10 ms·

It is probably not possible to solve the scaling problems on-chain - a secure decentralized consensus on a global scale cannot be fast. Currently the bitcoin pr

by zby 9y ago

It is probably not possible to solve the scaling problems on-chain - a secure decentralized consensus on a global scale cannot be fast. Currently the bitcoin protocol processes about 7 transactions per second. Doubling the speed by doubling blocks will not make it much closer to the 50K transactions per second of a system like VISA. But it is probably possible to scale the transaction system off-chain - with https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/ - which works like a protocol for writing and accepting checks. As far as I know Lightning is impossible or very hard without SegWit. But with Lightning off-loading the bulk of transactions miners will lose a bit of their power - so maybe this is what makes them against it. Another aspect of the riddle is that SegWit will eliminate ASICBoost - which is an optimization developed by one of the biggest ASIC miners producer - so he is probably also against it. There is also the thing that ASICBoost is probably patented - so it has a lot of opposition in the community.

Hermel 9y ago
I'm really tired of hearing the "increasing the block size won't suffice"-argument. Yes, increasing blocks to 10 MB won't give us VISA-scale, but it will allow Bitcoin to serve TEN TIMES AS MANY USERS! I can't believe how many otherwise intelligent people fail to see that this is desirable. It's like driving your car at 10 km/h per hour on the high-way and refusing to increase your speed because that would still not make you as fast as a rocket.
- zby 9y ago
  Well - increasing the block size is not costless - it is not just pushing the gas pedal a little more like in your example.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    Pushing the gas peddle is not costless either. It costs gas.
    - beachbum8029 9y ago
      This thread is about bitcoin, not ethereum.
      - omarchowdhury 9y ago
        No wei!
        andirk 9y ago
        oi wei. Gas can mean ETH gas, petrol gas, or gas gas.
  - rnhmjoj 9y ago
    What's the cost? It was 36MB originally and it has been reduced to 1MB as a temporary measure to limit spam.
    - rothbardrand 9y ago
      The cost is that larger blocks have difficulty crossing the great firewall of china and mining is already centralized there. I have seen this myself with a production blockchain and blocks that were less than 1mb. Increasing the size increases this effect and gives Chinese miners and artificial advantage. Plus there's no congestion on the network right now. There's not a scaling problem. It was spam. Further, segwit increases block size and efficiency so there's no reason to not activate it. This whole issue isn't about scale, core is still ahead of the curve on what's needed to scale, it's about control, and disabling ASICBOOST and keeping transaction fees high.
      - joosters 9y ago
        'The great firewall of china' isn't someone manually inspecting every byte that enters and leaves china, it can manage more than a 1mb transaction just fine. And, even if the delays were more than minuscule, how does it favour one side over the other? Both sides have the same delay. Plus there's no congestion on the network right now. There's not a scaling problem. It was spam. Woohoo! No need for anyone to do anything then. Remind me again why everyone is trying to scale bitcoin?
        rothbardrand 9y ago
        You don't even seem to understand what we are talking about (not 1mb transactions) and you're flat out wrong. I have direct experience with a p2p network that I have built, and the problems getting blocks between nodes on opposite sides of the "Great Firewall of China". Really any engineer with an understanding of that system and P2P networks should understand why. Everyone is trying to scale bitcoin because bitcoin is growing dramatically... that doesn't mean that the "full blocks" and "high fees" we saw recently weren't due to spam. Please logic.
      - 9y ago
  - jancsika 9y ago
    What is the cost? I would assume it is consolidation of mining power since larger block size makes it even less likely for smaller players to be able to verify new blocks in real time. But isn't mining power already consolidated?
    - grubles 9y ago
      The cost is, with 8MB blocks, 95% of nodes that validate consensus will be excluded (unable to keep up or become too costly to run) within 6 months - as per BitFury's (heavily invested Bitcoin mining company) research on bigger blocks: http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-size-1.1.1.pdf http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-siz... Without full nodes validating consensus, miners can (will) force protocol changes (eg. change 21,000,000 coin limit) on users, effectively changing the decentralized leaderless attributes to a centralized dictatorial less-efficient PayPal. At this moment, bigger blocks mean a less-free (as in speech) bitcoin.
