Topic: Why the Bitcoin rules can't change (reading time ~5min) - page 4. (Read 12031 times)

There is no purpose in dividing it into 10,000,000 pieces if it costs more to transfer those pieces then they are worth.

But you can't divide it into 10,000,000 pieces. And it's not so easy for someone say in Turkey to get his gold coin to a dude in Vancouver.

(disclaimer: I skimmed most of the thread, sorry if this is posted already)

hazek, wouldn't you still retain the same sovereignty you have today if the blocksize is somehow (an algorithmic code change that's agreed to now/once) changed periodically to at least roughly keep pace with Moore's law?

Obviously the details get technical and are important (and gotta consider the down-the-road case where transaction volume is mature and *not* increasing geometrically), but I think it's also important to understand there's a middle ground between keeping it at 1MB and raising the blocksize so much that small guys can't run a full node (as a full node works today).

I wonder if it might be possible to decentralise the validation process itself, in a way that lets the blockchain become much bigger, but with spotting when rules are being violated remaining cheap?

I'm thinking of mathematical proof-of-correctness tools. (Disclaimer: I don't know much about the contemporary details of such beasts. I played with one called "Lego" a long time ago... there are probably better ones now.) The idea is, a future giant blockchain would be distributed (peer-to-peer torrented) in the syntax of a giant theorem: "THEOREM 0. Under rule-set R, the genesis block is valid. PROOF: blah blah blah. THEOREM 1: Under rule-set R, if block 0 is valid then block 1 is valid. PROOF: blah blah blah. THEOREM 2: Under rule-set R, if blocks 0 and 1 are valid then block 2 is valid. PROOF: blah blah blah. (and so on)"

The proof syntax would have the "wrongness is locally detectable" property (achieved by bounded fan-in and fan-out of the dependency of parts of it on other parts). That is, if any part of the proof was wrong, either by incompetence or malice on the part of a "super-miner", the community could detect this wrongness without any one member of the community having to parse their way through the whole thing. Sceptical community members would simply point their mathematical proof-of-correctness tool at any randomly chosen part of the giant proof object; and it only takes one person to strike lucky, and alight upon the invalid part, for the wrongness to be detectable (and exhibitable to others) extremely cheaply. The news would of course then spread like wildfire. (Through Tor-like channels, if necessary in some societies.)

The consequence once the news had spread? Blocks later than the point of invalidity would then be rejected by everyone following rule-set R, even though no one of them had (within their own node) the resources to parse the whole thing from beginning to end single-handedly.

I don't know if this would meet the "self-ownership" requirements of the OP. (There might, for example, be a worry along the lines of "How do I know that this giant proof object is a proper translation of the raw blockchain, and not an imposter?". Hopefully, though, the translation process itself would be of a "wrongness is locally detectable" character.) And I wouldn't like to try and judge if this is feasible with today's proof tools - they do have a reputation for being rather slow and clumsy in their main application, proof of correctness of code (or of chip architectures). Others more knowledgeable than me might care to comment on feasibility. At any rate, I offer this idea as something for people to think about!

Bitcoin will always be massively decentralized with thousands of full nodes. Just because I can't currently run a full node on my smart phone doesn't mean that it isn't decentralized. If someone can't run a full node through a 56.6k modem connection routed through TOR that doesn't mean that bitcoin isnt still massively decentralized.

The problem of finding max block size based on some type of network consensus (consisting of full nodes) will ultimately be solved, just as the solution of adjusting difficulty solved the problem of hashing power increases.

I do know this, the people investing real money in Bitcoin related companies and technologies aren't doing it because they believe that its going to be a system that can only handle 7 transactions per second forever.

A wire transfer replacement technology that can only be used for high value transactions (because of high transaction costs due to artificially limited number of transactions) where the value following a transaction THEN has to be converted into another currency (since its now too expensive to spend in Bitcoins), is worth less than the current "market cap" of $300,000,000.00 that Bitcoin currently has.

Its not even digital gold at that point... I can trade a piece of physical gold for free.

Because if the core devs become corrupter, the users of the community will not accept a fork to centralization. The 50 threads about block size limit changes are stupid. You've got a dozen people crying don't destroy bitcoin and they don't know WTF they are talking about.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, hazek.


What makes you so sure that this is the case? Everyone can be corrupted. And given the personality pattern I've observed from part of the TBF members, I'd suppose they're even more prone to corruption than the average Joe. But I don't expect the majority to agree with that.

I feel at some not so distant point in future I'll be forced to evaluate alternatives to Bitcoin, because Bitcoin's features I've enthusiastically embraced in the beginning will have been changed beyond recognition.

The second Bitcoin becomes centralized, all those things can arbitrarily change and I have almost no doubt they would change sooner rather than latter when the government comes knocking. You seem to forget that Bitcoin offers these rules only because there are no doors for the government to come knocking on, point guns at people's faces and demand them be changed, it's just peers in a network. Not so anymore in a centralized network.

There may not be a point in having such a Bitcoin, maybe this is actually a flaw that was overlooked, that this decentralized system isn't capable of scaling, maybe another solution must be fund where it scales but where peers, maybe without the full blockchain, can still be equal peers (if that's possible).

I don't know. All I know is that I want a decentralized Bitcoin that I was promissed when I found it and be an equal peer in the network. If that isn't possible then I have no use for Bitcoin.

Nice post, thanks.

