Topic: Can we just stop with the block size panic crap? - page 4. (Read 4018 times)

lets say each person made 1 remittance a week
knowing that there are 144 blocks a day and a potential of 4000tx a block (with luck)
4000x144x7= 4 million users making 1 transaction a week.

which is not adequate for the 192million migrant workers (quoted by world bank), thats just over 2%

atleast for now, if bitcoin blocked standard usage and went remittance only, for now we could allow for 2% of total remittance.. but it would need to grow.

the other way of looking at it. is forgetting about remittance.. bitcoin can only allow 1 transaction a week for 4million people to buy.. maybe a magazine or a coffee.. or a GPU.. again not adequate for people wanting a coffee everyday.

lets say people wanted to do 2 transactions a day. one for lunch and one for beer in a bar in the evening.. thats only 288,000 people making 2 transactions a day.. and the problem being that its not going to be spread evenly over each block.. as most people would buy lunch between 12-1pm and beer at 6-8pm so there would be alot of bottlenecks at these times of days..

it would appear as 10 bottlenecks.. 2 bottlenecks per 5 main time zones.. and then no large amount of new tx relays inbetween, just existing tx's finally getting processed in the lull

Bitcoin is not a killer remittance solution. In fact remittances in bitcoin are a tough business. A lot of projects are trying to crack this problem, but so far there is nothing groundbreaking.
So I think bitcoin remittances are not going to be as easy as some people think. Why Western Union despite their awfully large fees is the king of remittance with bitcoin around?

So let's discuss the block size problem.

Currently the Bitcoin network can only support around 7 TPS (transactions per second) but you need to realise for a start that it is not "actually 7 txs per second" as a new block only gets created on average every 10 minutes (so a merchant can't expect a payment confirmation in seconds).

So no matter how much bigger you make the blocks you don't solve the 10 minutes problem (so the X txs per second are actually not *real* txs per second and never will be).

The very design of Bitcoin stops it from being like VISA and this is the point that I have been trying to make.

I don't have a smartphone, and the last time I drank coffee was the 9th December of 1973 (I hated it). So I'm all in favor of restricting BTC to serious payments like remittance, but that's a big market. Millions use remittance services every week, and as a very small business owner, I'm making at least one bank transfer each week. So even with coffee out of the equation, the block size problem remains on the table. You just need to look at the average number of transactions per day. How many are for coffee?

I don't believe that I have said "instantly" so unless you are going to provide proof that I did I would appreciate it if you didn't put words into my mouth (I'm not putting words into your mouth).

In any case the topic is about whether Bitcoin is really suited to competing with VISA (or the like) and therefore whether increasing the block size is an urgent matter or not so can we just stick to that rather than going down the path of "ad hominems", "appeals to authority" or the likes.

I didn't accuse you of lying but you are constantly telling me that "I need to provide proof" to back up my statements so I would think you would apply the same standard to yourself.

I'm happy to just assume that Andreas has said that (he isn't a technical expert so that would be understandable) but I would be surprised if Gavin has said that.

And in either case "appeals to authority" aren't really very convincing are they (especially when we are talking about something that is decentralised)?

andreas has made loads of video's.. but because i proved you wrong about the AUD->INR when you said im lying about stats... and so proved it using real local bitcoin prices.. i will actually bother to watch all andrea's videos again, just for the sake of showing you. as you seem to think people lie, unless they are kissing your ass

and if you read my post you will see i said ignore social studies and fix malle!!!

but the study was based on % of peoples morals..
but the general population who actually know of bitcoin is 0.1% so a thief who knows about bitcoin is something like 0.001% of general population..

but yes i agree if people know how to steal coffee and get away with it.. the lack of morals increase from 1% of populations to atleast 50%, and making the chance of a bitcoin customer stealing vs fiat customer goes from 0.001% to 0.05%.. then as more general public use bitcoin and 1% of the retail customers are using bitcoin. the chance of a coffee theft is then 0.5%.

i personally do not accept zero confirms.. which is where i disagree with you on your other posts/topics about the whole 'send instantly to other countries' has been said by you

but like i said.. even if the odds are low, its not good enough to just accept the odds of social studies as being low to just let it happen.. but instead fix malle! so there is no problem or chance

Please provide proof of this (i.e. video links to Gavin and Andreas at the very least saying just that as I certainly don't recall either of them saying it).

It should be noted that this kind of low fee zero confirmation theft does increase in probability as the mempool size increases - so a more popular Bitcoin will have more of these sort of double spends than a less popular one (another good reason why we shouldn't be so eager to make Bitcoin such a popular payment method and increase the block size).

And this is where you are getting things confused - if people can easily get away with out paying for something without any consequence then they will do it (that is human nature and I'm sure you can find many social studies that will back up this statement).

If you simply do a tx with an extremely low fee then it is entirely possible (even likely) that despite the tx being not rejected as dust it won't be confirmed before it is dropped from the mempool (and making blocks bigger isn't going to fix that either - a swimming pool will always fill up with water no matter how much bigger you make it).

