Topic: Not Bitcoin XT - page 4. (Read 21905 times)

Are you suggesting there won't be a panic when blocks are full and transactions are backlogged? Because that is pretty much what happened when the spam attacks happened. People panicked.

Why do you consider this to be an imagined problem?

Even if there is no emergency, if a problem exists, why should you wait before it becomes serious? That is not a good way to deal with things because then you have an emergency situation.

If it creates a fee market, then what happens to the claim that Bitcoin is a free or low cost way to transfer small amounts of money? That vision and the whole micropayemnts thing is going to go away. It could cause Bitcoin to lose users or simply prevent other users from joining.

Also, what if better scaling solutions can't come up before this becomes a problem? If you prefer kicking-the-can-down-the-road, then you should consider BIP 102.

Hard forks area *always* going to be contentious, except in dire emergency situations (aka, levelDB in 2013). I don't believe that you'll ever get 95% miner support for block increases so that alone is an issue. Also, people will have lots of reasons to push it off.

- Aug 2015 - we can't do a blocksize increase now - there's no emergency.
- December 2015 - we do a blocksize increase now - there's not enough time before the next fee halving and it will be unpredictable
- Nov 2016 - we can't do a blocksize increase now - the fee market is just starting to mature and it will cause some miners to become unprofitable
- Aug 2016 - we can't do a blocksize increase now - the LN is too immature and we don't know how payment channels will alleviate load, etc.

... sometime in 2017
- how come the price of BTC is so low? How come we don't have more users?

It's always going to be contentious to change consensus. Might as well fight the fight now.

But there will be no emergency. If there is panic it will be unwarranted, as it is now.

Nothing serious or bad will happen if we touch the limit. Its not a big deal.

Why? premature scaling is often the cause of the death of many businesses. The reality is fixing problems when they occur is often the pragmatic way to go.

Right now people are stressing about what I consider to be an imagined problem that will not occur. I can see no clear reasoning or evidence for the emergency scenario.

 You always have to weigh issues up individually to be honest. Sometimes dealing earlier is a good choice, sometimes not.

It might even be a good thing if we hit the limit if it creates a fee market and incentivises better scaling solutions.


We are panicking now about an event that could be mildly positive or mildly negative, that probably will not occur anyhow.

And a contentious fork in an emergency/panic is an even much more riskier and much more damaging event.

The whole point of planning and carrying out the fork in the near term is to preempt significant growth to prevent an emergency situation where the hard fork is done in a panic. That could be even worse. It is better to do it now when people are calm (mostly) and are thinking rationally (mostly) and various proposals can be heard and discussed. You never want to fix a problem when it becomes a problem.

I dont think scaling to 100x is best done by simply raising the block size limit. Its even less likely to work for scaling to 1000x or 100000x which I hope will be needed.


Right now an increase is not even needed. Maybe in about a year or two at the earliest.

Moderate increases over the next few years is the way to go I believe.

Sure, we have a small chance of touching the limit for a few months at some point if we have a sudden spurt. I dont believe there will be any sort of crash-landing doomsday scenario, in that event. It will not have a large impact on Bitcoin.

Fees might double, and wallets will have to implement some needed features (most should see it coming, infact some wallets already have these capabilities), whoopie doo, no big deal.

A contentious fork on the other hand is a much riskier and more damaging event.

Sure, let's say I agree with all of the above. To me, it's all moot without significant growth of users - growth that by your economic analysis won't happen with fees that are too high since the customers will go elsewhere. Either we can scale this thing 100X+ from where it is today or it's not interesting.

The funny thing is that Litecoin has XT scheduled too, but I hope they will implement it after Bitcoin.

So if bitcoin gets fucked up, then everybody could rush to Litecoin as an alternative. If they implement it in the same time then we are fucked.

Even though any modification is scheduled for january, I feel like we will have a cold autumn and  winter ahead

This conversation has been going on for years now. Is XT the solution? Only miners/merchants/users support will decide. However, XT is certainly pushing the conversation along more rapidly than it has been in the past. IMO, the scaling conference would not have been arranged without it.

Well anyways guys, I`ll be hedging myself agains this calamity with some Litecoin and other big coins.

Whatever will happen after the september meeting of the devs, I am not taking chances, so pray that bitcoin will be ok after that.

I just dont see how the push for XT will resolve anything...

Thats why I said this
The more efficient the market and price finding mechanisms are the less queues there will be. Even with a small block size.

If wallets allow for the fee price to be changed, queues for average users will be rare and there will be a known amount above which users can be certain of getting into a block immediately.

If wallets additionally have smart price finding mechanism the market will be even more efficient and queues will be rarer.

If you have  replace-by-fee as Peter Todd is trying to advocate, and wallets and pools implement that functionality, the market can be even more efficient and users can have a flawless experience without having to worry about fees at all.