It seems to me there is both a lot of underestimation of bitcoin's agility and way too much tendency to hurrah "the sharks are starting to notice us, hooray!" while worrying nervously "so we'd better throw away our shark tank else they might not find us appetising!"

-MarkM-

It's too early to talk about global significance, bitcoin is not going to heaven

Current hype will over when most of miners have migrated to ASIC devices, from then on there won't be fast expansion of hashing power and the price of bitcoin will not rise that fast as it doing now

And bitcoin have a long road to go before it reach widely acceptance, transaction capacity is such a small issue if you consider so many  legal and human factors. Even today, when I talk to my computer scientists friends in multinational company, most of them still doubt it is a scam, they have a good income and a good life, they might never care about this little thing

On the contrary, if it really gained mainstream acceptance and acknowledgement from government, there will be banks and institutions waiting in the line to solve this transaction problem with their existing mature and sophiscated clearing system, bitcoin will become a new digital gold standard. Do you really need to use a tiny bit of gold to buy milk?

If you are really that service minded, then you should consider remove the 21 million supply limit, and adjust the daily supply to keep the exchange rate fixed at $21,  then the merchants will feel safe to use bitcoin due to lower exchange rate risk

I had a strong impression that bitcoiners are so proud of the limited supply nature and I'm convinced this is really a different view in today's world, and I hope they are not walking towards a direction what everyone familiar: overproduction, plenty of supply and cheap

Yes. And I wonder how long it will take for one of the new alt-chains to replicate all the features of bitcoin except it also offers 20Mb blocks...?

I'm not myself claiming that alternative chains would be successful; I'm referring to some earlier posters' assertion on this thread that the demand for higher transaction rates would be met by new parallel blockchains popping up (once block space on the main chain becomes too scarce).  My claim is that, IF new chains were starting to become very widely used (as they would have to be to maintain a high transaction rate), there is no particular reason why coins on the main chain would continue to remain much more valuable than coins on the new chains in that scenario.  And if the overall supply of coins (on all widely-used chains) goes up, that is overall money-supply inflation, which would tend to depress the value of existing coins further.  IMHO, it would be very undesirable for the value of BTC to allow a lot of competing cryptocurrencies to pop up and be successful.  A good way to let that undesirable outcome happen would be to fail to upgrade Bitcoin to support some critical property that is (or soon will be) in high demand, such as scalability to high transaction rates.

Have you compared the value of coin on the Satoshi blockchain with coin on the other blockchains?

In my estimation, those who are interested in bitcoin technology itself (blockchain/transaction/mining etc) are almost all here, it is impossible in today's internet world that after 4 years of introduction and many times of media coverage, there are still some people in the world who have the potential to become a true bitcoiner and he has never started his mining operation

So from this point forward, the technical user base will not expand that much, and the late adapters will unlikely to have a full node installed, web based services will become popular, and they will provide a service similar to bank today (they only provide saving and transaction service with a fee)

Once the majority of people are using web based services, many retail level transactions will just be cleared inside these system without go through the blockchain, and the end user don't even need to know public key/sha256 such kind of tech noise, what they only need to know is that total amount of bitcoin is fixed by protocol and supply is decreasing

Fractional reserve banking will be very unlikely to happen, since the bitcoin is deflative. Bitcoin borrower will take a very high risk, it is a common sense to borrow the inflative currency and buy the deflative currency

Right. And if it becomes expensive to issue a Bitcoin transaction, solely because through a non scaling limit the entire world can only perform 7 per second, the value of the technology which currently allows for almost free almost instantaneous money transfers to anyone will collapse. Bitcoin is becoming more valuable because of integration of industry, and that stops it in its tracks.

"Soveriegn control of one's money" may be a desirable property, sure, but not if the value of that money eventually collapses because its protocol isn't scalable and so people abandon it.  

In the worst imaginable case, the ability to validate the currency becomes more expensive, not impossible. As long as it is not impossible, Bitcoin does not become a centralized payment system and you still have sovereign control over your money. Its still peer to peer, at worse its peer group to peer group. Of course this won't happen, because the devs are well aware of the dangers and are reasonable people who continue to put the technology and its users first. Reasonable people can come to compromises that provide for the greatest benefit for all parties.

To your other point, Paypal is a shitty comparison that does not meet people's needs because

A) My funds can be seized
B) I cannot send money to people in specific countries
C) It is not pseudo anonymous
D) The fees are too high to enable micro transactions
E) The fees are too high to provide adequate competition with other merchant processors
F) Paypal places artificial limits on withdrawals
G) Paypal can be much slower than Bitcoin despite being centralized
H) I have absolutely no say in any rule changes that Paypal makes

People saying that Bitcoin shouldn't aim to replace Paypal have no idea how badly Paypal sucks and how much better for humanity a solid Paypal competitor with Bitcoins advantages would be. Nor do they seem to understand or care about how much more important of a disruption that would represent than the "just slightly cheaper" wire replacement service that Bitcoin is designed to become with a hard block size limit of 7 transactions per second.  

I know you want and demand sovereign control over your money. I do not believe that is in any danger.

But, what is the point of having control of your node if it's following a set of rules that doesn't scale to global significance?  With the transaction-rate limit I don't see how Bitcoin can grow beyond a relatively small segment of the online transaction market  Eventually, something else will come along that scales better, and people (including you maybe) will abandon Bitcoin.