Topic: The first response to satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper (Read 369 times)
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And sadly these words still hold true to this day, even if Lightning Network will get widely adopted in the next few years, the on-chain capacity would still be not enough to allow Bitcoin to be as popular as major fiat payment networks. Our main hope is some new fundamental breakthrough in Bitcoin protocol that would allow even more scalability without compromising any decentralization like bigblockers want. But it could take many years before such change is even invented, and then more years before it's implemented.
I'm not sure, I'd have to find a quote from Satoshi where he basically says we shouldn't "kick the beehive" too quickly. That's somewhat paraphrasing there from memory. Maybe, he did have plans in the future to scale it, maybe he had ideas, before his sudden disappearance. I do think the initial genesis message probably suggests he was looking for an alternative to the current banking system, and maybe its already been achieved. Although, I think that Satoshi came up with a foundation of the solution, rather than the solution. I'm not convinced that Bitcoin is the solution to the whole problem with fiat currencies, just because of some of the limitations that have been brought up. However, I do believe Satoshi has started the wheel rolling, proving that we don't need banks, and there are solutions out there. Its already been demonstrated that there is an appeal to not using banks too.
I don't thin he actually said anything about making Bitcoin more popular too quickly? The closest resemblance I can think of is this; https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.29280.If Satoshi had any idea, he would have proposed it or at least told one of the lead devs at that time. Given that Gavin is pretty supportive of bigger blocks, I don't think there would be anything that could be gotten out from him. Satoshi could've probably proposed it under another alias since his disappearance so it would be tough to say that he chose to keep it himself. Satoshi is by no means a god, he managed to bring all the concepts together to form Bitcoin but he still had some oversight on certain aspects of the network.
Satoshi did mention that we could have increased the block size as well but he likely didn't think of the off-chain solutions and instead focused on making it scale on-chain.
Maybe, he did have plans in the future to scale it, maybe he had ideas, before his sudden disappearance.
The problem is, we will never know because he went awol. We also don't know if he is still around somewhere, operating in the shadows or under a different alias. Who can rule out the possibility that he is and was one of the developers who is still working on bitcoin to this day? If he had the skillset to remain anonymous all these years, he certainly could be operating under multiple names. I do think the initial genesis message probably suggests he was looking for an alternative to the current banking system, and maybe its already been achieved. Although, I think that Satoshi came up with a foundation of the solution, rather than the solution. I'm not convinced that Bitcoin is the solution to the whole problem with fiat currencies, just because of some of the limitations that have been brought up.
I think he came up with "A" solution and we still haven't seen the finished product. Someone, somehow, will need to finish it. If the biggest problems with scalability and network costs can be overcome, and we couple that with the already established decentralized nature of the network and its security, we will be very close to a final product. I am not entirely sure that off-chain solutions are the missing piece of the puzzle? What do you think?
Bitcoin outgrew his expectations. Maybe he was hoping, but never really expected it to get so big. The foundations weren't fitting to support a global economy, so alternative solutions had to be made. That's how we ended up having the Lightning Network, sidechains, and bitcoin-pegged tokens. Had bitcoin remained just a small-time payment system for geeks, we would have no discussions about scalability and blocksizes. The way it was initially structured would have been enough.
I'm not sure, I'd have to find a quote from Satoshi where he basically says we shouldn't "kick the beehive" too quickly. That's somewhat paraphrasing there from memory. Maybe, he did have plans in the future to scale it, maybe he had ideas, before his sudden disappearance. I do think the initial genesis message probably suggests he was looking for an alternative to the current banking system, and maybe its already been achieved. Although, I think that Satoshi came up with a foundation of the solution, rather than the solution. I'm not convinced that Bitcoin is the solution to the whole problem with fiat currencies, just because of some of the limitations that have been brought up. However, I do believe Satoshi has started the wheel rolling, proving that we don't need banks, and there are solutions out there. Its already been demonstrated that there is an appeal to not using banks too. 
There are many other cryptocurrencies these days that have solved the issue of scalability with Bitcoin, but none of them are being recognized, which is the issues with altcoins, they are all being overshadowed by the big coins, especially in a space where there are now thousands of cryptocurrencies, it’s very hard. Everybody only recognizes bitcoin, and it’s mostly being used for transactions, hardly will you see any other cryptocurrency being used for transactions.