- anon335dtzbvc 9y ago
  I think the car analogy is not quite correct. A car is able to dynamically change its velocity, bitcoin can't easylie do that. It would be much better to find a genereal solution that fix that problem altogether, instead of finding a solution that works for the next few years and might require future forks.
  - Hermel 9y ago
    There is rarely a silver bullet, and I don't see one in the case of Bitcoin. Even if lightning network (which is what everyone who does not see the need for a block-size increase points to) was available today, we would need larger blocks to reach VISA-scale. The responsible thing to do is to increase the blocks as early as possible while we still are in "beta".
- davidgerard 9y ago
  The most compelling argument I know of against bigger blocks is that the big blockers have started putting Craig Wright (Nakamoto Dundee) forward as, like, any sort of expert.
- gtrubetskoy 9y ago
  Increasing the block will solve the problem until the new size is not enough, which will be very soon. A larger block means a larger blockchain, and the nice thing about the blockchain is that you can download the entire thing. With a larger block it will outpace the storage advances and will not be downloadable for the average user, which means that only specifically equipped entities such as miners will be able to have a copy of it, and that is a big problem. 10x the transactions is not much at all. The comparison with the VISA network is not a valid one - with micropayments the volume could be 100x or 10000x - we should be able to accommodate it. The only solution is to begin handling transations off-chain. But the problem is that there is no one good proposal for it. Until it is clear how off-chain transactions work, we will keep seeing this sort of stuff.
  - lisper 9y ago
    > With a larger block it will outpace the storage advances and will not be downloadable for the average user This has nothing to do with the block size. The size of the chain is proportional to the number of transactions. Whether those are sliced-and-diced into small blocks or large ones is completely irrelevant to how big the chain is. The only thing the block size influences is how many transactions can be mined in one block, i.e. the rate at which transactions can be processed.
    - zby 9y ago
      If you don't change the rate of block creation - then the rate of blockchain growth is proportional to the block size. If you increase blocks - then the blockchain will grow faster. This is kind of obvious. But yeah - the size of the blocks does depend on the number and size of transactions and if you don't have transactions to fill up the block in full (i.e. so that its size is just under the maximal block size) - then the transactions will be the limiting factor.
    - h1d 9y ago
      No. If a block is 10MB, you might as well keep spamming the blocks to centralize the node operation when the storage starts to require TBs. Why do you think Satoshi's gave it an artificial 1MB limit if it didn't matter?
- mikeash 9y ago
  If you believe that Bitcoin needs to scale up far beyond 10x the current size, then it's like driving your car at 10km/h per hour on the highway and refusing to increase your speed because you're trying to get to the moon and going faster in your car won't help in the least.
- geofft 9y ago
  It seems to me that the otherwise-intelligent people are seeing the appropriate analogy as refusing to learn to run fast because they're trying to buy a car. Yes, most humans are capable of running faster and for longer distances than they currently can, with training. But training is a lot of work, and if your long-term goal is to go much faster than any human is known to be able to run, it's not clear that training is your best approach.
- h1d 9y ago
  Can you not simply do a small math? Currently at 160GB or something with 1MB block, what storage do you think a node will require with 10MB block in the next 5 years when the usage will be growing?
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  >I can't believe how many otherwise intelligent people fail to see that this is desirable. If there were no technical and economic tradeoffs to increasing the blocksize then yes, it would hard to see how otherwise intelligent people could oppose it. Everybody loves a free lunch. But there are tradeoffs, which you conveniently omit, which are giving those otherwise intelligent people pause, rightfully so.
julian_1 9y ago
A counter-argument is that the Lightening work is a proprietary development outside of bitcoin core (lead by Blockstream) and the work is even patent-encumbered. They state the ip is for defensive purposes only - however that is questionable given that anything they implement, automatically becomes prior-art. It is also contrary to the spirit and practice of the majority of crypto/alt projects. It is unreasonable to attack miners for having interests, without disclosing that other interests may benefit from the current levels of network congestion that a skeptic would say are caused by having artificially small blocks.
