Topic: Permanently keeping the 1MB (anti-spam) restriction is a great idea ... - page 9. (Read 105069 times)

I only see hysteria amongst the pro side..
Its you and his royal clueless roadstress that spreads fud and do nothing but fagocitating the debate with 'future' fear of bitcoin not scaling..

It is you that are actually scared and does not support bitcoin the way it is.

Please go ahead and fork that shit up.

Global consensus?! You wish..

This is why they have to resort to misdirection and false arguments - if they actually told the truth openly it would be very obvious that they are a small minority and the supermajority consensus is against them.

The amount of hysteria being generated by the anti-scaling crowd is in direct proportion to the degree to which the consensus is against them.

Really? So that's why you are anti raising the block limit. Because you want to use Bitcoin for yourself and you piss on people who want to buy coffee using your powerful technology. It seems like this powerful technology is your new God and peasants aren't even allowed to say its name.

Who are you to decide who should use Bitcoin and who shouldn't? (I know you will not answer to this)

I said it in the other thread and I will say it again here: Bitcoin should be neutral just as the Internet and it should be available for everyone, not just to the highest bidders.

Would we be able to filll enormous 10GB blocks with transactions if it costs $50 to relay and validate them? I think we wouldn't be seeing many bitcoin transactions if they cost $50 a pop, regardless of how many people use it.

If I'm not mistaken, there's also incentive for miners not to include no-fee transactions because they'd have to pay more to have their blocks propagated quickly.

It sounds like those are at least two of the market forces that would prevent 10GB blocks under justus' proposal.

Yeah, I'm kind of assuming the IBLT feature gets implemented so that nodes will already have all the tx's in the block, and the relaying after the block is found should be roughly the same speed no matter how many txs are in it.

miners also have an incentive for smaller blocks as they reduces their risk that it get orphaned.

miners also know that if they allow small fee transactions people will only pay a small fee. its still a prisoners dilemma with downward pressure tough.

I like Justus' pay-to-relay idea, but I'm having second thoughts about whether it would actually work.

Consider this thought experiment, there are three otherwise identical cryptocurrency networks. The total cost to do a trustless transaction is the tx fee plus whatever it costs to rent full-node capable hardware long enough to validate the transaction you receive.

A: 1mb block limit, $50 tx fee, validation cost: $0.05
B: 100mb block limit, $0.50 tx fee, validation cost: $0.50
C: 10,000mb block limit, $0.005 tx fee, validation cost $50

Which network do you want to receive payment on, assuming you don't trust the sender or any third party?  B. The reason B is so cheap, is that fees are inversely proportional to block size limit, but bandwidth costs are not linear. They're pretty flat until you get up to exotic speeds.

As Gavin pointed out, the optimal block size limit will scale with commodity bandwidth.

So, in the unlimited "pay to relay" model, what forces cause the price to converge at this optimal level? I'd suggest there aren't any. If nothing else, the block reward ruins it. The cost to relay will be insignificant until the block size is so huge, that it takes one of the world's fastest connections to transmit it. By then bitcoin is sunk, or at least depending solely on its head start rather than competing on features and price.

Miners have no reason not to accept all nonzero fees, no matter how large the resulting block is. They do not care if the large blocks knock commodity full nodes off the network. Users care! They'll just go to the hypothetical competing network that's the same, except much cheaper.

Now you could argue that miners are rational and wouldn't do anything to make bitcoin un-competitive.  I think that ignores the prisoner's dilemma that would come up.

Let's say all miners know that accepting tiny fees creates huge blocks, causing users to flee to cheaper networks. They don't want to harm their own operation, right?

Some miner will defect, and sweep all the tiny fees from the mempool, even though it creates a huge block. One huge block won't kill bitcoin.  Except the miners can't stop at just one. It will happen repeatedly, with no individual miner able to stop it from going down in flames. So they might as well defect themselves and collect every last satoshi while they can.

I think Gavin's got a solid plan. It's got ugly arbitrary constants, but it's simple and there's little doubt it will work.

