Topic: Blocks are [not] full. What's the plan? - page 5. (Read 14283 times)

I don't have time to completely argument, however, in brief:

1) No problem with credit cards or debit card: I already use them. I could just as easily use them with bitcoins. The issue is the fees that should be low.

2) Paypal is not a payment gateway, but a payment processor. It handles each transaction entirely. Both sender and receiver need to be registered on it. I propose instead a network of interoperable payment gateways where each user can choose its gateway (the cheaper or faster or trustworthy, even if the trust needed if almost zero). To have a transaction among two people, they do not need to use the same gateway.

3) If you want privacy, you can just choose a payment gateway in a country where there is no need to record transactions. A payment gateway could even be located into TOR.


The bandwidth and the storage space issues have already been discussed. You cannot get away with it by just saying that storage is cheap... We must abandon this kind of religious thinking where we just hope that storage will get cheaper and network speed bigger just as much as we need.
Off course there are going to be advancements but the pace of such advancements is not goint to allow to cope with the huge increase of the number of transactions.
In any case, as I said before, you can still use direct transactions (but fees are going to be higher).


Best regards,
ilpirata79

Thank you, Sir!

Off chain transactions are not a solution.

For one thing, off-chain transactions means giving up every advantage of Bitcoin - you're now stuck working through some kind gatekeeper service which has the ability to exercise prior restraint (censorship) and probably chargebacks and funds confiscation.

It's especially pernicious when there are about 7 billion people in the world who haven't got a chance to buy Bitcoins yet and they are the ones who most desperately need censorship-resistant money. The proponents of the small static blocksize are effectively locking them out of the benefits of Bitcoin forever.

Secondly, we need massive amounts of transactions on the blockchain in order to generate massive transaction fee revenue in order to pay for the hashing power we need to secure Bitcoin against attackers with nation state-level resources.

Bitcoin won't stay free with small blocks. There's no route to that outcome without sucking it up and making large blocks work.

Yes and one of Bitcoins big advantages are the small fees. A cheap, fast payment system without the need of intermediaries, that is one huge part of bitcoin imho.
We can have bitcoins without intermediaries. I care if I depended on an intermediary. I don't want companies between me and my money or the money transfer system. I can have that already, it's called a credit card . There is no problem with recording everything. Disk space is already very cheap and it gets cheaper and cheaper. If you have concerns about your privacy, I can guarantee you, that these intermediaries will be obligated to track everything, so you might have less privacy than with the existing system, which gives you enough room for anonymity if you really care. Intermediaries make the system unnecessary complicated. And they are absolutely not needed.
PayPal can be called payment gateway as well. For example, if we installed some kind of "no small transactions" system, there is a big chance, that companies like Ebay become these intermediaries. And as I stated above, there will be no privacy as soon as there is some kind of controllable intermediary.

I'm not saying I have the perfect solution, but there are some test-worthy ideas out there and there is no technical reason to limit transactions on the blockchain.

Off-chain transactions for small or micro payments does not forbid you to send  money to a friend of yours directly (through the blockchain - you may just have to pay a relatively high fee).

The problem is that one thing if what we want, another thing is what we actually CAN have. World is made of constraints. You just cannot record everything, but in any case why would you do that? I don't care if my coffee transaction does not get into the block chain (as a single transaction). Intermediares that lower the required fees and speed up transaction times are just good.

Consider that such intermediares (that I call payment gateways) could even increase user privacy, by aggregating several small transactions into a big one where the information about the component transactions is lost.

Best regards,
ilpirata79


 

I hope -and I'm relatively certain- that I will be (still!) able to do that in the future and imho any solution away from allowing a lot of cheap and fast transactions on the blockchain will be a major threat to bitcoins integrity. I know that "off the chain" transactions are hip these days, but imho this takes away a huge and major feature of bitcoin, NO intermediaries. This point can not be stressed enough. Taking away any kind of intermediary between people is one of the big pluses of bitcoin.
I don't want bitcoin companies between me and the bitcoin network, I want to participate in the network itself. I could just keeping my credit cards then.

Imho off the chain transactions are no solution at all, they are a way of complicating things.

Off-course, I meant that the coffee transaction does not end up being written into the block-chain, but you *still* are paying with bitcoins (through other means). After all, the block chain is just a distributed time stamp server. There is no need to put everything in there.  So, if you can achieve the same goal (pay) through more efficient means, it is ok.
Thanks anyhow for the clarification you made which is very useful.

Best regards,
ilpirata79

I think you should be careful to distinguish Bitcoin the currency and Bitcoin the payment network when you speak because on this matter what you can "never" do is quite different depending on which you're speaking of— I know you know this but the language makes it unclear.

I think you will never be able to pay coffee with bitcoins, when (and if) people really start using it (which is what we want). Unless you are willing to pay very high fees.

