Topic: Soft block size limit reached, action required by YOU - page 2. (Read 64189 times)

It's going to force the evolution that will need to happen sooner or later anyway.

Ripple or whatever other overlay system is required for micropayments. Free transactions in the blockchain are not going to last too long.

I don't think BTC is ready for fees so high.  That's going to shut out a lot of commerce, not just SD.

Not really.

Just expensive enough so SD is not viable. Say, 0.03 or so. For a moderate quantity it's not expensive. For micropayments, BTC is never going to scale to global scale as to accommodate micropayments. It's simple math really...

Hm, I think, that the fees which are currently paid, are much too low. When I look at blocks with 250kb, they often have a Transaction volume of 10 000BTC and the fees summed up are only 0.5BTC. This is 0.005%. The other reward is 25BTC, which is 50 times more than the transaction fees. When the transactionsfees succeed over the coin base bitcoins, it would not be profitable anymore to exclude fee-based transaction...

Testing compatibility with a bug in a previous version would require knowing about a bug in the first place, so I assume that the testing should have been conducted on older versions of Bitcoin, not 0.8.

I suppose you forgot already why this thread started - we ran out of block space and transactions started stacking up, unconfirmed. This almost immediately caused lots of user complaints.

Exactly because people did NOT upgrade to Bitcoin 0.8 fast enough, which fixed the bug in 0.7 and below, now we are now back to square one - stuck with blocks that are too small to meet demand for transactions. Expect the complaints to start again soon unless filtering of SD becomes common.

The options I listed in my first post are still the only options. If you don't want to filter out SD transactions then the default "do nothing" option means that transactions will become very expensive, and small quantities of Bitcoin won't be spendable at all.

The fork is certainly a big problem: unfortunately, nobody realized it would happen. It's not even clear yet what kind of testing would have revealed this issue. Simply making big blocks is apparently not enough to trigger it. That said, we knew that BDB was generally a rats nest of weird problems which is one reason why I ported Bitcoin to LevelDB. If the block sizes had been raised a few months from now, we'd probably have just abandoned the 0.7 users to their fate, but we got unlucky with the timing.

Assuming we want Bitcoin to scale up, we'll have to fork 0.7 and lower off the chain sooner rather than later and then raise the block size limits again.

0.8 did not reveal the bug in all prior versions. Suggestion to increase the soft limit revealed the bug.

Today we see the WARNING RED LETTERS on all the big sites and news.

 - If its healthy to upgrade, why the hell we dont get same media space and attention from system operators to tell everyone they should do it? thats a shame.

For something as important as Bitcoin, testing is crucial. 0.8 didn't even have a second release candidate before it went live.

But sometimes we have to realize that cohesion is even more important. If something is rushed in, like 0.8, we should immediately all switch to it. In fact, 0.8 didn't introduce any new bug. Instead, it revealed a bug present in all prior versions of Bitcoin. Merchants and miners should have upgraded immediately after release, rather than delay the upgrade so late.

My paranoid concern is that lots of thought has gone into recommending an option that is incompatible with BDB. Mike, I understand this comment is most likely bullshit, but you should understand it is legitimate. Even if bullshit, it teaches us a valuable lesson, and that is to not trust people who rush is into tweaking the system without due dilligence. That is exactly what happened, regardless of Mike's intentions.

Don't blame this option, blame the lack of testing all Bitcoin versions have gone through. If a chain-splitting bug was present since 2009, and only resolved "by accident", you can hardly blame the advice banking on there being no such bug.

apparently not much, they went with the kick the can down the road approach and look where it got them.....

Ahem. How much thought and work has gone into offering the first option in this list?

Having to deal with reputation on the side of the buyer absolutely kills the anonymity factor in Bitcoin.

But then again I don't see double-spending happening "from time to time", unless the network itself is clearly weakened from the start. At most I see a PoC happening under very special circumstances. The economics of carrying it out seem extremely self-defeating unless valuation/difficulty ratio was orders of magnitude off and someone was able to carry out a very expensive operation in a very sophisticated con, while keeping 50%+ of the hashing power under his control for long enough. I will believe it when I see it.

Well, you can gain trust in many ways. Bitcoin doesn't actually eliminate "trust" entirely regardless of how we may present it to the world, it just means you trust the majority consensus to not gang up on you and double-spend against you, instead of trusting an institution. In practice this seems to be always better than trusting an institution. But it's still trust.

Other ways you can gain trust - reputation of the counterparty, use of secure hardware, ability to find the guy who double-spent you and throw them in jail.

I think how often we see double spends happen, if ever, is one of the most interesting open questions in Bitcoin right now. It seems clear that some merchants have a higher tolerance for double-spending than others. Where the equilibrium ends up being is, I think, unknowable today.

It's a bit more complex than that. Miners can't directly force anyone to accept the blocks they mine - if they break the rules the blocks aren't Bitcoin.

But if block sizes grow to the point where running a validation node is expensive the reality is the group of people who have full copies of the set of all unspent transactions, the UTXO set, essentially control Bitcoin. If there are 50,000 copies of the UTXO set it's almost inconceivable that anyone could monopolize control over it; if there are 1000 copies it's conceivable, if there are 100 copies it's downright likely. (a situation pretty much like the central banking system)

It's especially nasty because once you're at that point the remaining validating nodes and mining pools have an easy time getting together and deciding to change the rules of Bitcoin, and even though they are forcing a hard-fork, what choice will you have but to install a new client and accept it? Without the UTXO set data you can't transact your Bitcoins. All this clever cryptography stuff we've come up with for proving inflation and what not is rendered useless if the central mining pools and validating nodes decide to turn the features off.


An interesting parallel I think is actually search engine data. You need a truly enormous investment in hardware to store the indexes required to run an internet search engine. Sure you could try to start your own, but without a full index, what's the point? What do you know, Google, Bing and Yahoo are pretty much the only players in that game.

A validation node is just that, a validation node. It allows the person running it to see what is going on in the network and whether or not the current blockchain is following the rules which are set out in his version of the client.

A validation node has no voting power whatsoever, it may at best refuse to relay blocks/txns it finds invalid. Ultimately the people who decide what rules the network is based on are the miners alone. This is why decentralisation of miners should not be taken lightly. If the hard fork makes p2pool unviable for many miners, it's not a good sign.

First you need to distinguish between a validation node and a mining node. For a mining node you can expect that they invest the necessary resources to have at least a 10x above average bandwidth.

A validation node is necessary for selecting the proper fork of the bitcoin blockchain. It gives you an economic voting power in case of a hard fork. And we need to keep that power in the hands of the masses.