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I still don't really understand why people were so against a block size increase. I get that there are centralisation risks if the block size increases too muc

I still don't really understand why people were so against a block size increase. I get that there are centralisation risks if the block size increases too much, but it doesn't really seem as though increasing to 2mb really make such a big difference? Am I missing something?

wmf 9y ago
I think small blockers are concerned that short-term fixes like increasing the block size will cause long-term scaling solutions to never be developed, necessitating more and more short-term fixes.
- linuxps2 9y ago
  Which to me is just stupid - like taking 5 min to increase the blocksize is going to take away significant development effort from more novel solutions. Meanwhile, tx fees are stupidly high and bitcoin can't be used as a currency for small-ish transactions.
lawn 9y ago
There are no real technical arguments against increasing to 2MB, only political. The main actors against a block size increase are Core developers who are also part of a company called Blockstream. Blockstream's business model is about selling side chains. But why use side chains if you can use on chain transactions instead? Well if you limit on chain scaling users would be forced on to your side chains... The movement against the Segwit2x upgrade was so fierce precisely because it threatened to offset Core as the de facto Bitcoin client, making them loose their power. They profit heavily from censorship on the bitcoin mailing list, the "bitcoin" subreddit and bitcoin.org. Their consistent propaganda and abuse has now caused the miners and businesses to back down on the Segwit2x upgrade, which would have been a certainty with 95% hashpower and business support. Keep these things in mind and you should get a better picture.
- wol_ 9y ago
  peddle your conspiracy theories elsewhere.
- xorcist 9y ago
  There have been a number of technical arguments put forth on the mailing list, and the discussion is much wider than the few developers who work for Blockstream. It is easy to introduce bias when following development through secondary sources. The development mailing list is mostly non technical enough that interested Bitcoiners can follow along, which would perhaps facilitate a more nuanced understanding how protocol extension proposals are being developed.
  - lawn 9y ago
    Yes I do follow the moderated mailing list and also other more open ones. The argument still stands.
- hndamien 9y ago
  There is also the contention that increasing blocksize would make running full nodes harder (at least by some margin) which therefore means an increase in centralisation (by a proportional margin). It would also set a precedent that miners are in control (or alternatively it could be interpreted as no-one is in control). The question then transaction speed and low fees are more important than the marginal increase in centralisation. Core would argue that any increase in centralisation is too much. Not sure why they think middle men are acceptable though.
  - lawn 9y ago
    > There is also the contention that increasing blocksize would make running full nodes harder (at least by some margin) which therefore means an increase in centralisation (by a proportional margin) Yet there is no attempt to quantify by how much. The damage done to Bitcoin by full blocks is much more than what a potential increase to 2MB would cause. This zero tolerance policy rhymes extremely poorly when the fees makes Bitcoin more expensive to use than to run a full node. > It would also set a precedent that miners are in control (or alternatively it could be interpreted as no-one is in control). Miners are in control because the real power lies with them. The problem is that they aren't coordinated and so status quo is favored.
xiphias 9y ago
SegWit was a soft-fork block size increase with other scaling improvements. I'm strongly against having any hard fork in Bitcoin. The last Ethereum hard fork (when half of the devs wanted to cancel it because of the bug that was found) showed how dangerous it is. At this point Bitcoin is worth so much, that it's better to not touch it at all without a formal proof that the network is not harmed at all. The biggest difference Segwit2x would make in centralization is the fact that block propagation latency is already very slow, and if it gets to over 10 minute for the whole network, the network can split. Bitcoin is an amazing store of value, and those of us who hold the currency wouldn't accept any risk of increased centralization just because non-holders want low transaction fees (that can be very easily be created by a centralized system)
- lawn 9y ago
  Hard forks aren't dangerous. Monero has scheduled hard forks all the time. It's the best and cleanest way to upgrade. > The biggest difference Segwit2x would make in centralization is the fact that block propagation latency is already very slow, and if it gets to over 10 minute for the whole network, the network can split. Yet there's no research to remotely suggest a meager increase to 2MB would have any effect. Compact blocks and Xthin (and recently Graphene) also improves on this immensely. > Bitcoin is an amazing store of value, and those of us who hold the currency wouldn't accept any risk of increased centralization Typical black and white thinking. Bitcoin must have a primary use case that's not a store of value otherwise it will crash down when no new money is injected. > just because non-holders want low transaction fees Yeah because non-holders are the ones who want to use Bitcoin as was always intended. Pure holders are only in for the speculation. The title of Bitcoin's whitepaper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" not "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Store of Value System".
- ChrisClark 9y ago
