Topic: Why can Core not Scale at a 0.X% for blocksize in the S-Curve f(X) - page 3. (Read 1126 times)

Another factor is that it's generally dangerous to set bars for participation based on any fraction of current participants.

Imagine, say we all decide 90% of nodes can handle capacity X. So then we run at X, and the weakest 10% drop out.  Then, we look again, and apply the same logic (... after all, it was a good enough reason before) and move to Y, knocking out 10%...  and so on. The end result of that particular process is loss of decentralization.

Some months back someone was crowing about the mean bandwidth of listening nodes having gone up. But if you broke it down into nodes on big VPS providers (amazon and digital ocean) and everyone else, what you find is that each group's bandwidth didn't change, but the share of nodes on centeralized 'cloud' providers went way up.  (probably for a dozen different reasons, -- loss of UPNP, increased resource usage, more spy nodes which tend to be on VPSes...)

Then we have the fact that technology improvements are not necessarily being applied where we need them most-- e.g. a lot of effort is spent making things more portable, lower power consuming and less costly rather than making things faster or higher bandwidth.  Similarly, lots of network capacity growth happens in dense/easily covered city areas rather for anyone.  In the US in a major city you can often get bidi gigabit internet at personally affordable prices but then 30 miles out spend even more money and get ADSL that barely does 750kbit/sec up. The most common broadband provider in the US usually has plenty of speed but has monthly usage caps that a listening node can use most of... Bitcoin's bandwidth usage doesn't sound like much but when you add in overheads and new peers syncing, and multiply that usage out 24/7 it adds up to more bandwidth than people typically use... and once Bitcoin is using most of a user's resources the costs of using it become a real consideration for some people.  This isn't good for the goal of decentralization.

The "blockchain trillema" fact is the reason why anyone with a brain should have their alarms go on full steam when someone is trying to sell you a coin that is "fast, cheap and as secure as bitcoin". You either get to have 2 of these features at once, unfortunately, and pretending that decreasing security for speed and cheaper transactions is a sane thing it's simply missing the point of what makes Bitcoin valuable on the first place. Any of these alts could be used to be fast and cheap, none of them can be as secure as Bitcoin, why the hell would you shoot yourself on the leg and destroy the niche you dominate? this is what big blockers don't get.

If LN works out well enough to do some low value fast and cheap transactions then that's fantastic, but fast and cheap transactions isn't the main goal, security and decentralization must always go fist.

Then there is more weight to the debate that block size should be regulated than to "let the miners decide" as in Ethereum through letting their miners decide the gas price limit.

Bitcoin Cash is the same but with a 30mb limit.

I believe you are over-emphasizing on hardware and less on bandwidth and network latency. Bandwidth's "growth" is going slower and slower over the years, and that slow growth will compound more on network latency because the effects of higher bandwidth does not translate immediately on the network according to Nielsen's Law.

There is also the "blockchain trillema" problem I posted page 1.

Most people either think miners won't jeopardize their own income by attempt to attack/control network or against hard-fork.


While it's true that increasing block size weight limit could lead to decentralization, but it will be needed when more people adopt/use bitcoin regularly even considering majority use LN/other 2nd layer protocol.
People still need to use on-chain to open/close channel, refill channel balance. Also, i'm sure people would prefer on-chain transaction for big payment.

While block weight limit increase won't happen anytime soon, IMO community must aware it's inevitable if they want to see Bitcoin used on bigger scale.


Some people think otherwise and follow Satoshi's vision which might be outdated.

I am aware that we will need to increase it at some point in the future. However, I don't support increasing the block weight without thinking about the consequences. There are still a few things that can be done in order to decrease the size of transactions, for example, implementing Schnorr signatures. Also, Channel factories might help once Lightning Network becomes more widely used.

Assuming that all transactions were SegWit ones, the maximum block weight would be 4 MB, right?

Andreas M. Antonopoulos published a video on Scaling and "Satoshi's vision" two days ago.
 
