7 ms·

10 GB Blocks

73 points by kushti 11y ago

transfire 11y ago
Why was a limit made at all?
- 1ris 11y ago
  Because every transaction has to be stored forever, on every single client. This was the easies method to prevent somebody from makeing the blockchain serveral terabytes.
  - oleganza 11y ago
    Not exactly. You can prune txs if you don't need to keep them for archiving purposes. But you have to validate the whole blocks to verify your own payments. You cannot selectively validate portions of blocks ("shard blockchain") and still have perfect proofs of validity of payments to you. If every block was capped at 100 Gb and there were miners creating such blocks, then only a handful of companies would be able to validate the blockchain and therefore mine and receive payments. That would reduce censorship-resistance and make the system less decentralized.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    In the old days, when people kept ledgers, they wouldn't tally up every line from the first page of their first ledger book all the way up to the last line entered. They would instead occasionally write a special summary line that encapsulates all the changes made since the last summary. At minimum, there would be a total at the bottom of each page, which would be copied to the top of the next. That way, you only had to deal with one page of the ledger at a time, rather than all the pages you have ever written. And yet, if you really wanted to, you could audit every transaction you ever entered. They were still there, but you didn't need to keep track of business from 10 years ago to get things done today. Is there no way for bitcoin to start a new page of its ledger by writing down the verified totals from all prior transactions? Satoshi wrote about pruning in section 7 of the design paper, but as far as I know, no pruning solution has been implemented. Why not? I'm not crypto-savvy enough or familiar enough with bitcoin to know why you can't write a block that rolls up the entire history of the blockchain in such a way that you only need to look at previous blocks if you want to verify the summary block itself. It would almost literally be just a list of all the addresses and the total amount each one could spend.
JayJee 11y ago
Every time I think I understand Bitcoin a little bit something like this comes out and washes that feeling away
superkuh 11y ago
Direct democracy is great but it has problems. Even though I'm a technical user and early bitcoin adopter I still don't understand enough about the protocol itself to decide between the proposed solutions to transaction rate scaling. So I just end up running, and implicitly supporting, the core client from my distro's repositories.
- yc1010 11y ago
  So you chose "representative democracy" option by having the distro maintainers decide for you At least bitcoin gives options to chose...
  - comboy 11y ago
    It's about trust. No matter what software you are running you always trust somebody. Intel, gcc, maintainers etc. You can't verify everything yourself. But one screw up can ruin somebody's reputation and then you can decide to trust somebody else. Well, with a client. Not with the protocol though. Most people simply can't have deep understanding of Bitcoin internals. It would be terrible if Bitcoin would be driven by democracy in the way that protocol becomes what most people want (yeah, I'm not hoping for karma with this one). Because then it would become the same as politics. It would drop down to marketing and manipulating memes by some small minority optimizing for its profit. The protocol is decided by miners who optimize for their profit and Bitcoin success is in their best interest because their earnings depend on it.
Strilanc 11y ago
Running a tweaked client like this seems really risky. Bitcoin is a consensus protocol. If clients disagree about which blocks are valid, you lose consensus. You're allowing attackers to inject controversial blocks that fork the history, resulting in double-spending or DOS attacks on you.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- supergreg 11y ago
  Which will only work if at least half the miner population agrees to use this tweaked client
  - sp332 11y ago
    DOS attacks are easy - just make tons of bogus transactions in super-size blocks. Other miners will discard the block immediately for being too large, but this client will be stuck verifying all the transactions. That attack doesn't require anyone else to agree.
  - ybx 11y ago
    Actually around 75%
    - lappa 11y ago
      51% is guarantees that over infinite time consensus will be achieved. 75% is just a stronger guarantee that it will with higher probability come to consensus in a shorter time.
  - lappa 11y ago
    This still exposes you to fake confirmation attacks. Any miner can give you a block that follows this clients rules and as long as most miners aren't following these rules, he can guarantee the block will be overwritten (reorged out). This allows cheaper double-spend attacks.
purpled_haze 11y ago
