Topic: Blocksize needs to be increased now. - page 9. (Read 25071 times)

There is no free space. Damnit you guys really have no clue about the blocksize debate and comment on it.

The cap limit is not a default setting.


Blocks wont become 8mb size, and 7.5 mb will become empty.

Blocks will remain the same 0.5mb, but it just lets the maxium reach 8mb if it needs to.


Now i dont think 8mb should be increased immediately, but it should be written into the protocol to increase at some point.

I dont like the command & control aspect of the development. There should not be a need for development anymore. Add a final BIP into it, and then its over.

Developing it further just gives more power to the developers and it creates a centrally planned currency, that is nothing better than fiat.

I just wish the developers can increase the block size to 2MB or 4MB for now. Further increase can be discussed later.

Having a bunch of "free space" that's unused due the cap being too big brings a lot of problems and possible exploits. What centralizes Bitcoin is not being able to run a node in your computer, not the nonsense you are talking about. Bitcoin will never scale to worldwide levels by raising blocksize.

Yea but thats not really why users use bitcoin now.

I get that bitcoin has like 10 features that are appealing but most people use bitcoin only for 2 things:  get money online, send money online.

You can already earn fiat money on various sites, and if banks really make TX instant, it will be a big blowback to bitcoin.


I think it will be a big blowback, most people dont care about financial privacy, and control over money anyway

The ultimate question is: If blocksize does not increase, will bitcoin die?

I think the answer is a definite NO

The spam attack during October was a good test. It almost filled every block as much as it can, but we just heard little complains from people sending small amount of bitcoins, majority of the users are not affected. This showed how flexible people are when blocks are full. Most important: The exchange rate of bitcoin was not affected by this kind of full blocks

Unlike normal IT business that striving for reaching 100% customer satisfaction, bitcoin is a monetary system. It is no way that FED is striving for average people's satisfaction for their monetary system. In fact, they sacrificed the benefit for almost every one but everyone in the society still adapt to their system and be happy

It is similar here, you should let people to adapt to bitcoin instead of letting bitcoin adapt to people, because bitcoin is money. Service oriented mindset of programmers comes from that they are typically an employee servicing a large enterprise, which in turn provide service for consumers. While the view from FED is different, they create money, every one else beg them for money, so their task is not to make customer happy, but make their money as trustworthy as possible

From this point of view, if something reduce the trustworthy of bitcoin, then it is negative. For example a security hole, an uncertain architecture, or split core devs, these all have negative impact. As long as bitcoin is as robust as gold, I think people will always be attracted and find solutions to solve the capacity problem. The motivation of using bitcoin definitely not comes from its cheap and fast transaction capacity

Imagine that every one uses bitcoin as their retirement fund, how frequent they are going to use bitcoin network? once a month for purchasing, and after decades, once a month for withdraw

True, as long as miners get block subsidy, they will only include transactions if those transactions do not increase their chance of being orphaned. And this will be the case for decades to come, thus make the fee income always small comparing to block subsidy (fee per block = block subsidy x orphan risk)  Is there any chance the fee will rise to replace block subsidy?

I just read a good opinion: Someone pointed out that miners have their own economy wisdom, so when they do the planning, they will calculate the reduce of block subsidy in their business model, thus either deploy more efficient miners (which helps short term wise), or seeking ways to cut maintenance/electricity cost (long term wise). In fact, even without block subsidy reduce, a 50% of jump in difficulty gives exactly the same impact, and I think they are all used to this kind of impact from time to time, so they are very well prepared. This is not something core devs should worry about

Average blocksize is already growing exponentially. You can see that quite clearly from the linear trend in this log chart.
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7×pan=all&scale=1&address=

Another important point most people are missing is the fact that the average block size will not peak at 1MB. At least not in the foreseeable future. And the reason for this is quite simple. Miners get almost all of their income from block reward rather than from fees so their main goal is to find a valid block asap. Filling it with transactions is only a secondary goal. If you check the blockchain you'll find many blocks like this one:
https://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000000a680d0736b971c40243dcab764ba7dc4a591b900e9c5a70
There is only the coinbase transaction. The chances of the mempool being empty when this block was mined are virtually 0. And there are many others.

Miners incentive to include transactions in blocks will grow as block rewards drops significantly but this will happen in the distant future. Average fees per block is around 0.25 BTC while block rewards is 25 BTC. That's x100. 

So even if the block size limit is 1MB we will start to see confirmation delays and fee inflation with average block size well below 1MB.

