7 ms·

8MB block means the block chain grows by 1,207,959,552 (~1GB) per day, or ~365GB per year. This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the d

8MB block means the block chain grows by 1,207,959,552 (~1GB) per day, or ~365GB per year. This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain, and more control is in the hands of the miners. I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners (should we just refer to it as greed?), but I do not understand the objection to SegWit which is essential for lightning to work. I am fairly convinced at this point that off-chain transactions as described in the lightning docs [1] is the future. The block chain cannot possibly support all the transactions, there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs. [1] https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/master/00-introduction.md https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/maste... Edit: If you're not familiar with lightning, you should read up on it. The gist of it (my understanding, I am not exactly a bitcoin expert) is that if I trust someone, there is no need to announce to the whole world that I just gave my kids ice cream money, it's between me and them. And it's instant. The blockchain is used only as last resort, when one of the parties does not cooperate as as agreed.

hossbeast 9y ago
And with SegWit about to lock in, lightning is beginning to look likely
MichaelGG 9y ago
Internet connection? It's under 128kbps, less than a 2 channel ISDN link. And for someone that cannot afford a 100$ drive every 5 years, toss the old blocks after saving a checkpoint and just keep the last X months plus UTXOs? How does this improve with offchain transactions? What's the point of validating the blockchain if it's no longer a peer to peer network? That can't be any better than validating from checkpoints.
- MichaelApproved 9y ago
  > It's under 128kbps, less than a 2 channel ISDN link. How long would it take you to download the initial data? I don't think a 2 channel ISDN link could ever catch up.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    I'm saying the extra connection is only that much. Right know such a link would take half a year to catch up. If it increased to 8MB, after a year the blockchain would be about half a TB, so with a 1Mbps connection you could catch up in 50 days. But again, you can't compare this to going offchain! You can never catch up with the private networks doing settlement on BTC. But if you just want to validate going forward, then you need 2GB of UTXO data, plus a checkpoint hash and you can validate from there on out.
- ve55 9y ago
  Not everyone running a node has a plethora of available resources for it. It would be great if we could keep scaling bitcoin by just increasing the blocksize, but by the time you get to a block size like 8MB or 32MB, things get really difficult. From a Bitfury paper on the subject [1]: 8MB blocksize requires: 411GB/year extra space, 1184kB/s average bandwidth, 35.4TB/year bandwidth, and 32GB RAM. If that isn't enough to scale, which it won't be if Bitcoin is to fulfill its goals of being able to compete with the currently leading payment networks, take a look at something like 32MB blocks: 32MB blocksize requires: 1643GB/year extra space, 4736kB/s average bandwidth, 141TB/year bandwidth, and 128GB RAM. Although these numbers are possible to meet, it's obvious that not everyone is going to have hardware like this just to run a Bitcoin node. So it's predicted that so many nodes will be excluded for larger blocksizes (90%+), that the decentralization will take a huge blow. [1] http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-size-1.1.1.pdf http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-siz..., page 4
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    And what kind of blow will decentralization take when no one wants to run a node that only serves the purpose of settlement for a few large players? The BW calculations are misleading - that counts transmitting the blockchain to other nodes. To validate transactions and participate, you don't need to upload it, only download. Also, if we consider transaction history irrelevant since Lightning or other offchain solutions are OK, then all that is needed is the last few blocks and UTXO. As Satoshi said, once client-only is in, it doesn't really matter, and the answer is to not care how big it gets. (Sure, quoting him isn't an end-all, but it shows the original design goals.) Also, none of this explains why an increase to say, 2MB was never done, unless it's a game of chicken.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Many (most?) people have a 1TB/mo cap.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    8MB blocks is only about 33GB/month.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      People won't even be able to start participating because they can't download more than 1TB in a month.
      - MichaelGG 9y ago
        They can start with just the UTXOs, 2GB, and the last few blocks plus a checkpoint.
        gruez 9y ago
        which has to be from a trusted source because you can't verify anything with just the UTXO + last few blocks.
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