It's been ten years since Bitcoin launched and a lot of things happened to it after Satoshi had gone. Take ASICs as an example, some people think that they are slowly leading us to the centralization of the network because most of the mining hardware is being manufactured by one company. There were a few Bitcoin hard forks which aim was to bring back GPU mining and ban specialized mining hardware. None of them succeeded.

Why did I mention mining? Well, that's what the community and mining pools have chosen. If users were really against ASICs then most of them would try to temporarily block them by changing the mining algorithm. Wasn't Satoshi against them too?

Do you remember SegWit2X? Despite its huge support from miners, it failed - users played a big part there. Why do you despise other scaling solutions? It will take months before Lightning Network becomes more reliable, but it shouldn't have any negative impact on the network unlike increasing the blocksize which might result in centralization (it was already explained above so I don't think if there is any point in repeating it). I doubt that many people would agree to decrease the blocksize after it turned out to be a bad idea.

Satoshi is not a God. Let the community choose.

Yes, indeed we know that. But as I said, did he knew the outcome too?

Was he ignorant/delusional enough that there would be consensus about it? Or he expected that such a change would be impossible?

He definitely entertained the idea of people being opposed:


So either he knew it was impossible and 1MB was set in stone once Bitcoin got enough traction for it to be "too big to change", or he was expecting that everyone involved would at some point reach super majority, or enough majority to make the change without causing a big disaster-split (which as far as I can tell, it's pretty delusional... I can only see a super majority consensus on hardforks when it comes to a fatal bug that would render everyone's coins useless... and still, even there we would have big debates and disagreements in how to proceed).

Satoshi was clear that the 1 MB max block size was meant to be a temporary anti-spam measure, and that the max block size should be increased in the future when the number of transactions warranted.

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What exactly does a non-mining node do for a "regular" user of Bitcoin who is not running a node, and is in the process of spending some of his bitcoin in a store? Since every node is free to choose their own settings, what would happen if this particular node has different settings than the mining nodes as a whole?

Because it's risky: no one knows how would full node hardware (read: desktops and laptops) evolve in the future - maybe in 10 years they will easily handle 30 MB blocks, maybe they will struggle even with 10 MB blocks. If your curve will grow faster than node resources, you'll end up with the same result as if you increased blocksize to some ridiculous number today: network centralization.

This risk also has very little reward: increasing tps from 7 to 30-50 won't solve the scalability problem, we need thousands transactions per second, and this is why we have Lightning. Also, there are more elegant on-chain capacity boosts that need to be implemented before any blocksize increases, like Schnorr.

Any idea? I believe not "any idea" will be good. Maybe some of them might be so stupid that Core would have to be polite enough not to ridicule the person who made it.

But maybe your idea is good. Fight for it for its own technical merit. Or do this, make an altcoin.


Yes. Do you know which group of developers are better than them?

Are you kidding? Any idea about improving bitcoin is taken by Core as an insult! They think they have been around for a long time and they have discussed and rejected any possible idea already. I'm done with them, I have no hope in them they are close minded and are responsible for leading bitcoin to its ice age, they have nothing to say about pools, ASICs and exchanges that have centralized the ecosystem, what kind of a crypto developer has no idea about how to defend against centralization threats?

You believe in these guys? Enjoy your popcorn watching their show, I'm no longer interested.


 

Heal from what sickness? The sickness of conservatism and making sure that the network is stable and efficient?


This might prove that you might not be as smart as you make it appear to be.


If you believe your ideas are good then let them be recognized for their own merits because your verbal attacks on the Core developers are not helping your cause.

Thanks for the advise about IRC,  I've been advised today once more to do this and I appreciate it. I will consider it  once I'm done formalizing my proposal more thoroughly, meanwhile I'm just discussing some parts and debating hypes and misunderstandings.

As of influential figures, I don't think they are the best audiences. You know, the most important figures, ones who practically own the network are pool operators and all I have to tell is it's time for them to say goodbye.

I agree with that ... instead just act as politicians who are already committed to their party, views and believes .. we should act more as a scientist ready to review any hypothesis if new data is coming out ...