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  There's nothing proprietary about Lightening Network. Lightning network was started by a startup, who published the paper, there are several open source implementations of it, and to my knowledge there's no actual involvement of Blockstream. Blockstream has their own solution (that doesn't need segwit right now) called Liquid. Liquid Network and Lightening Network are different things and work in a different ways. A new version of liquid that uses some of he lightening technology enabled by segwit is probably in Blockstreams plans... but there are multiple competing open source implementations of Lightening Network being worked on. Please link to the patents on the lightening network. I don't think you can. There is no current network congestion. Free transactions are clearing after awhile and very low fee transactions are clearing right away. All of the congestion of the past 3 months was from a spam campaign being run by the people who claim "bitcoin doesn't scale without larger blocks" ignoring that Segwit increases block size AND increases efficiency in using that capacity.
  - julian_1 9y ago
    I referred to Blockstream and this is their patent front announcement, > Today we are excited to announce some important steps we are taking on the patent front, why these defensive steps are necessary, and our hope that others will see merit in our approach and follow our lead. ... > Our Patent Pledge assures developers and users of our technology that we will not sue them for patent infringement, provided they comply with the terms and conditions of our pledge... https://blockstream.com/2016/07/19/blockstream-defensive-patent-strategy/ https://blockstream.com/2016/07/19/blockstream-defensive-pat... Edit: Here is a discussion of Blockstream's patent application for side car design, > The application, submitted on 9th May and published earlier this week, outlines “systems and methods...for transferring an asset from a parent chain to a sidechain”. http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-blockstream-patent-sidechains/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-blockstream-patent-sidechain... Here is blockstream talking about Lightening, > Blockstream’s work on the Lightning protocol began two years ago with the intention of enabling new applications and developing new use cases that could help further the adoption of Bitcoin and related technologies https://blockstream.com/2015/09/01/lightning-network.html https://blockstream.com/2015/09/01/lightning-network.html Also presumably if segwit activates then Liquid is no longer needed? Edit: The relationship between Blockstream and Lightning is underscored, by the fact that the largest contributor to the specification is a Blockstream employee (Rustee Russell), https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/graphs/contributors https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/graphs/con...
simias 9y ago
While I agree that only increasing block size forever (or simply removing the size limit) doesn't seem reasonable in the long run, are we sure that segwit and the off-chain scaling solutions proposed today will really solve the long-term scaling issues of BTC? All the practical "here's how lightning's going to work" papers I've read so far leave me very skeptical. Here's an example: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/overview-of-bips-necessary-for-lightning/ http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/o... The Q-and-A at the end in particular is interesting: >Q: On the last slide, one of the assumptions was 3 channels per person. Assuming payment channels wouldn't be useful for retail sales, because you don't want to buy a coffee just to open immediately. Is that correct? >A: Joseph might expand on this. Let's say you buy a coffee. You're probably buying a coffee only once, right? Well, maybe the coffee is $5, and you put $50 into the channel and leave it open. Then someone else comes to the coffee shop and she does the same thing. But she has a channel with the grocery store. There's me, coffee shop, Alice, grocery store, they all have channels. When I go to the grocery store next time, I don't have to open a channel. Payments are routed. >Q: It sounded like everybody would have to open new channels. >A: I am guessing the mean is going to be 3, but it will probably be an exponential distribution. Most people will probably have 1 channel, and then some might have 100s of channels open. I don't know about you but while on paper that might work I still see a lot of hand waving, guesswork and rather unsubstantiated assumptions. Why would I decide to "lock" $50 worth of Bitcoins when I buy a $5 coffee? What's the incentive