Topic: Fork off - page 9. (Read 37776 times)

12 minute blocks today reported by https://blockchain.info/de/stats
not 10 minute blocks

You think hash can stay up in case bitcoin continues to slump in the 100$ to 250$ ?
I see no rising demand and only rapidly rising supply.

Collapsing hashrate? The hash-rate at the last difficulty re-target (12/01) was 314,761,417 GH/s - the higher hashrate we ever had. Please point out some hard numbers (taking into account variance) that supports your "collapsing hashrate" theory.

IF bitcoin goes mainsteam. It didn't do that so far ... it's all hypothetical pipedream dancing in the sky.

How about Mr. Andresen gets his stuff ready and tested and worked out nicely and has it ready when there is an actual demand for it instead of fucking around like that?

Did he adress the difficulty retargeting which is actually the more popular topic in the community right now? Did he?

What is his take on the exponential growth not holding up? Did he make a statement? It's relevant too because it makes bitcoin look clownish (ponzi-like) with the current price, high inflation and collapsing hashrate. It looks pretty dead to me, disintegrating. Like a fundamental fail tbh. Reward curve was shit. Inflation was never good because it's destructive for the market. I think the evidence is in the charts!

In case it doesn't rebound, the point was correct, this fork was bogus to propose because: no fully justified demand currently

In case you hardfork it, you hardfork it ONCE and when you have to, not twice a year when you feel like it and it appears to be 'maybe useful in the future'. Hardforking ahead of demand and for future planning opens doors for abuse!
Sometimes these mega brains need to be told the simple stuff!

Evidence for the intention of Satoshi not to regard block size as a hard limit...


My bold highlighting

does anybody think bitcoin has high fees?

this for would bring even more centralization to bitcoin. larger storage requirements, bigger node network traffic because microtransactions will be possible with ultra low fees - any other changes?

does anybody think bitcoin is too centralized already?
I do.

well, I don't think that we can agree on one solution to fit us all. Thus until there is not a real need and consensus to do the change, why bother?

if you believe a change is necessary, fork it hard and put a catchy name like Gavincoin FTW on it!

This.

Furthermore, I think this is the most interesting part of Oleg's post:


In other words, there's no need to fix what is not broken. When and if the block size limit is hit and transactions start competing for block space, resulting in transaction fees going up, we can discuss about doubling the block size limit just because, probably, the market will ask for it. The key word here is *probably*: you need to hit such limit to see if the market prefers bigger blocks or higher fees. On that matter I agree with Oleg and I think the market will push for biggers blocks and more transactions, but anyhow it is something that has to be seen when such limit is hit.

What is completely ridiculous is to arbitrarily decide to increase the block size limit by a factor of 20 (!!!!!) just because "production quotas do not work", as Gavin suggests in his last blog post.

I'd really like to hear his position about the main "production quota" in bitcoin: the hard limit in the money supply (max. 21M Bitcoin). Maybe his next proposal is to increase it to 210 million bitcoin because, you know, "production quotas do not work".

He put the limit in the source code.
It's up to you to find a quote of him suggesting it'd have to be removed.

Thoughts from 2013 (Outside the current emo-drama) ...

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/43677417318/economics-of-block-size-limit

Can any members of the self appointed Plutocratic League for Ending Bitcoins Servicability please provide references to any post of Satoshi's that emphatically states that the block size is intended to be a hard limit? ... annnnd don't do a cut and paste cherry pick, link it so we see it in context.

I'm really puzzled/shocked by Gavin's new blog post:


For the uneducated: a production quota is just a limit to production used to control the supply of a certain good.

So, Gavin: isn't the hard limit to 21M bitcoins a production quota? YES IT IS. So now "production quotas" do not work?

What's next, will you argue in the future that we should increase the Bitcoin supply to 210M simply because "production quotas don't work"?

Wow. Just wow.

Just do the math. if Bitcoin goes mainstream (as mainstream as say, credit cards) it will not be able to deal with so many transactions per second without bad consequences such as bloat, slowness and whatnot. So we need to think before the problem actually happens.

Is there any good unbiased and reasonable (HAHAHA!) summary of the arguments for and against?

MPex's modus operandi seems to be having a high opinion of himself, calling people names, and wailing. If he has a point to make, he hides it very well behind a lot of bluster.

Having a single, open, payment network that can do everything (including small transactions) is the idealistic Bitcoin dream.

