10 ms·

Bitcoin May Have Solved Its Scaling Problem

94 points by artsandsci 9y ago

danmaz74 9y ago
Stopped reading after the first paragraph, which said: > after users overwhelmingly voted in favor of implementing a code improvement It was miners who voted, not users. If you can't get the first paragraph right, I don't need to read the rest of the article...
- ky738 9y ago
  all miners are users
  - chroem- 9y ago
    But very, very few users are miners.
  - MichaelBurge 9y ago
    People overwhelmingly voted for the new dictator, since the dictator's top generals voted for him and the generals are people.
    - ky738 9y ago
      That's a fallacy whereas what I said was simply a logic statement. true or false?
      - jwilk 9y ago
        True, but irrelevant.
    - matthewrudy 9y ago
      This is kind of how it works in Hong Kong, but a bit more convoluted.
hashmp 9y ago
Bitcoin is not slow. It's fast, if you are prepared to pay for it. This is where the disagreement lies. Should the price of on chain transactions be reduced and remain low.
- nathanvanfleet 9y ago
  The article mentions this
- rebuilder 9y ago
  That's one way of putting it. Another way to look at the blocksize issue is: should the supply of transaction space be limited by free market mechanisms alone, or by committee decision/voting/negotiations?
  - hashmp 9y ago
    There is an argument that block propagation and orphan rates acts as natural barrier to the blocksize. With a very large blocksize limit, miners who produce blocks which are very big, run the risk of a smaller block from a competing miner winning the race, as it is faster to validate and propagate over the network. This limiting factor should mean the blocksize converges to a size that the network can comfortably handle.
    - dgacmu 9y ago
      This isn't fundamental. The large-block miner can pre-stage copies of the block (before the nonce has been found) at a few replicas. If they successfully find a nonce, they blast the nonce to all of their replicas, which immediately disseminate the complete block.
- grey-area 9y ago
  Compared to existing payment processing networks (responses typically in < 1 sec), it is slow as molasses.
  - 9y ago
rebuilder 9y ago
This doesn't even remotely address the scaling problem, such as it may be. I'm not keen on forced blocksize caps as I don't see how that kind of planned economy model is compatible with the free-market money ideas behind Bitcoin, but even an unlimited blocksize would be unlikely to truly solve scaling. Bitcoin simply doesn't scale very well because of the way transaction history need sto be stored. As long as the rate of blockchain growth can't be significantly reduced, transaction rate can't grow very much. So small block proponents are likely to be right in that on-chain scaling is unrealistic, but if the market must be forced by developers to adhere to an artificial limit, I think that in itself implies Bitcoin is unlikely to be able to grow very far as the market is unable to self-regulate.
- GBiT 9y ago
  Bitcoin CAN scale globally right now if remove 1 MB cap. If someone doesn't want to hold every transaction of blockchain they can use pruning, and some us us use it already. For a simple user, it's not worth to keep all blockchain, because it does not matter. they can't change it or include transaction into a new block if they not mining.
- sanxiyn 9y ago
  Block size is protocol's security parameter. Cap on block size is not artificial. Thought experiment: if block size is unlimited, would it affect security? The answer is obviously yes, so it's not artificial.
  - erpellan 9y ago
    Satoshi added the block size cap as a DOS-prevention mechanism (to stop blocks from being bloated with 'dust' txns and grinding the network to a halt). It was done without any real discussion and the value was probably whatever felt right to him at the time. If he'd made it 10Mb, we'd be having this discussion in a few years time rather than now.
    - sanxiyn 9y ago
      Yes, I agree it is very reasonable to debate whether limit should be 1 MB or 10 MB or whatever. I don't think it is reasonable to say it should be unlimited, or decided by market, or such.
erikb 9y ago
> The bitcoin network simply wasn't designed to be able to handle the kind of volume it is experiencing as more people are beginning to use the currency, and the 1 megabyte "blocks" of transaction data that get uploaded to the blockchain are full. If you work in IT this is like a monthly meeting of the team. You ALWAYS hear "oh we are so suprised, it wasn't designed for such an amount of users/load/whatever". It's just not true. It's a show. And I really don't know why this argument STILL works. If you run 10 topics in parallel, 7 will report this exact reason. If you check them out closely 3 report that truthfully, but really let you wonder why management decided to put so stupid people on top of these projects in the first place. 4 actually have planned for this to happen, and where just not sure if they run into it this month or next month.
- jgord 9y ago
  Even the current linear architecture can certainly handle more that 3 transactions per second on modern hardware .. there is clearly a bottleneck.
jgord 9y ago
