Topic: Fork off (Read 37776 times)

People, read the logs. This is just a distraction now.

The chart below illustrates the growth in the number of transactions per day along with Bitcoin's market cap¹.  There is a strong correlation between the two variables².  If the correlation continues to hold, it suggests that the 1 MB blocksize limit may also limit Bitcoin's future liquidity and adoption.  




On another note, I chatted with Peter Todd briefly after his "scalability talk" at the O'Reilly conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.  He seems quite concerned about the 20MB + 2X/2-year proposal.  The strongest argument that I felt he made against a hard fork to significantly increase blocksize was that it would restrict the ability of nodes and miners to operate over TOR.  He argued that without the ability to operate over TOR, decentralization of the network would be at risk.  

What I'd like to know is:

1.  Is there any reliable data on TOR bandwidth and its historical growth rate?

2.  How important is it for decentralization that miners and nodes are able to operate over TOR?


¹I've plotted the number of transactions excluding popular addresses to remove the on-chain gambling bubble of 2012/2013.  This has only a minor effect on the 2014/2015 portion of the data.

²Actually between the square of the number of transactions and the market cap (Metcalfe's Law).

20MB * 6 (per hour) * 24 * 365 = 1051 GB per year

You must be having something in your food which disables your brain, man.

You must be new around here.
You're referring to the "oops! we accidentally hard-forked bitcoin", back in march 2013?

So you are suggesting the majority of developers who support this fork which is expressed by a majority of all the developers, have no experience in system design?   

You must believe Bitcoin is completely doomed, right?

It's really piss-poor design to build a defensible subsystem on top of a non-defensible foundation.

The whole point of sidechains is that they can rely on a small independant core (native Bitcoin) to provide a plethora of tunned solutions.  These solutions can address a whole host of needs, some of them being mutually exclusive.  This will allow protection for native Bitcoin by allowing it to remain tight and basically static (not needing to encur risky and objectionable changes.)

The fact that native Bitcoin is utterly critical to the value base of various autonomous sidechain efforts could provoke a need to support native Bitcoin regardless of the failure of simplistic economics to do so.  Especially if that is part of the basic design or used to solicit use of a particular sidechain which it would in my case at least.


Yes, I'm sure that for the most part it is and expression of ignorance by those who have no real experiance with system design.

The "10k nodes" was suggested by nubbins`, not MP. Some of us in -assets are testing the unit out, but no substantial quantities have been purchased. Regardless, the purpose of this device is partly to combat the hard fork. The fact that they are incompatible with gavincoin is by design; they are meant to be as cheap and easy to set up as possible. This ties back into my past comments about people who actually care about bitcoin; the people who actually care are researching ways to make the average american retard capable of running a full node out of his home internet connection. Meanwhile, derps like Gavin are actively trying to hinder this cause.



You guys do a lot of assuming. And who are you to say things like "a valid concern?" Seriously who are you? I've never heard of you, and yet apparently you're some sort of bitcoin expert. The imaginary poor people that "would use bitcoin except the fee is too high" are certainly not going to run a current full node, let alone a gavinnode monstrosity. And if they aren't going to run a full node, then they might as well not be using bitcoin; they might as well do it "off chain." If you're using a "wallet" that isn't a full node, then you are a poser. You are doing things "off chain." As for the blocked port, bitcoind runs fine without it.

Thanks. This is very enlightening and reveals the true motivations behind Mircea Popescu objections. He has made an investment in up to 10k nodes that would be obsolete if Gavin pushes through his hard fork. Why doesn't he honestly bring to the community these concerns as one of his principle motivations so we can try and find a solution together? The fact that he is not being forthright with this concern is troubling to say the least. Secondly, not designing something of this nature where it is easily upgradeable is foolish as well.

Any more information on this? The fact that he is secretly building 10k nodes on a network with 7k active nodes and dropping is a concern in itself and makes me want to support Gavin's hardfork even more so. I am all for increasing the node count but in a open and distributed fashion.