Ok, so say we go ahead with a hard fork to a > 1MB max block size ... are we also going to see a couple of other hard forking issues put through all at the same time or will this one be done alone?

Could it become like those congressional bills where all the crap legislation gets stuck inside the fine print of the guns 'n drugs 'n terrroists 'n kids cover page?

DeathAndTaxes for president!

Well stated.  

I see a number of questions developing.  Here is one:

1)  Imagine you are a miner (pool operator) in, lets say, 2015.  You have a choice to include more TX to go over 1MB or not.  You know going over 1MB is better for the network, it has to happen, etc.  However, you also know there are some nodes on the network that might reject your block.  Your fiduciary responsibility is to your hashers.  Leaving out a few TX, with minimal fees, lets you stay neutral on the issue as all nodes will accept your block, and increases your chance of getting 25 large coin.  What do you do?  

Okay, a lot of people appear to be talking without knowledge of how hard forks actually happen. 

The process starts with miners getting mining software that will understand and could produce blocks on the new version.  They start putting the new protocol version number into the blocks.  But they continue to produce blocks that follow the old protocol until the last 1000 blocks are 95% produced by miners that are putting the new protocol version into the blocks.  After that, the hard fork is enforced.  Two things happen;  they start using the new protocol, and they start rejecting any new blocks that have the earlier protocol number.   

Meanwhile, when the number of recently mined blocks showing a higher version number rises above 50%, any client with the old version will warn that it's on the losing side of an upcoming hard fork and a software update is required.

Here is an interesting thing about this split in particular; even when 95% of the miners start rejecting blocks for having too low a version number, there may not be an immediate split.  If this happens while we aren't bumping up against the 1MB limit, then the earlier clients will see nothing in the first few of the new blocks to object to, because all the new blocks (until a >1Mb block actually happens) are still acceptable to the existing clients.  So, until that time all that happens, from the point of view of the original clients, is that blocks bearing the original version number are getting orphaned by blocks bearing the new version number.

So any original-version blocks created during this time wouldn't wind up in their own block chain, they'd just get rejected, by the new clients for having too low a version number and by the original clients for having another perfectly-acceptable block chain get longer.  Even though the hard fork is being "enforced" by the new clients, it hasn't happened yet as long as the new blocks are acceptable to the old clients.  So any original-version blocks mined during this time are a dead loss for miners, regardless of which side of the hard fork they intend to be on.  Rather than mining at a dead loss, I expect that miners who haven't upgraded yet, mostly will. 

But after a while, a >1Mb block arrives, and the new version clients will build on it and the old version won't, so the hard fork actually happens.  Now the miners have a choice.  They could choose to mine on the new version or the old version.  Let's stack this up for a minute and see what the choice looks like.

The old version has already lost 95% of the hashing power before the new-version clients pulled the trigger by starting to reject old-version blocks.  Also probably lost at least 90% of whatever was left because miners don't like mining at a dead loss, so let's say they've got about one half of one percent of the hashing power.  That means they'd get a block about once per 33 hours.  A one-megabyte block every 33 hours.  Meaning, a limit of 1 transaction per 86 seconds.  Your transaction gets into a block in 33 hours, and it takes about ten days to get to the confirmation depth of 6 blocks.  If you get a coinbase transaction, good luck waiting out that 100 block depth until it's spendable.  It'll take over four and a half months.  Oh, but of course there are difficulty adjustments to make everything work right!  There sure are, every 2016 blocks.   Assuming you still have miners for that long, that takes over seven and a half years.  Taking the maximum reduction that the protocol can take, that'll quadruple the rate at which you get blocks. then you get up to 1 transaction per 21 seconds and you get another difficulty adjustment in 2 years, and another one six months after that, and another one just a month and a half later.  So we're up to about ten years later before the original chain gets back up close to one transaction per second.  This does not sound like a winner to me.

Meanwhile the new version takes off with 99.5% of the hashing power, and essentially flicks whatever holdouts and weirdos stick on the old chain off like an elephant shakes off a fly.  They are able to take 40 or so transactions per second, and the old-version chain, with its smaller crop of miners, is limited to less than one transaction per minute.