For this kind of (micro) payments we could follow the approach I described here, which leverages micro-payment channels in course of development: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/micro-payments-with-off-chain-transactions-344267.

Best regards,
ilpirata79
 

That is imho the worst approach. It takes one of bitcoins key features away, being a very simple and clear system.
Imho, you have to be able to pay your coffee without any intermediaries to keep bitcoin alive and to have a real impact on the world.
Cutting out intermediaries and making transactions cheap and fast, that was the approach described in the paper and I think this should stay bitcoins goal.
Allowing the same number of transactions as visa should be the midterm goal imho. I started using bitcoin quite regularly as shops start to accept it more and more and I definitely don't want this trend to stop. This is the real value growth of bitcoin, not some overheated numbers caused by speculation.

Off course, but that comes at a cost. I think Paypal is a good target because it's about internet payments that does not require very rapid confirmations. We could aim for a little more than paypal  and choose, for instance, a max block size that allows 1.2 or 1.5 of the paypal tps (so 12 or 15 mB).

On the other hand, I think that we should just forget about being able to address the same number and types of transactions visa and mastercard do. Such kinds of transactions (super-market, bar, etc.) have to be made off-chain. First because they require rapid confirmations. Second, because it is useless to register everything into the blockchain (I don't want to have even the coffee I buy registered into the blockchain. In fact, the less transactions inside the block chain, the better).

Best regards,
ilpirata79

Actually the issue is more with free tx (or tx with unconfirmed inputs, or other tx which weird issues).  Very few paying tx with confirmed inputs are being "left behind".  Also gmaxwell point is spot on.  If you force miners to include tx you open up whole new attack vectors which don't exist now.  Even if your rule was implemented right now miners would already be "compliant" as far more than 25% of waiting paying tx are being included.

Then someone starts maximum rate dust flooding transactions and people are forced to include them. Good job. Worse— they send floods of orthogonal transactions to different nodes on the network and now can freely trigger forking by effectively partitioning block propagation.

We wouldn't be having this problem if blocks that don't have at least a quarter of the transactions currently in the mempool would, like tx without fees, not propagate across the network.

Yup, and a bump lets us learn about what changes as the size is increased without risking unpleasant surprises; frankly even 10x is risky.


Viable? Based on what?

Notably orphan cost doesn't work the way you think it does - under certain conditions, conditions while not yet fully present are likely to be present in the future, it is in your benefit as a miner to avoid propagating blocks you mine more widely than a certain threshold. It's kinda like the selfish miner attack, but even more fundamental in that you gain through your inaction rather than explicit actions.

Anyway, this just points to how we need more people working on rigorous analysis of this stuff, rather than empty debate based on nothing... Pity really that the people behind the selfish miner paper are so short-sighted in how they handle PR.

Ghash.io and ASICminer both still observing the 256KB default. Anyone know if they will increase this soon?

Yep, you're right on this.
But I think it will become an issue rather sooner than later. And imho it is urgent, to have a working plan for this phase. I can buy more and more stuff with bitcoin here in Germany, which is great, but it's still fragile and shops depend on the quick transactions.

Well it is important to remember that raising the block size won't "solve" the problem because it isn't so much a problem as a compromise.  The reason why I say we have time is because miners are currently using all the space "available".  If the memory pool was empty of tx older than the last block and block sizes were rising day after day I might feel differently however IMHO if the block limit was 10MB right now blocks wouldn't be any larger.

Agreed.  Often is protocol design there is a saying "don't let perfect be the enemy of good".  Is going from one static artificial limit to another static artificial limit perfect?  Of course not.  However it is simple, easy to model, and well understood.  It won't be the be all end all solution which "solves" the issue to 2140 and beyond but it does buy us some time in a low risk manner.

The one thing I actually like about the "orphan cost" is that it acts to limit blocksizes below the cap.  The cap is 1MB today but nobody (as in not a single block in the history of Bitcoin) is 1MB.  So the cap is really acting just as a safety mechanism to prevent malicious activity.  The real "economic cap" is well below the 1MB limit.  That won't change if/when the cap is raised so the thinking should be what cap still protects the Bitcoin network from centralization and blockchain bloating attacks.   With current technology I think 10MB is viable. 

If someone wants to solo mine from a home connection they may have to pay for upgraded internet service but it isn't outside of the realm of possibilities like a 1GB block would present.

Yeah, as ugly as it is, everyone knowledgeable about the issue agrees that if the limit is to be raised, it has to be done in such a way that there is still a limit of some kind that is not under miner control to avoid creating new incentives to centralize hashing power, or for that matters furthering existing incentives to centralize. You know how they say in cryptography that attacks only get worse, not better? What we've seen in Bitcoin suggests that clever ways for large miners to abuse their position to get even larger seem to be found a lot more often than the other way around.