Since I so often see the argument about, what is good for the miners:
Is there any statement from the large mining pools about this?
Topic: Permanently keeping the 1MB (anti-spam) restriction is a great idea ... - page 22. (Read 105082 times)
February 05, 2015, 04:42:47 AM
February 05, 2015, 04:34:58 AM
I am not the only one totally annoyed by how bitcoin behaves in an effort to keep the dominant position and be the 'one coin for all' and with this hurts the alt-industry. I think at this point it becomes inevitable to start using more than one chain and stop looking at btc as the only coin worth bothering with.
I see, so rather than doubling the size of the bitcoin chain you'd rather have two chains half the size? How is that a win? 
February 05, 2015, 04:33:05 AM
then why does a transaction with a 1 satoshi fee take longer to process even though we are not at our limit yet?
explain me this.
explain me this.
Because majority of miner nowdays use the bitoin core as published by the devs and that compiles blocks following a mix of commercial and alturistic rules.
Majority of miner do not care about this since inflation provides three-four magnitudes higher income than fees at the moment. They will. And this discussion is about the future and the limits.
February 05, 2015, 04:26:48 AM
^ Did you read the entire post? The OP fully addressed the effect on fees:
He neglects that there is no reason to pay fees, if there is no limit on supply.
just because there's the POSSIBILITY of 20MB doesnt mean you HAVE TO use it.
Since there is no marginal cost in including a transaction to the current block, a rational miner will always include a transaction with a non zero fee,
before it is included by any of its competitors.
Therefore a lower bound on fee will not work without a cartel or without a competition for space.
I prefer algorithms over cartels.
then why does a transaction with a 1 satoshi fee take longer to process even though we are not at our limit yet?
explain me this.
February 05, 2015, 04:21:30 AM
Since there is no marginal cost in including a transaction to the current block,
let me be more precise:
There is a marginal cost implied by block propagation speed being proportional to size and propagation being proportional to orphan rate. There is also a computation cost of updating the merkle tree and updating miner with it. These marginal costs are today however magnitudes below the lowest non-zero fees paid.
February 05, 2015, 04:20:05 AM
You must be able to broadcast that huge block to most of the nodes in 10 minutes. I don't see the latest research regarding this area, but there is a paper from 2013
http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf
Based on this research, it took 0.25 seconds for each KB transaction to reach 90% of network. In another word, a 1MB block will take 256 seconds to broadcast to majority of nodes and that is 4 minutes
When block size reach 10MB, you will have a broadcast time of 40 minutes, means before your block reach the far end of the network, those nodes have already digged out 3 extra blocks thus your block is always orphaned by them. And the whole network will have disagreement about which segment have the longest chain, thus fork into different chains
Gavin's proposal is to let mining pools and farms connect to high speed nodes on internet backbone. That is reasonable, since the propagation time is only meaningful for miners, your transaction will be picked up by the mining nodes closest to you and if those mining nodes have enough bandwidth, they can keep up with the speed. But anyway, how much bandwidth is really needed to broadcast 10MB message in a couple of minutes between hundreds of high speed nodes need to be tested. And this is the risk that someone worried about the centralization of mining nodes: Only those who have ultra high speed internet connection can act as nodes (I'm afraid that chinese farms will be dropped out since their connection to the outside world is extremely slow, they will just fork to their own chain inside mainland china)
http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf
Based on this research, it took 0.25 seconds for each KB transaction to reach 90% of network. In another word, a 1MB block will take 256 seconds to broadcast to majority of nodes and that is 4 minutes
When block size reach 10MB, you will have a broadcast time of 40 minutes, means before your block reach the far end of the network, those nodes have already digged out 3 extra blocks thus your block is always orphaned by them. And the whole network will have disagreement about which segment have the longest chain, thus fork into different chains
Gavin's proposal is to let mining pools and farms connect to high speed nodes on internet backbone. That is reasonable, since the propagation time is only meaningful for miners, your transaction will be picked up by the mining nodes closest to you and if those mining nodes have enough bandwidth, they can keep up with the speed. But anyway, how much bandwidth is really needed to broadcast 10MB message in a couple of minutes between hundreds of high speed nodes need to be tested. And this is the risk that someone worried about the centralization of mining nodes: Only those who have ultra high speed internet connection can act as nodes (I'm afraid that chinese farms will be dropped out since their connection to the outside world is extremely slow, they will just fork to their own chain inside mainland china)
I don't know how you come to those assumptions based on that research.
