Topic: Inviting reasoned and civil criticism of my big-block position please? (Read 1989 times)

Sorry that was Pure Speculation on my part - I don't think Unlimited will get sufficient hash power to hard fork, and I don't expect Core to roll back Segwit and all the other stuff they've built on top of it. If there is a hard fork to 2 or 4MB blocks, it'll be in more than a year.  If the community gets behind Classic, I suppose it could be raised from the dead. Just my thoughts.

Well, for now, situation has relaxed a bit (as of now, you could get confirmed a transaction fast with as low as 20 satoshi/byte, for a standard transaction that would be less than 0.0001 BTC). If people would start paying lower fees for non-urgent transactions then I think we could be again at November/December 2016 fee levels for a while while there are no spam attacks.

But until Segwit is not activated, perhaps an altcoin like LTC or ETH is not a bad option to start to save low amounts. I think both are solid blockchains and will be there for a while. On the downside, they are even more volatile than BTC, so I would only recommend them for short-term storing of value (e.g. remittances) and not as a vehicle for long-term saving.


No, it's not that extreme, but LN requires the client checking the state of a channel every couple of days or so to avoid the counterparty to revert to a previous state (to be able to "punish" a scammer). In the scenario the OP would like to see more use of BTC (poor people in economically unstable countries) I can imagine LN to be a risky option because people could be weeks or months without a good Internet connection. For these use cases, I think a method without timelocks (CSV/CLTV) would be preferrable.

Is it for the system to designate what spam is? High fee paying spam which is disruptive is expensive to maintain. Low fee paying spam can be dealt with by dynamically by raising the minimum fee required to allow a transaction on the network when the transaction pool grows.

No blocks don't need to be full to create a fee market. A miner has to risk the block creation time of including a transaction against the risk of that block being orphaned due to a near simultaneous block generation event. Miners can create dynamically sized blocks based on the size of the transaction pool, and artificially delaying lower fee paying transactions compared to its broadcasting time depending on demand levels.

Full blocks fuck up the system beyond belief creating a never ending fee race between users. Zero confirmation economic risk is changed from the disadvantaged double spend attack to one of a never confirming transaction which can easily be double spent due to forgetful transaction pools and selective node transaction relay.

Block limit was not put in the white paper because it fucks the system up causing people to come up with solutions for problems they have created. See above.

No proof for this.

Demand has been exceeding supply due to a confluence of factors not determined by the demand coming from genuine economic activity, everyone is more than familiar with the provenance of spam attacks on the blockchain by now.



Further, your suggestion is based on a fallacious premise from the outset.

Demand must outstrip supply in order that the economic incentives for miners to compete to include transactions in their blocks is established. Users won't actively compete for fees when blocks are not full, and miners in turn will not compete for fees if the difference in profit margin between ignoring tx fees and including them is too small.

You're entirely wrong, therefore. Blocks must be full, so that the healthy incentives of both users and miners to compete in a real transaction market place are maintained, otherwise miners are in too powerful a position to decide whether to include transactions and which transactions to include. Profit motive should determine which transactions are included, not arbitrary whimsy.



Most are hard forks. No different to blocksize increases, "simple" blocksize increases (as you put it) require hard forks too (but maybe some of the transaction efficiency improvements could be programmed as soft forks, as I said, there are many possible ways to improve transaction space efficiency, or on-chain scaling as it should really be called).


So, I'm actually satisfying the title of the thread. Where is the OP, who deigned to be interested in the discussion that they proposed, and that I am tackling?

Simple block size capacity increase is simpler now, and we know what happens to the system when the demand exceeds supply. and it is not appealing to the user.

I'd agree that more compact transactions are a better solution. This however is more difficult to implement because of the protocol in use. It's obviously easier to implement some features on a new coin than to try and retrofit it to an existing one.

I did ask in another thread (perhaps you missed it) how this could be implemented. Would it require a hard fork or a soft fork?

Okay then, let's put aside that the word "scaling" has 3 meanings in English, and you've decided to choose the 1 single definition that suits the big blocks argument.


Using your preferred definition, scaling is a terrible idea, period. It increases the capacity, while adding the same amount of resources to the burden the Bitcoin network must bear. 1MB in increased "scaling", as you are erroneously using the word, adds 300,000 transactions per day, however many times you add an extra 1MB to the blocksize. The ratio of increase is identical, al the way up the "scale", as you are using the word. A linear, x=y relationship.