        Indeed. My main concern is that core tech (e.g. the standard Bitcoin app) has never had a massive security breach. But the only way to use it is if consumers can realistically download the entire blockchain. I guess it was just a matter of time until this happened, though ideally it would've been many years rather than two years.
        MichaelGG 9y ago
        You always need a trusted source! So making the trust the first block or the millionth... Not sure there's much difference.
smokeyj 9y ago
1tb drive = $50. 1 year of data costs about $16. > I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners Bigger blocks = more supply. Wouldn't the cost go down?
- jstanley 9y ago
  The cost per byte would go down but the number of bytes would go up.
- statoshi 9y ago
  Transaction fees would go down while the cost of operating a fully validating node would go up.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
ve55 9y ago
It's true that decentralization will decrease if/when Bitcoin nodes require significantly more resources to run. But LN isn't good for decentralization either. Most big blockers want to maintain decentralization as well, they just think that it's better to try to scale the blockchain instead of scale via third party companies.
- jstanley 9y ago
  Anybody can run a LN hub just as easily as they can run a Bitcoin node. You don't need to be a company to run a LN hub.
simias 9y ago
I always thought that was a weak argument. There are currently 8403 nodes online if I believe https://bitnodes.21.co/ https://bitnodes.21.co/, that's not exactly impressive. If a big miner wanted to take over the majority of the nodes they could probably afford to just spawn spawn 10 thousand nodes. Not that it will do them a lot of good, what matters most is what the exchanges and other important economic entities handling bitcoins consider "the real bitcoin", having a majority of nodes won't do much. There's simply not enough incentives for Bitcoin users to spawn a node so most people prefer to use a light wallet. Furthermore ~400GB per year is not particularly insane, you can get a 6TB drive for less than $200 and that'll be enough to store more than 15 years worth of blockchain. As for bandwidth it amounts to less than 14kB/s on average. >there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs Maybe, but I'm a bit surprised that so many people believe that LN will be successful when we have so little data on how it'll actually work. But I'm going to repeat myself, I already explained my concerns here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14759965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14759965 (with some insightful replies). In particular I can't really imagine how LN could reach a Visa-level number of transactions without having a few mega "nexus nodes" concentrating most of the open LN channels. That would give those nodes some power as they could decide who they pair with (which channels they open) which would be a big blow to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin. The idea that every bitcoin user would each end up having a handful of channels open and we'd keep routing around the graph (with all the balancing issues it involves) to pay everything seems rather optimistic and aligns poorly with real-world incentives.
- jstanley 9y ago
  > There's simply not enough incentives for Bitcoin users to spawn a node so most people prefer to use a light wallet. Bitcoin users are important economic entities. There is no distinction between a "consumer" and a "business" in Bitcoin. Everyone is a user. Everyone sends and receives payments.
  - ve55 9y ago
    Users don't have to run a full node to use it though. I'd bet that most users just use a 3rd party web wallet (such as Coinbase), and thus are contributing nothing to the network in terms of decentralization.
lmm 9y ago
> I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners (should we just refer to it as greed?) It should mean lower transaction fees for users, but more transactions are possible so the miners make it up on volume. Win-win. > I am fairly convinced at this point that off-chain transactions as described in the lightning docs [1] is the future. The block chain cannot possibly support all the transactions, there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs. If you trust your counterparty you wouldn't be using bitcoin in the first place. SegWit/lightning seems to undermine most of the point of bitcoin; certainly moving to transactions happening off-chain would be a radical change and it's not clear it would preserve bitcoin's positives (e.g. decentralization). Whereas increasing the block size is a simple, well-understood change.
disconnected 9y ago
> This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain, and more control is in the hands of the miners. Isn't this inevitable? Once demand of anything increases beyond a certain threshold, individuals can no longer supply enough of that thing to satisfy that demand, because they are overwhelmed by the costs of logistics, storage, maintenance and so on. In the case of bitcoin, I imagine that soon you'll need to have dedicated machines for this task. Not a lot of people can afford to have one - or several, for redundancy - machines to do it. Hence, the "power" - like in anything else - is in the hands of those that are willing to make a significant investment to keep things running. The payoff for them is that they can profit from providing this service. If I understand correctly, this comes in the form of transaction fees. Or did you think that bitcoin could rise to the level of, say, Visa or Paypal on the backs of volunteers? Bitcoin isn't even "mainstream" yet, and the network is already buckling. I think this outcome was more than predictable.