for me to do this? Where does this estimate of 3 come from exactly, I see it repeated everywhere but I can't find the maths behind it? Here's an interesting attempt at simulating a real-scale ligtning network (why aren't there more of these? Aren't we talking about a $40bn market cap currency here?): https://hackernoon.com/simulating-a-decentralized-lightning-network-with-10-million-users-9a8b5930fa7a https://hackernoon.com/simulating-a-decentralized-lightning-... The simulation is rather unrealistic and I'm not sure how to interpret its conclusions. It seems to kinda work but there are issues: >133,401 micropayments were attempted and 3461 (2.6%) of these failed. For successful payments the median number of hops was 19 and the median total fees were 2 bits (0.000002 btc) or 32% of the value transferred. Now it could be caused by a bad simulation rather than a real issue with Lightning network, but frankly I can't tell at this point. I don't have a horse in this race but as seen from the outside it all looks a bit rushed and amateurish. I don't know the whole story though, maybe I'm just poorly informed.
jcfrei 9y ago
There are some new attempts being made without using a blockchain but still reaching the same level of consensus or finality. They are usually based on DAOs (directed acyclic graphs - not to be confused with The DAO Organization). A good introduction is this paper: Blockchain-Free Cryptocurrencies: A Framework for Truly Decentralised Fast Transactions - https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/871.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/871.pdf It was previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14730354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14730354
- tree_of_item 9y ago
  The acronym for directed acylic graphs is DAG, not DAO. That's also an incredibly vague thing to be "based on" and seems more like an appeal to "impressive technical sounding name that actually happens to be extremely trivial and something people learn about in a first year undergraduate mathematics course".
  - jcfrei 9y ago
    DAG and not DAO of course... The mathematical description is straightforward however the implementation (for example mining fee distribution) seems fairly complicated and loses a lot of the beauty of a blockchain. AFAIK Iota is the first serious attempt at running such a crypto currency.
pmarreck 9y ago
I have been being told all along that the 7TPS limit is just an artificially-imposed limit and it's only there because the devs don't actually know what would happen if they (say) doubled it... was this a lie?
_red 9y ago
The 7 TPS claim is an apples-to-oranges comparison. You must remember that Bitcoin transactions are "settled" in that 7 TPS timescale, whereas VISA transactions are merely "recorded" in their 50K TPS rate. In reality, it generally takes a minimum of 15 days for your VISA transaction to "settle" with your bank account. Thereby the true TPS rate is orders of magnitude lower for VISA.
- DavidSJ 9y ago
  Bandwidth is not the same thing as latency.
- BenjiWiebe 9y ago
  So everyone quits making transactions for a week while Visa catches up? Or does there backlog increase indefinitely? OR do they have to settle at the same rate as record, just delayed? I'm guessing the last one...
  - jchw 9y ago
    A better question would be what 50K TPS means. Does it mean on average, or at peak, or etc. Obviously in any case it will be faster than Bitcoin.
- zby 9y ago
  The numbers are about throughput. Bitcoin has 7 TPS throughput and VISA has 50K TPS (peak) throughput. With regard to latency bitcoin is still worse in practical applications - because VISA confirms a transaction immediately even if as you write it settles after 15 days - while bitcoin more or less settles after and an hour - but the first confirmation you get only after about 10 minutes.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  So how many transactions does each system fully settle in a month?
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  If your mouth is sewn shut, it doesn't matter that much how fast you can digest food.
davidgerard 9y ago
The problem there is that Lightning Network is as yet vaporware.
kerkeslager 9y ago
Surely Hacker News understands exponents enough to see that doubling the size does get us to Visa-like 50k transactions in only 16 doubles.
- girst 9y ago
  surely HN understands exponents enough to notice that 1MB * 2^16 = 64GigaBytes.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    Yes. And how many applications actually have to store the block chain?
EGreg 9y ago
I don't understand how you know it can't be fast. I think proof of work mining is extremely wasteful. But once it is in place, you can sign a merkle tree of any size. You can add as many transactions as you want. The problem is that the ledger has to grow and grow. It would be nice if something was developed where you didn't need to keep the whole history.

