Topic: Please do not change MAX_BLOCK_SIZE - page 7. (Read 13023 times)

My sincere condolences to you and your family. I'd suggest avoiding places like this forum for a while, and instead watch out for yourself and your loved ones.

Please, don't be silly.
I'm sorry for your lose, but should I be bringing the deaths in my family as well? I've surely had some recently, but it's just not an argument for a bitcoin development board.

As for the wiki page, or pros/cons list - I've been there and I am now old enough to know that the only reason anyone would refer me to such a means, is if he wants to get rid of me.
So thanks, but I won't use it.

Again, these point have nothing to do with whether a central planning is necessary to avoid market cartelization on the bitcoin network, or whether we have any technical reason to keep this damn constant there (we don't).

Dropping the hard-coded block size limit is totally orthogonal to developing off-chain transaction technologies by the way. I'm for instance very optimistic about Open Transactions. But I still want to be able to transact on the blockchain daily. One thing doesn't rule out the other.

Yes.  If you're feeling helpful, please create a wiki page or other document that organizes all of the pro/con arguments: economic and technical. And maybe another wiki page that organizes all of the various proposals for how to increase the block size.

I've been derailed the last week by a death in the family, and still need to finish up some payment protocol work.

This is totally unrelated and a sort of ad hominem.

I'm also wary of this Vesseness guy. He seems the typical ""capitalist"" that won't hesitate to use the government to rule out his competitors. I'm not very found of the bitcoin foundation either, as you can guess.

That has nothing to do with the block size limit. This damn constant should never have been created in the first place.... the day I learned about it I knew it would be a problem...

Well, then please refer me to the post that addresses my last question: Does Gavin's salary paid by the Bitcoin Foundation create a conflict of interest?
Or another question: Does Bitcoin Foundation try to discourage development of off-chain transactions technologies, in favour of increasing the block size?

Every point presented on this subject has already being addressed. Multiple times.

I'm not sure we're talking the same thing here.
What I call "soft limit" is not a personal limit on the blocks you'll generate or relay.
What I mean would be a set of value-pairs (X,Y), where X is a limit for block acceptance, and Y is the number of block deeps a third-party block violating X needs to be in the chain for you to accept to mine on top of it.
For example, let's say, for block size soft limit you set (1Mb, 1), (5Mb, 2) and (10Mb, 3). That means that if you receive a block larger than 1Mb, you refuse to build on top of it, unless it has already another block on top of it. For >5Mb, it needs to be 2 blocks deep. For 10Mb, 3 blocks deep and so on.
I also strongly suggest soft-limits on "percentage of unknown transactions (not in memory pool)", because that's how a spammer-miner would create gigantic blocks: by filling it with transactions that he does not intend to broadcast, as that would require paying lots of fees.

AFAIK none of these are implemented, right?

I think we must give him some time to consult the answers with the lawyers first

Without an explicit written permission, he seems to be only entitled to giving replies on whether he is a nazi, a troll, or a coward..

Nobody is trolling here, seriously. We are just pointing out that your arguments are idiotic.

Your "thick skin" should help you surpass the shock in no time. Meanwhile just address some points presented in this thread and don't feed other trolls, if it's not too much to ask.

Block size soft limit is already a configurable parameter inside bitcoind.

Ha, and I hear you called Peter either "The Devil's Advocate" or "The Antichrist" at the conference. (my source wasn't quite sure)

As I was saying, I think all this talk is a bit pointless and distracting from real work that could be done, so I'll do what I can to end this thread in the usual internet tradition.

Heil Hiter!

Yeah, keep trolling guys. I surely care

Best comment I've seen here.

That is not the topic of the discussion, so i ignored it as offtopic.

Obviously none of you is going to address jdillon's key argument, that is:
Bitcoin Foundation is doing (more or less consciously) everything to:
1) get bitcoin under control of the US government.
2) disturb anyone in solving the scaling issue by other means than increasing the block size

The funny thing is I don't even remember being angry in the last 72 hours...

Well, I guess that jdillon knows better what i feel then.

I'm doing well this month, so far I've been called an "Angry Internet Troll", a "coward", and a "nazi".

The wording "using Bitcoin for products and services" is very specific. As Peter pointed out earlier the fact that transactions currency cost $12 each shows very clearly that the market does not think Bitcoin as a payment service is valuable now, but instead either thinks it will be in the future, and/or sees Bitcoin as valuable as a pure investment.

"Actually writing code" is misleading. The core developers other than Gavin have a consensus that while the blocksize may be raised in the future decentralization is important and raising the blocksize must be balanced against that concern. Unfortunately for the payment side of Bitcoin that consensus also is that off-chain transactions will be required for low-value payments and you can see that consensus in action by how the developers decided to block microtransactions from Bitcoin on the basis that they weren't valuable enough for the resources they use. The question is how low is too low? No-one knows what that answer will be because as long as payments happen on a decentralized consensus system the cost of a transaction depends on how popular Bitcoin becomes. Put another way, O(n^2) scaling is a bitch.

A more interesting question is to ask why doesn't the foundation ever talk about off-chain transactions? My guess is they know that FinCEN has them in a nasty bind now that they've made it clear that Bitcoin is ok provided you use it exactly the way they want you to: as an easily traceable blockchain-only payment method. Promoting alternatives would raise ugly issues around money laundering and so on. Right now if someone went off and implemented one of Peter's anonymous chaum-token using fidelity bonded banks it would most likely be used not as a payment system, but as a way to launder money.

Yet it would also provide an answer to the scalability issue, just not one the Foundation can back, and probably not a solution that the Foundation's publicly visible and mostly US-based members can use to accept payments anyway regardless of how well it works. That gets back to the issue of his repeated thunderous public statements of course. What do they do? They discourage anyone from working on alternatives. If they don't exist, people won't have any option but to raise the blocksize.

The worst scenario for the Foundation is if off-chain transactions are developed to the point where they are a secure and usable way of moving funds, yet the legal situation in the US doesn't change or gets worse. The rest of the world could easily choose to leave the blocksize as it is, gradually pricing companies who must follow strict anti-money-laundering laws out of Bitcoin entirely.

As for you Peter, and indeed anyone else who cares about Bitcoin's future, don't let yourself get distracted by forums. Your efforts to make the problems Bitcoin has as a payment system clear, like the replace-by-fee project and making mining more decentralized with pooled-solo mode, are good and you should keep them up. Writing code and non-forum PR is a far more valuable use of your time than chatting to angry internet trolls like ShadowOfHarbringer and Gavin.

edit: Speaking of, I agree with that anonymous timestamper. You should be encouraging UTXO timestamping and other abusive uses of Bitcoin that we know threaten Bitcoin in the future now, precisely to make the risk clear. With Bitcoin it's not unlike security disclosure, where not disclosing the security risks puts us in much greater harm in the future. Gregory Maxwell's concept of our "startup capital" has value, but at the same time we should get a sense now of how valuable people see abusive use when we know we have no way of stopping them in the future other than by making the use expensive. So yes, turn off your timestamping servers until someone is willing to pay you properly to run them.

edit #2: Note how I'm not saying that the foundation is trying to get Bitcoin under FinCEN/US government control, just that they are taking a perfect rational approach towards promoting the blockchain as the solution to all payments given the limitations public companies in the US face.