Hah. You're right.

Nonsense.  If you simply ignore everyone else's blocks, you can make *every* block empty as long as you have at least slightly more hashrate than everyone else, by mining your own blockchain in isolation from the network and leaking it out to the other nodes.  If you have at least slightly more hashrate than everyone else, eventually your blockchain (with every block empty) will win.

Mining on top of other blocks found by other miners would pretty much defeat the purpose of a 51% attack.  That would certainly be "amateur night at the 51% party."  A correctly executed 51% attack mines on top of the attacker's own blocks, so they can override everyone else's blocks when their alternative blockchain with a higher chain trust is introduced to the network.

Totally not.
With a 51% attack you can at most make half the blocks empty, not "exclude anyone's toes from mined blocks".
What he did was perform a 10000% attack, had the difficulty adjust, and then left. What that does, and why that's hardly possible with Bitcoin is left as an exercise for the reader.



You send the headers first, and the actual contents of the block later.

Can someone explain again why it's not a free market selfregulating process? And why we need a bigger blockchain before we need it?

By doing this you end up with central control over txfees and will have to make them fixed and rising later. I don't see the point in responding to things that aren't even an issue yet.

Can someone also please explain to me why something needs to be done before something needs to be done?

Can you explain that please i don't really get the concept.

Well, perhaps if by "mine for a while", you mean "51% the coin while excluding anyone's transactions from the mined blocks", then that would be pretty close to what happened (if I remember correctly).

No, that's possible. It's just incredibly harder to pull-off.
Double-spends would become a concern before this gets anywhere near serious.



Ever heard of "headers first" ?



Fine with me.

Nice to see your estimates. I have long thought about where the reward/fee crossover point is. Obviously it depends upon rate of tx growth, but 30-60MB seems likely to be the block size range.
Agreed also that the block reward is still in the subsidize-to-grow-usage phase, tx fees are really useful just as an anti-spam measure. Beyond that, trying to force tx fees higher at this point only risks driving ecosystem business to alternative cryptocurrencies.

I may be a silly socialist, but asking for the block-size to be increased is hardly asking for a "free ride".

First, Bitcoin is still new. Coins are still being distributed through the block-subsidy. As has been pointed out, transaction fees are currently insignificant compared to the block subsidy. Artificially inflating fees to match the currentl block subsidy will only discourage Bitcoin usage (which would make the block-chain smaller).

Second, even with an "infinite" block-size, there are still practical limits to the size of blocks. For example, my full node (with idle token hash-power) is currently set to broadcast 500kB blocks. The reason is that my (ADSL) Bandwidth is limited to 5Mbps up. If I want to send a newly found block to 16 hosts at once, we are talking a delay of about 12.8 Seconds. With a 600 second block-time, that corresponds to an orphan rate of at least 2.1% (one hop). If I had a 1Gbps connection, and wanted to limit my orphan rate to 5%: 600x.05=30 seconds. 1Gbps*30s/(say)64 connections*8bits/byte=58.6MB Block-size (again assuming one hop). At about 300 bytes per transaction (many transactions are larger), that works out to about 195 thousand transactions per block.

Third, Bitcoin can not even replace the SWIFT network with a block-size of 1MB.
- Monthly FIN traffic evolution

Taking the yearly average: 5.6 Billion messages/(365.25 days/year)/(24 hours/day)/(3600 seconds/hour)= 177 messages per second.
I am not completely sure if 1 FIN message==1 Bitcoin transaction, but 177 sounds a lot higher than the common 7tps figure thrown around.

(195k transactions/block)/(600 seconds/block)= 325 Transactions/second for the 56MB block figure.
For the 20MB block being debated: (20MB/block)/(300Bytes/transaction)/(600 seconds/block)= 111 Transactions/second.

So, even with the proposed larger block-size, Bitcoin would still not be able to match the SWIFT network. If Bitcoin even attempted it, the value per coin would be so high that even 100µBTC fees would be comparable to SWIFT transaction costs. In other words, people will naturally stop using Bitcoin to buy snacks/coffee.

Edit: Fees with different block-sizes (assuming 100µBTC/kB)
1MB=100mBTC
20MB=2BTC
56MB=5.6BTC

Those figures imply the fees won't be be significant until the block reward drops to 12.5 or 6.25 BTC/block. Note that the 2BTC figure is almost 10% at the current block subsidy (but the block-size is limited).