grey-area 9y ago
Decentralised, consistent, fast. Pick two.
mrb 9y ago
"8MB block means the block chain grows by 1,207,959,552 (~1GB) per day, or ~365GB per year. This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain" No. You provide no stats, no costs, to justify why 8MB is prohibitive while 1MB is fine. In reality 8MB blocks remain easily affordable. The limit where it starts being quite costly for an individual to run a full node is around 100MB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825934 And by the time we get to 100MB, computing, networking, storage technology will have improved and let us go even further.
andrewla 9y ago
There's no reason to expect that every block, especially in the near term, will approach that 8MB limit. It will scale with actual transaction volume instead, as Bitcoin did before the 1MB limit became a problem -- 1MB blocks were exceedingly rare; the block growth was fairly steady until it hit the upper bound. [1] It's reasonable to expect that the block size curve will continue to rise with transaction volume, but capping out the full 8MB is unlikely for some time. [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-size.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-size.html
deweller 9y ago
> I do not understand the objection to SegWit which is essential for lightning to work. Let's talk about the realities of Lightning for a minute. Lightning is an interesting technology solution to scaling transactions and settling on the blockchain. But realize that there are significant drawbacks. In order to spend anything on the lightning network, you need to have funds locked in a channel with a hub. And you can only spend the maximum that is in your hub. Likewise, you can only receive up to the maximum that the hub has put in the channel. In other words, your net credit or debit balance can't exceed the maximum put in by the other side. There are some significant user experience drawbacks to this approach. I want to send someone $100, but I only have $50 in my channel. So now I need send $50 more of bitcoin and wait 20 minutes for confirmations. Then I can send the $100. It is even worse if I want to receive $100. Now the hub (bank?) has to approve my request to "receive" $100 because it costs them fees and capital to fund the channel. Make no mistake, the hubs will pass these fees on to you, the consumer. Suddenly this starts to look a little more like Paypal then we want. Granted it is a better version of Paypal - there can be multiple, interoperable hubs - but with small blocks, funding transactions will not be cheap. In a small block world, Lightning network fees will likely be more than you think. It could easily cost $10 worth of bitcoin for both sides to fund a $1000 channel. Why would I want to tie up $1000 to use this. I'd rather just pay the 3% to send via Paypal.
- VMG 9y ago
  Why should lightning fees be high if there is an open market for hubs and they compete on fees?
  - simias 9y ago
    Running a hub could end up being expensive as you need a massive amount of "collateral" to lock in your channels. A hub is rather worthless if it only provides $1 channels to all its "subordinates". If you have a huge "bank of america" hub connecting to hundred of thousands of entities through large channels on one side and a small "mylightninghub.io" with a dozen of people through $10 channels you better hope that they're extremely competitive on fees to make up for it. It's almost exactly like the credit card business currently. If I come to you and tell you "Here's the SimiasCard, it has extremely low fees and great advantages! But you're limited to $5 a day and it's basically accepted nowhere." Would you take it?
h1d 9y ago
Wouldn't be full from day 1, that's for sure.
rictic 9y ago
> I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners (should we just refer to it as greed?) As space in blocks becomes crowded we should expect transaction fees to grow, and indeed they have: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... If space in blocks is abundant then transaction fees should settle at the approximate per byte cost to the miner of the additional transaction. I would expect smaller block sizes to be more profitable for miners, all else being equal (e.g. ignoring that high transaction costs make BTC less valuable).
imaginenore 9y ago
1) It will grow by 1GB/day only if the blocks are full. Which they won't be for a long time, unless that branch becomes much more popular. 2) 8TB drive is $175 on Amazon. That alone can hold ~1 thousand days of full blocks. That's almost 3 years worth of blocks. By then the HDD prices will likely be even lower. 3) If some regular user will want to mess with the whole blockchain (which is such a strange argument, most don't care for it), downloading 8TB of data takes less than 18 hours on a gigabit connection. It will take years to get to 8TB. 4) There's no real objection to SegWit, as long as it comes with the large blocks. But consider what happened with Segwit2X - as soon as Segwit support solidified, a talk of ditching the 2MB extension started, a classic bait and switch. It's all over /r/bitcoin.

