Topic: Blocks are [not] full. What's the plan? - page 4. (Read 14343 times)

The value rises because it is a superior store of value and has international transaction ability. Chinese investors highly value its international transaction ability since they can't freely exchange USD with CNY.

Although many shops accept bitcoin payment, as long as you can exchange it for fiat money, you will always get a fiat loan to spend and wait for the bitcoin price to appreciate many folds and repay the loan with a tiny fraction of your original coins, this is a no-brainer (see my signature why bitcoin will appreciate forever)

And, any ponzi scheme or bubble theory does not apply to money itself, a perfect example is fiat money, although it has no intrinsic value, everyone are still joining this ponzi scheme day by day

For a major pool server maybe but the cost is pretty much static so it makes super massive pools and operations far easier to ammortize that cost.


Not really.  A CPU can perform roughly 15,000 ECDSA verifications per second and that is operating single core (no multithreading).  At PayPal transaciton volume = 50 tps, a block would contain 30,000 tps.  Even today that would take a single core no more than 2 seconds to verify.  With a multi CPU server with 8 to 16 cores total you could perform that in a fraction of a second.


Fees buy security.  Right now the subsidy distorts that relationship.  Even at high transaction volume 1 satoshi in fees isn't going to generate significant revenue for miners so the hashrate would collapse and the network would be far easier to attack.   

Exactly!

That's what I used to think too. However, the system is self-stabilizing, ridiculously large blocks which fork the blockchain will find themselves orphaned. If unlimited size is too worrying then the simplest safety net would be max block size = 10x median block size during previous 2016 blocks or previous difficulty period.

Sharding the operation of a full node amongst mutually trusting participants seems like an easy enough way to scale.  It's not the ideal, and there appear to be more clever ways, but its certainly better than any centralized outcome, if that actually turns out to be the only alternative.  So I don't really believe centralization of fully verifying nodes is a realistic long-term fear, except in the case of ridiculously high loads and very unreasonable expectations of the blockchain.

Otherwise I agree, and expect this is pretty much how things will play out: keep kicking the block size limit can down the road until the problem solves itself (it just doesn't need to be raised any more), and build micropayment channel networks for microtransactions, where the point that micro becomes macro is defined by reality, and not what we wish it to be (not that we can't push the envelope with clever scaling solutions).

A node in every town is risky because it is easy to take down. Who is going to administer such nodes?

The idea is that the max block size is going to increase, but slowly. Maybe a x10 multiplication of the soft and hard block sizes could be a good start (maybe even risky).

At the same time, to be on the safe side, it is good to develop safe and cheap distributed tecniques to handle micro transactions in order to avoid the unnecessary inflation of the block chain. Like the one I posted and that invite you to read.

It is not an unnecessary complication. Other crypto currencies may arise that handle things better because are better designed and  more sofisticated/complicated.

Best regards,
ilpirata79

That's roughly it.  Miners want to produce small blocks to minimize the time they take to propagate over the network.

Otherwise somebody who came up with a smaller block, later than theirs, can have it propagate and reach a majority of miners before their block does, which results in orphaning their block and sacrificing their block reward.

The "orphan cost" will cut itself in half when the mining rewards get cut in half -- but we can't wait that long because Bitcoin is currently in a mode of intermittent service failure and that undercuts the value of all coins.

So , let me make sure I understand this...
Because the rewards from the tx can compare to the block reward.. there is no incentive for miners to create larger blocks , so even if we raise the limits to 10 Mb , there won't be much difference , unless a caring miner and a lucky one gets some blocks done.

I think the point is:

- The more transactions a block contains, the bigger it is.
- Bigger blocks take longer to propagate on the network and get accepted.
- If 2 smaller blocks get confirmed before the bigger one gets a child, all TX included in the bigger block don't get confirmed, and this is the "orphan cost".

There is no motivation today for miners to include more TX, as it makes it very risky.
They play small and secure.

The question now, is : "how do we make sure bigger blocks get bigger rewards overall".

Or maybe I didn't get it right, which is also a likely hypothesis.

Ok i got the first part of your answer but for the second part i'm not so sure. You mean that bigger blocks will likely cause more orphans?
Anyway thanks for clearing it out.

If blocksize isn't scarce at all why not include every transaction that pays at least 1e-8 BTC which you've already received and validated?  If it's purely orphaning that influences your decision why won't all your spending go to bandwidth (neutrino links to other miners and such ) and none to POW? etc.

Perhaps I will be crucified here as I was at /r/bitcoin.  But have you considered the possibility that bitcoin is simply meant to be the currency for large transactions of money?  Perhaps millions of dollars?  You could buy a house or car with bitcoin.  But send your lunch money with peer coin.  To me, this is economically inevitable, and would serve to drive the price of bitcoin upward and push it in a position where it is a currency that is meant for large sums of money to be sent....which would be good, I think.  