  > The last Ethereum hard fork showed how dangerous it is. The last hard fork was on Oct 15, 2017. It did not split the chain, it went smoothly and added great new features. Ethereum has had many hard forks. Only the DAO one was controversial. Using hard forks to upgrade the network is smooth and works great.
- 9y ago
brighton36 9y ago
Andreas antonopolous sold a lot of believers on their investment as an investment in 'anarchy'. As such, any fork represents a dissolution of their original investment principle
hudon 9y ago
I'll copy a response I left below: The value of full nodes is widely understood by bitcoin contributors [0][1][2]. Increasing the block size directly increases the amount of resources required to run a full node. Increased bandwidth requirements is especially a problem. It is up to the candidate (s2x), not the incumbent (core) to show that no, it won't be harder to run full nodes, or to show that you can have just as much security by running an SPV node. Because the candidate has failed to back up their proposal with evidence that security is not harmed, the proposal should not move forward. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/3eq3y7/full_node_question/ctk4lnd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/3eq3y7/fu... [1] https://medium.com/@morcos/no2x-full-nodes-889c20100a8d https://medium.com/@morcos/no2x-full-nodes-889c20100a8d [2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node
- xwvvvvwx 9y ago
  Why would a full node be more secure than an SPV node? I had understood that SPV nodes store only the merkle root of all the transactions in each block, so as I understand it should be able to verify whether a given transaction is valid or not?
  - hudon 9y ago
    Peter Wuille provides one answer to this in the first link I shared: > SPV nodes (such as some mobile clients, and Multibit) place a blind trust in the majority of miners, without checking validity of the blockchain they produce. It still requires a majority of miners to mislead an SPV node, but they can make it believe anything (including "You received 10000000 BTC!"). The reason why this does not happen is because full nodes would not accept such blocks, and assuming a large portion of the ecosystem does rely on full nodes, miners who do this would not see their blocks accepted by the larger economy, resulting in them wasting money. Further, on this page, you can read about security considerations between light clients and full nodes: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security Basically, a network comprised of only SPV nodes and miners places the SPV nodes at the mercy of the miners. Because of how centralized and state-controlled mining is (see Russia and China), this would be a very easy way for states to attack bitcoin.
wol_ 9y ago
Segwit activation in August was a blocksize increase, and a much more elegant solution than just doubling the blocks. An agreement was made by a few corporate entities to allow for segwit after a long standoff. They also decided on doubling the blocksize later in the year to appease the miners. Miners reneged on the agreement when Bitcoin Cash or BCH was forked when a small minority thought a better solution was to allow miners to control blocksize with a consensus mechanism. In the end it was clear the agreement and the hard forks never had community support. Segwit2X was never about a blocksize increase, it was meant to seize control from the Bitcoin Core developers and switch development from the original Bitcoin repo to the newly created Bitcoin1 repo controlled by Jeff Garzik. It was not open to the Core developers and incompetently run, it was built on an old version of the software and resulting bugs were disingenuously blamed on Core developers. Had this been a success it would have signaled the transfer of control of Bitcoin from the many developers and contributors to corporate banking and wall street interests. it would have been the end of decentralized crypto network open to many and the start of a corporate controlled network open to only a few.
- lawn 9y ago
  > Segwit activation in August was a blocksize increase, and a much more elegant solution than just doubling the blocks Segwit is a technical failure as it was implemented in a soft fork as a hack. It's scaling is inefficient. Did you see the capacity increase when it got activated? It was abysmal. https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-fork-too-far-87d6e57a4179 https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-... It also decreases the security of the network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoFb3mcxluY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoFb3mcxluY > Had this been a success it would have signaled the transfer of control of Bitcoin from the many developers and contributors to corporate banking and wall street interests. it would have been the end of decentralized crypto network open to many and the start of a corporate controlled network open to only a few. Now who's pushing conspiracy theories?
  - wol_ 9y ago
    so countless bitcoin developers acting in their own self interest is somehow a sign of a Blockstream takeover, but handful of people that got together to decide on the fate of a fork with idiot one developer is business as usual. you'd have to be a moron to believe that. an article from Dec 2016 in no way disproves the reality of today. a huge amount of value has entered the network, fees are low and the number of transaction per block have increased, segwit adoption is increasing and the community is strongly in favor. I don't know this jaqen dufus, and and Rizun is an incompetent fool. The 'chief scientist' has no clout and his BU software was complete failure and joke in a long line of takeover attempts and subversions including classic and others. segwit is the most thoroughly reviewed code that's ever been written, a vulnerability in SSL was revealed and patched as a result of this work but if you don't like segwit please use BCH instead, lol.