Seriously?  Seriously, you think staying on the original-version chain is a viable choice?  I invite you to do so; the rest of us will ignore you, except for the ones that care enough about your welfare to stage an intervention and tell you you're crazy and you need to get help.

OP, Weren't you vehemently against raising the limit few years ago? I think I remember a lot of intellectual technical discussion around here involving you, gmaxwell and others regarding this matter. Around v0.0.9?

What changed?

I am personally very much against hard forks of such. However I am all in for new crypto with new parameter that considers how a previous crypto has lagged behind. From my point of view a hard fork with a lot of publicity to adhere to and "update" to keep up with is simply an act of how a few control the mass. Whether it is for a good reason or bad or whatever, It really breaks the original principles of decentralization and fairness. 

What do you think?

Is Bitcoin 'hemorrhaging market share'?  I hadn't heard.  Whatever the case, losing a lot of the users is a fairly desirable thing to me.  Users who want to use a very powerful technology such as Bitcoin to buy their morning coffee are a distinct liability to the system and are in the process of killing it right now (hence this thread.)

No alt I've seen targets the only use-case that I care deeply about nor seeks to address the main problem that Bitcoin has: too many idiot users.  The reason most alts don't have capacity problems is because they don't have users rather than any particular architectural design that they did right.  That is my sense since I've really not studied any of the alts very closely.  I liked some of the ideas in Litecoin when it first came out, but it was basically a regression from Bitcoin in the ways which were important to me.

In spite of it's rather severe design faults Bitcoin is still the leading contender as a reserve and balancing currency on the basis of it's first mover advantage alone, though it is also still better tuned for this duty than a lot of the alts.  Eventually a solution will emerge that makes use of the very powerful method of one simple layer of abstraction (main chain supporting many tuned, targeted, and non-critical subordinate chains.)  I hope it turns out to be Bitcoin which takes on this role and the core devs who organized under Blockstream seem to be thinking the same thing.  It's probably Bitcoin's only real chance of survival as a robust monetary solution which is independent of government control, and falling into that trap will ultimately kill off Bitcoin's value more than making user's pay what it's worth to use the system.

Makes you wonder whether those proponents regard Bitcoin hemorrhaging market share as desirable or as undesirable.

+1 And you will not find a single prominent proponent of a permanent 1 MB limit give a compelling counter-argument to this.

Sounds like the OT technology might be a promising way to manage the internal accounting inside of a sidechain.  I'll be interested to see how it performs in such a capacity and might entrust a small fraction of my stash to a sidechain which employs it.  If they do other interesting things as well of course.

I don't even think transactions will be pushed off-chain anymore than what is happening organically today. Yes, it is good that off-chain solutions develop, but they should attract user business on their own merits, not be a refuge for users who are forced there. Forcing users to do something stretches the network effect to its limits. Users will instead transact with a different cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin will hemorrhage market share.

dayum , floppies that were the timse man ! didnt know people actually still used them , and now i want to use them : >

The block size limit should raised because off-chain transaction systems should not be artificially subsided.

If the limit is not raised, the more transactions will be pushed off chain which otherwise belong on the chain, which won't exactly kill the entire space right away, but as a plan B it's far inferior to allowing the distribution of on-chain vs off-chain transactions to find a natural balance.

I thought the point was to increase the block size limit to avoid having to use off chain transactions.

If the block size remains at 1 MB, most of humanity will be forced by necessity to transact off chain.

The rationing is a form of artificially subsidizing off-chain solutions, causing them to see usage that they otherwise would not if people were free to choose between on-chain and off-chain transactions.

OT has many other uses besides financial transactions so it would be fine even if Bitcoin handled all the world's monetary transactions. If Bitcoin is not allowed to step up to the plate, however, OT (and other off-chain systems) would need to take up the slack.

That's not a particular great scenario. It'd hardly be better than the fragmented and high-friction financial system we have now.