Increasing the efficiency of how the transactions are stored is far preferable. Blockspace resources are used less within the same blockspace, as each transaction is smaller, taking up less blockspace, and allowing for more transacitons within the same amount of blockspace.

None of the problems associated with blocksize increases can happen that way, and all of the benefits (which, of course, is actually just 1 benefit: more transaction capacity). And further, blockspace efficiency increases come with even more benefits: smaller transactions can propagate across the network quicker, attack vectors can be disarmed, additional cryptographic features can be added with new signature types, changes can be made to improve the time it takes for initial download of the blockchain. The full list of possible additional benefits from changing the transaction format is too long to mention (and I doubt I could think of them all from the top of my head right now anyway).



Now, I asked for technical arguments, not semantic arguments. You can play with the definitions of words to suit your non-arguments all you like, but can you actually tackle the actual argument I am positing using technical analysis? You failed to do so. By all means, I am interested in real arguments, bring them.

I'm still waiting.

Okay C Banks, perhaps we should define what a scale is.


So scaling by increasing block size that allow for an increase is transaction capacity at the same measurement of transaction space efficiency is going up the same scale, using the same scale of measurement.

Efficiency improvements to allow more transactions per block is changing the way a scale is measured.

Whilst there are ways to improve space transaction efficiency (e.g. schnorr signatures), other desirables such as privacy may be a hindrance to transaction space efficiency too.

And let's not forget the fantasy land rhetoric you're all espousing also (aside from d5000).


Where is your evidence that a majority of Bitcoin uses have been crying out for bigger-blocks for years and years, as you continue to state? (both explicitly and by implication)


No different to the other big-blocks loud mouths, you're all seeming to present yoursleves talking about it on this forum (and rBTC, lol) as that evidence.



Explain this: why, when 2MB increases were proposed by 2 external dev teams in 2 separate hard fork both rejected? Why has Bitcoin Unlimited's blocksize based consensus voting "solution" fork-coup now been rejected the same way? Why is the balance of big-blockers so disproportionately high on forums in comparison to the decision taken by the aggregation of actual players in the Bitcoin economy?





Both this point (bigger blocks fork-coups rejected three times by BTC community), and the fact that bigger blocks is not a scaling paradigm are highly pertinent answers to the question this thread poses. Will you tackle them, where other big-blockers could not?

I can empathise with a lot of this. However, for clarification, when you say bitcoin won't hard fork, do you mean it either will not change, or any change will be a planned consensus change (e.g. a new active hard fork where the old fork is left dead and checkpointed to prevent chain reorg)?
So far lack of consensus as protected bitcoin as is, despite plenty of Mutually Assured Destruction threats rhetoric.

Bigger blocks isn't a scaling paradigm, at all.


Where is the technical discussion in this thread that is ostensibly concerned with a technical issue?


I've regularly made this point, backed with actual reasoning, and not the political mud-slinging you are all practicing in this thread.




And I've yet to experience a single refutation of the point: you cannot claim that bigger blocks are a scaling solution, when it's easily demonstrable that only capacity increases can be achieved, at precisely the same scale, irrespective of how much blockspace is added.

The wilful refusal to refute that arguments by any big-blocks advocate speaks volumes: it cannot be refuted.

The size of the "teamspeak" group diminishes every day. First off, their team is failing and has no leadership. What leadership they do have is engaged in a pathetic propaganda war. Just yesterday Core (specifically, GMaxwell) launched another FUD campaign about "ZOMG Bitmain covert ASICboost exploit violates patent and broken by Segwit" - total crap.

Have you noticed my username? I was a core fanboi too. I thought Gavin was a douche for forking Classic. About a year ago I started doing my own research and stopped consuming the spoon-fed core party line. That's part of the reason I post in these threads.

I don't believe we need to reverse polarisation. Every day that passes, more people start to wake up and see the elephant in the room. And remember, Unlimited likely won't be adopted and there won't be a hard fork. We just need to focus on sane upgrades to bitcoin that MAKE IT WORK AGAIN, without any complicated technical debt-laden soft forks.

Thank you for your thoughts.


I hear what you're saying about the potentially corrosive influence of money in conflict-of-interest scenarios - and I am prepared to accept that, to a certain extent, that's what this is. And if it is the case, then it needs for some people to be ensuring this aspect isn't brushed under the carpet.

However, what is as far as I can see not helping at all is that the fact that it may be so is used to dismiss otherwise reasonable-sounding arguments.  Exactly the same happens with the other side dismissing arguments because of the assumption those making them are funded by Ver / Jihan.

