Topic: Inviting reasoned and civil criticism of my big-block position please? - page 3. (Read 1993 times)

Pools can be a Sybil attack from the same whale miners.

You are writing a lot of nonsense and I am not going to waste my time.


PoW difficulty has nothing to do what we are discussing.

You are not competent for me to have a discussion with.


There was no meandering. I stated the relevant facts. You are meandering into incoherent nonsense.

Thanks for the responses to-date. Plenty food for thought for me to sleep on. I'll respond to the extent I understand and am capable of coherently expressing my thoughts tomorrow.

"centralisation"??

hmm 2013.. blocks 0.5mb ... 5 pools
2017 blocks 0.999mb... 20+pools

goodluck in your research

p.s
i do like how you now stepped aside the PoW statement.
and are now trying to meander it to being about tx validation.

EG
if PoW algo was to change. and only PoW was to change
if it took 2 sconds to validate tx data before
it will take 2 seconds to validate tx data after.

the PoW is not about tx data. is about the block hash's security lock that comes AFTER tx validation.

and that security lock is always going to be based on a 256bit piece of data no matter how many tx's are included or not.

---

anyway to gt to the OP's opinion
LN has a niche for some people that do spend more than once a week, such as faucet raiders, gamblers etc. but LN requires a deposit and eventual withdrawal (2 onchain tx's) by which due to uncertainty of how often some people wish to spend bitcoin would not want to waste 2 tx's to lock funds into a contract they may not use for that fortnight.

yes LN can have a 1 year contract. but then there is the issue of. can people predict their spending habits of a year to know how much to put in at the start. can they really trust having their whole hoard locked in for a year.
there are actual issues with LN.
such as address-reuse signing and blackmail, CSV changebacks etc. which is where even LN devs have suggested only use $60 amounts with ~2week contracts.

doesnt matter if its PoS or PoW.
the orphan rate due to block data is a separate thing.

infact by costing so much electric. pools are probably going to do a better job at validating the data before creating a has that needs to be SHA'd ..
compared to a block that just needs to be signed thus decreasing orphan risk because they know how much work is involved in securing the data

oh. and here is the fnny part

if you have a block with 10 transactions or 1000 transactions. does not mean the PoW difficulty changes or the amount of hashes needed.

No. Propagation of data. And the equation of orphan rate applies. And different miners see a different orphan rate. This is what causes centralization and impacts scaling.

That is incorrect.

Block size increases, exponentially increase hashrate wastage due to exponential orphan rate increase.

It doesn't scale because the frictional costs of raising the block size are exponentially bad.

Have you guys ever looked at the equation for orphan rate. It relates block size to block period in an exponential relationship.

validating data..
no matter what, takes time agreed.
but the bit after validation... whther its PoW PoS or whatever doesnt change if its 0.000250byte block or a 2gb block.
the hash that needs to be signed or SHA'd is the same length and takes the same time no matter what size the block is

By example let's say we increase the blocksize from 1MB to 2MB, that's increasing the average amount of transactions from 300,000 per day to 600,000 per day.

So, 1MB:300,000, 2MB:600,000.

And that's the same ratio, for 1MB or 2MB. i.e. 1:3 is exactly equivalent to 2:6

So that's not scaling, the scale is identical. All blocksize increases do to change the capacity is that they change the amount of resources the Bitcoin network uses at the exact same scale, no matter how much the blocksize changes.



I actually agreed with Gavin (but not Mike) on his 2015 ideas to improve Bitcoin's transaction capacity, except for 1 very crucial point.

Gavin had all the right ideas, except he wanted to schedule the changes in the wrong order. He wanted to increase the blocksize 1st, then bring in the changes that counter-balance the impact of blocksize increases after that. Which is odd, but Gavin expressed it pretty much that way, perhaps without even realising the logical inconsistency. He's since gone full retard though, advocating BU's aggressive destruction of the Bitcoin Core blockchain, which was particularly appalling coming from someone who made good contributions to Bitcoin in the past (and also from someone who claimed to be in favour of the free market/open competition).

the propagation is a different matter that has nothing to do with PoW

validating transactions and making a hash, and transmitting a block to other nodes is the same if it was PoW or PoS

the actual work of PoW and PoS is a separate thing.

once PoW has a solution. the new hash is added to the block data. and funnily enough to check that the PoW solution (hash with so many 000 at the start) actually takes less milliseconds to verify than it does to chck signatures of 'stake' holders block header data.

again the Proof_of_..
and the tx data inside a block are 2 separate things

Dude you really don't understand the math of propagation. That is an idiotic claim.

Without verification of transactions in the prior block, PoW can't be safely devoted to mining the next block.

Scaling of block size is all about the fact that all miners have to verify all transactions. Which intimately tied to PoW.

If miners start trusting other miners by reputation instead of verifying, then you no longer need PoW. You can based the consensus proof-of-maximum-trust, i.e. trust is centralization.

PoW has nothing to do with blocksize.

ASICS have no hard drive. they never touch the blockchain or validate transactions.
all they receive is a 256bit hash and a few rules to comply too (difficulty)

a 0.000250mb block and a 0.999750mb block send the exact same amount of data to a PoW asic,

arguments that PoW cant scale is a fake narrative just to try making sheep think its ok to ruin security purely for the sake of greedy people thinking they can get some free bitcoins from running a node in their basement

dont beleive me..
unscrew an ASIC and look for a hard drive

https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/631ffe/pools_that_block_litecoin_development/dfr3weo/

Focus on this specific post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/631ffe/pools_that_block_litecoin_development/dfsd1yp/

Thank you.

Would you elaborate please what you mean by 'it doesn't scale'?