wmf 9y ago

I think small blockers are concerned that short-term fixes like increasing the block size will cause long-term scaling solutions to never be developed, necessitating more and more short-term fixes.

linuxps2 9y ago
Which to me is just stupid - like taking 5 min to increase the blocksize is going to take away significant development effort from more novel solutions. Meanwhile, tx fees are stupidly high and bitcoin can't be used as a currency for small-ish transactions.

lawn 9y ago

There are no real technical arguments against increasing to 2MB, only political. The main actors against a block size increase are Core developers who are also part of a company called Blockstream. Blockstream's business model is about selling side chains. But why use side chains if you can use on chain transactions instead? Well if you limit on chain scaling users would be forced on to your side chains... The movement against the Segwit2x upgrade was so fierce precisely because it threatened to offset Core as the de facto Bitcoin client, making them loose their power. They profit heavily from censorship on the bitcoin mailing list, the "bitcoin" subreddit and bitcoin.org. Their consistent propaganda and abuse has now caused the miners and businesses to back down on the Segwit2x upgrade, which would have been a certainty with 95% hashpower and business support. Keep these things in mind and you should get a better picture.

wol_ 9y ago
peddle your conspiracy theories elsewhere.
xorcist 9y ago
There have been a number of technical arguments put forth on the mailing list, and the discussion is much wider than the few developers who work for Blockstream. It is easy to introduce bias when following development through secondary sources. The development mailing list is mostly non technical enough that interested Bitcoiners can follow along, which would perhaps facilitate a more nuanced understanding how protocol extension proposals are being developed.
- lawn 9y ago
  Yes I do follow the moderated mailing list and also other more open ones. The argument still stands.
hndamien 9y ago
There is also the contention that increasing blocksize would make running full nodes harder (at least by some margin) which therefore means an increase in centralisation (by a proportional margin). It would also set a precedent that miners are in control (or alternatively it could be interpreted as no-one is in control). The question then transaction speed and low fees are more important than the marginal increase in centralisation. Core would argue that any increase in centralisation is too much. Not sure why they think middle men are acceptable though.
- lawn 9y ago
  > There is also the contention that increasing blocksize would make running full nodes harder (at least by some margin) which therefore means an increase in centralisation (by a proportional margin) Yet there is no attempt to quantify by how much. The damage done to Bitcoin by full blocks is much more than what a potential increase to 2MB would cause. This zero tolerance policy rhymes extremely poorly when the fees makes Bitcoin more expensive to use than to run a full node. > It would also set a precedent that miners are in control (or alternatively it could be interpreted as no-one is in control). Miners are in control because the real power lies with them. The problem is that they aren't coordinated and so status quo is favored.

xiphias 9y ago

SegWit was a soft-fork block size increase with other scaling improvements. I'm strongly against having any hard fork in Bitcoin. The last Ethereum hard fork (when half of the devs wanted to cancel it because of the bug that was found) showed how dangerous it is. At this point Bitcoin is worth so much, that it's better to not touch it at all without a formal proof that the network is not harmed at all. The biggest difference Segwit2x would make in centralization is the fact that block propagation latency is already very slow, and if it gets to over 10 minute for the whole network, the network can split. Bitcoin is an amazing store of value, and those of us who hold the currency wouldn't accept any risk of increased centralization just because non-holders want low transaction fees (that can be very easily be created by a centralized system)