Quote
the block message may be very large — up to 500kB at the time of writing.
Quote
The median time until a node receives a block is 6.5 seconds whereas the mean is at 12.6 seconds.
Quote
For blocks, whose size is larger than 20kB, each kilobyte in size costs an additional 80ms delay until a majority knows about the block.
The do not mention the average size of blocks they measured. Let's assume all their blocks were 0KB. 12.6 seconds for that. Add 80 ms per addicition KB.... 80ms * 1024 * 20 is about 27.3 minutes. Add the original 12.6 seconds... Roughly 28 minutes for 20MB.
Of course, 28 minutes is still long. That is based on 2013 data. I assume the nodes now will have improved their verification speed and have more bandwidth. New measurements could / should be made to verify that propagation speed will not become an issue.
February 05, 2015, 04:16:39 AM
^ Did you read the entire post? The OP fully addressed the effect on fees:
He neglects that there is no reason to pay fees, if there is no limit on supply.
just because there's the POSSIBILITY of 20MB doesnt mean you HAVE TO use it.
Since there is no marginal cost in including a transaction to the current block, a rational miner will always include a transaction with a non zero fee,
before it is included by any of its competitors.
Therefore a lower bound on fee will not work without a cartel or without a competition for space.
I prefer algorithms over cartels.
February 05, 2015, 04:07:51 AM
The blockchain works by supply and demand, and supply is made by the miners themselves, not by some dumb hardcoded limit.
You assume that miner can effectively control supply. This in absence of a block size limit is only the case if they are building cartels, that artificially limit the supply.
Is that you really prefer instead of an algorithmic decision?
Remember Bitcoin's promise is to operate without the need of cartels and authorities.
oh but you can.
the miners decide which transactions are valid and which are not.
you can make your own rules about which fees to accept and which fees not to accept. You can even ban individual transactions or addresses if you want.
I'm pretty sure there's also a way to make your own limits to the size of the block you want to solve, as long as it's not bigger than the hard-coded limit.
As long as your block is considered "valid" by the rest of the network you decide the rules about which transactions you accept and which you dont accept.
If you have sufficient power as a miner, you can have a pretty big influence on the fees. And any miner who's not stupid will ask for at least a small fee. Or like make something like a 250KB limit for 'free transactions' and reserve the rest of the block for transactions with fee, the more fee the more priority, something like that.
be creative...
just because there's the POSSIBILITY of 20MB doesnt mean you HAVE TO use it.
There's not even a need for cartels, but each miner/pool will set their own limits based on some calculations.
Do i really need to do all your thinking for you?
Calculations would be roughly based on
- how much electricity does mining cost for me?
- how much $/kWh in my area?
- how much transactions are in an average block lately?
- how many blocks do i solve (or more likely does your pool solve) per hour
- how much of a % do i influence the pool?
- how much is the block reward if any? (and how much does it cover the cost of mining?)
- how long does this mining equipment stay competive
- how much did my equipment cost and how much will i need to profit to invest in new one
- overhead costs
weight all those factors against each other and you can make a rough estimate on how much fees you should ask for an average transaction.
now let's suppose we're far into the future and we rely mostly on fees as opposed to block rewards.
lets also assume there's (for simplicity sake) 8 large pools controlling a majority of the mining. (not to say this will happen but just to keep the calculations easy).
