Topic: Luke Jr's 300kb blocks - page 2. (Read 907 times)

I see. Ok, Luke's a bit single-minded about 300kB. This completely invalidates my interpretation of the old proposal; it seems he even wanted everyone to take a 300kB base size seriously even back when he first promoted it.



Wasn't there an idea from sipa to change how transactions are serialized that reduced the entire chain's size? If one cares about IBD, one ought to be most interested in proposals that remediate the historic chain size as well as those that improve it forwards in time.

It worked till where we are today, and the number of nodes continues to increase. That's not exactly a sign of there being a problem, or does it?

If you also add that with Lightning growing even more nodes will pop up, because whoever the operators are, there is a financial incentive to run a node now, so the number of nodes will continue to increase.

Average user incentives are buy in low and sell higher. They use light weight clients, or they don't use a client at all, but leave their coins on an exchange.

Don't break something that works extremely well today. We know that it works. Messing around with something so important is a gamble, and will likely drive people away from Bitcoin.

Are you arguing like "it is just fine, people should sit on the backbone (like me) and boot in half a day if they got real incentives, being a bitcoin whale (like me)" ? And you expect Luke to appreciate your argument and back-off? 

Average users have incentives to join, like you and other bitcoin whales they just can't and it is getting worse as the time passes. A UTXO commitment/reconciliation protocol could change the scene radically, imo.

He seems pretty vocal on Twitter, which actually worried me a bit, because it's beyond ridiculous to even suggest something like that where we are right now.

It's not as bad as it seems. If you're running a decent setup, the sync time is pretty reasonable actually. I set up a second node myself earlier this year, and it synced in like 11-12 hours, and that while I expected it to take a day at least. RPI's are a different story, but then again, run a decent setup and you don't have these problems.

In the end, the average person won't run a node even with a very small block size. Why? They just don't give a fuck. People who do give a fuck, and merchants, will continue to spec out their hardware to run their node in the most stable possible manner.

Luke Jr lost his mind.

What Luke is championing for (in Twitter  ) is both improving sync time and block propagation delay.

Of the two, the latter is improved by FIBRE a lot (very low << 0.001 orphan rates right now) and is under even more developments AFAIK but the first one,  initial sync time is an open problem.

As of initial sync problem,bootstrapping,  besides what Greg Maxwell has reminded above (Luke's proposal not helping with current situation just reducing the pace by which it is getting worse), I think there is definite need for the original problem to be addressed somehow.

In btctalk we've been discussing it recently:

here         https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.46692966

and here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.49479330

That was the old thing, but apparently on twitter he's talking about something even less reasonable now.

In any case, I showed this thread to other developers and the response was uniformly a big wtf.

Initial sync time does suck and is a problem, but the damage has been done-- since long ago-- no amount of size reduction will solve it. If it would then perhaps these ideas would get a bit of traction, but it won't...

Articles about Twitter threads are stupid.

What I get from Luke Jr's original tweet is about a demonstration to prove (to somebody?) that it is possible to have temporary soft-forks!

I don't see anything like an advocacy for such a change in Luk's tweet. The article OP has linked to is a different story tho....

I didn't have enough time to track the writer down but my first impressions are not encouraging. He is obviously twisting things for indirectly accusing Core team of being too much LN oriented and engaged in kinda conspiracy against bitcoin to reduce its throughput hence making fees to jump high and pushing people to layer-2 solutions like LN.

Edit: it is just ridiculous,  I  found more tweets from Luke, he is seriously championing for such a soft fork! The guy is getting completely out of rail by his fruitless obsession with decentralization, imo.

We're going to have to wait until the Lightning network get to near or half capacity. So far, the current solution is working.

It's a really old proposal. I thought it was trying to be too smart/subtle.


The idea was to reduce to 300kB base size, but also set a graduated increase schedule, based on absolute block heights (the 300kb step was set to take place at a blockheight back in 2017 IIRC). It finally reached 1MB base size again in 2024, and continued at a percentage rate (also IIRC). In other words, if the proposal was adopted today, we'd be past the 300kB stage already.

This was partly a psychologically based proposal, which is why people reacted badly, lol. I think Luke knew that 300kB base size would get laughed off, but he figured that since the blockchain grows constantly, that the closer we get to 2024 (when 1MB base would be reached again), the more people might begin to realise that reducing from the 1MB base size was smarter than it sounded back when the blockchain was a more manageable size.

Note that all of this is using base block figures, the real possible block size would be x2-4 the base block (so 300kb would in fact be 600-1200kB if all transactions in a given block are segwit txs).

Bear in mind that as we're still not in 2024, Luke's plan may actually work, and reducing the base from 1MB to whatever the schedule would be stepped to now (which has of course increased beyond 300kB) might look good to some people. It would probably still take some convincing, but there's still 5 years left on the clock.

I never even heard of it until your link.  So yes.

I see this subject has bubbled up again on Twitter and Luke Jr is proposing an experimental soft fork with smaller blocks.

https://cryptoinsider.com/on-reducing-the-bitcoin-block-size-to-300kb/

Rather unfortunately it appears to have been latched on to by the usual casualties who zombified themselves with BCH and other dead ends. They're expressing lots of 'concern' about ongoing sustainability now Bitcoin turns out to have had big blocks all along.

Does it have any merit as an idea or is the entire thing one guy's worry being twisted into yet another attempt to undermine BTC?