Topic: Why the Bitcoin rules can't change (reading time ~5min) - page 8. (Read 11946 times)

I don't think any discussion of Bitcoin development should be based on assumptions that it's important to listen to those with 56.6kbps modems. Bitcoin should not be designed around the lowest common denominator of technology, just to dictate that "everyone can run it."

It should be usable by most people, but there's no reason to get hung up about fringe use cases like 56.6 modems.

This is the great thing about the current 1MiB blocksize cap: you can run a full node on a 56k dial-up connection. Yes, you'll have to get a copy of the blockchain somehow to start, probably by finding someone local with a copy, or getting a copy delivered to you on DVD's by mail, but once you have that copy a 56k dial-up modem is fast enough to keep up with the full blockchain. The real-world speed of a 56k modem is about 4KiB/second. On the other hand even if every single block is 1MiB that's only 1.7KiB/second. You'll have to leave your node running at least 50% of the time to keep up, and trying to mine using that node won't be practical due to the huge orphan rate, but it really is possible.

??

Is what mark is saying accurate?

you are thinking about this the wrong way.
Dining at this restaurant would look like this and to enable micro-transactions with every bite you need tons of transactions/sec a good reason to use an alt-chain.

I suspect it is more about exactly how much to increase the block size, including how many years the increase will give us before we end up relenting to yet another increase, then another, then another, then another, as the privileged and entitled and elite continue their normal expectable gameplan of disenfranchising everyone else.

Oh and maybe also forcing the footprint of a full node to such a scale that they can easily sniff out all resistance cells and free speech movements and dissidents and so on.

-MarkM-

That may well be but me not being able to validate the rules I consented to are being followed most certainly wasn't.

I don't care how Bitcoin works, as long as principles I consented to are adhered to and one of those principles is that I can validate that the rules are being followed. I said in the OP I'm not opposed to rule changes per se, but I am opposed to rule change that would change that or the effects of which would inevitably change that.

How are you gonna run an upscale restaurant and bar if no one comes by to show off? 

Yes but low value is not necessarily a bad thing.

If primary chain coins reach a trillion dollars per coin, the 0.005 fee for transacting on it might very reasonably deter people from moving their trillions back and forth just for fun or practice, and also deter them from buying lunch and some rounds of drinks with them for the folks who happen to be at their favourite upscale restaurant-and-bar to show off their eliteness. Meanwhile they still might prefer to use a lower-fee chain, probably with lower value coins on it, when the Joneses are not watchng them waiting to be unimpressed.

Meanwhile I am now wondering just what kind of footprint you do actually need in order to slip under the radar of your local repressive regime while running your local fifth column's backbones?

-MarkM-

Value depends greatly on adoption rate, though, so it would start with a pretty low value.

From the mouth of satoshi himself!!



It wasn't needed then, but we are getting closer. Hmmm..... long live satoshi.

A lot of the appearances of the word bitcoin in this thread might be more usefully replaced by the term blockchain based currency, or possibly one might limit that to lbockchain based currencies that can be merged mined alongside bitcoin.

There is absolutely no reason to have the masses running in and out of fort knox every day, but there is every reason to have them able to fire up the primary chain to check that their gold is still there, that it still has the properties they selected it for, that no one has snuck in some subtle timebomb, a change of hard limits or something that will in the long run deny them access by increasing the technical limits that made that particular chain appealing to them in the first place.

Hopefully the primary chain coins will be so valuable anyway that putting your yearly retirement savings in there once a year will be plenty enough transactions on that chain.

Multiple chains seems to me far more scalable, with far more ability to stick to the constants assigned to the particular chain.

All this fuss has in fact led me to think that putting lower limits initially when first deploying a chain than one intends as the permanent and final limits of of that chain, is not a good idea.

At one time I had thought hmm maube to get people initially into a new chain one might get uptake faster by pretend, baby values, to bait and switch people into thinking aha here is a currency my particular level of hardware and connection capability can handle, that I can confidently commit to for life, might be reasonable so that spammers in the earliest days could not immediately push the thing to its max size of blocks and max speed of blocks and max transaction fees and so on to scare people way, making them think oh gosh sounds nice but there is no way I am the kind of person who tends all my life to have that much computer power and connectivity at my fingertips.

So now I think we should be careful whenever deploying a chain not to dress it up in baby values to sucker people into thinking it is something it is not.

If we want to make a blockchain based currency suitable for Google, Mastercard, Visa, Amazon, Paypal, and so on and so on to all use for all their daily transactions and all their customers' daily transactions while every adult and child on the planet also uses it for all their lunch purchases and pocket money and penny-ante wagers we can look at how large we would need block size to be to accomplish that, but I do not think we should pretend that that "establishment megacorp-to-megacorp network" is a grass roots person to person, small enough footprint any normal machine anywhere might be one of the backbone servers "the man" is looking to "take down" power to the people network such as bitcoin was sold to us as being.

-MarkM-

Especially a change that has been anticipated and talked about since the very beginning:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/patch-increase-block-size-limit-1347

Raising the max block size was always part of the plan - it's what was always brought up whenever some bitcoin skeptic mention the low transaction rate. Now all of a sudden when the time is approaching to do it some people want to keep bitcoin limited to seven transactions per second.

Not at all, there could be an easier solution by reducing the new blocks propagation time.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bip-increasing-the-network-hashing-power-by-reducing-block-propagation-time-145066

Now you are listening to arguments? Previously it was merely you signed up and want to keep it that way.

It sounds more like you don't want Bitcoin to get big? You're still very confusing.

People in a low bandwidth community, could easily pool together, and rent a dedicated server that they control and run a full node. Then the members of the community with low bandwidth could easily run a lite client especially now that we have the bloom filters working in the Satoshi client. They could have control of their FULL node, how the rules are applied, and could deal with block sizes larger than a meg.

I'm still confused on your argument. Why do you want Bitcoin not to change? You even started your post of confirming the fact that Bitcoin has already changed in the past. Shouldn't you just leave Bitcoin and make your own currency? One that can't change? If it has already changed in the past, why are you fighting so hard that it would never change again?

Hashing power is only a piece of the large puzzle that makes up a successful fork.  Ultimately, it is about the exchange rate.  Every fork will have its own exchange rate.  Whichever has the higher value, people will migrate to.

Here's an interesting scenario.  Create a fork with no more block reward.  Given we are at about the half way mark to 21M, it should be worth double the value of the current bitcoin version.  Key word should be.  It would definitely get people's attention.

@ OP: +tip 0.01 BTC verify

And so finally it turns out that Bitcoin's gold might need a silver after all, and a nickle, and a copper, ...

As I've said, I don't care how it's done, all I care is that I am able so be a sovereign Bitcoin user, meaning that rules can't change without my giving my explicit consent via downloading a new client. How this is solved technically is beyond my concerns.

The current 1Mb block size limit places a limit on the Bitcoin network of 7 transactions per second or approximately 604,800 transactions a day. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability. If say 1% of the world's population say 90,000,000 people were to use Bitcoin they would have to wait on average 148 days for their transactions to clear. And this is for what purpose so that once can validate the blockchain over dialup? It is time to do some simple math here.

I like the dedicated box idea but I would prefer a client server model where one would connect to the box remotely using a dailup modem while keeping the sensitive encryption keys on the local device.

Or if the hard limits increase faster than those efforts bear fruit.

-MarkM-