"Personally, I’m in favor of global adoption, but I don’t really care if it is used for more than just settlement." If you want global adoption, why not go all the way? Personally, I will never use bitcoin unless I have to, because I don't trust much currency these days, much less a currency/ETF that is used for illegal activities, that you had to "get in early" to make any money off of, and that people have had problems with or need to hack clients for because of problems with its definition. I think eventually we will "regress", although I cringe using that word because I think it was always a better option, to trading and bartering directly without some flawed and inappropriate way to represent value. The things that really matter for trade are basically services, products, resources, or food, etc. for sustenance. We should be able to share these things, and for those that don't want to share or want a workable system around sharing, they can trade. Sure, our society's not really setup for this anymore at global scale, although we do trade services and products both at micro and macro levels. But, I think if we keep relying on (virtual) currency or similar, whether it be dollars, euros, yen, rubles, bitcoin, or anything else, then we are just setting the chessboard for something to completely screw the system. In the end, there are things that matter, and things that don't. Money for the sake of money never mattered. And even if you think it matters, you don't matter to it. Love and life are what matters. There is no virtual currency for those things.
- travisby 11y ago
  > Personally, I will never use bitcoin unless I have to, because I don't trust much currency these days, much less a currency/ETF that is used for illegal activities, that you had to "get in early" to make any money off of, and that people have had problems with or need to hack clients for because of problems with its definition. You're in luck! I think USD is just what you need. It's never been used for illegal activities, and there are no clients built on top of it that add extra layers of abstraction and bring with it their own sets of problems. In fact, you can start collecting USD tomorrow and have just as likely of a chance of being rich as if your family started collecting it when they "got in early"
  - icebraining 11y ago
    And it never had problems of definition, like being suddenly and unilaterally unpegged from other assets.
yitchelle 11y ago
For a bitcoin newbie like me, is this not like getting a dollar bill, change the picture on the front to my face and calling a new currency?
- supergreg 11y ago
  Yes, but that bill will only have value if people accept it. It's the same with all the alternative cryptocurrencies out there.
  - sp332 11y ago
    Or real currencies either. http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/you-can-now-make-two-tenners-by-cutting-a-20-bill-in-half-in-this-quebec-town-vgtrn http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/you-can-now-make-two-tenners-...
- sp332 11y ago
  It's not the money that's being changed, it's the rules regarding transactions and accounting. This client will accept more transactions per block. Blocks are mined at a semi-regular rate averaging <10 minutes. So this allows tons of transactions to be added.
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  No. His software fork is participating in the same Bitcoin network as everyone else. This software fork is not the same as a network fork, and definitely not the same as creating an entirely new network that just happens to run the same software.
  - rmc 11y ago
    > No. His software fork is participating in the same Bitcoin network as everyone else. for now
- inoop 11y ago
  It's more like introducing a new $10.000 dollar bill that only you accept, but no-one else. He's making it sound like Bitcoin is all about freedom of choice, when in reality a small group of ~6 Chinese miners decide what the block size is.
rmc 11y ago
> But with bitcoin, I can implement any change I want, immediately, just by modifying the software. No, you've created software that works the same now, but could cause a fork. Which means it's not a change to bitcoin, but a new software version./
- wolfgke 11y ago
  > No, you've created software that works the same now, but could cause a fork. Where is the problem? As far as I understand it (but prove me wrong!) in the extreme case we'll have two Bitcoin blockchains: One without the block size restriction and one with. In each of these two blockchains there will be a consensus (that's what the Bitcoin protocol is in principle about). In the "typical" case the supporters of one of these two forks will stop mining in it, since they see that it is "not mainstream enough". If both blockchains have lots of supporters behind, we'll have "two different bitcoins". Here it can get interesting, since now we have "two different products/bitcoins", where the market will have to decide (and in the extreme case this ability to choose will damage bitcoin - here also things get interesting).

