5 ms·

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

by 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.
    - paulmd 9y ago
      > The cost is that larger blocks have difficulty crossing the great firewall of china and mining is already centralized there. Ironically, this has actually become a real Byzantine Generals problem. Guess Bitcoin can't actually solve that problem in the real world. From what I understand, China isn't too keen on the whole endeavor since it circumvents their (stringent) capital controls. What happens if they turn the baleful eye of their deep packet inspection onto the Bitcoin network? (serious question) (Background for those who don't know: encryption/etc don't work against the Great Firewall, it knows what a given type of connection "looks like" in terms of packets/activity, so it can identify (eg) a VPN session even if it's "wrapped" or "tunneled" across some other protocol. They use a massive amount of machine learning hardware to profile connections in realtime to pick out "suspicious" activity and those connections will be dropped after a few moments. It's not impossible to run arbitrary connections through the firewall but it's very difficult and getting harder all the time.)
- 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.

by Hermel 9y ago

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.
  - paulmd 9y ago
    > The cost is that larger blocks have difficulty crossing the great firewall of china and mining is already centralized there. Ironically, this has actually become a real Byzantine Generals problem. Guess Bitcoin can't actually solve that problem in the real world. From what I understand, China isn't too keen on the whole endeavor since it circumvents their (stringent) capital controls. What happens if they turn the baleful eye of their deep packet inspection onto the Bitcoin network? (serious question) (Background for those who don't know: encryption/etc don't work against the Great Firewall, it knows what a given type of connection "looks like" in terms of packets/activity, so it can identify (eg) a VPN session even if it's "wrapped" or "tunneled" across some other protocol. They use a massive amount of machine learning hardware to profile connections in realtime to pick out "suspicious" activity and those connections will be dropped after a few moments. It's not impossible to run arbitrary connections through the firewall but it's very difficult and getting harder all the time.)
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.