Topic: Please do not change MAX_BLOCK_SIZE - page 19. (Read 13023 times)

Any solution which requires a trusted authority isn't Bitcoin. Any means of transacting in which payments may be blocked, censored, or reversed with less effort than what is required to orphan a block isn't Bitcoin.

Saying that we should use off-chain transactions is a bait-and-switch scam. It means convincing people to adopt Bitcoin by offering them a trustless, decentralized, censorship-resistant payment method and then turning around and telling them they can't actually have any of those things. They'll have to route all their transactions through regulated gatekeepers and thereby negate absolutely every advantage Bitcoin offers.

its not just about 56k modems. its also about people being able to mine through tor. you could not mine 30mb blocks throug tor.

Jeff, this is the development & technical subforum. Can you provide an examples of the types of off-chain transactions you are talking about which "are bitcoin"? I know about rapidly-adjust payments, which does solve a certain specific type of micropayment problem in a compact way. However what general solution exists? How do you handle 10k tps between unique party pairs, within the bitcoin protocol and with a 1mb block size limit?

I know about, say, Fellow-Traveler's proposal to "lock" bitcoins for use on an Open-Transactions server in a trust-free way. You can then scale the centralized Open-Transactions server with beefy hardware to handle whatever load you need. But I wouldn't call that bitcoin.

Reason being... oh wait there is none.

Not true at all.  You may send a digitally signed message to anyone, by any means of digital transmission.  Any number of economic incentives may exist to maintain exclusivity.

It just feels stupid that you send some one a coin and he send you a coin back and you need two transactions broadcasted just for nothing happened in reality

The book keeping method is a common practice in accounting, it reduce the real transaction in financial system. If you have lots of bitcoin nodes that transfer bitcoins between each other, the real amount of transaction on the blockchain will be very small and the nodes just need to broadcast the net incoming or outgoing transactions

BTW, I think today most of the transactions are just pools paying miners, that can be dramatically reduced by reduce the pay out frequency  

+1048576

Here's an interesting thing I just conjured up:  From a doc 'UnitedStatesComp.pdf'


To save one the math, I get about 5 tps.

Seems to me truly a no-brainer to consider various forms of off-chain transactions vs. trying to shove everything onto the blockchain.  Even with 'ultra-prune'.  The only real question is when.  A median of $25k and average of $3.5M is pretty alarming...though we are talking about $380T here...  It cannot be said that I am not a 'USD user' by virtue of the fact that I've never performed a Fedwire transaction.  The same would stand for Bitcoin.

If the 'source of truth' for values is stored on 1,000,000 power-users computers distributed around the world (and processed by the same) vs. in some computer system owned by the federal reserve (or BIS or whatever) that is a pretty revolutionary thing.  If the same basic solution consists of Google and Facebook, or even a few thousand DWolla-sized entities, that is a much less compelling to me.

Ultimately, I think the appropriate factor to weigh most heavily in a decision about data rate is what, exactly, is required to protect against which particular threats.  Various economic factors will certainly play important roles in this equation, but I truly believe that they should be secondary.  This because resistance to attack will ultimately define the value of the solution in my opinion.

Off-chain transactions aren't Bitcoin.

Micro-payment channels and their distant cousin probabilistic coinbase txout payments are useful, but they are really just a particularly efficient form of on-chain transaction.

Off-chain really refers to systems where the transaction never has to see the blockchain at all, ranging from really simple stuff like Easywallet account-to-account transfers (and SilkRoad for that matter) to advanced solutions like fidelity-bonded payment systems and trusted computing hardware where the trust in any third party is minimal.

Speaking of scale, we know that at some level Bitcoin just can't be decentralized and still have every transaction on the blockchain - you just have to read the wiki page on Scalability to see how VISA-level volumes require a system that's hardly decentralized, let alone resistant to government control. We've already had to ban sub-cent microtransactions from P2P network in the 0.8.2 client due to scaling concerns - I'd rather see Bitcoin develop into a system where we don't have to make ugly decisions like that again.

I think this is the most useful direction to take the discussion.

Being able to send 0.00982 BTC to the coke machine is a cool trick, but really should be seen as the sort of stuff that doesn't belong in the global network.

For reference, when talking about "off-chain transactions" are we talking about Rapidly-adjust (micro)payments?  I would guess so, but just making sure.

Sure, off-chain transactions can replace a lot of the bulk of the blockchain, but there will still clearly be more than 7 tps between previously-unrelated parties if Bitcoin is going to scale to the levels it needs to.  Not to mention, that the RA(M)P referenced above does require two transactions per pair of parties, and needs to be renewed at some regular interval. 

There is no 7 tps limit, even with 1MB blocksize.

Off-chain transactions offer unlimited tps.

You could think of P2P client systems, to the bitcoin network that would take care of small transactions and even make them faster, also using some sort of blockchains, though sort of compressing them in the actual chain, for a fee.
Hell, if you think about it, you can even involve mining there, as long as it gets cheaper than the bitcoin chain fees.
Just leave the 1MB block limit and you will see it bloomig (good for everyone), while the actual bitcoin network will be able to breath out.

Besides, IMO it's also too dangerous to change anything in this protocol.

So at it has been show here, if we just make the block size unlimited, and let the miners decide, it will only encourage the mining arm race - the only thing that the chain may be afraid of.
At the very moment when a set of nodes decide that they wont accept block with a valid difficulty, just because it is too big for "their standards" - that's the moment of the disaster.
So we won't just stick to the traditional 1MB? That's the best way, IMHO.

This puppy ain't gonna fly with a 7 Transactions per second limit, even if it was only reserved for large transactions.

This is the real problem.

There's no reason to be concerned about blocks getting too big in the absence of a protocol limit unless you're also worried about some entity gaining majority control of the network, and in the case of an entity gaining majority control they can interfere with the network in other ways with or without a protocol-specified maximum block size.

I think the number of non-mining full nodes is going to drastically increase as more businesses begin to adopt Bitcoin. especially as we see the node implementation become heterogeneous with the emergence of Bits of Proof and btcd. The obvious solution if you're worried about mining pool misbehavior is to give all full nodes tools for specifying the maximum block sizes they will relay. If a large pool tries to make an excessively large block it won't do them any good if the rest of the network refuses to relay it and the other miners refuse to build from it.

I just mentioned that I read it all the time: "bitcoin is not for microtransactions" - and I agree with it.
But it was not my entry point - rather a by the way argument.

My point was: if it doesn't scale further, just get advantage of it's fine design that has a built in mechanisms to solve it.
Though, at the other hand, I understand the politics and the need to balance between the resource consumption vs. making the system available for anyone, in order for it to become successful.
So yeah, why not 10MB

circular logic alarm!

bitcoins is not for microtransactions
-> the 1mb limit will stop microtransactions
-> everything that doesnt fit into 1mb is a microtransaction
-> bitcoins is not for microtransactions

Thanks @DeathAndTaxes
You have some good point here, that I had not considered.
Still, I don't quite understand the argument why 10MB is "better" than 1MB.
Better for who? And can to prove it?

Someone asked me whether $7.50 is a micro-transaction..
Well: if it's lower than the remaining 2000+ txs that went into a block - then yes.
Obviously whether something was a micro or not, is a relative term.
If you are aiming into Bitcoin becoming the new global currency, then even $1000 would be a micro-transaction.