hossbeast 9y ago

And with SegWit about to lock in, lightning is beginning to look likely

MichaelGG 9y ago

Internet connection? It's under 128kbps, less than a 2 channel ISDN link. And for someone that cannot afford a 100$ drive every 5 years, toss the old blocks after saving a checkpoint and just keep the last X months plus UTXOs? How does this improve with offchain transactions? What's the point of validating the blockchain if it's no longer a peer to peer network? That can't be any better than validating from checkpoints.

MichaelApproved 9y ago
> It's under 128kbps, less than a 2 channel ISDN link. How long would it take you to download the initial data? I don't think a 2 channel ISDN link could ever catch up.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  I'm saying the extra connection is only that much. Right know such a link would take half a year to catch up. If it increased to 8MB, after a year the blockchain would be about half a TB, so with a 1Mbps connection you could catch up in 50 days. But again, you can't compare this to going offchain! You can never catch up with the private networks doing settlement on BTC. But if you just want to validate going forward, then you need 2GB of UTXO data, plus a checkpoint hash and you can validate from there on out.
ve55 9y ago
Not everyone running a node has a plethora of available resources for it. It would be great if we could keep scaling bitcoin by just increasing the blocksize, but by the time you get to a block size like 8MB or 32MB, things get really difficult. From a Bitfury paper on the subject [1]: 8MB blocksize requires: 411GB/year extra space, 1184kB/s average bandwidth, 35.4TB/year bandwidth, and 32GB RAM. If that isn't enough to scale, which it won't be if Bitcoin is to fulfill its goals of being able to compete with the currently leading payment networks, take a look at something like 32MB blocks: 32MB blocksize requires: 1643GB/year extra space, 4736kB/s average bandwidth, 141TB/year bandwidth, and 128GB RAM. Although these numbers are possible to meet, it's obvious that not everyone is going to have hardware like this just to run a Bitcoin node. So it's predicted that so many nodes will be excluded for larger blocksizes (90%+), that the decentralization will take a huge blow. [1] http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-size-1.1.1.pdf http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/block-siz..., page 4
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  And what kind of blow will decentralization take when no one wants to run a node that only serves the purpose of settlement for a few large players? The BW calculations are misleading - that counts transmitting the blockchain to other nodes. To validate transactions and participate, you don't need to upload it, only download. Also, if we consider transaction history irrelevant since Lightning or other offchain solutions are OK, then all that is needed is the last few blocks and UTXO. As Satoshi said, once client-only is in, it doesn't really matter, and the answer is to not care how big it gets. (Sure, quoting him isn't an end-all, but it shows the original design goals.) Also, none of this explains why an increase to say, 2MB was never done, unless it's a game of chicken.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
Many (most?) people have a 1TB/mo cap.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  8MB blocks is only about 33GB/month.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    People won't even be able to start participating because they can't download more than 1TB in a month.
    - MichaelGG 9y ago
      They can start with just the UTXOs, 2GB, and the last few blocks plus a checkpoint.
      - gruez 9y ago
        which has to be from a trusted source because you can't verify anything with just the UTXO + last few blocks.
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
        Indeed. My main concern is that core tech (e.g. the standard Bitcoin app) has never had a massive security breach. But the only way to use it is if consumers can realistically download the entire blockchain. I guess it was just a matter of time until this happened, though ideally it would've been many years rather than two years.
        MichaelGG 9y ago
        You always need a trusted source! So making the trust the first block or the millionth... Not sure there's much difference.

smokeyj 9y ago

1tb drive = $50. 1 year of data costs about $16. > I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners Bigger blocks = more supply. Wouldn't the cost go down?

