Topic: P2P Cash or Settlement Layer? - page 3. (Read 2628 times)

Well...  I don't want to be dismissive... but that is definitely not what I mean.

Visa is not Cash. And I don't consider bank accounts a secure store of wealth.... so if I had to pick an analogy (imperfect as they all are) by cash I mean something similar to how cash payments work now with coins and notes: final, irreversible, P2P payments (but online.. obviously).

By settlement I would mean something similar to gold (as it was used between central banks to settle international balance of payments before 1971 and by regular people before 1913).

This is where it all starts being flawed. That's not the average transaction size, not even close. Source.
I can't answer this as your calculations are flawed due to using a wrong average. If you re-do them, then we might be able to talk about it.

the OP means. do we want bitcoin to be fast instant transactions like visa. or a reserve/store of wealth secure like a bank savings/investment account

bitcoins rarity and ledger seems to be more on the onus of long term store, and not aimed at the instant transaction market.

we should not ruin bitcoins rarity or ledger to enter the instant transaction market. nor should we force people away from bitcoins rarity or ledger for a different service/network/chain that offers instant transaction market.

allow bitcoin to grow capacity to allow more users to transact comfortably at the own pace and have the freedom to choose to use a blockstream faster service features. WITHOUT abusing bitcoin by hindering it to attempt to force people into blockstream features.

I agree with the questions u have raised, but disagree with the way u r looking for resolution. In this poll, a person having 0.0001 BTC have the same voting power as of the guy holding 10 or 100 BTC. U could get a better representation if u used http://bitcoinocracy.com/.

Getting a tx to be much smaller than the current minimum size would be no small feat although I do understand that a reduction of maybe 30% for the signature size might be possible after SegWit has been implemented.

But I think that is more likely going to be 200 bytes than 100 (and in general over time crypto stuff tends to need more bytes in order to remain secure so you can't really expect any further significant size reductions).

Personally I think get the settlement side perfected first and then work on the payment side of things (there are already quite a lot of off-chain services to do payments as it is so this isn't really so urgent IMO).

Understand that the settlement side of things includes the remittance market which is actually huge (it is the first big market that Bitcoin should actually have already disrupted yet it has failed to make any significant inroads into so far).

So... let's say that we want 20 million people to be able to use Bitcoin as P2P cash regularly (say once a day).

20.000.000 tx/day --> 232 tx/s or 13.889 tx/min --> 138.890 tx/ block

Currently txs are on average 250 bytes... but let's say that we can somehow get that down to 100 bytes... (I've see discussion on several ways of doing this).

140.000 txs x 100 bytes = 14.000.000 = 14MB


What would be the big tech constraint in 2020 preventing 14MB blocks?

Memory? Bandwidth? latency?

Oh, I must have missed that part somehow (fatigue got the upper hand). However, I don't prefer this perspective as some might think that it can be directly compared.

A worst case scenario can't be unfounded. When it comes to the processing time of algorithms, different instances will have different processing times and those will always be in O(something). That O(something) is the upper limit, i.e. worst case scenario. That upper limit is obviously used for a reason and would never be an unfounded numbers. People who have worked with algorithms and data structures should be aware of this, the other well, might have a hard time understanding even when it gets explained to them. It might be worth reading this if you want to learn more.

Both?

Agreed. But if that worst case scenario proves unfounded and there are solutions... we should make the most of them.

It is not meant as an analogy... that is why it is immediately followed by this:


..so I am not ignoring the argument. Just trying to inject some perspective.

Well, we can't exactly know when these block sizes are going to be safe exactly right now. Additionally, it is worth saying that the internet uses several layers in order to operate.

This is a very bad analogy. You're comparing uploading/downloading data from centralized servers and uploading/downloading data from a P2P decentralized network.

That's what the worst case scenario is, and one has to be prepared for it.

If billions of people can share selfies, videos and other media online.... I have to believe that we will be able to find a way to send a few million txs a day and have the Bitcoin Network process them. The theoretical n² traps only affect a few aspects of tx confirmation and validation.

I understand the argument that Facebook, YouTube or Bittorrent don't have to have every node independently validating all the data that they transmit... but if you think about it, neither does Bitcoin.

How much data do you need about a tx to really validate it? can you validate txs in the mempool and then just check that txs in blocks are ones that you had already validated? can you torrent the mempool? can you delegate validation of certain parts of the blockchain among collaborating groups of nodes? Can you separate parts of the tx data (as SegWit proposes) to reduce the amount of on-block data? Can you make validation modular so that different types of nodes focus on different parts of the process (just like mining specialised by separating from full nodes)?

The truth is that Bitcoin has less than 100 significant contributors on GitHub. It is a tiny project with tiny resources. Once we get to 1/100th the size of Linux and there is significant more brainpower put into this... we will find all kind of solutions that right now seem far fetched.

I am not talking about millions of people now... but in 5-10 years time. Sure, there are technical hurdles. I don't think that these obstacles are larger than what the Internet had to overcome in the 1990s to become what we use today. I still remember WebCrawler and Mosaic...

The amount that can be reached on-chain is very questionable. Look at the network now, we're still not sure what the exact block size limit would be considered safe (a maximum). Currently the network is able to do around 3 TPS on average. Even if we had 10 MB blocks, that's only 30 TPS and nowhere near enough for it to be used regularly by millions of people. It might be enough to be used occasionally by millions of people. However, wouldn't this make it some sort of settlement layer as well?

Speed of confirmation? Zero confirmation will solve this problem, there shouldn't be any problem as long as users add recommended fee & it's not very big transaction.
There's some merchants already accept zero confirmation and i have time use their service thanks to almost instant confirmation.

If block size problem has been solved, there wouldn't be any problem regarding fee and confirmation time.
Of course it must still be P2P cash, not others.

I actually agree with you. Still.. given a choice I would like to see enough on-chain capacity for Bitcoin to be used regularly by millions of people. If we then need a second or third layer to reach billions of people.. I'm OK with that.

Maybe it's a false dichotomy... that is why there is the "Other" option... but still a fair point.

Bitcoin is what it is... but it is not a finished product, it is still evolving. I would at least want to make explicit what direction we want it to evolve in. There are many choices and trade-offs in development.... so it would be nice to know what priorities existing users have.

I rather it be a p2p system as it seems I will be mainly be using that as I just like moving my coins around alot

I did not participate in the poll because the question presents a false dichotomy.

Bitcoin is what it is.

I want the consensus rules to remain the same.  If they change for anything that is not near 100% unanimous then that means that a majority can dictate to the minority and steal their funds away from them.   That undermines trust in all cryptocurrency, not only bitcoin.

Why not both? They're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Also, maybe you should re-phrase the question to something like "what the primary purpose of Bitcoin blockchain should be". Otherwise the results won't tell you much. If someone sees BTC primarily as P2P cash but prefers txs to be done via off-chain solutions, how does he vote?