-policy neutrality. - It can't be censored. - it can't be shut
down - and the rules cannot change from underneath you.
except it can be shutdown the minute it actually gets used by its
inability to scale.
what's the point of having all this if nobody can use it? what's
the point of going through all that energy and CO2 for a mere
24,000 transactions an hour?
It's clear that it's just a matter of time before it collapses.
Here's a simple proposal (concept) that doesn't pretend to set a
fixed block size limit as you can't ever know the demands the
future will bring
https://gist.github.com/gubatron/143e431ee01158f27db4
This seems to be a really good idea... May I add in here something
that's been dismissed before but I will mention it again anyway...
Garzik's BIP 100. For some reason I keep getting attacked for saying
this.
We don't need to go as far as countries with hyper inflation trying
to use the technology to make it collapse, anybody here who has
distributed commercial/free end user software knows that any small
company out there installs more copies in a couple weeks than all
the bitcoin users we have at the moment, all we need is a single
company/project with a decent amount of users who are now enabled
to transact directly on the blockchain to screw it all up (perhaps
OpenBazaar this winter could make this whole thing come down,
hopefully they'll take this debate and the current limitations
before their release, and boy are they coding nonstop on it now
that they got funded), the last of your fears should be a malicious
government trying to shut you down, for that to happen you must
make an impact first, for now this is a silly game in the grand
scheme of things.
And you did sound pretty bad, all of his points were very valid and
they share the concern of many people, many investors,
entrepreneurs putting shitload of money, time and their lives on a
much larger vision than that of a network that does a mere 3,500
tx/hour, but some people seem to be able to live in impossible or
useless ideals.
It's simply irresponsible to not want to give the network a chance
to grow a bit more. Miners centralizing is inevitable given the POW
based consensus, hobbists-mining is only there for countries with
very cheap energy.
If things remain this way, this whole thing will be a massive
failure and it will probably take another decade before we can open
our mouths about cryptocurrencies, decentralization and what not,
and this stubornness will be the one policy that censored everyone,
that shutdown everyone, that made the immutable rules not matter.
Perhaps it will be Stellar what ends up delivering at this stubborn pace.
http://twitter.com/gubatron
On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 4:38 AM, Thomas Zander via bitcoin-dev
Post by Mark Friedenbach via bitcoin-devIt follows then, that if we make a decision now which destroys
that property, which makes it possible to censor bitcoin, to deny
service, or to pressure miners into changing rules contrary to
user interests, then Bitcoin is no longer interesting.
You asked to be convinced of the need for bigger blocks. I gave
that. What makes you think bitcoin will break when more people use
it?
*Tuesday, 11 August 2015 08:10 *To: *Thomas Zander *Cc: *Bitcoin
Dev *Subject: *Re: [bitcoin-dev] Fees and the block-finding
process
On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 11:31 PM, Thomas Zander via bitcoin-dev
On Monday 10. August 2015 23.03.39 <tel:2015%2023.03.39> Mark
Post by Mark Friedenbach via bitcoin-devThis is where things diverge. It's fine to pick a new limit or
growth trajectory. But defend it with data and reasoned
analysis.
We currently serve about 0,007% of the world population sending
maybe one transaction a month. This can only go up.
There are about 20 currencies in the world that are unstable and
showing early signs of hyperinflation. If even small percentage of
these people cash-out and get Bitcoins for their savings you'd have
the amount of people using Bitcoin as savings go from maybe half a
million to 10 million in the space of a couple of months. Why so
fast? Because all the world currencies are linked. Practically all
currencies follow the USD, and while that one may stay robust and
standing, the linkage has been shown in the past to cause
chain-effects.
It is impossible to predict how much uptake Bitcoin will take, but
we have seen big rises in price as Cyprus had a bailin and then
when Greece first showed bad signs again. Lets do our due diligence
and agree that in the current world economy there are sure signs
that people are considering Bitcoin on a big scale.
Bigger amount of people holding Bitcoin savings won't make the
transaction rate go up very much, but if you have feet on the
ground you already see that people go back to barter in countries
like Poland, Ireland, Greece etc. And Bitcoin will be an
alternative to good to ignore. Then transaction rates will go up.
Dramatically.
If you are asking for numbers, that is a bit tricky. Again; we are
at 0,007%... Thats like a f-ing rounding error in the world
economy. You can't reason from that. Its like using a float to do
calculations that you should have done in a double and getting
weird output.
Bottom line is that a maximum size of 8Mb blocks is not that odd.
