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There might be a misunderstanding here. Capacity does not increase with the number of nodes. The only thing the number of nodes tell you is the amount of users

There might be a misunderstanding here. Capacity does not increase with the number of nodes. The only thing the number of nodes tell you is the amount of users who participate without trusting a third party. This is literally the invention behind Bitcoin. A company that deploys a thousand nodes does absolutely nothing for the network. An end user who deploys just one, and transacts with it, has real value. Discussions around block size always include someone obsessed with storage, and that argument can go both ways. But storage is the least interesting aspect. Increased transactions per second means increased validations per second, which has a number of implications including increased latency in the peer to peer network. This affects mining protocols, orphan rates, mempool size, throttling algorithms etc. There are several interesting aspects, and storage is very far down the list. A lot of work has been done for the past few years to improve that situation, look at the new crypto library for a few concrete examples. This kind of work is what led the developers behind segwit to provide for a quadrupled block size. I am not familiar enough with the details to have an opinion if that is somehow an optimal block size, but that's where we are now that segwit locks in. I don't know what it is about block size that makes everyone and their mother so desperate for an opinion about it. People who have no clue about the underlying protocol or the various scaling properties of the involved algorithms pull a number out of the air and somehow that's their opinion of the matter. There are probably very interesting things to discuss here but it's completely drowned in noise of one single constant.

simias 9y ago
>There might be a misunderstanding here. Capacity does not increase with the number of nodes. The only thing the number of nodes tell you is the amount of users who participate without trusting a third party. This is literally the invention behind Bitcoin. A company that deploys a thousand nodes does absolutely nothing for the network. An end user who deploys just one, and transacts with it, has real value. I completely agree, my point is that even with full 8MB nodes the barrier of entry is not much higher than it is today with 1MB node. Or to put it an other way I don't think we'd have 10 times more nodes if block size was at 100kB. I postulate that the main barrier of entry right not is simply bothering to actually set up a node. At least in the "first world" the average joe has the resources available to run a full 8MB node without having to starve himself, both in terms of bandwidth[0] and storage[1]. So while there's some discussion to be had about what constitutes a safe amount of nodes online (Taek has some interesting points about that elsewhere in this thread) I still think it's pretty irrelevant in this blocksize debate. >But storage is the least interesting aspect. Increased transactions per second means increased validations per second, which has a number of implications including increased latency in the peer to peer network. This affects mining protocols, orphan rates, mempool size, throttling algorithms etc. There are several interesting aspects, and storage is very far down the list. That's a very interesting point and something I hadn't really thought about. I'm surprised though, given that nowadays the rule of thumb is "wait for 5 confirmations before accepting a transfer" it seems to me that the latency between the moment I issue a transaction to the network and the moment it's "mined" into a block is not that significant? I mean, at a rate of 8MB every 10 minutes you have the time to do a lot of crypto work on the nodes... [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/204952/average-internet-connection-speed-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/204952/average-internet-... [1] https://www.newegg.com/Desktop-Internal-Hard-Drives/SubCategory/ID-14?Tid=167523 https://www.newegg.com/Desktop-Internal-Hard-Drives/SubCateg...

simias 9y ago

>There might be a misunderstanding here. Capacity does not increase with the number of nodes. The only thing the number of nodes tell you is the amount of users who participate without trusting a third party. This is literally the invention behind Bitcoin. A company that deploys a thousand nodes does absolutely nothing for the network. An end user who deploys just one, and transacts with it, has real value. I completely agree, my point is that even with full 8MB nodes the barrier of entry is not much higher than it is today with 1MB node. Or to put it an other way I don't think we'd have 10 times more nodes if block size was at 100kB. I postulate that the main barrier of entry right not is simply bothering to actually set up a node. At least in the "first world" the average joe has the resources available to run a full 8MB node without having to starve himself, both in terms of bandwidth[0] and storage[1]. So while there's some discussion to be had about what constitutes a safe amount of nodes online (Taek has some interesting points about that elsewhere in this thread) I still think it's pretty irrelevant in this blocksize debate. >But storage is the least interesting aspect. Increased transactions per second means increased validations per second, which has a number of implications including increased latency in the peer to peer network. This affects mining protocols, orphan rates, mempool size, throttling algorithms etc. There are several interesting aspects, and storage is very far down the list. That's a very interesting point and something I hadn't really thought about. I'm surprised though, given that nowadays the rule of thumb is "wait for 5 confirmations before accepting a transfer" it seems to me that the latency between the moment I issue a transaction to the network and the moment it's "mined" into a block is not that significant? I mean, at a rate of 8MB every 10 minutes you have the time to do a lot of crypto work on the nodes... [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/204952/average-internet-connection-speed-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/204952/average-internet-... [1] https://www.newegg.com/Desktop-Internal-Hard-Drives/SubCategory/ID-14?Tid=167523 https://www.newegg.com/Desktop-Internal-Hard-Drives/SubCateg...