Pool A asks for a fee of 1 bitcoin minimum. and controls 25% of the network
Pool B asks for a fee of 0.001 bitcoin minimum and controls 5% of the network
Pool C asks for a fee of 0.005 bitcoin and controls 10% of the network
Pool D asks for a fee of 0.003 bitcoin and controls 10% of the network
pool E asks for a fee of 0.5 bitcoin and controls 15% of the network
pool F asks for a fee of 1 satoshi and controls 10% of the network
Pool G asks for a fee of 0.01 bitcoin and controls 15% of the network
Pool H asks for a fee of 0.025 bitcoin and remains the remaining 10%
now if i would want to sent a transaction and be absolutely sure it gets confirmed 6 times within the next 6 blocks (which should take about an hour) I should add a fee of 1 bitcoin.
However, if i'm satisfied with a 75% chance of waiting for a block i just add a fee of 0.5 instead.
If i am satisfied with a chance of 60% to have to wait a block, i'd add a fee of 0.025 and so on.
Of course as the user I don't know exactly what the miners ask in fees, so it's a bit of trial and error. But most users will add a fee that proved to work for them in the past.
Many large transactions or transactions that NEED to be processed fast will likely have a higher fee to ENSURE a fast transaction (some miners only accept large fees) smaller transactions (which will be more plentiful) will add lower fees, risk waiting a little bit longer.
The miners who accept smaller fees will process more transactions and the sheer volume of transactions may actually add up. But the few big transactions that the other pools sometimes pick up may also bring in some large chunks of fees from time to time.
There's no need for a hard-coded limit, fees will come in anyway, and you can make your own rules.
February 05, 2015, 03:57:27 AM
The OP gives a valid technical argument for raising block size limit, but is neglecting a financial argument against it.
The miners' income has to be greater than the cost of their work. Miners' income is inflation now, but is expected to be replaced by fees,
since inflation halves every four years. Purchasing power of new coins might be sustained for a while but must converge to zero in the limit.
Transaction fees exist only because there is a competition for block space. Eliminating that competition eliminates the fees and with that mining.
Therefore block space has to become and remain a scarce asset.
The miners' income has to be greater than the cost of their work. Miners' income is inflation now, but is expected to be replaced by fees,
since inflation halves every four years. Purchasing power of new coins might be sustained for a while but must converge to zero in the limit.
Transaction fees exist only because there is a competition for block space. Eliminating that competition eliminates the fees and with that mining.
Therefore block space has to become and remain a scarce asset.
like i have said before in this very thread, it's better to sell 1 billion screws and make 0,01 cent profit from every screw than to sell 1 Lamborghini and make a profit of $100000 from that single sale.
bigger blocks means more transactions which means MORE FEES.
not less fees, MORE fees.
it's a GOOD thing for miners, not a bad thing.
Imagine if you owned a taxi business, but no matter how many taxis and taxi drivers you have, you are only allowed to transfer 500 passengers a day, period. You could own a million cars and a million drivers, but you would still only be allowed 500 passengers. There could be a major sport events like the superbowl or the champions league, 100,000 of people could be waiting for a taxi ready to pay but no, you can not take more than 500, why? because protocol said so.
The blockchain works by supply and demand, and supply is made by the miners themselves, not by some dumb hardcoded limit.
