Topic: Please do not change MAX_BLOCK_SIZE - page 16. (Read 13023 times)

The beauty of off-chain solutions are that they have almost infinite flexibility to adapt to attacks.  Like a starfish, if you cut him to pieces each piece grows a new starfish.  In off-chain solution land, though, this would happen probably literally overnight in a lot of cases.  But it requires an enduring base upon which to ride.  That is, hopefully, a free Bitcoin network.

I found the rest of your note to fantastical to really comment on.  Sorry.

Well, then various powers would compete. Even if they would make some international agreement, I don't believe people would allow their gov's to set high tx taxes, much higher than the free network. Furthermore seeing how the world tackles tax heavens problem, I wouldn't worry about it that much.

Off-chain framework is also vulnerable to control unless it's hidden under tor. But then again it would not be accessible. If it won't be accessible, not many people will use it -> sum of tx fees will be low -> low hashrate -> vulnerable to gov 51% attack with the help of the likes of TMSC. 51% threat is a big one now and can only be deterred by fast growth.

And you said it again.  Simply saying it twice does not, in and of itself, make it a particularly meaningful statement.

^lol, it depends on your definition of handling, take a pick

As already said, a 56k modem can handle 30 MB blocks...

If mining is brought under control, you'll likely find your coins tainted/tarnished unless you pay the taxes and other fees which are required by the various powers that be.

These are likely to exceed by a wide margin what you would be paying on a free Bitcoin network, not to mention an off-chain framework built around on top of a free Bitcoin network.

Increase the block size! We need more centralization so we can handle the oncoming billionsPMMMFFFHHHMMPFF!! Sorry why is anyone concerned about this again? There cant be that much demand for gambling and drugs. I mean people certainly arent using them for legitimate things like postage.

Ultimately its users who will decide what is unacceptable.
The difference is bitcoin users would still own their money. But with high fees, their full participation would indeed be highly limited.
It has everything to do, as block size will ultimately determine miners ability to stay anonymous and users ability to process normal txs via blockchain. One needs to find a compromise.

That ship has long since sailed, for reasons that have nothing to do with the block size limit.

It is not acceptable for mining to be something only a select and non-anonymous few can participate in. You might as well argue the conventional banking system is perfectly acceptable because using it is cheap and easy, who cares about the fact that full participation is highly limited.

In fairness, one does not really need to know what such things are to use them.

A much bigger concern in my mind is that one may need, say, 1Mbps of bandwidth which is free of disruption by commercial network carriers.  These players have little ability to act autonomously of government security policies even if they had a desire to do so.

I think it hopeful in the extreme to assume that any political leadership is going to stand idle by while the power inherent in controlling a currency system is eroded.  If distributed crypto-currencies never reaches the stage where it is a eats into existing monetary solutions and supplants some of their function then yes, we are probably safe from such attacks.  It is far from clear to me that such solutions will not achieve such a capability.

Except from the ones who don't know what RAID array and >1Mbps network connection is.

It just has to run on any PC than can play youtube - then I'm fine with it.
If a PC plays youtube, but cannot keep up with the chain - then the chain is broken.

Well, not quite. It lets the argument about scaling up be about mining only. UTXO indices + bloom filters (already implemented) means that miners are the only ones who need to attach themselves to the firehose of transactions on a scaled-up p2p network, or the terrabytes of historical blockchain data. If we scale up to the limits of a beefy desktop PC with a RAID array and >1Mbps network connection, we wouldn't be pushing anyone out from actually using the network.

sometimes I get these feelings like all the people know what they are talking about, except me.

Absolutely, and I'm glad to hear you are working on it. But essentially it lets us scale down, not up.

It does, however, greatly alleviate the network, storage, and processing requirements for non-mining full nodes, allowing for modest devices (a 3G phone, for example) to operate with some assurance of security. This discussion isn't just about miners.

I2P is better suited to high bandwidth hidden services than Tor, and a I2P transport protocol is already under development.

Also mining anonymously is only essential to the survival of the currency if every government in the world simultaneously banned Bitcoin. As long as this is not the case it's possible for mining as an industry (not necessarily the individual miners) to route around oppressive legal environments.

I, at the other hand, think that this is the most important thing that we should actually worry about

I expect at this time bandwidth is the major bottle neck.  At least in the US I think we can expect someone wishing to run a full node to have at least 1Mbps of bandwidth.

All transactions will be first broadcast then transmitted again in a block.  There is also overhead for the inventory notify messages.  I will guess that protocol overhead, inventory and addresses take up about as much bandwidth as transactions so needed inbound bandwidth is about 3x what is needed to just transmit the blocks.  Slow connections would naturally limit outbound traffic as nodes would fetch inventory from other hosts that advertise that inventory sooner.  That said it might be worth improving the client to take into account connection speed between nodes.

1Mbps of bandwidth is 75MB per 10 minutes.  I would expect someone would want bandwidth for other things so lets assume 30MB available.  This means someone with 1Mbps of bandwidth should be able to handle up to about 10MB blocks.

Given this I wouldn't expect raising the limit to 10MB would have a significant centralizing effect but significantly higher would.  This doesn't account for tor.

Bitcoin does have the potential to grow significantly faster than network and computer speed increases so transaction growth to a point where block size would become prohibitive is a real future possibility.  I expect we have a little time before this becomes an a significant issue but its clearly best to have a solution prepared before its absolutely necessary.

Could we get decent statistics on the bandwidth of internet connections through the world and basically set the block size to ensure something like 95% of the fixed internet connections would be able to run a full node?  Lots of fudge factors in this calculation but its still less arbitrary than 1MB.

As soon as the block limit is hit it will raise transaction fees and there will be a significant need to justify the limit.  The more objective and reasonable the way that limit is set the better.

I put the possibility of world governments coming together to force bitcoin mining nodes to direct their hashing power to attack a parallel blockchain as pretty close to zero and way down on the list of things to worry about.