Regards to scaling, in the real world is very hard to predict how a certain type of network will scale because so many variables ( when we add economical, human decision, etc) ..
So I decided to look at simulators ...
There are so many types of networking simulators  ... virtualization, emulators, hybrid systems, discrete event, etc ... in my point of view if we need run a very large simulation in order to et data to support an argument or hypothesis .. I would choose discrete event simulation ...   

Even if you were to be right, you would need to argue this with the people that have the most influence in the ecosystem: big merchants, big miners, big whales, show them the proof, and see what the feedback is. Perhaps starting by going into MP's group chat on IRC (see Anonymint posts). Go there and show your technological arguments about why it's a good idea and post the log there.

Do the same on any other relevant place and post results. You need to be debating this in these places, besides in here, otherwise it just stay as what you think it's a good idea, but not ever implemented.

what do you mean IF?  
So, you think everything is what it should be and it could be and bitcoin is King James Bible which God supervised personally to happen and has promised to keep it safe and not altered ? You know nothing dude, you are just a believer, aren't you?

I have thoroughly proved it in the other thread, go read it, if you are interested in the truth, otherwise just keep praying, God bless you  

Block time decrease is not all I got, I'm just telling that it is one helping step for decentralization, and I strongly denounce such an improvement to be 'nothing' or to encompass centralization threats! It is ridiculously wrong.

As of you and your mates having long history of talking, it  doesn't change the fact that you didn't accomplished a great job:
Right now, we have bitcoin overwhelmingly centralized by pools, controlled by exchanges and whales and what your endless discussions have brought to us is nothing more than projecting almost every problem off the chain. I don't take it as an impressive carrier.

If a faster block time had a positive impact on decentralisation, we would have done it years ago.  Kindly stop talking out of your posterior.  You have refuted nothing.  
 


That, or it's just a sensible argument, maybe?  

If lots of people think it's a good idea, then naturally a conversation will flow and things will fall into place without much effort involved.  Instead, what we have here is you talking at us and we frankly don't care what you're saying because it sounds terrible.  We had more years than I care to remember with the entire forum arguing about block size/block time/alternating blocks/paired blocks/whatever other ideas people had and we're pretty much tired of hearing it now.  People just aren't receptive to this kind of stuff anymore.  We've moved on.  You should too.



That's just it, though.  You think your ideas are "right and true", but we've heard people suggesting shortening the block time dozens of times before and we still think it falls under the category of "maybe later if we absolutely have to".  If it seems like we're being short with you, it's because we've had enough of those kind of ideas now.  They're not original, they're not innovative and, most of all, they won't achieve scaling on the kind of levels we need.

Nop. You are wrong. Centralization is not a ghost to be summoned by some spells, any claim against an improvement proposal should be analytically provable, no room for intuitions. I have refuted any such claim regarding centralization consequences of a moderate block size increase up-thread and as of block time decrease (my alternative suggestion) it has a considerable positive decentralization impact (actually in orders of magnitude).

Aren't you and @Doomad same persons?  He is used to bring forward this argument whenever it comes to a change proposal.

I understand your concerns, bitcoin is no more an experimental project and everything is political here, I truly understand but I don't care. I'm sure at the end of the day we are left with nothing less or more than the truth not lies and the 'right'  not wrongs.

Any for the problem of evolution and consensus around it, I have some ideas, for now it is better to remain focused on 'the right' and 'the true', imo.

It's not even relevant. No matter if one thinks a bigger blocksize and blocktime wouldn't centralize (I disagree, there's no free ride, you pay a price with some % of centralization due node resource going up + more orphans) but anyway, the main point is, you just can't do it, how are you going reach hard fork consensus? how are you going to get all the whales on board so when the fork happens they do not dump on you, crashing the price, forcing miners to stop mining your fork? Betting against the original Bitcoin is always going to have an unreasonable amount of risk to do so, you are always going to on the losing side supporting a fork, unless you manage to make everyone and their money to agree with you somehow.