by zby 9y ago

Hermel 9y ago

I'm really tired of hearing the "increasing the block size won't suffice"-argument. Yes, increasing blocks to 10 MB won't give us VISA-scale, but it will allow Bitcoin to serve TEN TIMES AS MANY USERS! I can't believe how many otherwise intelligent people fail to see that this is desirable. It's like driving your car at 10 km/h per hour on the high-way and refusing to increase your speed because that would still not make you as fast as a rocket.

zby 9y ago
Well - increasing the block size is not costless - it is not just pushing the gas pedal a little more like in your example.
- colordrops 9y ago
  Pushing the gas peddle is not costless either. It costs gas.
  - beachbum8029 9y ago
    This thread is about bitcoin, not ethereum.
    - omarchowdhury 9y ago
      No wei!
      - andirk 9y ago
        oi wei. Gas can mean ETH gas, petrol gas, or gas gas.
- rnhmjoj 9y ago
  What's the cost? It was 36MB originally and it has been reduced to 1MB as a temporary measure to limit spam.
  - rothbardrand 9y ago
    The cost is that larger blocks have difficulty crossing the great firewall of china and mining is already centralized there. I have seen this myself with a production blockchain and blocks that were less than 1mb. Increasing the size increases this effect and gives Chinese miners and artificial advantage. Plus there's no congestion on the network right now. There's not a scaling problem. It was spam. Further, segwit increases block size and efficiency so there's no reason to not activate it. This whole issue isn't about scale, core is still ahead of the curve on what's needed to scale, it's about control, and disabling ASICBOOST and keeping transaction fees high.
    - joosters 9y ago
      'The great firewall of china' isn't someone manually inspecting every byte that enters and leaves china, it can manage more than a 1mb transaction just fine. And, even if the delays were more than minuscule, how does it favour one side over the other? Both sides have the same delay. Plus there's no congestion on the network right now. There's not a scaling problem. It was spam. Woohoo! No need for anyone to do anything then. Remind me again why everyone is trying to scale bitcoin?
      - rothbardrand 9y ago
        You don't even seem to understand what we are talking about (not 1mb transactions) and you're flat out wrong. I have direct experience with a p2p network that I have built, and the problems getting blocks between nodes on opposite sides of the "Great Firewall of China". Really any engineer with an understanding of that system and P2P networks should understand why. Everyone is trying to scale bitcoin because bitcoin is growing dramatically... that doesn't mean that the "full blocks" and "high fees" we saw recently weren't due to spam. Please logic.
    - 9y ago
- jancsika 9y ago
  What is the cost? I would assume it is consolidation of mining power since larger block size makes it even less likely for smaller players to be able to verify new blocks in real time. But isn't mining power already consolidated?
  - grubles 9y ago
    The cost is, with 8MB blocks, 95% of nodes that validate consensus will be excluded (unable to keep up or become too costly to run) within 6 months - as per BitFury's (heavily invested Bitcoin mining company) research on bigger blocks: http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-size-1.1.1.pdf http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-siz... Without full nodes validating consensus, miners can (will) force protocol changes (eg. change 21,000,000 coin limit) on users, effectively changing the decentralized leaderless attributes to a centralized dictatorial less-efficient PayPal. At this moment, bigger blocks mean a less-free (as in speech) bitcoin.
anon335dtzbvc 9y ago
I think the car analogy is not quite correct. A car is able to dynamically change its velocity, bitcoin can't easylie do that. It would be much better to find a genereal solution that fix that problem altogether, instead of finding a solution that works for the next few years and might require future forks.
- Hermel 9y ago
  There is rarely a silver bullet, and I don't see one in the case of Bitcoin. Even if lightning network (which is what everyone who does not see the need for a block-size increase points to) was available today, we would need larger blocks to reach VISA-scale. The responsible thing to do is to increase the blocks as early as possible while we still are in "beta".
davidgerard 9y ago
The most compelling argument I know of against bigger blocks is that the big blockers have started putting Craig Wright (Nakamoto Dundee) forward as, like, any sort of expert.
gtrubetskoy 9y ago
Increasing the block will solve the problem until the new size is not enough, which will be very soon. A larger block means a larger blockchain, and the nice thing about the blockchain is that you can download the entire thing. With a larger block it will outpace the storage advances and will not be downloadable for the average user, which means that only specifically equipped entities such as miners will be able to have a copy of it, and that is a big problem. 10x the transactions is not much at all. The comparison with the VISA network is not a valid one - with micropayments the volume could be 100x or 10000x - we should be able to accommodate it. The only solution is to begin handling transations off-chain. But the problem is that there is no one good proposal for it. Until it is clear how off-chain transactions work, we will keep seeing this sort of stuff.
- lisper 9y ago
  > With a larger block it will outpace the storage advances and will not be downloadable for the average user This has nothing to do with the block size. The size of the chain is proportional to the number of transactions. Whether those are sliced-and-diced into small blocks or large ones is completely irrelevant to how big the chain is. The only thing the block size influences is how many transactions can be mined in one block, i.e. the rate at which transactions can be processed.
  - zby 9y ago
    If you don't change the rate of block creation - then the rate of blockchain growth is proportional to the block size. If you increase blocks - then the blockchain will grow faster. This is kind of obvious. But yeah - the size of the blocks does depend on the number and size of transactions and if you don't have transactions to fill up the block in full (i.e. so that its size is just under the maximal block size) - then the transactions will be the limiting factor.
  - h1d 9y ago
    No. If a block is 10MB, you might as well keep spamming the blocks to centralize the node operation when the storage starts to require TBs. Why do you think Satoshi's gave it an artificial 1MB limit if it didn't matter?
mikeash 9y ago
If you believe that Bitcoin needs to scale up far beyond 10x the current size, then it's like driving your car at 10km/h per hour on the highway and refusing to increase your speed because you're trying to get to the moon and going faster in your car won't help in the least.
geofft 9y ago
It seems to me that the otherwise-intelligent people are seeing the appropriate analogy as refusing to learn to run fast because they're trying to buy a car. Yes, most humans are capable of running faster and for longer distances than they currently can, with training. But training is a lot of work, and if your long-term goal is to go much faster than any human is known to be able to run, it's not clear that training is your best approach.
h1d 9y ago
Can you not simply do a small math? Currently at 160GB or something with 1MB block, what storage do you think a node will require with 10MB block in the next 5 years when the usage will be growing?
SkyMarshal 9y ago
>I can't believe how many otherwise intelligent people fail to see that this is desirable. If there were no technical and economic tradeoffs to increasing the blocksize then yes, it would hard to see how otherwise intelligent people could oppose it. Everybody loves a free lunch. But there are tradeoffs, which you conveniently omit, which are giving those otherwise intelligent people pause, rightfully so.