This is a valid concern, but an exaggerated scenario. His proposal assumes a 50% increase in bandwidth per year http://blog.bitcoinfoundation.org/a-scalability-roadmap/ thus a cheap 5 dollar a month VPS should handle those bandwidth needs no problem for many years in the future. Most High speed consumer connections these days will handle that as well, and the slower (about 2Mbps down, 4Mbps up)) ones you refer to typically aren't being used as nodes regardless because ISP's block 8333 port by default and rarely do consumers request to open the port.


The end game doesn't stop there because we cannot foresee the future. Perhaps there is never any need for increasing the block size past 20MB, perhaps we use sidechains in the future, perhaps we keep increasing the block size because future mesh networks can sufficiently handle larger blocks in a decentralized manner, and perhaps a new innovative solution is created to solve the problem.

There isn't some secret conspiracy with an end goal of centralization and I doubt Gavin wants that either.


This is an odd statement and one that betrays all common sense. Bitcoin tokens intrinsic value exists only with the utility of the network and we are attempting to make that network more valuable. Gold's intrinsic value partly is within the commodity itself and its properties.

If bitcoin costs 4 dollars to teleport "virtual gold" , I'm going to switch to an alt that can allow me to teleport another form of "virtual gold" for a couple pennies.

It certainly calls to attention the feeling that the gavincoin fork is the proverbail 'camel's nose in the tent' and most of the adherents have no intention of stopping there.  As I said, stopping there would be pointless.

The end-game is a vastly larger block size so it is not the slightest bit irrational to consider the choice as being between a lite-weight and defensible (and hopefully decentralized) system and one which is very far from this.


Several years ago on a thread in the tech section as I recall, some people were musing about the 1MB constrained transaction rate and realized that it happened to be about the maximum that one could expect to run through tor.

I'm not saying that Satoshi considered this when he set the limit...I don't know the guy and don't claim to be able to read his mind (as do many gavincoin enthusiasts) but he did seem to be generally aware of some of these kinds of things.  1MB is also a nice round number so it could have been just an accident of fate.  Hard to know at this point, but it does illustrate the points that a few of us are trying to make with respect to the increased defensibility which comes along with a lower level transaction rate.

I think this is the crux if the disagreement.

One side wants Bitcoin to scale. Meanwhile, the other side is saying:

They have a point: using garlic or onion routing at least triples your bandwidth usage. For small miners running full nodes, their Internet costs will likely exceed their power costs.

I believe that Bitcoin will become much more expensive to use in the future, precisely because it can not scale well. The debate is over how much we can scale the network without awkward centralization problems. I think the recent drop in price has actually promoted more decentralization, based on the Bitcoin hash-rate distribution (The huge operations can't pay their bills).

The "Gavincoin" advocates have been pointing out that "side-chains" are not really a solution to the scaling problem. It just means the average user has to deal with some kind of centralized exchange. I have noticed that the "MPcoin" proponents don't even try to dispute this: they really don't care as long as Bitcoin remains strong.

I firmly believe that if Bitcoin really takes off, it will mostly replace wire-transfers. VISA and Mastercard will still be common forms of payment. If you want to avoid credit cards for coffee, you will either have to resort to dirty FIAT, or use debit (implying you are still going to need a bank account). However, there is a problem: in it's current form, Bitcoin can not even scale to match wire transfers. I think a 20MB block limit will allow such use, while still making common 100µBTC fees too high for "frivolous" use.

The fees from mining will rise with the price of Bitcoin. Not only will the fees rise in dollar terms, but transaction volume has traditionally gone up every time Bitcoin gains wide attention. In the past there have been (successful) calls to reduce the recommended default fee when the price of Bitcoin rose. I think in the next price rise, we should resist calls to reduce the default fee. Perhaps instead, users can be educated on what a high-priority transaction is.
For example:
A 1BTC transaction becomes "high priority" within about a day. A 1mBTC transaction becomes "high priority" within about 3 years. The implication being, if you want your low-priority transaction included quickly, you should include the fee (even if it works out to $40 in fiat).

Warning: I have come to the conclusion that we can not simply ignore the "MPcoin" proponents. I also doubt that they will be persuaded a larger block-size is needed until "MPcoin" (forked or not) is run into the ground. One possible alternative is Monero, which automatically scales the block-size based on previous blocks. Monero has a complicated birth story...involving innovative scamcoins.