Not a great article. Perhaps best to downvote until a better one comes along. Things to consider, which most people can agree on : - SegWit2X [ segwit feature, followed by 2MB block size ] is seen as a compromise worth taking to move things forward past the current impasse, by a range of people who dislike SegWit and think an actual blocksize increase is urgently needed - There is an immediate scaling problem : The mean and median blocksize is converging on the max blocksize of 1MB, and transactions waiting to get into the block blow out on a daily basis to 20MB. This backlog of waiting transactions causes users to pay high fees to get their transaction to the front of the queue, and causes delays in processing/confirmation times. - there is a less urgent longer term scaling problem due to the linear architecture of the blockchain itself My personal viewpoint : - if you are only processing 3 transactions per second, there is substantial room for performance increases - SegWit may help slightly in alleviating transaction pressure, and a 2MB block size will help a bit more. Given the voracity of the debate, SegWit2X is a practical compromise we should adopt to move forward. The USD/BTC market seems to agree with this. - We do need a schedule for block increases over the next couple years so all parties have certainty, and so it doesn't create renewed havoc every few months. - blocksize is just the first of several engineering optimizations that could see transaction throughput on the same linear architecture increase over 1000x. eg. We have a 150GB full blockchain - it would be half the size on disk if compressed. - Even if LN or side chains are the way to scale, and only 0.1% of transactions are 'settled' on the main chain, we will still need a more efficient main blockchain, because the growth of transaction volumes will likely be exponential for the next decade. - some people think the blocksize is a fundamental part of the genius breakthrough in technology that is the blockchain, and so cannot be tinkered with. This is wrong. Proof-of-work, monetary supply, miner reward, chained hash of the blocks, longest block wins, distributed redundancy are fundamental ideas at the core of bitcoin .. but blocksize is merely a technical issue, an artificial limit that was there to make implementation simpler, and always assumed that it would need to be increased well before it became an issue.
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  Unless things have changed in the last week, your info on the backlog of transactions is out of date. There was a concerted spam campaign from April to June of this year that made the backlog grow and transaction fees go up, but that has ended around the time Segwit2X was getting committed. You also don't seem to understand that Segwit is an increase in the block size, up to about 4MB, and there are very good engineering reasons for keeping blocks smaller-- namely larger blocks increase centralization when the Great Firewall of China is taken into account.
baalimago 9y ago
bitcoin wont ever become useable since it's too easy to be anonymous. governments wants structure
- mdns33 9y ago
  governments can only do that much. there will come a government who will eventually succumb. its a free world you know.
mdns33 9y ago
worth discussing charlie lee, founder of litecoin proposal on how bitcoin and litecoin can work together to solve the scaling problem: https://segwit.org/my-vision-for-segwit-and-lightning-networks-on-litecoin-and-bitcoin-cf95a7ab656b https://segwit.org/my-vision-for-segwit-and-lightning-networ...
richardw 9y ago
Crypcocurrencies need to stop requiring us all to hold every transaction in one unified blockchain dump. There has to be some way to break the network out into shards while still preserving the distributed nature and ability to pay anyone. No matter what we do, moving and storing every single transaction is insane. It's like my bank account needing to know what every person in the world's purchases are this morning. I shouldn't need to know what some guy on the other side of the world spent his lunch money on, just to buy my own. What am I missing? Surely the uber com sci phd's have fully solved this?
- GBiT 9y ago
  You don't need to hold every transaction why do you think you have to keep all blockchain? Right now you can use pruning on a client like Core ar Unlimited or you can use light clients like Electrum.
  - richardw 9y ago
    I do use a light wallet but the main blockchain doesn't have sharding as a primary design. It's gone from mb to many gb.
  - honestlyreally 9y ago
    People who promote convenience without talking about the cost scare me the most.
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  It's not like Bitcoin does it because it _wants_ to; in fact, semi-anonymity is a semi-goal of Bitcoin. It's just a tough problem to solve differently. I haven't heard of any recent updates, but I believe ZCoin was supposed to address this issue, to an extent.
- Temasik 9y ago
  Sounds like iota.org to me a blockchainless cryptocurrency based on directed arcyclic graph
- buzzybee 9y ago
wildbunny 9y ago
Bitcoin hasn't solved the scaling problem. All these BIPs are just short term fixes which don't address the core problem. I opened a discussion thread on bitcointalk hoping to catch the attention of the core developers, but it seems they don't read that forum anymore. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2036368.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2036368.0
- Torai 9y ago
  I'm tired of Bitcoin's useless drama.
  - eternalban 9y ago
    Useless to you and me, but quite a lot of fortunes are riding on this ponzi scheme.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- knocte 9y ago
  > All these BIPs are just short term fixes which don't address > the core problem. Wrong, SegWit (BIP 91 and 141) solves transaction malleability, which in itself will allow new layers (off-chain) to be built on top of the first layer (on-chain), which will allow orders of magnitude more throughput on number of payments per month.
  - olegkikin 9y ago
    Off-chain is, by definition, not Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself is still very limited in throughput, and will remain so until the block size is increased.
    - knocte 9y ago
      Wrong. When you sign a transaction off-chain, you're signing a real bitcoin transaction, which you choose (or your software) to not broadcast to the network for convenience reasons (as you will likely sign more transactions later).
auggierose 9y ago
Somehow Bitcoin reminds me of tulips.
basicplus2 9y ago
Even if the scaling problem was ever solved, what will one do when one runs out of all the power in the known universe to generate more Bitcoins.. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-co...