julian_1 9y ago

A counter-argument is that the Lightening work is a proprietary development outside of bitcoin core (lead by Blockstream) and the work is even patent-encumbered. They state the ip is for defensive purposes only - however that is questionable given that anything they implement, automatically becomes prior-art. It is also contrary to the spirit and practice of the majority of crypto/alt projects. It is unreasonable to attack miners for having interests, without disclosing that other interests may benefit from the current levels of network congestion that a skeptic would say are caused by having artificially small blocks.

rothbardrand 9y ago
There's nothing proprietary about Lightening Network. Lightning network was started by a startup, who published the paper, there are several open source implementations of it, and to my knowledge there's no actual involvement of Blockstream. Blockstream has their own solution (that doesn't need segwit right now) called Liquid. Liquid Network and Lightening Network are different things and work in a different ways. A new version of liquid that uses some of he lightening technology enabled by segwit is probably in Blockstreams plans... but there are multiple competing open source implementations of Lightening Network being worked on. Please link to the patents on the lightening network. I don't think you can. There is no current network congestion. Free transactions are clearing after awhile and very low fee transactions are clearing right away. All of the congestion of the past 3 months was from a spam campaign being run by the people who claim "bitcoin doesn't scale without larger blocks" ignoring that Segwit increases block size AND increases efficiency in using that capacity.
- julian_1 9y ago
  I referred to Blockstream and this is their patent front announcement, > Today we are excited to announce some important steps we are taking on the patent front, why these defensive steps are necessary, and our hope that others will see merit in our approach and follow our lead. ... > Our Patent Pledge assures developers and users of our technology that we will not sue them for patent infringement, provided they comply with the terms and conditions of our pledge... https://blockstream.com/2016/07/19/blockstream-defensive-patent-strategy/ https://blockstream.com/2016/07/19/blockstream-defensive-pat... Edit: Here is a discussion of Blockstream's patent application for side car design, > The application, submitted on 9th May and published earlier this week, outlines “systems and methods...for transferring an asset from a parent chain to a sidechain”. http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-blockstream-patent-sidechains/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-blockstream-patent-sidechain... Here is blockstream talking about Lightening, > Blockstream’s work on the Lightning protocol began two years ago with the intention of enabling new applications and developing new use cases that could help further the adoption of Bitcoin and related technologies https://blockstream.com/2015/09/01/lightning-network.html https://blockstream.com/2015/09/01/lightning-network.html Also presumably if segwit activates then Liquid is no longer needed? Edit: The relationship between Blockstream and Lightning is underscored, by the fact that the largest contributor to the specification is a Blockstream employee (Rustee Russell), https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/graphs/contributors https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/graphs/con...

