Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 89. (Read 2032247 times)

Yes, they're not expensive, especially the spam ones. And guess why is that so ? Because there's no room for those transactions in a 1MB block, and  whoever is sending them can just resend them over and over again without actually spending a dime on them.

Money currency is defined as better by users fundamentally by its transfer efficiency.

fify.  Better: Money is defined as better by users fundamentally by its storage of value efficiency.

Please excuse the digression.  

I like the wind of subsidy in early tx's sails analogy.  But the recent appearance of "cosmic background spam" makes it outdated.

The problem is that sailboats are expensive to construct and operate, while Bitcoin tx are not.

If we are to think about Bitcoin in the long term, and given Bitcoin's reasonably critical economic mass of ~$5 bil, current temporary block subsidies can be discounted as we consider fundamental questions about how and when to change one of Satoshi's Holy Numbers.

Yes, that's right.  I joined Bitcointalk in mid-2011 as part of my sinister master plan of "campaigning for a crippled Bitcoin, so [I myself] can execute a massive Monero put during a time of Bitcoin crisis and Monero pump, hoping to catch the reverse trade when the 1MB is finally fixed and quadruple [my] coinage accordingly."

Who told you?  Was it (that fucking troll) smoothie?  

But seriously...you have no evidentiary basis on which to validly assert what is or is not "a protocol level transaction cap so small it is too crippled to ever become a significant part of the world economy."  That is an empirical question; we do not at this time know what sidechains/Lightning will do to relieve Layer 1 tx/fee pressure.

Talking out of your ass may impress Frap.doc, but the Team Core and I know better.

Didn't you learn your lesson about bullshitting when you spouted off some nonsense about 5 year deadlines for DoS regulator deprecation predicated upon an embarrassing dearth of expertise in Bitcoin 101?

Y2K was pretty easy, the problem was finite, scope driven, and easily prioritized.  Lots of things were just turned off and replaced (though the replacements weren't necessarily better, just maintainable).

There are a number of issues under development that will also reduce the hard fork risks, and block size increase risks.

PS: this hard fork "danger" overrated, like Y2K.  We'll have tested moving across the limit over and over.  And if for some reason TSHTF, the very centralized mining pools will simply get together and fall back to the old code (unwinding blocks > 1MB), just like they did during the accidental hard fork a few months ago.

This is one great property of Bitcoin, since every node validates (processes) every block, you can't have a bug lying latent in a block that's (say) 500 deep in the chain before someone suddenly triggers it.  Half of the nodes will reject the new block RIGHT NOW and the other half will accept it.

This is a perfect example of your flawed reasoning.  This comment is analogous to claiming that a sailboat is incredibly inefficient because its energy use is equal to the total wind power available in the ocean divided by the number of sailboats.

Instead the volume of wind power (energy spent mining) is present for a reason that is completely orthogonal to sailboats (transactions).  It is proportional to the amount of energy being input into the system.  In the Bitcoin world, the "energy input" is the conversion of value into bitcoin representation (i.e. long term purchases).  When the block subsidy dies down, this energy input will be reflected in coin appreciation.  When the block subsidy ultimately approaches a negligible quantity, boats will (finally) have to turn on their motors and pay their way across the bitcoin network.

Additionally, you make the circular fallacy of defining the number of total boats allowed on the ocean, and therefore finding the ocean winds to be inefficient.

Ultimately there will be a fee market.  Miners will turn off hashing power until transactions appear that will make mining the block profitable.  We don't need to centrally force this to happen.  You are falling into the fallacy of thinking that others are forcing a lack of a fee market but in fact you are centrally forcing one to exist.  It is technically feasible to have larger blocks, and having them makes each transaction more efficient, so anything less than larger blocks is central planning and reduces efficiency.

And by forcing a fee market you are running the sails and the motors simultaneously, uselessly, and dangerously.

Why is it dangerous?

Money is defined as better by users fundamentally by its transfer efficiency.  This was hard to measure with fiat or PM currencies but it is simple with Bitcoin.  It is the ratio of the fee to the quantity transmitted.  Once the block subsidy diminishes this ratio will be nowhere near zero like it is today.  It is ironic that you ignore this because it is what fundamentally gave Bitcoin value in the early days while nobel laureate economists were insisting that Bitcoin would fail because it had "no intrinsic value".

Once the motor's (transaction's) true efficiency is not hidden by the wind (block subsidy), the most efficient (and accessible) cryptocurrency implementation will "win" just like gold "won" over silver.  Just like Apple is learning, getting a head start does not matter much when a huge percentage of the world simply cannot afford your product, so MUST choose a competitor.

This is pretty much where I am also.

Either:

• A 1 time increase, (without all this "I know the future and what will be needed and what we can do when" stuff).  This could be 2-3mb without significant additional risk, and would give a bit of time for other developments to be ready for a more long term change.
• BIP 100, after some more testing.  The monero method has been working for a good long while, but hasn't really had as much stress testing as would be nice to see.

Any hard fork presents an edge case where unusual risks are presented.  This is especially true when these hard forks are so rare.  There is no practiced resilience to the sorts of things that creative minds can cook up to exploit events. 

I'm less about raising fees "now" than I am about not suppressing, via centralized governance, fees now and forever.

Block subsides have taken Bitcon this far, we don't need to enhance the subsidies.  There is a line around the block for Satoshi's Better Mousetrap, so we don't need to undercharge nor promote with giveaways.

Good point about fiat/btc ratio driving adoption!  We always operate under the key assumption Bitcoin is and will continue growing.