I believe that having some fee pressure will push wallet developers to implement these relatively simple abilities. Some small block size increase(s) will be needed tho at some point.

It's more like 200 people showed up to take the bus but when the time came to board the bus, they found out that the price was too high so they were forced to wait for the next bus. Eventually, as you say, less people are interested in taking the bus and go to another bus company. During volatile demand times, you will not know what the price is to get on the bus now - you will pay your fee and maybe if your wallet allows for you to increase the fee you'll be able to change your mind later.

Let's get one thing out of the way - the 21 million limit is completely arbitrary since any number would have worked. 1BTC would have been no different than 1 trillion BTC.

Block size is not as arbitrary since it limits the number of people that can use the system. And yes, in 20 years I think 800 person busses is something to expect. Either Bitcoin is a payment system many people use or else it's a settlement system accessible by only the super wealthy individuals or coinbase style banks. Block size needs to grow as much as it technically is possible to grow without much regard to fees, at least short term.

If the ticket price increases only 100 people will want to take the bus not 200 so there will be no queue.

Thats how economics works everywhere for everything. Using your reasoning everything on earth has a unlimited queue, from tomatoes to busses, to bitcoin now, cause if the cost to buy bitcoin (or any other product or service on earth) was lower more people would get it.

With all due respect thats absurd, thats not a queue by normal definition.

And there is nothing artificial about it, in the same way that busses can only hold so much people and there is nothing artificial about that.  

To go with the bus analogy, in my eyes you want to design a bus that holds 800 people (i.e. 8GB blocks) I find thats too much and think the design should only allow for 200 people. There is nothing artificial about a limit in the design of a bus.

Its a characteristic of Bitcoin, its no more artificial then the 21 million limit which is also just another characteristic. The second one is held more sacred tho.

No, that doesn't make any sense. If 200 people want to take the bus but it only has 100 eats then it doesn't matter what the ticket price is - there will be 100 people that will be delayed getting to their destination. The only option you are talking about is that 100 people who really want to take the bus now are forced to take a taxi - aka, use something other than Bitcoin. While this is possible, it is also bad for growth when done by artificially taking seats out of the bus for the purpose of forcing ticket prices higher.

TLDR; Limiting the block size for any reason other than technical scalability reasons is a bad idea.

No, if the price can adjust then demand will always equal supply. What kind of professor are you?

The price for fees can change, more wallets need to implement this feature tho. That is all that is needed for there to be no queues.

No, not Bitcoin XT

I simply wish that the devs can come to an understanding and that the community opts by the Block size increase options.

On this topic, this post by DeathAndTaxes has made it to a reading on LTB.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/permanently-keeping-the-1mb-anti-spam-restriction-is-a-great-idea-946236 - https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-241-the-big-blockist-perspective

Whenever the demand is greater than the capacity, some transactions will inevitably be delayed.  If there is a 60-seat bus every 10 minuets, and 100 passengers arrive at the bus stop every 10 minutes, some passengers will have to wait until the demand goes down to less than 60 per hour.   If that excess demand lasts for a few hours, many passengers will have to wait for hours.

It is grammar-school-level math.  It does not matter how much the passengers are willing to pay or how cleverly the bus company sets the fees.  

The average waiting time will depend only on the network's capacity and how the incoming traffic will vary over time.  Fiddling with the transaction priorities will not change the average delay by one second.


The average daily traffic now, when there are no "stress tests", is ~120'000 transactions per day, and has grown by 5000 tx/day per month for the last 12 months.  The network's capacity, revealed by the stress tests, is ~200'000 tx/day.  Since the traffic varies during the day and with the day of the week, congestion will begin to occur well before the average demand reaches the capacity; perhaps already when the traffic will be 160'000 or 180'000 tx/day.  Even if the growth is linear rather than exponential, at the curren pace that will happen by mid-2016.  (If the growth is exponential, that may happen in early 2016.)

Most of the transactions pay the minimal fee.  True, if the minimum fees were raised to a significant level (say 0.20 USD/tx, still much less than the cost of the network), a large fraction of the traffic would disappear, and then the block size limit issue would not be urgent for another couple of years.  But neither camp seems willing to do that, for various reasons...

That wont happen because you simply have to pay a small fee for your transaction to be accepted. There will not be any queue.

Actually we are far below the limit now if you count fee paying transactions.

You got 10 Cute Points there, but surely you know what I meant? 

Blockstream's invariant message for the last two months has been "it is not necessary to increase bitcoin's block size limit because the LN will accomodate any future traffic increase."  Except that the LN will be centralized and dependent on trusted third parties; users will have to submit to AML/KYC, their coins will be locked in the system for months, ad their payments can be easily traced and blocked. Oh, and, while bitcoin exists and sort of works, the LN is very unlikely to do either thing...