Thus unless your coffee seller has checked that the fee looks good enough to confirm within a day (and how does the seller actually really know this?) the coffee buyer can enjoy their coffee and the next day be able to do it again (presumably they would probably not frequent the same coffee shop for fear of being caught but let's just assume that this person is a tourist and so doesn't care about coming back again).

malleability is not just one issue. there are many ways to screw with data and swap transactions, all of which are termed malleability.. yes there were some bug fixes, but there are still ways to twist a transaction to your favour, so its still not good to blindly trust a tx until its confirmed. not yet atleast

its also not good to technically trust a transaction with 1 confirm. because miners sometimes dont simply stale their attempts when there is a solved block by a competitor, and so orphans can make a tx with a confirm appear valid. then seconds/minutes later invalid, because that block became orphaned. and the competing block didnt include your transaction when it raced to first place to throw the other block into orphan

though only 1% of blocks lead to a orphan, and of those orphaned blocks the chances that the competing block didnt also have your tx, is 1 in ~4000 means the odds of a 1 confirm suddenly leaving a retailer with an empty pocket is something line 0.00025% (1 in ~400,000 chance). so people dont worry or talk about that kind of odds much.. but it is possible

thats why even the big names, andreas, gavin, and hundreds of others say
price of a coffee 0 confirms (only 1% of your customers lack morals and want to be a theif)
price of a TV 1 confirm (1 in 400,000 something will go wrong, and it takes 10 minutes to get the TV out of the shops storeroom, so no problem waiting)
price of second hand car 2 confirms
price of new car 3 confirms
price of small house 4 confirms
price of large mansion 5 confirms
bill Gates net value 6 confirms.

although the odds increase massively per confirm to numbers a brain cant quantify, and some people can take the small risk vs customer experience satisfaction, its still worth thinking about how important the item your selling is, vs how long you will make a customer wait vs risk of a miner not staling or immoral thief.

emphasis:
coffee can be bought using zero confirms.. not due to there being no malle.. but the social study that a coffee shop would only have 1% of coffee stolen. and a coffee shop makes enough profit to cover that loss, and would not want to lose more money simply by upsetting customers by making them wait, thus losing future customers loyalty. in short its more about social loyalty to keep profits coming in, to cover potential losses.

but ignoring social studies.. and thinking about bitcoin security/trust of tx's.. malle really needs to be fixed! as it is a risk that shouldnt rely on social statistics, or retailers profitability or customer loyalty to pretend its not a problem

i thought it was solved with the version 0.8 of the client, also it seems that malleability it's more of a exchange, or merchants fault that keep running alternative custom client

i remember that it was mtgox fault at that time, because other exchange did not face this problem

Totally agree, and another very useful function is saving, since fiat money is already useless for long term saving

There are hundreds of fast and cheap payment method in today's financial world, adding one more bitcoin does not make any difference for coffee purchase (even worse since you have to convert to bitcoin first). But there is not even one single fiat money that is not inflationary, so saving is the most obvious reason people come to bitcoin

I think most of the bitcoiners are driven by such a thought: "I get some bitcoin now and after some years I start to spend it. By that time, fiat money has already inflated so much that my bitcoin value will rise at least several times"

And when the time has come for spending, they realized that they better spend fiat money since those are inflative and widely accepted domestically, so they only sell a little bit bitcoin on exchanges to get fiat money to spend

Being able to directly do person to person transaction on blockchain is cool, but it is just cool, no any real usage strongly demand such kind of functionality, since people will always spend fiat money first, so their interface at both end would still be exchanges. Even when you do international remittance, you have to convert from/to fiat money at both end

Imagine an extreme case: During 2016 bitcoin value rise another 10 times, all the blocks are full at 2MB. Average people can not do transactions due to the fee is now $10 per transaction (So that only $1000+ transactions are reasonably cheap). Would people leave bitcoin? Definitely not, they will do exactly like today's pooled mining, rely on large institutions to do transaction for them cheap and fast

Yes Bitcoin is getting popularity but gradually and very slowly , some thing should be planned to make is more popular like advertise about Bitcoin and giving out some vouchers.

Actually it is very useful right now (as both a store of value and means to send funds nearly anywhere in the world fast and cheaply) and being popular is not why one wants to be involved with disruptive technologies such as Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is definitely not suited for coffees. We need more people to start using it before it is even good for remittance. Overall Bitcoin needs to be more popular before we can do anything.

DO NOT USE BITCOIN! BITCOIN IS DOOOOOOOOOMED I TELL YOU.
DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!

Pretty sure those problems are easily solvable.  99% of people won't be trying to double spend on coffees. 
I'm confident the community will find a way to scale Bitcoin for transactions large and small.

Creating an arbitrary limit where certain transactions are too small to be "suitable"
(and I'm not talking about dust) seems to be overly rigid and defeatist.

Just my opinion...but if you want to try to convince people not to use Bitcoin
for small transactions, I can't stop you.

 

You don't even show ID to buy a coffee (at least not as yet) so how on earth are people risking going to jail by not paying?

We don't seem to have jails packed full of credit card fraudsters either for that matter.

The point is not an immediate double spend but simply a tx that will confirm too slowly due to a lack of fee (or too small a fee) so that the "double spend" will happen well after you've left the coffee shop (when the original tx is dropped from the mempool).

The core devs have all recommended not to trust zero confirmations yet seemingly you know better than them?