Make no mistake: the "Elite" can be effective when they want to be. Their leader,  Mircea Popescu, claims to have invented paywalls now used by the New York Times and other newspapers. Currently, they are in the process of producing a small, cheap "set it and forget it" box that will act as a full node on the "MPcoin" network. They plan to distribute upwards of 10,000 of these. They will be difficult to upgrade to "Gavincoin", and not necessarily due to technical reasons: but also due to inertia. Because they are not designed for easy upgrade-ability, they will likely run modified Bitcoin 0.5.x until they die. They will studiously ignore blocks larger than 1MB.

A competing "Gavincoin" box will need the OS and Bitcoind on separate media from the block-chain storage. The reason is cost: to store 5 years of full 20MB blocks will take about 5.3TB. 5 Years of full "MPcoin" blocks would take only about 262GB (+~30GB for the current chain). The "Gavincoin" solution in version 0.10.x is to start pruning old transactions. Reasonably safe if you go back at least a year (implying 1TB of storage), but is still strictly a reduction in security.

Edit: BTW, full 20MB blocks would have been a problem for my full node recently shut-down. 1MB blocks with 64 connections (+namecoin+P2Pool) were using about 100GB per month; out of a 300GB cap. I am not really aware of consumer-level Internet access that allows 2TB of transfers per month (even if the Head-line "burstable"  rate can technically handle it (about 2Mbps down, 4Mbps up)).

Just get rid of decentralisation and consenus, make 1000MB blocks and 3 nodes and a cartel for it is enough. This way we will get all transactions in the world.

The higher the transaction rate, the less likely it will be that reasonable function can be achieved under attack.  Below a certain threshold traffic can slip through almost any crack in the wall.  The absolute values can only be guessed at since there are a lot of unknowns, but the general principle is pretty easy to understand.

More significantly, if systems and expectations evolve assuming high reliably and high capacity network potential, degradation (or more likely, shattering) of this potential is much more likely to result in a total loss of the system.

A system which remains at a defensible data rate allows the opportunity for the needed defensive solutions to occur, though only a relatively few people will be interested in working on them.  If the overall system is operating at a data-rate based on full and free use of commodity network capacity then it would be impossible for those who might be interested in network hardening to run the native system.

Total bulk data is also a consideration, but not as significant as network issues.  At some point it will be necessary or at least more practical to jumpstart a full node with physical media one way or another.

I look forward to the "random derps" and the "gavinbots" and whatever else you might have called people over the numerous pages of this thread, all coming together to make you eat those words.  Again, you know the numbers are against you and no amount of name-calling will change that.

Bitcoin is a tool about creating decentralized consensus. Not give voting rights to random derps.



That's pretty cute actually.

Consensus is king in Bitcoin and I'm still pretty sure you're not going to get it.  Again, this thread is all about the fact that you know you don't have enough people to make your preferred chain survive.  You need to convert some "gavinbots" to your way of thinking and so far I'd say it's not going so well (probably because people on your side of the debate refer to them as mindless bots).  In fact, it seems the only people who seem to share your view are the ones in that collective circle-jerk #bitcoin-assets.  The majority will decide, not your little elitist clique.  

I came into this thread trying to take a neutral and objective view, but after reading some of the posts from certain people, like being hit with a sheer wall of arrogance, it just made me want to take an opposing view.  If you were hoping to get people to agree with you, it's definitely not working.  Now I hope the fork goes ahead and leaves you all in the dust (which is fitting, since your mirceacoins will be worth less than dust    ).

No.

You mean like Kodak? That's why we all are still using film cameras, right? Because we don't have any say

Has it occurred to you that usually, the majority of the people doesn't get a say about the elite? By very fucking definition?

It was the reason, but if you're happy to provide me with yet more, then keep up the sterling work.  Maybe you'll convince other people in the process to steer well clear, what with your amiable nature and all.   

In fact, you (personally) are the best argument in favour of the fork.  The majority of people don't want Bitcoin to be yet another tool for the elites and that's precisely what you want to turn it into.  Elitist IRC club, elitist exchange, elitist blockchain.  Thank you for making my argument for me just by being yourself.

LOL. Yeah that's the reason you won't be using MPEx; not because of the 30 BTC registration fee.