If the miners think 0.001 fee per transaction is too low, they are free to deny those transactions. But they should deny transactions just because 'lol the block is full'
To clarify... Suppose there are 5 transactions:
| # | Fee | Size | Fee per 256 KB |
| 1 | 0.1
February 05, 2015, 03:55:05 AM
^ Did you read the entire post? The OP fully addressed the effect on fees:
Quote On a transaction fee basis. Currently the cost of the network is roughly $300 million annually. The users of the network are collectively purchasing $300 mil worth of security each year. If users paid $400 million the network would be more secure and if they paid $200 million it would be less secure. Today the majority of this cost is paid indirectly (or subsidized) through the creation of new coins but it is important to keep in mind the total unsubsidized security cost. At 2 tps the network the unsubsidized cost per transaction would be about $5. At 100 tps it would be $0.05. If Bitcoin was widely adopted, more users purchasing more coins should mean a higher exchange rate and thus the value of potential attacks also rises. The future cost of the network will need to rise to ensure that attacks are not economical and non-economic attacks are prohibitively expense relative to the benefit for the attacker. It may not rise linearly but it will need to rise. If someday one Bitcoin is worth $10,000 and we are still only spending $300 million a year on security we probably are going to have a problem. Now advocates of keeping the limit may argue that the majority of the network cost won't be paid by fees for many years but the reality is that with the limit on potential transactions there are only two other ways to balance the equation and that is much higher fees or much lower security. February 05, 2015, 03:47:46 AM
The blockchain works by supply and demand, and supply is made by the miners themselves, not by some dumb hardcoded limit. You assume that miner can effectively control supply. This in absence of a block size limit is only the case if they are building cartels, that artificially limit the supply. Is that you really prefer instead of an algorithmic decision? Remember Bitcoin's promise is to operate without the need of cartels and authorities. February 05, 2015, 03:32:34 AM
The OP gives a valid technical argument for raising block size limit, but is neglecting a financial argument against it. The miners' income has to be greater than the cost of their work. Miners' income is inflation now, but is expected to be replaced by fees, since inflation halves every four years. Purchasing power of new coins might be sustained for a while but must converge to zero in the limit. Transaction fees exist only because there is a competition for block space. Eliminating that competition eliminates the fees and with that mining. Therefore block space has to become and remain a scarce asset. like i have said before in this very thread, it's better to sell 1 billion screws and make 0,01 cent profit from every screw than to sell 1 Lamborghini and make a profit of $100000 from that single sale. bigger blocks means more transactions which means MORE FEES. not less fees, MORE fees. it's a GOOD thing for miners, not a bad thing. Imagine if you owned a taxi business, but no matter how many taxis and taxi drivers you have, you are only allowed to transfer 500 passengers a day, period. You could own a million cars and a million drivers, but you would still only be allowed 500 passengers. There could be a major sport events like the superbowl or the champions league, 100,000 of people could be waiting for a taxi ready to pay but no, you can not take more than 500, why? because protocol said so. The blockchain works by supply and demand, and supply is made by the miners themselves, not by some dumb hardcoded limit. If the miners think 0.001 fee per transaction is too low, they are free to deny those transactions. But they should deny transactions just because 'lol the block is full' February 05, 2015, 03:32:25 AM
You must be able to broadcast that huge block to most of the nodes in 10 minutes. I don't see the latest research regarding this area, but there is a paper from 2013
http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf Based on this research, it took 0.25 seconds for each KB transaction to reach 90% of network. In another word, a 1MB block will take 256 seconds to broadcast to majority of nodes and that is 4 minutes When block size reach 10MB, you will have a broadcast time of 40 minutes, means before your block reach the far end of the network, those nodes have already digged out 3 extra blocks thus your block is always orphaned by them. And the whole network will have disagreement about which segment have the longest chain, thus fork into different chains Gavin's proposal is to let mining pools and farms connect to high speed nodes on internet backbone. That is reasonable, since the propagation time is only meaningful for miners, your transaction will be picked up by the mining nodes closest to you and if those mining nodes have enough bandwidth, they can keep up with the speed. But anyway, how much bandwidth is really needed to broadcast 10MB message in a couple of minutes between hundreds of high speed nodes need to be tested. And this is the risk that someone worried about the centralization of mining nodes: Only those who have ultra high speed internet connection can act as nodes (I'm afraid that chinese farms will be dropped out since their connection to the outside world is extremely slow, they will just fork to their own chain inside mainland china) February 05, 2015, 03:30:10 AM