94 points by artsandsci 9y ago

Stopped reading after the first paragraph, which said: > after users overwhelmingly voted in favor of implementing a code improvement It was miners who voted, not users. If you can't get the first paragraph right, I don't need to read the rest of the article...

ky738 9y ago
all miners are users
- chroem- 9y ago
  But very, very few users are miners.
- MichaelBurge 9y ago
  People overwhelmingly voted for the new dictator, since the dictator's top generals voted for him and the generals are people.
  - ky738 9y ago
    That's a fallacy whereas what I said was simply a logic statement. true or false?
    - jwilk 9y ago
      True, but irrelevant.
  - matthewrudy 9y ago
    This is kind of how it works in Hong Kong, but a bit more convoluted.

hashmp 9y ago

Bitcoin is not slow. It's fast, if you are prepared to pay for it. This is where the disagreement lies. Should the price of on chain transactions be reduced and remain low.

nathanvanfleet 9y ago
The article mentions this
rebuilder 9y ago
That's one way of putting it. Another way to look at the blocksize issue is: should the supply of transaction space be limited by free market mechanisms alone, or by committee decision/voting/negotiations?
- hashmp 9y ago
  There is an argument that block propagation and orphan rates acts as natural barrier to the blocksize. With a very large blocksize limit, miners who produce blocks which are very big, run the risk of a smaller block from a competing miner winning the race, as it is faster to validate and propagate over the network. This limiting factor should mean the blocksize converges to a size that the network can comfortably handle.
  - dgacmu 9y ago
    This isn't fundamental. The large-block miner can pre-stage copies of the block (before the nonce has been found) at a few replicas. If they successfully find a nonce, they blast the nonce to all of their replicas, which immediately disseminate the complete block.
grey-area 9y ago
Compared to existing payment processing networks (responses typically in < 1 sec), it is slow as molasses.
- 9y ago

rebuilder 9y ago

This doesn't even remotely address the scaling problem, such as it may be. I'm not keen on forced blocksize caps as I don't see how that kind of planned economy model is compatible with the free-market money ideas behind Bitcoin, but even an unlimited blocksize would be unlikely to truly solve scaling. Bitcoin simply doesn't scale very well because of the way transaction history need sto be stored. As long as the rate of blockchain growth can't be significantly reduced, transaction rate can't grow very much. So small block proponents are likely to be right in that on-chain scaling is unrealistic, but if the market must be forced by developers to adhere to an artificial limit, I think that in itself implies Bitcoin is unlikely to be able to grow very far as the market is unable to self-regulate.