The way I'm experiencing soooooo many exchanges is that they typically go like this:

commenter 1: 'I believe this particular aspect of your pro-segwit / anti-segwit argument is weak because...'
commenter 2: 'No, I disagree because [technical-sounding] reason'
commenter 1: 'I am familiar with that argument but disagree because...'
commenter 2: 'Yeah, but you're only saying that because you're corrupted by Blockstream / Ver.'
commenter 1: takes the bait, gets annoyed
commenter 2: ups the insults, proclaims massive generalisations about 'the other side'
End of discussion, nothing achieved!

This, or variations upon it (for segwit, read big blocks, BU, Core, EC etc. etc.) happen hundreds of times a day and it achieves nothing other than to further polarise and deepen the schism in the community.

Regarding the history, how this all came about. I was deliberately vague and circumspect in my response here for obvious reasons. Funnily enough, just after that, I had an interesting read that rings true to me - even if it overemphasises some aspects and ignores others. http://bitsonline.com/war-message-board-bitcoin-unlimited/

This is where I disagree. If we dismiss a whole group as 'beyond hope' rather than engaging where we can on aspects with which we agree and disagree - and to make a reasonable attempt to assume that they do have the best interests of Bitcoin in mind (even if it's not true) - we may have some hope of begining to reverse the polarisation. If reasonable discourse with a massive bunch of people who have a significant stake in the project is 'beyond hope' then I fear the whole project may be 'beyond hope'!

If LN requires such a stable internet connection that people require redundant connections, uninterruptible power supplies, backup generators etc, then it is clear that opening and closing an LN channel is not intended for the average user. They won't be able to move their small amounts of BTC on-chain anyway. It leads me back to my thoughts that an LN becomes a banking network, with big BTC holders operating as bankers with reserves, and users transaction in BTC derivative tokens backed by those reserves.

Thank you for your thoughts.
I wasn't intending to limit my considerations in that manner though that may be simply because I'm not familiar enough with the other proposals currently under consideration / development.
A potential vulnerability of LN for theft / fraud was not what I had in mind, rather the risk for anyone getting involved with bitcoins with small amounts being at risk of never being able to move them because of fees. If the likelihood is in creasing that the failure of the community to come to a consensus will lead to no change - or a change that does not allow fees to return to something that allowed for a multitude of use cases - then I need to be thinking differently about the use case I had in mind that brought me to Bitcoin in the first place.

Because if fees are on their way up by another order of magnitude or two then we should be warning poorer people with fiat-abusing governments to hold out until 2nd tier technologies are mature and available - and to live with the hyperinflation in the meantime. Because buying on-chain bitcoins in small amounts carries a significant risk they'll never be able to spend them - or that they'll lose such a high proportion in fees to move it off-chain that they would have been better off sticking with the abused fiat!

These sound promising in that respect. And as for the 'problem' of a dependency on miners to transfer back, as Andreas Antonopolous says, it's not a choice of having everything on the chain or not, it's whether we want the 2nd tier to be private databases such as Coinbase's or something something that is decentralised. And I'd much rather trust a miner (who has an enormous amount at stake in the success of the Bitcoin space) than 'banks'.

Then let's hope for - and work towards - a day where you and I can meet up in a coffee bar in Khartoum, paying for it with a bitcoin-pegged whatever (or with bitcoin itself - who knows)! I said to myself as we took off from there (in 1996) that I would be back one day when they have governance that does not tear the country apart and that its people are free to build lives for themselves and for their families. Currency is just one piece of that jigsaw. The country has since split (North and South) so the killings are not as bad as they were but most of us have heard of the Darfour camps and have an image of depravity even if many aren't aware of where it is and the causes of the problems.

However, I live in hope and part of my motivation in engaging in conversation that often seems to be a total waste of everybody's time is the hope that between us, we can make something happen that has Bitcoin - or something, anything - that can at least solve the currency abuse aspect and see what part that may have in moving towards resolving the other stuff.

We're well past the phase of "trying to get the right people to listen"...  We've been in the "looking for new competent leadership" phase for over a year.


I think you can rest assured that pride is less of a factor than $75 mil in Blockstream investment. Not to mention all of the money Blockstream plans to make off spinoff services and products... it's a fact that they MUST have Segwit adopted to move forward.  I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to assert that a business will try anything and everything to secure profits.

People who are brainwashed by the Core "teamspeak" are beyond hope - there's no point in trying to argue with them. They're a funny bunch - seemingly so idealistic about open source development and democracy, yet so utterly clueless to the people investing millions and their shifting alliances, and quietly pulling the levers of power. I just finished up a thread with a low-level Core dev who proclaimed vehemently that "nobody leads core". He seemed to believe that the roadmap was collectively drawn up and voted on, and he stated that Blockstream has no influence on Core development!