10 GB Blocks

73 points by kushti 11y ago

transfire 11y ago

Why was a limit made at all?

1ris 11y ago
Because every transaction has to be stored forever, on every single client. This was the easies method to prevent somebody from makeing the blockchain serveral terabytes.
- oleganza 11y ago
  Not exactly. You can prune txs if you don't need to keep them for archiving purposes. But you have to validate the whole blocks to verify your own payments. You cannot selectively validate portions of blocks ("shard blockchain") and still have perfect proofs of validity of payments to you. If every block was capped at 100 Gb and there were miners creating such blocks, then only a handful of companies would be able to validate the blockchain and therefore mine and receive payments. That would reduce censorship-resistance and make the system less decentralized.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  In the old days, when people kept ledgers, they wouldn't tally up every line from the first page of their first ledger book all the way up to the last line entered. They would instead occasionally write a special summary line that encapsulates all the changes made since the last summary. At minimum, there would be a total at the bottom of each page, which would be copied to the top of the next. That way, you only had to deal with one page of the ledger at a time, rather than all the pages you have ever written. And yet, if you really wanted to, you could audit every transaction you ever entered. They were still there, but you didn't need to keep track of business from 10 years ago to get things done today. Is there no way for bitcoin to start a new page of its ledger by writing down the verified totals from all prior transactions? Satoshi wrote about pruning in section 7 of the design paper, but as far as I know, no pruning solution has been implemented. Why not? I'm not crypto-savvy enough or familiar enough with bitcoin to know why you can't write a block that rolls up the entire history of the blockchain in such a way that you only need to look at previous blocks if you want to verify the summary block itself. It would almost literally be just a list of all the addresses and the total amount each one could spend.

JayJee 11y ago

Every time I think I understand Bitcoin a little bit something like this comes out and washes that feeling away

superkuh 11y ago

Direct democracy is great but it has problems. Even though I'm a technical user and early bitcoin adopter I still don't understand enough about the protocol itself to decide between the proposed solutions to transaction rate scaling. So I just end up running, and implicitly supporting, the core client from my distro's repositories.

yc1010 11y ago
So you chose "representative democracy" option by having the distro maintainers decide for you At least bitcoin gives options to chose...
- comboy 11y ago
  It's about trust. No matter what software you are running you always trust somebody. Intel, gcc, maintainers etc. You can't verify everything yourself. But one screw up can ruin somebody's reputation and then you can decide to trust somebody else. Well, with a client. Not with the protocol though. Most people simply can't have deep understanding of Bitcoin internals. It would be terrible if Bitcoin would be driven by democracy in the way that protocol becomes what most people want (yeah, I'm not hoping for karma with this one). Because then it would become the same as politics. It would drop down to marketing and manipulating memes by some small minority optimizing for its profit. The protocol is decided by miners who optimize for their profit and Bitcoin success is in their best interest because their earnings depend on it.

Strilanc 11y ago

Running a tweaked client like this seems really risky. Bitcoin is a consensus protocol. If clients disagree about which blocks are valid, you lose consensus. You're allowing attackers to inject controversial blocks that fork the history, resulting in double-spending or DOS attacks on you.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
supergreg 11y ago
Which will only work if at least half the miner population agrees to use this tweaked client
- sp332 11y ago
  DOS attacks are easy - just make tons of bogus transactions in super-size blocks. Other miners will discard the block immediately for being too large, but this client will be stuck verifying all the transactions. That attack doesn't require anyone else to agree.
- ybx 11y ago
  Actually around 75%
  - lappa 11y ago
    51% is guarantees that over infinite time consensus will be achieved. 75% is just a stronger guarantee that it will with higher probability come to consensus in a shorter time.
- lappa 11y ago
  This still exposes you to fake confirmation attacks. Any miner can give you a block that follows this clients rules and as long as most miners aren't following these rules, he can guarantee the block will be overwritten (reorged out). This allows cheaper double-spend attacks.