I think getting standard fee in 10k is ok, the problem is the ludicrously low 1mb block size each 10 minutes,  if they dont agree to up the size block soon we can see transactions being confirmed in 24 hours in the next months

Bitcoin might get a higher fee, but it will never lose its most significant appeal in the long run: Long term saving and international remittance

Let's be honest: Bitcoin will never be able to compete with those fast&cheap mobile/3rd party payment solutions that charges 0 transaction fee and instant confirmation (you even get some bonus when using them), and the possibility of refund

For example, Sweden has already over 50% of population use mobile payment. So all of these users will feel angry when they need to pay a fee  to use bitcoin to spend, besides all the hassles about exchange into and out of bitcoin

So, even if you make bitcoin 0 transaction fee + instant confirmation + refund, people would still not use bitcoin to spend, because they gain nothing from switching from existing mobile payment solutions to bitcoin. People who care about bitcoin mostly attracted by its deflative nature for value storage, and they usually buy large amount of coins, so the fee is the least concern for them (I have seen these people paying 5-10% above market price to get 1-2 bitcoin, do you think they really care about the current level of fee?)

If you consider its major advantage against existing financial system, it is clear that the best marketing for bitcoin is either its exchange rate rises (for long term saving), or more and more exchanges are available in each country (for international remittance)

Agreed. There is exponential growth looming in front of us, and if we wait too long, bitcoin will miss it's chance to start booming. If we keep having this 1 MB ceiling, TXs will either take much longer, or the average TX fee will have to rise, as people fight each other for the fastest transaction.

We need this change soon, lest we all drown in slow transactions. We don't want that, do we?

Well then bitcoin will have a much higher fee, and will lose most of it's appeal in the long run.

I already have problems sending transactions at 0.0001 BTC fee, so now I use 0.00025 BTC/kb as set in electrum.

Soon that will double of triple, and bitcoin will lose its fast & cheap transaction appeals. It will be a huge marketing blowback.

8MB would never work:




Even the Fedwire system that responsible for all the large transactions between FED and thousands of member banks do 4tps only. It all depends on how you use the system. I think it is a huge waste of resource to let thousands of expensive nodes to relay transactions of coffee purchase

Bitcoin gaining popularity not because its payment function, and it will never be. There are plenty of statistics showing that people are not interested in using bitcoin to purchase coffee, they are more interested in use bitcoin to hedge against inflation and make money

It would be nice to find a measure to make those "tests" more expensive without affecting normal transactions.

Well i`m sure one of the previosu stress test were done with 0 fees and have flooded the mempool almost making the bitcoin network crash.

It was a quick fix of it, but it was concerning since the transaction didnt even took place, it was the miners memory that was targeted.

It was more like a DDOS against bitcoin.

This is an important point - they are paying fees for the majority of the stress tests.  Eventually they will run out of bitcoins to use for the stress test and will have to buy on the open market.   The so-called stress tests are not costless so can't continue indefinitely without driving up the fiat value of bitcoin.

There is a minimum, not at protocol level but at the node level which is set by default to 0.00005. Any fee under that is not relayed by the node.

Also, the stress tests do not send transactions with 0 fees. They always send with enough fees.

Stress testers?  Disable 0 bitcoin fees. If they want to test, pay for it.

A stress test is the same as regular transaction. Pay and then they can send as many TX they want.

0 bitcoin fee should be disabled at protocol level. Minimum should be at least 1000 satoshi.

There's no problem with 8MB blocks but do you have a way to deal with stress testers? Do you know how make their tests more expensive? Higher dust limit and Higher fees?

Maybe we should go to 2MB first which is a 100% increase.

Dude, the 8 MB limit is not each and ever block. If the cap is 8mb, and the current block size is 0.5 mb , then 0.5 mb blocks will circulate. The 8mb block is only the cap limit, not the default size.


Therefore the block structure won't really be destroyed, it's not like you have to reformat earlier blocks to all have the identical size. Even now block sizes vary so that's not an issue.


But what you are doing here is artificially not letting the block size go up, and when the limit is hit, then people will compete for the empty space, so the TX fee will massively go up, and most people cannot transact and the TX confirm time will go up.

That is the real sabotage.

The blocksize will go up anyway, the question is, will you let it go up naturally, or you plan to make bitcoin a communist centrally planned currency. I hope not.

We need more nodes, and larger blocks. But not one without the other.