistic or idealistic reasons. Which is why I think that possibly hampering adoption in order to maintain decentralization would be counter productive.

I recognize node centralization as being a definite problem and a valid criticism of BIP101 specifically. Mining centralization however I do not see as an issue that is effected by blocksize whatsoever. I have now written extensively on the subject and if you would like to know in more detail why I think that mining centralization is not effected by blocksize read my article on the subject, though in short, miners do not run full nodes, therefore they are not effected by the increased difficulty of running a full node.

I am actually a miner myself, running a 10KW operation from my home, so I do understand some of the intricacies and nuances of mining today which is very different to just a few years ago. I do think that there is a threat of mining centralization however this threat primarily comes from the centralization of manufacturing and economies of scale. Pool centralization is a completely different issue which I am not overly concerned about presently, I think that this would only become a problem once mining becomes to centralized and then this would just be an extension of mining centralization in actuality. As a relatively small "home" miner, which are the types of miners which best serve decentralization I am in a good position to see how I would be effected by an increase in the blocksize, I can say now with absolute certainty that I would not be effected by such a change whatsoever, since I am pointing my hashing power towards a pool and I am not running a full node for the purposes of mining. Even though I do not think mining centralization is an issue relating to increasing the blocksize, I do recognize that node centralization is a legitimate issue related to increasing the blocksize.

I can understand that you want optimizations to be completed before we increase the blocksize. I have a background in political philosophy which has taught me that sometimes a perfect choice does not exist, and when we are faced with a moral dilemma we must still choose even if it is the lesser of two evils. My point being if these optimizations are not complete before adoption requires us to increase the blocksize in order to avoid transactions becoming unreliable and prohibitively expensive then we should do so. Since the alternative under that scenario would be worse. Since if decentralization and financial freedom is our goal then we should at least have a blocksize that maximizes these principles since keeping the blocksize to low for to long can also cause significant centralization pressures which I would argue would be worse then a moderate increase at such a time. To be clear I do not consider BIP101 a moderate increase, and I do favor a moderate increase, still waiting on either another alternative implementation or Core to implement it. I do think that changing it often in small steps in terms of hard forks might also not be particularly viable because of the political difficulty that would cause which is why I do prefer proposals with a fixed schedule or a dynamic limit.

I did want to say here that I do respect your views. You are consistent in your believes and you are not resorting to sophistry and ad hominem towards me, unlike many of the other people on this thread. You stating that you think that the block size now might even be to large is evidence of the consistency of your logic and I can respect that, even though I do not agree with your conclusions. As I have stated before I think that the ideal solution will most likely be a middle ground in regards to the blocksize. Since there are centralization risks on either side of the spectrum. If the blocks became extremely large without a cap that could cause massive centralization risks, in the same sense keeping the blocks extremely small at one megabyte for a long period of time would also cause massive centralization risks. When faced with such decisions it is good to be pragmatic and important to weigh up all of the different variables that effect and are effected by this decision, which are vast and multidisciplinary in nature.

Yes, but it won't work. "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool ALL of the people ALL of the time."

Block propagation improvements were the important point in that post.

Still, never a good thing to have more space taken. Just less punitive after the optimisations than before.

Pruned nodes still need to initially download and verify the whole blockchain which remains one of the major pain points in running a node.

Moreover we can not rely only on a network of pruned nodes.

... the first attempt to hardfork onto a big block chain.

The switch to LevelDB IIRC. Which by the way, continues to suck. And caused a pretty catastrophic accidental hard fork.