jstanley 9y ago
The cost per byte would go down but the number of bytes would go up.
statoshi 9y ago
Transaction fees would go down while the cost of operating a fully validating node would go up.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

ve55 9y ago

It's true that decentralization will decrease if/when Bitcoin nodes require significantly more resources to run. But LN isn't good for decentralization either. Most big blockers want to maintain decentralization as well, they just think that it's better to try to scale the blockchain instead of scale via third party companies.

jstanley 9y ago
Anybody can run a LN hub just as easily as they can run a Bitcoin node. You don't need to be a company to run a LN hub.

simias 9y ago

I always thought that was a weak argument. There are currently 8403 nodes online if I believe https://bitnodes.21.co/ https://bitnodes.21.co/, that's not exactly impressive. If a big miner wanted to take over the majority of the nodes they could probably afford to just spawn spawn 10 thousand nodes. Not that it will do them a lot of good, what matters most is what the exchanges and other important economic entities handling bitcoins consider "the real bitcoin", having a majority of nodes won't do much. There's simply not enough incentives for Bitcoin users to spawn a node so most people prefer to use a light wallet. Furthermore ~400GB per year is not particularly insane, you can get a 6TB drive for less than $200 and that'll be enough to store more than 15 years worth of blockchain. As for bandwidth it amounts to less than 14kB/s on average. >there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs Maybe, but I'm a bit surprised that so many people believe that LN will be successful when we have so little data on how it'll actually work. But I'm going to repeat myself, I already explained my concerns here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14759965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14759965 (with some insightful replies). In particular I can't really imagine how LN could reach a Visa-level number of transactions without having a few mega "nexus nodes" concentrating most of the open LN channels. That would give those nodes some power as they could decide who they pair with (which channels they open) which would be a big blow to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin. The idea that every bitcoin user would each end up having a handful of channels open and we'd keep routing around the graph (with all the balancing issues it involves) to pay everything seems rather optimistic and aligns poorly with real-world incentives.

jstanley 9y ago
> There's simply not enough incentives for Bitcoin users to spawn a node so most people prefer to use a light wallet. Bitcoin users are important economic entities. There is no distinction between a "consumer" and a "business" in Bitcoin. Everyone is a user. Everyone sends and receives payments.
- ve55 9y ago
  Users don't have to run a full node to use it though. I'd bet that most users just use a 3rd party web wallet (such as Coinbase), and thus are contributing nothing to the network in terms of decentralization.

lmm 9y ago

> I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners (should we just refer to it as greed?) It should mean lower transaction fees for users, but more transactions are possible so the miners make it up on volume. Win-win. > I am fairly convinced at this point that off-chain transactions as described in the lightning docs [1] is the future. The block chain cannot possibly support all the transactions, there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs. If you trust your counterparty you wouldn't be using bitcoin in the first place. SegWit/lightning seems to undermine most of the point of bitcoin; certainly moving to transactions happening off-chain would be a radical change and it's not clear it would preserve bitcoin's positives (e.g. decentralization). Whereas increasing the block size is a simple, well-understood change.

disconnected 9y ago

> This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain, and more control is in the hands of the miners. Isn't this inevitable? Once demand of anything increases beyond a certain threshold, individuals can no longer supply enough of that thing to satisfy that demand, because they are overwhelmed by the costs of logistics, storage, maintenance and so on. In the case of bitcoin, I imagine that soon you'll need to have dedicated machines for this task. Not a lot of people can afford to have one - or several, for redundancy - machines to do it. Hence, the "power" - like in anything else - is in the hands of those that are willing to make a significant investment to keep things running. The payoff for them is that they can profit from providing this service. If I understand correctly, this comes in the form of transaction fees. Or did you think that bitcoin could rise to the level of, say, Visa or Paypal on the backs of volunteers? Bitcoin isn't even "mainstream" yet, and the network is already buckling. I think this outcome was more than predictable.

grey-area 9y ago

Decentralised, consistent, fast. Pick two.