I believe that Satoshi knew about this scalability issues, but he just chose not to look at that, and maybe he believed it wasn’t time yet for him to focus on that, and if the time comes those that he’s living it for will be the ones to handle it.And now it’s the time, Satoshi is nowhere to be found, it’s only the devs that are in charge now, let’s just wait till they solve it.
I believe that Satoshi knew about this scalability issues, but he just chose not to look at that, and maybe he believed it wasn’t time yet for him to focus on that, and if the time comes those that he’s living it for will be the ones to handle it.And now it’s the time, Satoshi is nowhere to be found, it’s only the devs that are in charge now, let’s just wait till they solve it.
Bitcoin was created as a P2P electronic cash system but if it ends up being more of a store of value than a medium of exchange, as it seems, that's OK. If it is used as a store of value, there will be fewer and larger transactions on average than if it is a medium of exchange, so there won't be a scalability problem.
Bitcoin outgrew his expectations. Maybe he was hoping, but never really expected it to get so big. The foundations weren't fitting to support a global economy, so alternative solutions had to be made. That's how we ended up having the Lightning Network, sidechains, and bitcoin-pegged tokens. Had bitcoin remained just a small-time payment system for geeks, we would have no discussions about scalability and blocksizes. The way it was initially structured would have been enough. 
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To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which, naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof.
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014814.html
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014814.html
^Problem solved with multi-chain/side-chains approach that has been shared on this forum. The side-chains need to be structured appropriately to scale.
Fortunately, Satoshi wrote about side-chains on Bitcointalk.
He was right, Bitcoin "does not seem to scale to the required size."
Luckily for all of us, people decide to use it as value heaven than everyday transactions and now we have a 50 000 USD Bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto and the rest were true innovators and now there are other coins for everyday usage.
Luckily for all of us, people decide to use it as value heaven than everyday transactions and now we have a 50 000 USD Bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto and the rest were true innovators and now there are other coins for everyday usage.
That's what I think. Bitcoin was created as a P2P electronic cash system but if it ends up being more of a store of value than a medium of exchange, as it seems, that's OK. If it is used as a store of value, there will be fewer and larger transactions on average than if it is a medium of exchange, so there won't be a scalability problem.
He was right, Bitcoin "does not seem to scale to the required size."
Luckily for all of us, people decide to use it as value heaven than everyday transactions and now we have a 50 000 USD Bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto and the rest were true innovators and now there are other coins for everyday usage.
Luckily for all of us, people decide to use it as value heaven than everyday transactions and now we have a 50 000 USD Bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto and the rest were true innovators and now there are other coins for everyday usage.
They are the first true visionaries, the ones who already deduced that some things might cause some minor inconveniences/problems along the way. Satoshi answered the bandwidth problem in an understandable way that even I with not much of technical understanding got it. Bandwidth prices and offerings scaled on the needs of those who run full nodes, and is not much of an issue anyway apart from personal users who are still using the Core client. A good exchange of ideas in the early days of bitcoin, and it is indeed one of the most talked-about things in bitcoin's scaling issues currently.
Answer to James A. Donald:
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Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 
to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.
The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.
If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.
Satoshi Nakamoto
to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.
If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.
Satoshi Nakamoto
"The cypherpunks-- some of them-- might have clues. Could James A. Donald and Satoshi Nakamoto have been one man having a back and forth shibai technical conversation with himself for the immediacy of profound teaching edification to a highly-skilled reader base?"
I read that as well but didn't consider it that important. I don't really see satoshi being a person who used an alt personality (James A. Donald) to give added significance to his currency or to enrich the conversation in that way. It is possible that satoshi (if he was one single person) still follows the development of his creation in some online form or the other. Forgetting all about Bitcoin and never looking back would be unimaginable if it was me. Offchain solutions such as lightning will probably solve scalability issues for a few years. I believe that in a few years most transactions will occur off-chain, and just big transactions will be on-chain.
There is no need to tell all nodes that you bought a coffee.
That's exactly what the Lightning Network does. It allows you to transact back and forth with the funds you deposited in a multi-signature address with the other user and record only the final balance to the Bitcoin blockchain. Unless I misunderstood you and you believe we will see even further development to LN which will remove even the final transaction from the first-layer chain? There is no need to tell all nodes that you bought a coffee.