can't afford upgrading harddrive all the time ... raising the blocklimit and creating a chain as big as 200gb and more 200GB of hard disk space costs about $10, making it the cheapest upgrade you can possibly get. Though if your system is so cheap that 200GB of hard disk space actually counts as an upgrade, one has to wonder how you ever managed to run a full node on it in the first place. February 05, 2015, 03:27:15 AM
the point is: the chain is already pretty big. If it becomes 20 fold as big i will be forced to stop using bitcoin because i don't want a lite-client or rely on 3rd parties with my coins but on the other hand can't afford upgrading harddrive all the time (especially not with these bad btc prices). If you raise blocklimit 20-fold it will become unaffordable for normal people to store the blockchain on their computers and because of that people loose access. No need to post the same thing in 2 separate threads. Here is my answer: my point is: the chain is already pretty big. If it becomes 20 fold as big i will be forced to stop using bitcoin because i don't want a lite-client or rely on 3rd parties with my coins but on the other hand can't afford upgrading harddrive all the time (especially not with these bad btc prices). If you raise blocklimit 20-fold it will become unaffordable for normal people to store the blockchain on their computers and because of that people loose access. Why does everyone believe that raising the block limit will instantly raise the blockchain too? It will not. It will take time until that will happen! Even if it takes time: the blockchain is already very big - if you make it bigger normal people will need to upgrade their hardware to use it and people won't do that. Right now there isn't even an immediate need to fork so the proposale doesn't make sense at this point in time. As noted before: reaching the blocklimit will at first result in microtransactions being pushed off the chain and that won't be an issue for most users. Fork to a bigger chain isn't rational at this point in time. Period. Do you know how many viable blockchains are out there with almost only empty blocks and very small chanis (below 1bg storage)? Dozens! Blockchains aren't scarce. So why would i use one blockchain that requires hundreds of GB storage when i can use one almost as secure with much less HD-use? I guess you were referring to this one. even though we never reached over 50% of the maximum blocksize yet, the block sizes vary wildly per block, and grow pretty much exponentially. Also, we are at about 30% consistently right now. If it keeps growing at the same rate as it has now, it may very well take a little over a year before we really need the upgrade, but what if it doesn't? What if we get another rally next month, or in two months? Another rally will surely come with an increase in transactions, a massive increase, as can be seen from the charts. And since we are already using about 30% another rally will likely need more than 1MB. It will not need 20MB, but while we are at it we may as well give ourselves some room. If we keep the 1MB limit, the next rally will kill bitcoin, because the transactions will be too limited, the network will clog, and people will blame the blockchain technology for it. And we may very well never get a second chance to do it right. and all those other blockchains are so small because NO ONE USES THEM growth is a GOOD thing, more size means more transactions means more users means more value. February 05, 2015, 03:26:03 AM
The OP gives a valid technical argument for raising block size limit, but is neglecting a financial argument against it.
The miners' income has to be greater than the cost of their work. Miners' income is inflation now, but is expected to be replaced by fees, since inflation halves every four years. Purchasing power of new coins might be sustained for a while but must converge to zero in the limit. Transaction fees exist only because there is a competition for block space. Eliminating that competition eliminates the fees and with that mining. Therefore block space has to become and remain a scarce asset. February 05, 2015, 03:09:27 AM
my point is: the chain is already pretty big. If it becomes 20 fold as big i will be forced to stop using bitcoin because i don't want a lite-client or rely on 3rd parties with my coins but on the other hand can't afford upgrading harddrive all the time (especially not with these bad btc prices). If you raise blocklimit 20-fold it will become unaffordable for normal people to store the blockchain on their computers and because of that people loose access. It's spelled lose. and you rather wait for 30 years before your transaction gets through? Because that's what will happen when you keep the filesize at 1 MB On a sidenote: I am not the only one totally annoyed by how bitcoin behaves in an effort to keep the dominant position and be the 'one coin for all' and with this hurts the alt-industry. I think at this point it becomes inevitable to start using more than one chain and stop looking at btc as the only coin worth bothering with. All the problems dissolve at exactly the moment we accept a multi-coin/chain solution. Allowing altcoins is opening a can of shit, if we just keep inventing and embracing new altcoins all the