Because a 20 times increase is very common in a "company" that is
about 6 years old. For instance Android was about that age when it
started to get shipped by non- Google companies. There the increase
was substantially bigger and the company backing it was definitely
able to change direction faster than the Bitcoin oiltanker can
change direction.
...
Another metric to remember; if you follow hackernews (well, the
incubator more than the linked articles) you'd be exposed to the
thinking of these startups. Their only criteria is growth. and this
is rather substantial growth. Like 150% per month. Naturally, most
of these build on top of html or other existing technologies. But
the point is that exponential growth is expected in any startup.
They typically have a much much more agressive timeline, though.
Every month instead of every year. Having exponential growth in the
blockchain is really not odd and even if we have LN or sidechains
or the next changetip, this space will be used. And we will still
have scarcity.
I'm sorry, I really don't want to sound like a jerk, but not a
single word of that mattered. Yes we all want Bitcoin to scale
such that every person in the world can use it without difficulty.
However if that were all that we cared about then I would be
remiss if I did not point out that there are plenty of better,
faster, and cheaper solutions to finding global consensus over a
payment ledger than Bitcoin. Architectures which are
algorithmically superior in their scaling properties. Indeed they
https://www.stellar.org/ http://opentransactions.org/
So why do I work on Bitcoin, and why do I care about the outcome
of this debate? Because Bitcoin offers one thing, and one thing
only which alternative architectures fundamentally lack: policy
neutrality. It can't be censored, it can't be shut down, and the
rules cannot change from underneath you. *That* is what Bitcoin
offers that can't be replicated at higher scale with a SQL
database and an audit log.
It follows then, that if we make a decision now which destroys
that property, which makes it possible to censor bitcoin, to deny
service, or to pressure miners into changing rules contrary to
user interests, then Bitcoin is no longer interesting. We might as
well get rid of mining at that point and make Bitcoin look like
Stellar or Open-Transactions because at least then we'd scale even
better and not be pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the
atmosphere from running all those ASICs.
On the other side, 3Tb harddrives are sold, which take 8Mb blocks
without problems.
Straw man, storage is not an issue.
You can buy broadband in every relevant country that easily
supports the bandwidth we need. (remember we won't jump to 8Mb in a
day, it will likely take at least 6 months).
Neither one of those assertions is clear. Keep in mind the goal is
to have Bitcoin survive active censorship. Presumably that means
being able to run a node even in the face of a hostile ISP or
government. Furthermore, it means being location independent and
being able to move around. In many places the higher the bandwidth
requirements the fewer the number of ISPs that are available to
service you, and the more visible you are.
It may also be necessary to be able to run over Tor. And not just
today's Tor which is developed, serviced, and supported by the US
government, but a Tor or I2P that future governments have turned
hostile towards and actively censor or repress. Or existing
authoritative governments, for that matter. How much bandwidth
would be available through those connections?
It may hopefully never be necessary to operate under such
constraints, except by freedom seeking individuals within existing
totalitarian regimes. However the credible threat of doing so may
be what keeps Bitcoin from being repressed in the first place. Lose
the capability to go underground, and it will be pressured into
regulation, eventually.
To the second point, it has been previously pointed out that large
miners stand to gain from larger blocks, for the same basic
underlying reasons as selfish mining. The incentive is to increase
blocks, and miners are able to do so at will and without cost. I
would not be so certain that we wouldn't see large blocks sooner
than that.
We should get the inverted bloom filters stuff (or competing
products) working at least on a one-to-one basis so we can solve
the propagation time problem. There frankly is a huge amount of
optimization that can be done in that area, we don't even use
locality (pingtime) to optimize distribution.
Post by Mark Friedenbach via bitcoin-devFrom my experience you can expect a 2-magnitude speedup in that
same 6 month period by focusing some research there.
This is basically already deployed thanks to Matt's relay network.
Further improvements are not going to have dramatic effects.
Remember 8Gb/block still doesn't support VISA/Mastercard.
No, it doesn't. And 8GB/block is ludicrously large -- it would
absolutely, without any doubt destroy the very nature of Bitcoin,
turning it into a fundamentally uninteresting reincarnation of the
existing financial system. And still be unable to compete with
VISA/Mastercard.
So why then the pressure to go down a route that WILL lead to
failure by your own metrics?
I humbly suggest that maybe we should play the strengths of
Bitcoin instead -- it's trustlessness via policy neutrality.
Either that, or go work on Stellar. Because that's where it's
headed otherwise.
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