Topic: Please do not change MAX_BLOCK_SIZE - page 8. (Read 13023 times)

Because I'd prefer this community to stay united, in order to protect the network, instead of starting a war on who has a bigger hashing board.

Besides, I cannot resist the feeling that there is some hidden agenda and it hasn't been necessarily planed to leave the default at 1MB, but rather to sneak the patch through, without doing too much noise around it, hoping that nobody would notice. Just a fact that the lead developer is getting paid by the very same people who have a vast interest in making bitcoin nodes unavailable for an average citizen of the world - it itself indicates at least a possible conflict of interest, though some people might just simply call it a corruption.
On top of that, nothing has been consulted with the community. Gavin jumps into the thread with an announcement "The block size will be raised" because "that is the overwhelming consensus among the people who are actually writing code and using Bitcoin for products and services that it needs to happen."
What the hell? Are we supposed to just believe that whoever he talked to in San Jose was a good statistical representation of the worldwide bitcoin community and so the bitcoin community surely wants him to lift the limit from the protocol, and they want him to do it ASAP?

A display of FUD and economic ignorance in a single sentence.

Well perhaps there could be a configuration settings in the normal(non-miners) clients for that too.

So then we could threaten miners that we won't accept/relay/confirm their blocks if they don't comply with our demands.

Indeed you can, but you've moved away from the standard Bitcoin model where we hold miners hostage by saying if they do something we dislike, we'll ignore the blocks they mine. If we were having a discussion about what the inflation subsidy would be, no-one would ever suggest putting it to a miner vote; as Jeff Garzik said a few months ago the decision is very much like the inflation subsidy: http://garzikrants.blogspot.ca/2013/02/bitcoin-block-size-thoughts.html (he proposes a fixed blockchain growth rule, although that has many problems of it's own because you can't predict the future)

Actually, no. Individual miners have freedom to choose a pool which suits their interests better or simply use the P2P pool.

OR start a new pool and convince enough people to use it.

You mean the 3 people controlling the pools that have the majority of hashing power control the blocksize.

+n, n->∞

I actually was under the impression that we are libertarians here and we should push for any solution that decreases centralization.

No block size limit = free market decides the proper size
Block size limit = central planning

Central planning never works and is bad. Aren't 300+ million casualties of communism enough to prove that ?

+1M

But if you're convinced miners would not go above the 1Mb limit, why are you afraid of replacing a hard-coded constant by voluntary/decentralized/p2p/spontaneous-order limits?

When it's time to drop the limit, soft-limits configs should be available on bitcoind. The default first entry could be precisely 1Mb, just to keep as is. Block generators would have to manually change that configuration in order to start easily accepting larger blocks... otherwise they would refuse them until they're deeper.

As you say, they'd likely not change it so easily. They'd only change if they consider the potential extra-revenues from adding more transactions more valuable than the risk of being orphaned - and that's precisely demand pushing for more supply.

100 000 000 times this

Mining should be stopped at all.
If we need "more" BTC a small algorithm is enough, setting for example

1 old BTC = 100 new BTC

Indeed.

More to the point, people who are putting time and money into Bitcoin payment systems should think really carefully about how little we know about what Bitcoin is going to look like in the future. I had an interview with the BTC Journal at the conference, which included this segment on where I thought Bitcoin would be in five years: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z902nIOvL0 In short, I don't know.

That uncertainty is the truth of the matter. We've already had to ban sub-cent microtransactions in Bitcoin - the 0.8.2 release now blocks them as "spam" - and we have no idea what the cost of transactions will be in the future. Given that uncertainty if the Bitcoin Foundation wants to promote Bitcoin as a payment system they really should be looking at technology that genuinely can scale rather than relying only on technology where scaling directly conflicts with decentralization.

I actually said the opposite. You wish they were, but I doubt that they are...

I wish you good luck with the change Gavin although, like piotr_n says, people are either stupid or ignorant.

You are the one who needs to focus on leading the development team according to the Bitcoin community, not the other way around. I would recommend having more than a rough consensus on this issue.

Well then we can only hope that none of the existing pools will choose the "force your competition out of business" model, and so if Bitcoin Foundation want to turn bitcoin's main chain into a paypal replacement, they will have to start from investing in a mining hardware, prior to building the data centers for running the nodes.

It depends on how big you are. Right now transactions cost about $12 each in terms of the inflation subsidy, which also shows how the Bitcoin price is being held up by investors, not the utility of Bitcoin as a payment system. If you are a small mining pool you have every reason to keep that 1MB limit... but if you are a large mining pool, why not make huge blocks filled with almost free transactions and force your competition out of business?

Orphaned blocks are interesting too, because if a mining pool is trying to do that what makes sense for your competition is to produce blocks with no transactions in them at all to keep collecting the inflation subsidy. When you do that you don't need to know what transactions are on the network, nor do you need to validate blocks. Of course the people mining at your pool might leave, but only if the largest pool pays miners more in reality - they might not if the business isn't there.

It's a really strange set of incentives.

Incidentally I'm planning on making sure code that makes it easy for miners and mining pools to do exactly this is available, although I hope people use it in a different way: when you know a block has been generated, but haven't validated it fully, attempt to mine a zero-transaction block that would orphan that block. But the way incentives are, mining in the no-validation way is what's most profitable.

I still don't see it how they are going to convince the miners to drop the 1MB limit.
Is there even a single mining pool that would not want to see 1MB limit at work, at least for awhile?
When they see it, when they see the size of the incentive the limit gives them, it will make them even more motivated to never unlock it.

Counting on the pool operators that they will just unconsciously start mining version 3 blocks, just because it will be a default setting in bitcoind version 0.8.4 onward...
One would need to think that these people are either stupid or ignorant, which I don't think they are.

Thank you Gavin for keeping common sense on this matter.

Little suggestion to the dev team: when dropping the block size limit, also consider implementing "replacement code" that would give block generators the ability to control the block limit themselves through soft-limits. Soft-limits could be useful not only on the size of the block, but on the amount of "unknown transactions" you see in a new block - spammer-miners would have to fill their blocks with transactions that are not on other generators' memory pools. In other words, don't forget to provide the tools for block generators to collectively control the block size.
You may bet that, as soon as there's no longer a hard limit on block sizes, some of these "Bitcoin should crippled and limited to a SWIFT2.0"-people will attempt to spam the network with gigantic blocks, if only to "prove their point".

You have to understand where he's coming from. He and the Bitcoin Foundation are pushing Bitcoin as a system to do payments on the internet; the recent San Jose conference had the tagline "The future of payments" after all.

It's a lot harder to convince people that investing time and money into implementing Bitcoin for payments is a good idea with a 1MB limit on transactions. Removing the blocksize limit entirely and making it something that miners decide solves that problem from that perspective: regardless of what the demand from transactions are at least one entity will always be able to meet that demand at a cost approaching the cost of bandwidth and servers. That's why Gavin likes to talk a lot about "free market forces" and "competition" when it comes to mining, and has said before he's happy to see the smallest 20% or so of miners and full-node operators get forced out of business by rising costs every year.

From the perspective of someone who wants to accept Bitcoin payments on their online store letting the majority of miners decide what the blocksize is solves the uncertainty of how much transactions will cost. They connect directly to miners to send their transactions and don't care if Bitcoin is controlled by six people or six million. From the perspective of someone investing in Bitcoins because they want a decentralized store-of-value, AKA electronic gold... well they might see things differently.

Yeah - like the guy who once had Liberty Reserve..

This is not a problem, really.

Dedicated servers are so cheap these days you can easily set up a machine in a random country.

Check this out:
http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/

REALLY CHEAP.