time, everyone would just print their own coin and how exactly would that be different from every nation issuing their own fiat currency? Bitcoin is valuable because it's limited, deal with it. No other coins need to replace bitcoin, and if bitcoin is not suitable, we update it. And that's exactly what will happen, bitcoin will get an update, and it will be updated again and again until it is perfected. Just like every other piece of technology, including the internet. Technology adapts, technology evolves, technology changes, get used to it. The only constant in the universe is change, you either change with it and adapt, or you get left behind. according to OP, if i understand right: if we don't raise limit little people loose access (i doubt it) BUT raising the blocklimit will also ensure little people to loose access. Conclusion: one blockchain for everyone is no viable idea With raising the blocklimit and creating a chain as big as 200gb and more as soon as 1 or 2 years down the road bitcoin won't be able to reach the enduser. little people will lose access to the blockchain if we KEEP the limit at 1 MB because the 4 tps or something will never be enough to cover even a fraction of the transactions. You'd need insane amounts of fees to get included in the blockchain, more than any individual could ever afford. We are currently siting at an average size of about 0.4 MB (so we are not at our limit yet) and it's not being spammed to be full, which is good. But there's not a lot of room left for growth. 40% may not seem like much, but under exponential growth, it's getting dangerously close. And with things like this you really don't want to wait til the last moment. Also, it's just the LIMIT that increases, it doesn't suddenly increase the ACTUAL size 20 fold, it just increases the MAXIMUM POSSIBLE size 20 fold. So it gives us a little more breathing room, nothing to be scared of. and lastly, harddisks are very cheap nowadays, and will only become cheaper. what does it matter if the blockchain is 30 gb or 500 gb? It's not like 2TB harddisks are expensive or anything. Still cheaper than a safe. Or do you really trust the banks with all your money? See if they don't run off in the event of the next economic collapse? Think the government will bail them out again? With what money? They can't really raise the taxes any higher you know? Not without civil unrest anyway. I bet you're one of those guys that keep complaining about phone batteries getting smaller, while in reality they get bigger (capacity-wise anyway), but it's all those extra functions that drain the batteries faster than they can create more powerful batteries. my point is: the chain is already pretty big. If it becomes 20 fold as big i will be forced to stop using bitcoin because i don't want a lite-client or rely on 3rd parties with my coins but on the other hand can't afford upgrading harddrive all the time (especially not with these bad btc prices). If you raise blocklimit 20-fold it will become unaffordable for normal people to store the blockchain on their computers and because of that people loose access. Why does everyone believe that raising the block limit will instantly raise the blockchain too? It will not. It will take time until that will happen! yes, my answer is on the other thread. No idea why OP needs to open third thread on the same issue and can't just post his view on the other thread. Probably he feels important enough to open a new thread (he must be extraordinary important) . Maybe i open another one for the same topic with my personal views ... maybe just everyone should open their personal thread for this. You had time to post this, but you couldn't just quote yourself here? I bet you're afraid that we will come up with counter-arguments to it, because you probably realize you are wrong but you're not man enough to admit it. February 05, 2015, 02:55:43 AM
^^^
i would say this guy is a sheep February 05, 2015, 02:54:42 AM
^ I would say this guy doesn't want Bitcoin to succeed
Bitcoin has no advantage over low inflation altcoins which can hold their value. Bitcoin ends right here. Crypto is just about to begin. Sorry for all who fell for the hype around that particular coin called 'Bitcoin'. Anyway, it deserves to be said again: great post by D&T. This is basically the definitive counter to arguments from supporters of a permanent 1 MB restriction. February 05, 2015, 02:51:12 AM
my point is: the chain is already pretty big. If it becomes 20 fold as big i will be forced to stop using bitcoin because i don't want a lite-client or rely on 3rd parties with my coins but on the other hand can't afford upgrading harddrive all the time (especially not with these bad btc prices). If you raise blocklimit 20-fold it will become unaffordable for normal people to store the blockchain on their computers and because of that people loose access. Why does everyone believe that raising the block limit will instantly raise the blockchain too? It will not. It will take time until that will happen! yes, my answer is on the other thread. No idea why OP needs to open third thread on the same issue and can't just post his view on the other thread. Probably he feels important enough to open a new thread (he must be extraordinary important) . Maybe i open another one for the same topic with my personal views ... maybe just everyone should open their personal thread for this. Jump to:
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