Isn't it a fallacy to assume that Ver is the only opposition to Core? I'm really not captivated by either team right now. I'll keep running a 0.12 node for the next ten years if I nothing better comes along...


Andreas Antonopolous did a great speech on scaling, drawing on 20 years of internet history. Basically he says that the Internet never scales because every time it increases capacity, people add new services that use it all up. Basically he says that you just keep trying to scale and failing - not everything works exactly right, and that's OK.

It's absolutely the worst thing in the bitcoin ecosystem right now. Rick Valkvinge called Core "the Soviet Politburo" https://falkvinge.net/2017/01/26/impressions-satoshi-roundtable-iii/ LOL. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”


You are aware that the lead developer of Core quit because he couldn't increase the blocksize (Andresen)? And that 2 prominent devs were run out/quit in disgust due to the hardline on blocksize (Garzik/Hearn)? This all happened several YEARS ago! The fact that we're all still here bitching about this is mind-boggling!

You apparently are limiting "2nd layers" to lightning-network-like "payment channels" proposals. LN would be available in the whole world, also in Sudan, because it's not limited to a geographic region. But you are right that for a person with a unstable Internet connection LN comes with certain risks (the counterparty could try to scam you reverting to an older channel state while you're not connected).

But there are other ideas like sidechains/drivechains and extension blocks that don't have this problem. They preserve the "blockchain transaction paradigm" in the sense that there is no third party involved. Drivechains are "pegged altcoins" that are meant to be secured by the same miners than the main chain via merged mining; miners would also be the entity that decide if coins can be transferred back to the main chain (in my understanding, that's the hard problem of sidechains). As sidechains are independent blockchains, there can be a large number of them working in parallel.

I prefer these solutions for the scaling problem, and LN for small microtransactions like the coffee at Room77 (or in a Sudanese bar)

That may well be so. Except in this instance, as you can not but understand by now, I wasn't was I? Whether the original misunderstanding was genuine or not, by now you're just being obtuse, riding that horse high, and proclaiming to the world how you know better than everybody else what free speech means.

OK, so we've discovered I have a different theoretical opinion than you on the limitations (or lack thereof) of free speech. But given your insistence that it does not apply in a theatre because it is private, how on earth does can you genuinely believe it has any bearing on my choice to ignore - and to declare that I ignore - something you wrote that - as I saw it - was not in line with the spirit of what I was intending by instigating this particular thread?

I think I'll hand you the award of thread de-railer and leave it at that.

Ah, thanks for this - I thought I was going mad for a moment. Glad it's not just me! I have to say I haven't hung out round these parts for a couple of years (since the politically-motivated 'moderation' got out of hand) so I don't really know who is who. Funnily enough, I only posted this here because after having written it and posted it on r/bitcoin it lasted about three likes and ten minutes before being removed so I thought I'd try here. No point in posting it in /rbc because I'd just get choruses of 'yeah, they're all corrupt and blah blah'. Not saying they're not right, but not helpful to me in trying to really be as open as I can to arguments from any side.

I hear you - and I think stating some of the things in this way may not be conducive to bringing the debate back to economic and technical considerations. There may be an element of the lack of social skills with some technical experts, but I don't think to generalise about Core that way is likely to get the people you might most need to hear your arguments to listen.

Only last night was I wondering whether Core would consider rolling back segwit if it doesn't get accepted within the year. But my fear is there is so much pride at stake - too many egos to be bruised by stepping back and acknowledging the other side might have had a point that the extremes on both sides may prefer to see the ship go down than to climb down. On Blockstream (at least you didn't go the whole Axa / Bildaberg), whilst there is a possibility there may be influence, first, I'm not convinced it's substantial, second, there's no need to go there to make constructive arguments against the block-size limit and third, again, it really doesn't help! For any Core contributors who have been convinced by the technical merits of the path they've taken, these kinds of accusations just sound ludicrous and those making them will be dismissed and any valid points they have will be lost. It's the same as the r/Bitcoin Core fanbois assuming and accusing anyone who is not in full agreement with them of being paid by Ver. Sometimes it seems like the whole community (if I may borrow Carlton's phrase) has gone 'full retard'! 'It's too late for compromise' is just a way of justifying a refusal to listen and to engage without sounding like a five-year-old. But I'm beginning to think if we picture stubborn five-year-olds refusing point blank to listen to anyone and sticking to what they want irrespective of anyone and everything, that's closer to what's going on here than most would like to acknowledge.