I believe I am more open to put the politics to one side and to be persuaded that the Core roadmap has more merit than my ideas*

Rather than just asking, I just brushed up on the arguments according to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy but I'm still not sure I know what you mean.

I recollect talk of a technical issue that, as things stand, means an increased block size causes a disproportionately high demand on bandwidth. Is it this you're referring to? Or maybe that given the potential demand, there's no way the blockchain would suffice on its own, thereby requiring off-chain scaling? Or something else?

On the first, even with my low technical understanding, I can see that there would be sense in addressing this prior to increasing the block size. However, on technical issues, I look to see to others whose judgement I trust who have better understanding - such as Gavin & Mike - and on this I don't recollect this issue as being seen as a big problem.

On potential demand, I have no argument with the blockchain not being able to hold it all in the long term. It could, however, hold more and I am given to understand that technical minds outside of Core see very little risk in increasing current capacity, allowing continuity of the growth as we've experienced so far whilst allowing time for technology, ideas and development to continue.

If it is something else you mean, I'm genuinely interested.

Whilst I have given my current responses to my two guesses as to what you meant, it doesn't mean I'm dismissive of what you write. Responding as I have helps air and articulate where I'm at at the moment whilst keeping the door open to being persuaded otherwise.

Thanks again Carlton Banks

* this very same post got shadowbanned on r/bitcoin within 10 mins (https://www.ceddit.com/r/Bitcoin/new/) but despite this, though disappointed, I'm not angry and not deterred in pursuing the most reasoned conclusion of which I'm capable, whatever that may be.

It's very simple


There is more than one way to increase on-chain capacity. Scaling is the best way. Blocksize increases do not scale.


So, blocksize increase are the worst way to increase capacity. It's simple, but not smart. Scaling is better. It's sometimes simple, sometimes complex, and always smart.

Preamble you can skip if you want: I'm as guilty as many on both sides of snarky, smart-arse comments but tonight I just spent a very enjoyable hour (doing a face-to-face trade) with two who hold different opinions than me. I think we all learned something and I'm confident we all had more respect for the legitimacy of holding a different view from ourselves.

My primary point is that a technical expertise does not make one an economics expert and therefore there's a danger in trusting the technical experts to make the decisions that risk what has proven to work thus far i.e. enough space to accommodate almost all transactions.

I wanted, since visiting Sudan in the mid nineties, a currency that would protect people in countries from government actions that truly screw them over such as the monthly doubling the money supply to pay the army (that doubled the price of everything on the day the army was paid).
I had figured out in the years after that public key cryptography might be the basis of an independent currency and was hoping someone smarter than me might figure it out. But even though I was kinda expecting it I was still blown away by the elegance of Satoshi's solution.

One of the exciting things was that the same currency served the needs of so many different groups of people including: the Austrians / gold-bug types, libertarians / ancaps and others including me who see value in an incorruptible currency, people screwed by high remittance fees or by gov't restrictions of internal or international currency transfer, the unbanked who are cut off from financial services most here take for granted, its use for contracts such as with Factom - even those, such as me - who liked to give small amounts away* or raise intrigue with shopkeepers, restaurant owners by offering physical (or later wallet app) bitcoins for my meal etc. etc. The fact that there were, in addition, so many use cases that we could not even imagine what they might be was just mind-blowing for me.

The failure to do something about the transaction bottleneck before it started to nudge fees up and (and/or cause delays orders of magnitude higher than before) is and will continue to have an impact. This isn't about laying blame today. I think it's fair to say all stakeholders (in the wider use of the term) including developers, miners, other users and moderators jointly - if not equally - have to-date failed to make a change a user can use today.
I am looking forward to seeing 2nd layer off-chain solutions bringing all kinds of new use cases. I also mourn the loss of the use of the blockchain for the other use cases as their viability is eroded to nothing by fees and delays.

As I see it, those whose judgement on Bitcoin's future has apparently earned the respect of the majority on this sub due to their technical merit, have a plan that accepts the loss of the multitude of use cases (on-chain) as a price worth paying to have Bitcoin be as strong as possible for the three use cases they deem worthy: censorship-resistant-currency, store-of-value, settlement-layer.

If this argument continues to prevent the increase of the block-size limit, as much as I'd like to see them proven wrong, I genuinely hope that Bitcoin will continue to be of value to enough for merely those three use cases to survive and to thrive. The fact is we don't know. Nobody can know. The combination of use cases and unlimited potential use cases was what got us to where we are today. How long can we chip away at the other use cases and still have something that holds value? Maybe indefinitely? It depends entirely on the faith and the preparedness of those who stay in to pull us out of whatever next big dip is. It is still a significantly inflationary currency and the higher up the price goes, with more coming on board at higher prices, the further it has to fall. And we ought not forget it is not the only player in the crypto space.

From what I understand of 2nd layer channels, they're not going to serve the Sudanese and those in the many countries where the spread of mobile telephony means they could potentially exchange what for us are small amounts to protect themselves. My hope is that Bitcoin can still do this - as I believe was the vision of Satoshi and as I understand some with a much better technical understanding than me (GA, for one) believe is still possible.

But if it's not Bitcoin, I'm kinda hoping for the sake of what it once was that it survives and continues to reward those who believed in it but more importantly, if it's not Bitcoin, I'm really hoping another currency will take up the baton for those who most need use of this technology - and if that is at the cost of Bitcoin falling by the wayside, so be it. We - jointly, as a whole community - will only have ourselves to blame.

*Those many, many 25mBTC paper wallets I gave away may, unless their owners figure it out soon, be sums that are forever not be economically viable to move.