You also already seem to get the fact that a ~5 cent BTC tx uses electricity equivalent to about 1.5 days worth of typical American home (ie $15-$20; cite: some post on reddit I can no longer find).  That's a good starting point.

What you are missing in order to get from there to my position is an understanding of (the implications of) the fully intentional very high difficulty of forking Bitcoin.  Even uncontroversial soft forks like BIP66 entail some degree of FUD/chaos/drama.  Therefore, it is not best practice to posit anything remotely like an easy, flexible, fine-grained path for us to "get the blocksize to the largest rationally supportable size and allow nature to take it's course" via consensus and subsequent commits.  Let's work with, leverage, and indeed celebrate, what we have (ossification at 1MB) and not make the actual the enemy of the perfect ("the largest rationally supportable size").  "Rationally" presupposes a purpose, and subjective individual interpretations of Bitcoin's Ultimate Purpose^TM differ wildly.   

Until block subsidies taper off, we only need (as in must) raise tx fees sufficient to exclude spam via prioritization.  But the spam exclusion/wallet improvement/RBF initiatives also present an excellent early opportunity for the rough contours of a fee market to emerge.  IMO, sudden massive blocksize increases waste that opportunity.

The last step to see my PoV is an appreciation of what sidechain/LN's Layer 2 will do to scale and thereby enhance Layer 1 tx.

As Frappuccino purchases move off main chain and are consolidated by Layer 2 processes, each of Layer 1's 7 tps becomes increasingly valuable, demonstrating it is not the size of the block that matters, but how you use it.

Good. I am fine with that as well as that is a perfectly sensible position.
It is also a compromise, which is why it is so dismaying to see Core Dev all but ignore Jeff's bare-minimum BIP 102. This is a problem, they are not offering any alternative themselves.

As mentioned before too: IBLT is a known change which can help a lot with decentralised scaling.

It is not a protocol that is amenable to successful modification by a marketplace of different implementations doing different things (with respect to the consensus rules). The result of that is chaos and likely failure.

Perhaps it is possible to build such a protocol, and some ideas along those lines have been discussed here and elsewhere, but there is a lot more to that than just multiple implementations.

Then again the argument could be made that we already have such a protocol/marketplace and it is called altcoins. But if you want to stick with Bitcoin itself, you need more to successfully make changes without human consensus.

The problem is that currently Bitcoin (the protocol) is conflated with Bitcoin Core (the software). Until this state of things changes we are de facto running a centralized system, with veto power in the hands of a few selected ones. And this is what bothers me the most.

The good news is that Bitcoin is not software.   It is a protocol  .   Of course you have to get people to agree to use your fork but that is another thing entirely.  Errr, consensus?

No, I've already said I'm in favor of an immediate modest increase to 2-3 MB (and generally only keeping up with hardware technology unless there are other changes to the software that improve its ability to scale decentralized, which so far there have not been)


The Monero scaling is somewhat similar to BIP100. I consider it very much an open question how that will work out (perhaps okay, perhaps quite poorly), and I wouldn't want to impose something so unproven on Bitcoin.

Is this your position too? Because the way Bitcoin is today with a protocol level transaction cap so small it is too crippled to ever become a significant part of the world economy. A cap too small even for LN to provide much scaling because LN needs the capability to close a lot of payment channels simultaneously. SC is not a scaling solution unless Pieter is wrong.
Which then leaves Monero as a lifeboat where I recall some recent post about it having massive scaling capacity, no 1MB rubbish for them!

Icebreaker is transparent like an ice-cube when it comes to campaigning for a crippled Bitcoin, clearly so he can execute a massive Monero put during a time of Bitcoin crisis and Monero pump, hoping to catch the reverse trade when the 1MB is finally fixed and quadruple his coinage accordingly.

He was thinking in the context of any hard fork, and specifically rejecting the notion of him "deciding" to implement a hard fork that is contraversial.

You are never going to get human consensus on an unlimited block size to the point where it isn't controversial. Just isn't going to happen.

I suspect Wladimir was thinking in context of a hardfork vs. context of ongoing blocksize increases chosen by an algorithm.   I might not have seen his specific commentary though so I could be wrong.  It is hard to keep up with all the goings on nowadays.     

I can certainly see how a complete removal of the hardcoded block size limit would be an attractive option.   There are several large systems that have unrestricted scale but are controlled by each individual actor according to their capability.    Bitcoin is much more likely to end up like the big I Internet in this respect than something that everyone can run on their raspberry pi.

With respect to "no changes to consensus rules ever"; that way lies madness  .  I don't see a solution where Bitcoin retains value as a monetary unit or a ledger of record without a blocksize increase.  Lightning and Sidechains are great but they need a strong ledger of record to support them.   Strength requires broad adoption.    Broad adoption requires high TPS.   With Sidechains I suppose you could argue that everyone will just transition out of Bitcoin into something else but that probably won't fly with those bought into the existing ecosystem.   

 

Sidechains can be done with a soft fork, which means all they need to do is sign up miners (and of course find customers who want to use the side chain). It doesn't require a global consensus.

i wonder what all those guys will say next year when the Blockstream guys want to change the code for SC's and LN if Gavin objects.

The only way to remove human consensus from the ongoing process is to leave it exactly the way it is. No changes to the consensus rules ever (MP argument).

That is btw pretty much Wladimir's view. He's not going to back any change that doesn't have human consensus. So you either have human consensus or, removing it from the process, no changes at all.

When the user base grows sufficiently exchanges will take notice.