simias 9y ago

While I agree that only increasing block size forever (or simply removing the size limit) doesn't seem reasonable in the long run, are we sure that segwit and the off-chain scaling solutions proposed today will really solve the long-term scaling issues of BTC? All the practical "here's how lightning's going to work" papers I've read so far leave me very skeptical. Here's an example: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/overview-of-bips-necessary-for-lightning/ http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/o... The Q-and-A at the end in particular is interesting: >Q: On the last slide, one of the assumptions was 3 channels per person. Assuming payment channels wouldn't be useful for retail sales, because you don't want to buy a coffee just to open immediately. Is that correct? >A: Joseph might expand on this. Let's say you buy a coffee. You're probably buying a coffee only once, right? Well, maybe the coffee is $5, and you put $50 into the channel and leave it open. Then someone else comes to the coffee shop and she does the same thing. But she has a channel with the grocery store. There's me, coffee shop, Alice, grocery store, they all have channels. When I go to the grocery store next time, I don't have to open a channel. Payments are routed. >Q: It sounded like everybody would have to open new channels. >A: I am guessing the mean is going to be 3, but it will probably be an exponential distribution. Most people will probably have 1 channel, and then some might have 100s of channels open. I don't know about you but while on paper that might work I still see a lot of hand waving, guesswork and rather unsubstantiated assumptions. Why would I decide to "lock" $50 worth of Bitcoins when I buy a $5 coffee? What's the incentive for me to do this? Where does this estimate of 3 come from exactly, I see it repeated everywhere but I can't find the maths behind it? Here's an interesting attempt at simulating a real-scale ligtning network (why aren't there more of these? Aren't we talking about a $40bn market cap currency here?): https://hackernoon.com/simulating-a-decentralized-lightning-network-with-10-million-users-9a8b5930fa7a https://hackernoon.com/simulating-a-decentralized-lightning-... The simulation is rather unrealistic and I'm not sure how to interpret its conclusions. It seems to kinda work but there are issues: >133,401 micropayments were attempted and 3461 (2.6%) of these failed. For successful payments the median number of hops was 19 and the median total fees were 2 bits (0.000002 btc) or 32% of the value transferred. Now it could be caused by a bad simulation rather than a real issue with Lightning network, but frankly I can't tell at this point. I don't have a horse in this race but as seen from the outside it all looks a bit rushed and amateurish. I don't know the whole story though, maybe I'm just poorly informed.

jcfrei 9y ago

There are some new attempts being made without using a blockchain but still reaching the same level of consensus or finality. They are usually based on DAOs (directed acyclic graphs - not to be confused with The DAO Organization). A good introduction is this paper: Blockchain-Free Cryptocurrencies: A Framework for Truly Decentralised Fast Transactions - https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/871.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/871.pdf It was previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14730354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14730354

tree_of_item 9y ago
The acronym for directed acylic graphs is DAG, not DAO. That's also an incredibly vague thing to be "based on" and seems more like an appeal to "impressive technical sounding name that actually happens to be extremely trivial and something people learn about in a first year undergraduate mathematics course".
- jcfrei 9y ago
  DAG and not DAO of course... The mathematical description is straightforward however the implementation (for example mining fee distribution) seems fairly complicated and loses a lot of the beauty of a blockchain. AFAIK Iota is the first serious attempt at running such a crypto currency.

pmarreck 9y ago

I have been being told all along that the 7TPS limit is just an artificially-imposed limit and it's only there because the devs don't actually know what would happen if they (say) doubled it... was this a lie?

_red 9y ago

The 7 TPS claim is an apples-to-oranges comparison. You must remember that Bitcoin transactions are "settled" in that 7 TPS timescale, whereas VISA transactions are merely "recorded" in their 50K TPS rate. In reality, it generally takes a minimum of 15 days for your VISA transaction to "settle" with your bank account. Thereby the true TPS rate is orders of magnitude lower for VISA.

DavidSJ 9y ago
Bandwidth is not the same thing as latency.
BenjiWiebe 9y ago
So everyone quits making transactions for a week while Visa catches up? Or does there backlog increase indefinitely? OR do they have to settle at the same rate as record, just delayed? I'm guessing the last one...
- jchw 9y ago
  A better question would be what 50K TPS means. Does it mean on average, or at peak, or etc. Obviously in any case it will be faster than Bitcoin.
zby 9y ago
The numbers are about throughput. Bitcoin has 7 TPS throughput and VISA has 50K TPS (peak) throughput. With regard to latency bitcoin is still worse in practical applications - because VISA confirms a transaction immediately even if as you write it settles after 15 days - while bitcoin more or less settles after and an hour - but the first confirmation you get only after about 10 minutes.
maxerickson 9y ago
So how many transactions does each system fully settle in a month?
ceejayoz 9y ago
If your mouth is sewn shut, it doesn't matter that much how fast you can digest food.

davidgerard 9y ago

The problem there is that Lightning Network is as yet vaporware.

kerkeslager 9y ago

Surely Hacker News understands exponents enough to see that doubling the size does get us to Visa-like 50k transactions in only 16 doubles.

girst 9y ago
surely HN understands exponents enough to notice that 1MB * 2^16 = 64GigaBytes.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  Yes. And how many applications actually have to store the block chain?

EGreg 9y ago

I don't understand how you know it can't be fast. I think proof of work mining is extremely wasteful. But once it is in place, you can sign a merkle tree of any size. You can add as many transactions as you want. The problem is that the ledger has to grow and grow. It would be nice if something was developed where you didn't need to keep the whole history.