Thank you for saying this. It needs to be heard more often from 'our' side of the debate. What the first 'natural' bottlenecks would have been and when they might have begun to have an impact is a matter of educated (or not-so-educated) guesswork. But there is no doubt it would - and will if we get past the present impasse.

One of the most frustrating aspects to me are the economic illiterate arguments that this forced 'fee market' is a positive thing. It is economic rent and from Adam Smith, those who get it know that it is crippling to an economy - as it is increasingly crippling to the economy as we feel its impact.

I don't think that's fair. Many have been engaged in the debate for a long time. But here's how I see it: when a small number refused to consider they may not be seeing the whole picture, that they may be mistaken in their view, when that stubbornness resulted in the loss to the project of some sharp minds such that they could steer the rest of the contributors to do things their way, there was a high likelihood we'd get to the split community we have today. Add to that the campaign to control the narrative and stifle discontent and I'd say it was almost inevitable we'd reach here.

The original and best canard that is always invoked by those that wish to suppress the "free" in  "free speech"


1. Theatres are private property. Free speech does not apply on private property, the proprietor may rightfully eject anyone they deem to

I could stop there, because that's the literal No.1 killer blow to this statist idiocy, but I love deconstructing this nonsense non-argument


The patrons of any theatre have common sense on their side if someone were to falsely shout "fire"

2. Theater's are dark, on account of their evening schedule. Even with the lights up they are difficult to keep well lit, as theatres are typically rather spacious. Fires are highly visible in dark places, because of how bright they are in contrast to the darkness.

3. The dulling of one sense (i.e absence of light in the theater) tends to enhance the perception of other senses. Other patrons may well smell the smoke before a fire becomes visible enough to see.


There are no limits to free speech. The "shouting fire in a crowded space argument" argument doesn't cut it. If danger to others were justification for limiting free-speech, censoring the blocksize debate would have been accepted a long, long time ago (although false accusations of censoring that debate are still used as anti-Bitcointalk propaganda even today)

It seems everyone else has lost interest in this thread otherwise I'd be tempted to simply ignore this response. But seeing as there's no discussion to derail by pursuing it...

I have to say I'm beginning to suspect you're having me on here. You're not seriously as outraged as you make out are you - because I criticised your reference to Gavin Anderson, saying that I wouldn't respond to it - or some such?


Oh yes I will (sorry, I can't think of anything more appropriate than a pantomime response to that one)!

Melodrama aside, you are correct with respect to my only being responsible for my own speech. I have no interest whatsoever in limiting your speech to whatever 'my personal definition of reasonable'. The 'within reason' qualifier was simply an acknowledgement to what I tend to agree are sensible limits to free speech as exemplified by Wendell Holmes Jr's 'shouting fire in a crowded theatre'. I was not referring to what you say in this thread or on this or any forum. I don't know of any clearer way I could say that I accept and would not wish to impinge or restrict in any way your freedom of speech.

Regarding this thread, I had merely expressed a preference for the tone here and after your Gavin reference, I had implied that in my opinion you had not respected that and that I would not respond to itf. You jumped on your high horse. I accepted that and said you're welcome to say what you want. I was just politely asking - from the top - that opinions here be expressed in a much narrower format than free speech allows. I requested that, you chose otherwise. So be it. I'm not offended. I haven't a clue what you're so hot under the collar about!


Yes, absolutely. Here at least we are both on the same page, if only you could see that!

Oh my, and don't you love it when you believe that's happened because you can feel self-righteous in going off the handle and laying into those who offend you so!
Look Carlton, Please go back and read it again. If you take away your apparent misinterpretation of my 'within reason' and accept I was talking about principle (seeing as that was the direction you'd gone in), not about whatever you may choose to say in the thread I'd started (the moderators would jump in and intervene LOOOOONG before I'd say anything here 'should not be said'. The rest was just an expression of a preference. And if you understand free speech as well as you believe you do, you'll realise I do have a right to express a preference.

Get a grip! Who do you think you are, my mother?!!

Are you seriously trying to claim here that saying that someone has 'gone full retard' is not an attack on a person but on the substance of his argument?

At this point, I think we've gone past any hope of you and I deriving any benefit from taking this further. I haven't yet, but seeing as you went to the trouble of writing the rest, I will at least respect that and read it and give it consideration - but I won't respond because I believe by now it's a waste both of your time and mine.

I'll wish you the best.