purpled_haze 11y ago

"Personally, I’m in favor of global adoption, but I don’t really care if it is used for more than just settlement." If you want global adoption, why not go all the way? Personally, I will never use bitcoin unless I have to, because I don't trust much currency these days, much less a currency/ETF that is used for illegal activities, that you had to "get in early" to make any money off of, and that people have had problems with or need to hack clients for because of problems with its definition. I think eventually we will "regress", although I cringe using that word because I think it was always a better option, to trading and bartering directly without some flawed and inappropriate way to represent value. The things that really matter for trade are basically services, products, resources, or food, etc. for sustenance. We should be able to share these things, and for those that don't want to share or want a workable system around sharing, they can trade. Sure, our society's not really setup for this anymore at global scale, although we do trade services and products both at micro and macro levels. But, I think if we keep relying on (virtual) currency or similar, whether it be dollars, euros, yen, rubles, bitcoin, or anything else, then we are just setting the chessboard for something to completely screw the system. In the end, there are things that matter, and things that don't. Money for the sake of money never mattered. And even if you think it matters, you don't matter to it. Love and life are what matters. There is no virtual currency for those things.

travisby 11y ago
> Personally, I will never use bitcoin unless I have to, because I don't trust much currency these days, much less a currency/ETF that is used for illegal activities, that you had to "get in early" to make any money off of, and that people have had problems with or need to hack clients for because of problems with its definition. You're in luck! I think USD is just what you need. It's never been used for illegal activities, and there are no clients built on top of it that add extra layers of abstraction and bring with it their own sets of problems. In fact, you can start collecting USD tomorrow and have just as likely of a chance of being rich as if your family started collecting it when they "got in early"
- icebraining 11y ago
  And it never had problems of definition, like being suddenly and unilaterally unpegged from other assets.

yitchelle 11y ago

For a bitcoin newbie like me, is this not like getting a dollar bill, change the picture on the front to my face and calling a new currency?

supergreg 11y ago
Yes, but that bill will only have value if people accept it. It's the same with all the alternative cryptocurrencies out there.
- sp332 11y ago
  Or real currencies either. http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/you-can-now-make-two-tenners-by-cutting-a-20-bill-in-half-in-this-quebec-town-vgtrn http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/you-can-now-make-two-tenners-...
sp332 11y ago
It's not the money that's being changed, it's the rules regarding transactions and accounting. This client will accept more transactions per block. Blocks are mined at a semi-regular rate averaging <10 minutes. So this allows tons of transactions to be added.
rahimnathwani 11y ago
No. His software fork is participating in the same Bitcoin network as everyone else. This software fork is not the same as a network fork, and definitely not the same as creating an entirely new network that just happens to run the same software.
- rmc 11y ago
  > No. His software fork is participating in the same Bitcoin network as everyone else. for now
inoop 11y ago
It's more like introducing a new $10.000 dollar bill that only you accept, but no-one else. He's making it sound like Bitcoin is all about freedom of choice, when in reality a small group of ~6 Chinese miners decide what the block size is.

rmc 11y ago

> But with bitcoin, I can implement any change I want, immediately, just by modifying the software. No, you've created software that works the same now, but could cause a fork. Which means it's not a change to bitcoin, but a new software version./

wolfgke 11y ago
> No, you've created software that works the same now, but could cause a fork. Where is the problem? As far as I understand it (but prove me wrong!) in the extreme case we'll have two Bitcoin blockchains: One without the block size restriction and one with. In each of these two blockchains there will be a consensus (that's what the Bitcoin protocol is in principle about). In the "typical" case the supporters of one of these two forks will stop mining in it, since they see that it is "not mainstream enough". If both blockchains have lots of supporters behind, we'll have "two different bitcoins". Here it can get interesting, since now we have "two different products/bitcoins", where the market will have to decide (and in the extreme case this ability to choose will damage bitcoin - here also things get interesting).