GBiT 9y ago
Bitcoin CAN scale globally right now if remove 1 MB cap. If someone doesn't want to hold every transaction of blockchain they can use pruning, and some us us use it already. For a simple user, it's not worth to keep all blockchain, because it does not matter. they can't change it or include transaction into a new block if they not mining.
sanxiyn 9y ago
Block size is protocol's security parameter. Cap on block size is not artificial. Thought experiment: if block size is unlimited, would it affect security? The answer is obviously yes, so it's not artificial.
- erpellan 9y ago
  Satoshi added the block size cap as a DOS-prevention mechanism (to stop blocks from being bloated with 'dust' txns and grinding the network to a halt). It was done without any real discussion and the value was probably whatever felt right to him at the time. If he'd made it 10Mb, we'd be having this discussion in a few years time rather than now.
  - sanxiyn 9y ago
    Yes, I agree it is very reasonable to debate whether limit should be 1 MB or 10 MB or whatever. I don't think it is reasonable to say it should be unlimited, or decided by market, or such.

erikb 9y ago

> The bitcoin network simply wasn't designed to be able to handle the kind of volume it is experiencing as more people are beginning to use the currency, and the 1 megabyte "blocks" of transaction data that get uploaded to the blockchain are full. If you work in IT this is like a monthly meeting of the team. You ALWAYS hear "oh we are so suprised, it wasn't designed for such an amount of users/load/whatever". It's just not true. It's a show. And I really don't know why this argument STILL works. If you run 10 topics in parallel, 7 will report this exact reason. If you check them out closely 3 report that truthfully, but really let you wonder why management decided to put so stupid people on top of these projects in the first place. 4 actually have planned for this to happen, and where just not sure if they run into it this month or next month.

jgord 9y ago
Even the current linear architecture can certainly handle more that 3 transactions per second on modern hardware .. there is clearly a bottleneck.

jgord 9y ago

Not a great article. Perhaps best to downvote until a better one comes along. Things to consider, which most people can agree on : - SegWit2X [ segwit feature, followed by 2MB block size ] is seen as a compromise worth taking to move things forward past the current impasse, by a range of people who dislike SegWit and think an actual blocksize increase is urgently needed - There is an immediate scaling problem : The mean and median blocksize is converging on the max blocksize of 1MB, and transactions waiting to get into the block blow out on a daily basis to 20MB. This backlog of waiting transactions causes users to pay high fees to get their transaction to the front of the queue, and causes delays in processing/confirmation times. - there is a less urgent longer term scaling problem due to the linear architecture of the blockchain itself My personal viewpoint : - if you are only processing 3 transactions per second, there is substantial room for performance increases - SegWit may help slightly in alleviating transaction pressure, and a 2MB block size will help a bit more. Given the voracity of the debate, SegWit2X is a practical compromise we should adopt to move forward. The USD/BTC market seems to agree with this. - We do need a schedule for block increases over the next couple years so all parties have certainty, and so it doesn't create renewed havoc every few months. - blocksize is just the first of several engineering optimizations that could see transaction throughput on the same linear architecture increase over 1000x. eg. We have a 150GB full blockchain - it would be half the size on disk if compressed. - Even if LN or side chains are the way to scale, and only 0.1% of transactions are 'settled' on the main chain, we will still need a more efficient main blockchain, because the growth of transaction volumes will likely be exponential for the next decade. - some people think the blocksize is a fundamental part of the genius breakthrough in technology that is the blockchain, and so cannot be tinkered with. This is wrong. Proof-of-work, monetary supply, miner reward, chained hash of the blocks, longest block wins, distributed redundancy are fundamental ideas at the core of bitcoin .. but blocksize is merely a technical issue, an artificial limit that was there to make implementation simpler, and always assumed that it would need to be increased well before it became an issue.