mrb 9y ago

"8MB block means the block chain grows by 1,207,959,552 (~1GB) per day, or ~365GB per year. This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain" No. You provide no stats, no costs, to justify why 8MB is prohibitive while 1MB is fine. In reality 8MB blocks remain easily affordable. The limit where it starts being quite costly for an individual to run a full node is around 100MB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825934 And by the time we get to 100MB, computing, networking, storage technology will have improved and let us go even further.

andrewla 9y ago

There's no reason to expect that every block, especially in the near term, will approach that 8MB limit. It will scale with actual transaction volume instead, as Bitcoin did before the 1MB limit became a problem -- 1MB blocks were exceedingly rare; the block growth was fairly steady until it hit the upper bound. [1] It's reasonable to expect that the block size curve will continue to rise with transaction volume, but capping out the full 8MB is unlikely for some time. [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-size.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-size.html

deweller 9y ago

> I do not understand the objection to SegWit which is essential for lightning to work. Let's talk about the realities of Lightning for a minute. Lightning is an interesting technology solution to scaling transactions and settling on the blockchain. But realize that there are significant drawbacks. In order to spend anything on the lightning network, you need to have funds locked in a channel with a hub. And you can only spend the maximum that is in your hub. Likewise, you can only receive up to the maximum that the hub has put in the channel. In other words, your net credit or debit balance can't exceed the maximum put in by the other side. There are some significant user experience drawbacks to this approach. I want to send someone $100, but I only have $50 in my channel. So now I need send $50 more of bitcoin and wait 20 minutes for confirmations. Then I can send the $100. It is even worse if I want to receive $100. Now the hub (bank?) has to approve my request to "receive" $100 because it costs them fees and capital to fund the channel. Make no mistake, the hubs will pass these fees on to you, the consumer. Suddenly this starts to look a little more like Paypal then we want. Granted it is a better version of Paypal - there can be multiple, interoperable hubs - but with small blocks, funding transactions will not be cheap. In a small block world, Lightning network fees will likely be more than you think. It could easily cost $10 worth of bitcoin for both sides to fund a $1000 channel. Why would I want to tie up $1000 to use this. I'd rather just pay the 3% to send via Paypal.

VMG 9y ago
Why should lightning fees be high if there is an open market for hubs and they compete on fees?
- simias 9y ago
  Running a hub could end up being expensive as you need a massive amount of "collateral" to lock in your channels. A hub is rather worthless if it only provides $1 channels to all its "subordinates". If you have a huge "bank of america" hub connecting to hundred of thousands of entities through large channels on one side and a small "mylightninghub.io" with a dozen of people through $10 channels you better hope that they're extremely competitive on fees to make up for it. It's almost exactly like the credit card business currently. If I come to you and tell you "Here's the SimiasCard, it has extremely low fees and great advantages! But you're limited to $5 a day and it's basically accepted nowhere." Would you take it?

h1d 9y ago

Wouldn't be full from day 1, that's for sure.

rictic 9y ago

> I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners (should we just refer to it as greed?) As space in blocks becomes crowded we should expect transaction fees to grow, and indeed they have: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... If space in blocks is abundant then transaction fees should settle at the approximate per byte cost to the miner of the additional transaction. I would expect smaller block sizes to be more profitable for miners, all else being equal (e.g. ignoring that high transaction costs make BTC less valuable).

imaginenore 9y ago

1) It will grow by 1GB/day only if the blocks are full. Which they won't be for a long time, unless that branch becomes much more popular. 2) 8TB drive is $175 on Amazon. That alone can hold ~1 thousand days of full blocks. That's almost 3 years worth of blocks. By then the HDD prices will likely be even lower. 3) If some regular user will want to mess with the whole blockchain (which is such a strange argument, most don't care for it), downloading 8TB of data takes less than 18 hours on a gigabit connection. It will take years to get to 8TB. 4) There's no real objection to SegWit, as long as it comes with the large blocks. But consider what happened with Segwit2X - as soon as Segwit support solidified, a talk of ditching the 2MB extension started, a classic bait and switch. It's all over /r/bitcoin.