What I am suggesting is that perhaps what happnens now is the altcoins play this role and finally become more than just, well, worthless.  Peercoin is perfect for sending $1 and bitcoin is no longer that great at it.  So what?  

I 've read Gavin's answer on reddit about block size
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rqexb/87898_kb_block_just_now/


What does he mean when he says that "fees have to float" and also what's the concern of a "downward spiral of transaction fees"?

Bitcoins value just rises, because people believe it might become an alternative currency. It doesn't just rise because it is rare. In this case, all the people saying bitcoin is just another pyramid scheme would be right. All these systems declaring "this and this is now rare and we will sell it to you" failed. Bitcoin as value storage is a tech bubble, because it has no real usage.
Bitcoin as a currency has a real usage and thus it has a value. And I'm very happy, that the number of shops accepting bitcoin is growing, I don't want that to go backwards.
Bitcoin will definitely not be welcomed by the existing players. The players have their systems and they use them. They don't need a decentralized alternative. The people need that, not the banks.
Network traffic and computing power is a very, very, very cheap ressource. You don't keep your fiat, because the paper is "too expensive".

People who think, that bitcoin will be a "value storage" just because it's rare are believing the same bullshit people believed often enough. In this case, the "tulip mania" jerks are right, bitcoin differs in no way from all the other "value storages" that came up in history and went down.

Bitcoin was always designed to be a currency and the existing limits were never thought to be forever.
I don't want to see bitcoin as the next tech bubble and imho a lot of the "next value storage" "gold 2.0" talk sounds fatally like all the bullshit you can hear in EVERY investment bubble.

You know that visa offers some services that will never be replaced by bitcoin.
But visa might use bitcoin for those services.

The Bitcoin network is not in anyway like paypal or VISA, it is very similar to central banks issue moneys in big blocks and distribute them to the society. Just like the FED never issue credit cards, it is a waste of resource to use bitcoin to do micro payments, and in daily life, people really want to spend the fiat money first

Bitcoin won't replace fiat money, since their usage don't overlap: Fiat money is for spending, its value drops each passing year, and bitcoin is for saving, its value rises each passing year

Bitcoin is an unique addition to existing financial world and it will be welcomed by all the existing players, since it has the highest credibility on the planet and will be regarded as the most trustworthy store of value

If there is no cost to operate the bitcoin network, then bitcoin can also carry out  the mission of micro payments, but when the network traffic and computing power is a limited resource, there should be a focus on its major usage

The fear of bitcoin becoming centralized because of "heavy" nodes is imho completely unnecessary. The traffic and storage technology can be maintained by small groups, it is not like there will be "one big government node" in every country. It is more like having a node in every town.
Any system that requires a system on top of bitcoin for payments is a threat for bitcoin and it is not necessary. The basic, existing system of bitcoin allows to replace visa if it is adapted to a bigger volume.
Anything else will make Bitcoin complicated and I know I am repeating this, but one huge factor of bitcoin is, that I don't need an intermediary.
Keep Bitcoin simple, complicating systems unnecessarily has never been wise.

You are presenting a false choice. The choice is not "centralized systems" OR "everything in Bitcoin". There are many options to build non-centralized ways of settling payment on a decentralized Bitcoin— ilpirata79 linked to one such approach. A lack of care into the operating costs of Bitcoin nodes may result in Bitcoin itself becoming effectively centralized, which is an outcome which would make building a non-centeralized payment method on top of Bitcoin pointless or impossible.

I find nothing factually wrong with your point of view, but I can't help but feel that your approach to this problem is against the spirit of Bitcoin. Centralized systems requiring trust are generally cheaper to operate than decentralized ones - think for example of modern governments and the deadlock that they often find themselves in - the cost of a centralized system however is in the potential abuse of trust, monopolistic inefficiencies, etc.

The great innovation of Bitcoin is in allowing for a decentralized financial network at a relatively low cost. While you may be right in saying that the economics may not permit small transactions to go on the blockchain, our focus should be to push the limits of the technology to reduce costs, and then let the free market decide what the blocksize should be, rather than chastising people for having "this kind of religious thinking". Centralized payment systems on top of Bitcoin will always exist, it is up to the individual to decide if the cost of giving up autonomy is less than the cost of using Bitcoin directly, however we ought to do all we can to make centralized systems unnecessary.

I'm sorry if the debate on this issue has evolved significantly beyond this, please feel free to point me in the right direction.

2013/11/28     5.1 seconds   22.4 seconds   1.4 seconds   4.7 seconds
2013/11/29         6.0 seconds   35.0 seconds   1.7 seconds   6.5 seconds

hmm.  well, first off, i guess the average block size was bigger since the difficulty just went up.  but that's much higher than % of block size increase

anyway,


my buffalo node had 5TB upstream used from bitcoind after 25 days, the hetzner used more  , when it wasn't being dos'ed or ddos'ed