Topic: Moving towards user activated soft fork activation - page 3. (Read 24355 times)

And we must remember that to run a node you need to have the full blockchain on your computer. With its size increasing at every block, the computational power demand will be constantly rising. This will probably kill the home based nodes, leading to the already much-discussed topic of undesired node centralization, right?

Right, some of the devs (especially those from Core) are not interested in user experience too much.
Those guys are there for various reasons, and many of the reasons aren't necessarily economic.
As a result, they have no direct incentive for doing what users want, but rather trying to force their own views or ideas.


I think it's already impossible for certain machines to download full Bitcoin blockchain. It's not only the problem of the size but also tech specs.
Few days ago I started to sync the blockchain from scratch on my older laptop (purchased 6-7 years ago), and it's "stuck" at 40% (with db_cache set to 2000 which was max for that machine). The progress is 0.2% per hour now, so I'm pretty sure it will never sync but wanted to check how bad is it :-)

I wonder if regular home-class users will be able to sync BTC blockchain at all in the future (let's say in 5-6 years). Maybe the only option for them will be bootstrap files, but not sure if it's possible to verify the downloaded blockchain against network version.

When I first time learned about BTC, the first question to me was: what will be with those block sizes and overall chain size? I understand that you can move it up always as needed, but cmon, if BTC will ever be the number 1 currency in the world, the blockchain will weight enormous amount of terabytes... anyone from devs thinking about it? Have any solutions to it? Even now on my new mac to download btc core wallet with all blockchain and to purge it to smaller size took like 3 days with normal internet... in future it could take ages...

You got the point here, I agree, but It looks like crypto devs are do not bother to make it easier to mine...

All of which has nothing to do with Moore's law, Quickseller.

Moore's law is done, as ck said. It may be revived in the future, but it will need to use a totally different paradigm to double computational power every 12-18 months (as a side effect of shrinking transistors in size), which is what Moore's law stipulated

Looking at it strictly from a cost/unit, then yes you are correct. However in recent years, manufacturers of computer related products have invested less in being able to increase the number of units in the products they sell, and have invested more into making the products they sell more reliable, and otherwise increasing the utility of their products.

Take hard drives for example, while the rate at which the price per GB has declined has fallen, hard drives have failed at lower rates, and can access data more efficiently. This makes comparing the cost of a 1 TB HDD today to the cost of a 1 TB HDD yesterday not an apples-to-apples comparison. There is also the issue of the fact that from a retail user's point of view, there is little reason to need 2 TB worth of space on your HDD, especially considering that things like moves and tv shows can easily (and cheaply) be streamed as the user wishes to watch them -- this fact creates less pressure for manufacturers to create larger HDDs, which keeps somewhat of a mesh floor on the unit cost of HDD space. If a retail consumer has to choose between two hard drives, one with 500 GB worth of space, and one with 1 TB worth of space, he may choose the 500 GB HDD, even though the unit cost of drive space is higher because he has little/no use for the 2nd 500 GB worth of space.

Also, as HDDs become more reliable, consumers need to purchase less of them in order to keep their data on a HDD, along with necessary backups (or cheaper backup options can be used if as the chances of failure approach zero). Having to purchase HDDs less frequently and having to purchase less HDDs for backup purposes further skews the apples-to-apples comparison of unit costs.

If and when there are more real world retail demands for larger HDDs, manufacturers will invest more into creating larger HDDs, and I believe the unit cost will continue to fall at an accelerated rate.

Except that we fell off the curve for Moore's law years ago. Technology is struggling to grow at even 1/4 the rate Moore's law predicted now.

Except 2 years ago, an overwhelming consensus of Bitcoin users rejected a less modest 2MB hard fork proposal (and then they also rejected essentially the same proposal by a "different" external development team a year hence, just in case the first rejection wasn't a clear enough message)

What makes you think that we would have all agreed to something 4 times the size of that? 8MB was on the table then, and no-one but a small minority of miners took that even slightly seriously

Im not sure about 4 years ago, but it would probably not be unreasonable to believe that concensus could have been reached for 8 MB blocks two years ago.

Judging solely by mores law, it would probably be safe to have a max block size of 8 MB 2 years ago if 1 MB was safe 7 years ago, especially if a very simple fix to the risk of having too many signatures in a transaction was also implemented.

Yep. Could've just ordered all the miners and nodes to do it.

That's probably a pretty accurate description of what's going on.

I agree that BU signalling is a statement of opposition to Core. Core doesn't get it, and continues to alienate people who are undecided, and continues to hype the dead Segwit. The FUD is a desperate attempt to scare people into line with Core. It's not working.

The net result is flight into alts. Good job Core. You could've upped the blocksize 4 years ago. Now you're committing suicide in a spectacular show of drama.

Any sane UASF will use a flag-day for the activation.

I prefer the Flag Day approach, precisely because of the toxic political environment you're referring to (or at least I'm calling it toxic). But it's arguably UASF in a different guise, although "user activated" is a little of a misnomer for Flag Day activation.

I don't think there will be any solutions.
The miners votes has been too polarized.
They've seen how some people were trying to fuck them.
It won't be easy now to regain the lost trust - they will be far more skeptical in the future.

IMHO the blockchain protocol will be fixed for years to come.  
You can forget about the core's fancy road map - it's not gonna happen, unless for an altcoin.
Which may actually not be such a bad thing.
It can surely use some stability now, after all these shit and havoc of a two competing forks just about to come... Each one of them 'to fix bitcoin' 

Bitcoin doesn't need fixing, but some people should definitely learn more respect towards it.

Maybe, but if they are, it cannot last forever. The discussion is too long, and it's time for solution(s).
Bitcoin is losing market share quickly, and even the tx backlog is not that big recently.
Apparently many users already started using other coins for their operations.

UASF is a wonderful tool in today's bitcoin political environment, I have no reason to believe it is unsafe and will not work as specified.

In the very beginning, miners where full nodes.  They ve just overoptimized things and now small user nodes think they control bitcoin. I m very sure miners have to rerun more nodes and bitcoin is back.

Hey Piotr, welcome back. I still miss your Goxbot. Why don't you make a new one for some major exchange?

Imho what is wrong with Bitcoin is that there are no incentives for full nodes. If a part (or all, why not) of the Tx fees where distributed to full nodes (maybe according the tx relayed by each one) we would have a much stronger network of some order of magnitudes more full nodes. Moreover the game would be much more fair since anyone with a consumer grade puter could gain like in the good old times.

I already made this same proposal here years ago but nobody cared. Maybe now someone will?

Yes, fear - I get it.
But FUD can't change bitcoin protocol.
Only majority of miners can do that.

The 40% is not so much disturbing if you know that each single one of them is voting to keep the block size limited to 1MB - nobody's pointing that out.
If it is a political statement, you should read it: we don't like the core, but we want to keep the protocol as is (no fork)

However the disturbing part is that all this fear / FUD about moving the miners out of the business, connected with the price drop must surely have a negative effect on new investments into mining infrastructure. Which means it gets easier to actually build up a single enterprise that controls 50% of the hashrate.