There are lots of proposed solutions, lots of hardfork made to increase size yet many still uses bitcoin (1mb), now we used segwit to reduce much more transaction data (separate signatures in transaction data)
Segwit doesn't reduce transaction data, the segwit transactions could actually still be bigger than legacy transactions under some circumstances. Segwit is essentially just a block size increase.It was quite obvious from the onstart that Bitcoin wasn't going to scale, bandwidth-wise. There wasn't any block limits initially until quite a bit after it was released. Bandwidth was a far greater concern then and it was obvious that it wasn't going to scale at that time. Lightning network is not the panacea to the problem. You still have to make on-chain transactions to open and close channels. Perhaps it could alleviate the problem but onchain capacity will remain an issue.
Unless otherwise some guy who can either be Satoshi or a good samaritan will come over and take care of it, there's no stopping this problem.
There are lots of proposed solutions, lots of hardfork made to increase size yet many still uses bitcoin (1mb), now we used segwit to reduce much more transaction data (separate signatures in transaction data), and there you called lightning which is still considered in early development yet very useful already. So we don't need satoshi anymore, current core developers, community consensus and other new ideas is the only way to take over such problem.
I was reading the cryptography mailing list when I came across something very interesting that dates back to November 2008. According to Wikipedia's article about Cypherpunks, the post I am about to share below was the first answer that satoshi got about Bitcoin.
Cypherpunker James A. Donald was the first who noticed what Bitcoin will have problems with scalability. In his reply, he wrote:
Cypherpunker James A. Donald was the first who noticed what Bitcoin will have problems with scalability. In his reply, he wrote:
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We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.
I read the reply you mentioned and he also noticied that it will require a lot of bandwith to run a node:
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To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one
must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which,
naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past
transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If
hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of
bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof.
must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which,
naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past
transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If
hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of
bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof.
I believe nobody, even satoshi, imaged that bitcoin would become so big as it is now. With a giant hashrate, lots of transaction, and a global network which connects people from different countries and religions...
Offchain solutions such as lightning will probably solve scalability issues for a few years. I believe that in a few years most transactions will occur off-chain, and just big transactions will be on-chain.
There is no need to tell all nodes that you bought a coffee.
Some more links about it as well diving down onto those links: https://btcmanager.com/the-long-history-of-the-fight-over-scaling-bitcoin/
Well, that's interesting to know but interesting as well about the theory I read below this link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cypherpunk#James_A._Donald
"The cypherpunks-- some of them-- might have clues. Could James A. Donald and Satoshi Nakamoto have been one man having a back and forth shibai technical conversation with himself for the immediacy of profound teaching edification to a highly-skilled reader base?"
Well, we never know that but it's arguably interesting that even in the early days of bitcoin there has been also a pseudonymous James A. Donald that talking about the current problem of scaling.
Well, that's interesting to know but interesting as well about the theory I read below this link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cypherpunk#James_A._Donald
"The cypherpunks-- some of them-- might have clues. Could James A. Donald and Satoshi Nakamoto have been one man having a back and forth shibai technical conversation with himself for the immediacy of profound teaching edification to a highly-skilled reader base?"
Well, we never know that but it's arguably interesting that even in the early days of bitcoin there has been also a pseudonymous James A. Donald that talking about the current problem of scaling.
He probably saw bitcoin as Satoshi saw it, being a worldwide currency, however, he also saw its flaws which he found out to be the scalability limitations itself, and with Satoshi basically being non-existent at this point, it's only going to be a bigger and more painful problems to us users in the near future. Unless otherwise some guy who can either be Satoshi or a good samaritan will come over and take care of it, there's no stopping this problem.
I was reading the cryptography mailing list when I came across something very interesting that dates back to November 2008. According to Wikipedia's article about Cypherpunks, the post I am about to share below was the first answer that satoshi got about Bitcoin.
Cypherpunker James A. Donald was the first who noticed what Bitcoin will have problems with scalability. In his reply, he wrote:
You can read his entire reply below:
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014814.html
In a time when everyone is talking about the scalability limitations, I found it interesting to mention who realized it first, immediately after reading the original whitepaper.
Cypherpunker James A. Donald was the first who noticed what Bitcoin will have problems with scalability. In his reply, he wrote:
Quote
We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.
You can read his entire reply below:
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014814.html
In a time when everyone is talking about the scalability limitations, I found it interesting to mention who realized it first, immediately after reading the original whitepaper.
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