Topic: SatoshiDice, lack of remedies, and poor ISP options are pushing me toward "Lite" - page 4. (Read 7313 times)

The scarcity of bitcoin's can not be maintained without security, the worth of Bitcoin as a transaction medium can't be maintained without security. The comparitive benefits of Bitcoin over alternatives depend on decenteralization. Security and decentralization are not possible without block size scarcity.

I certainly signed up for limited size blocks— and so did Satoshi, as the limit is baked into the code not just a soft limit— as many limits are (including the 500k maximum block target)— but a hard network rule.  Absent this rule Satoshi's economic argument that fees will eventually provide the incentive for honest participation once the subsidy has become small is invalid.  There _must_ be competition for block space to make fees a viable way to pay for security.   

Without a limit which is reasonably within the bounds of inexpensive hardware there will be great pressure to let someone else handle the validation, and you end up with an outcome similar to the central banks in democratic countries.  Bitcoin would be just another very technically inefficient way to have a trust laden monetary system.

The overwhelming majority of gold and USD transactions are not done with gold bars or US bills— can no one use these currencies.

Your use of 'Various' there is deceptive.  Various means people have a choice. It's perfectly possible to build fully decentralized payment system denominated in Bitcoin.  But if Bitcoin itself is bloated then these options can't exist because they they would have both their own high cost of operation plus the unimaginably high cost of operation of a bitcoin shipping around gigabyte blocks.


And on this point we do not completely disagree, though I think 100MB is rather high.  I'm not saying that adjusting the limit is a complete non-starter. Only that removing it or setting it to some value which is not utterly uncontroversial— long after most practical devices can handle it is a non-starter.  My point in responding here is that arguments that it will soon be harder to handle— and only something that major businesses can support— are bogus.  It may or may not be increased in the future, but if it is it will only happen to a level which is uncontroversial.

The absolute maximum long term average bandwidth pulling the blockchain can take is about 13.3kbit/sec.  I'm not sure what the source of your issues is— it may be due to bandwidth used relaying blocks and transactions to other peers, but you do have enough bandwidth to stay synchronized— at least to within a couple blocks of most current.

Claims like "I am afraid that any remedy will only push out your timeline running a full node a few months or a year. "   are just factually untrue on the data that you've provided. And, if  the "business of running a full node, (...) become(s) as serious as it is now to be a mining pool operator" then bitcoin will be dead and pointless, because running a full node has no _business case_ as it can't be directly monetized and there is always an incentive to let someone else take the cost if the cost is great enough to not be inconsequential. If fairly few parties run Bitcoin, then Bitcoin would fail at its purpose of requiring less trust than the commercial banks of democratic nations, as their trust model is stronger. Fortunately, the design of the Bitcoin actually prohibits this loss of decentralization from happening— Blocks have a maximum size (and the size of blocks nodes will create is further artificially constrained by current implementations), and this bounds the cost of running a full node. This size can not be increased without a hardfork of identical technical complexity to changing the supply of coins— so to pull it off it would have to be utterly uncontroversial, and presumably people will always stand up to insist Bitcoin remain practically decenteralized.  The maximum cost is still a bit high relative to current hardware, but it won't be in a couple years with a few more cranks of the silicon and storage scaling laws.

That said, for a mobile connection— a thin or lite client is the obvious thing to use.  Ideally, you could run one behind a full node that you have absolute trust over (E.g. because you own it), and then you don't even need to worry about the potentially reduced trust model involved.

But it would still be interesting to figure out why your node isn't keeping up.

Mike, do you know if Bloom filter support is intended for the Bitcoin 0.8 release or after that?

We will soon be merging support for Bloom filtering into Bitcoin and bitcoinj. This will allow you to have SPV level security without downloading the whole block chain - just headers and relevant transactions. It means as long as honest nodes control the majority of the hashing power, you can trust the block chain to be correct.

This mode will give you what you want. So it's just a matter of time. I'm hoping we can have a testing setup you can use in the next few weeks, at least, with release some time after that.

See Ultimate blockchain compression w/ trust-free lite nodes.

It was never intended for every user to run a full node. I haven't followed up on the details of the above suggestion but AFAIK it's viable and, once implemented, allow using an SPV client without need for trust.

Also, while people in your situation shouldn't be neglected, I don't think it's the norm. I think enthusiasts will be able to run full nodes for quite a while.

You get the blockchain headers with Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) clients, such as MutliBit.

That's as silly as saying that the 'olden days' of bitcoin didn't give equal votes because my mother (she doesn't mine) couldn't exclude transactions. She could have if she cared and so can any current miner.

Do you think pool operators are special? They are just people who care to do what is required by the actual laws of physics to set up blocks for mining.

I'm not 100% sure, but supposedly 0.8 will be fast enough that processing won't be the bottleneck anymore so the maximum you would have to download each day is ~6x24 = 144MB. And in reality it's like 10% of that now.

I am afraid that any remedy will only push out your timeline running a full node a few months or a year.

You will have to decide to be in the business of running a full node, that will become as serious as it is now to be a mining pool operator,
or you move your bitcoin with most of the customer to a tablet.

Above statements are not ideological, just rational thinking.

I also regret that times of all having equal "vote" will be gone. They are actually already gone. A mining pool operator has more than equal "vote" compared to your full node since long, e.g. he can exclude transactions from blocks, you do not. You will hardly win a real world argument against blockchain.info with a merchant remote from you by pointing to your screen.

I work on an implementation that aims to support creation trustworthy centralized services, unlock innovation so we preserve as much of the the zero trust environment as possible. The future will unlikely be a homogenous set of nodes, since it is not already.

Peter works on a short term remedy with 0.8 for us.

I can't keep up with the blockchain anymore. I am now roughly 150 blocks behind.

I cannot run Bitcoin-qt during the day because I'm on a tethered 3g connection and do actually need to use most of the available 5-150kbps of bandwidth during the day. My only available alternatives are dial-up, which simply couldn't keep up with the blockchain even if on 24/7, and satellite, which, aside its terrible latency issues, has bandwidth caps harsh enough to make downloading the blockchain a two-week process. I'm a bit beyond the Last Mile zone, which most people probably don't have to deal with, but many more people do have to deal with increasingly-common bandwidth caps, and certainly not just with satellite and mobile ISPs.

Where am I to go, but a centralized server handing me only information they deem true and relevant? What am I to do, but throw away the largely zero-trust system I was initially interested in? There are alternatives in the "Lite" world.... Some people let me "own" my coins, instead of tossing it all in a collective wallet. Some people are even generous enough to allow me to keep my privkeys to myself. If their service goes down, I could go to another private entity, but I can never again hold what the majority agree is "the blockchain" - just what small groups of people, or individuals, tell me the blockchain is.

I love Armory. It's a fantastic product. I need a blockchain to use it, though, and I can't keep up. I can go to family/friends' houses to leech off their cable connection, so I'll see transactions days after they happen. Maybe the migration to lite clients isn't necessarily bad, but I don't think active nodes shutting off could possibly be considered good.

So what can we do? Expand our definition of "dust" and further limit freedom to use Bitcoin? Do we forfeit the zero-trust vision? Do we wait for a real solution? How much longer? ... Someone sent me a couple BTC this morning. I wouldn't have known if he didn't email me.

Anyway - enough wispy bullshit -- Is there a solution I'm missing, or one in the works? Or should I just suck it up, quit my bitching, and download Electrum?