rothbardrand 9y ago
Unless things have changed in the last week, your info on the backlog of transactions is out of date. There was a concerted spam campaign from April to June of this year that made the backlog grow and transaction fees go up, but that has ended around the time Segwit2X was getting committed. You also don't seem to understand that Segwit is an increase in the block size, up to about 4MB, and there are very good engineering reasons for keeping blocks smaller-- namely larger blocks increase centralization when the Great Firewall of China is taken into account.

baalimago 9y ago

bitcoin wont ever become useable since it's too easy to be anonymous. governments wants structure

mdns33 9y ago
governments can only do that much. there will come a government who will eventually succumb. its a free world you know.

mdns33 9y ago

worth discussing charlie lee, founder of litecoin proposal on how bitcoin and litecoin can work together to solve the scaling problem: https://segwit.org/my-vision-for-segwit-and-lightning-networks-on-litecoin-and-bitcoin-cf95a7ab656b https://segwit.org/my-vision-for-segwit-and-lightning-networ...

richardw 9y ago

Crypcocurrencies need to stop requiring us all to hold every transaction in one unified blockchain dump. There has to be some way to break the network out into shards while still preserving the distributed nature and ability to pay anyone. No matter what we do, moving and storing every single transaction is insane. It's like my bank account needing to know what every person in the world's purchases are this morning. I shouldn't need to know what some guy on the other side of the world spent his lunch money on, just to buy my own. What am I missing? Surely the uber com sci phd's have fully solved this?

GBiT 9y ago
You don't need to hold every transaction why do you think you have to keep all blockchain? Right now you can use pruning on a client like Core ar Unlimited or you can use light clients like Electrum.
- richardw 9y ago
  I do use a light wallet but the main blockchain doesn't have sharding as a primary design. It's gone from mb to many gb.
- honestlyreally 9y ago
  People who promote convenience without talking about the cost scare me the most.
ComputerGuru 9y ago
It's not like Bitcoin does it because it _wants_ to; in fact, semi-anonymity is a semi-goal of Bitcoin. It's just a tough problem to solve differently. I haven't heard of any recent updates, but I believe ZCoin was supposed to address this issue, to an extent.
Temasik 9y ago
Sounds like iota.org to me a blockchainless cryptocurrency based on directed arcyclic graph
buzzybee 9y ago

wildbunny 9y ago

Bitcoin hasn't solved the scaling problem. All these BIPs are just short term fixes which don't address the core problem. I opened a discussion thread on bitcointalk hoping to catch the attention of the core developers, but it seems they don't read that forum anymore. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2036368.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2036368.0

Torai 9y ago
I'm tired of Bitcoin's useless drama.
- eternalban 9y ago
  Useless to you and me, but quite a lot of fortunes are riding on this ponzi scheme.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
knocte 9y ago
> All these BIPs are just short term fixes which don't address > the core problem. Wrong, SegWit (BIP 91 and 141) solves transaction malleability, which in itself will allow new layers (off-chain) to be built on top of the first layer (on-chain), which will allow orders of magnitude more throughput on number of payments per month.
- olegkikin 9y ago
  Off-chain is, by definition, not Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself is still very limited in throughput, and will remain so until the block size is increased.
  - knocte 9y ago
    Wrong. When you sign a transaction off-chain, you're signing a real bitcoin transaction, which you choose (or your software) to not broadcast to the network for convenience reasons (as you will likely sign more transactions later).

auggierose 9y ago

Somehow Bitcoin reminds me of tulips.

basicplus2 9y ago

Even if the scaling problem was ever solved, what will one do when one runs out of all the power in the known universe to generate more Bitcoins.. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aek3za/bitcoin-co...