lawn 9y ago
Hard forks aren't dangerous. Monero has scheduled hard forks all the time. It's the best and cleanest way to upgrade. > The biggest difference Segwit2x would make in centralization is the fact that block propagation latency is already very slow, and if it gets to over 10 minute for the whole network, the network can split. Yet there's no research to remotely suggest a meager increase to 2MB would have any effect. Compact blocks and Xthin (and recently Graphene) also improves on this immensely. > Bitcoin is an amazing store of value, and those of us who hold the currency wouldn't accept any risk of increased centralization Typical black and white thinking. Bitcoin must have a primary use case that's not a store of value otherwise it will crash down when no new money is injected. > just because non-holders want low transaction fees Yeah because non-holders are the ones who want to use Bitcoin as was always intended. Pure holders are only in for the speculation. The title of Bitcoin's whitepaper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" not "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Store of Value System".
ChrisClark 9y ago
> The last Ethereum hard fork showed how dangerous it is. The last hard fork was on Oct 15, 2017. It did not split the chain, it went smoothly and added great new features. Ethereum has had many hard forks. Only the DAO one was controversial. Using hard forks to upgrade the network is smooth and works great.
9y ago

brighton36 9y ago

Andreas antonopolous sold a lot of believers on their investment as an investment in 'anarchy'. As such, any fork represents a dissolution of their original investment principle

hudon 9y ago

I'll copy a response I left below: The value of full nodes is widely understood by bitcoin contributors [0][1][2]. Increasing the block size directly increases the amount of resources required to run a full node. Increased bandwidth requirements is especially a problem. It is up to the candidate (s2x), not the incumbent (core) to show that no, it won't be harder to run full nodes, or to show that you can have just as much security by running an SPV node. Because the candidate has failed to back up their proposal with evidence that security is not harmed, the proposal should not move forward. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/3eq3y7/full_node_question/ctk4lnd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/3eq3y7/fu... [1] https://medium.com/@morcos/no2x-full-nodes-889c20100a8d https://medium.com/@morcos/no2x-full-nodes-889c20100a8d [2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node

xwvvvvwx 9y ago
Why would a full node be more secure than an SPV node? I had understood that SPV nodes store only the merkle root of all the transactions in each block, so as I understand it should be able to verify whether a given transaction is valid or not?
- hudon 9y ago
  Peter Wuille provides one answer to this in the first link I shared: > SPV nodes (such as some mobile clients, and Multibit) place a blind trust in the majority of miners, without checking validity of the blockchain they produce. It still requires a majority of miners to mislead an SPV node, but they can make it believe anything (including "You received 10000000 BTC!"). The reason why this does not happen is because full nodes would not accept such blocks, and assuming a large portion of the ecosystem does rely on full nodes, miners who do this would not see their blocks accepted by the larger economy, resulting in them wasting money. Further, on this page, you can read about security considerations between light clients and full nodes: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security Basically, a network comprised of only SPV nodes and miners places the SPV nodes at the mercy of the miners. Because of how centralized and state-controlled mining is (see Russia and China), this would be a very easy way for states to attack bitcoin.

wol_ 9y ago

Segwit activation in August was a blocksize increase, and a much more elegant solution than just doubling the blocks. An agreement was made by a few corporate entities to allow for segwit after a long standoff. They also decided on doubling the blocksize later in the year to appease the miners. Miners reneged on the agreement when Bitcoin Cash or BCH was forked when a small minority thought a better solution was to allow miners to control blocksize with a consensus mechanism. In the end it was clear the agreement and the hard forks never had community support. Segwit2X was never about a blocksize increase, it was meant to seize control from the Bitcoin Core developers and switch development from the original Bitcoin repo to the newly created Bitcoin1 repo controlled by Jeff Garzik. It was not open to the Core developers and incompetently run, it was built on an old version of the software and resulting bugs were disingenuously blamed on Core developers. Had this been a success it would have signaled the transfer of control of Bitcoin from the many developers and contributors to corporate banking and wall street interests. it would have been the end of decentralized crypto network open to many and the start of a corporate controlled network open to only a few.

lawn 9y ago
> Segwit activation in August was a blocksize increase, and a much more elegant solution than just doubling the blocks Segwit is a technical failure as it was implemented in a soft fork as a hack. It's scaling is inefficient. Did you see the capacity increase when it got activated? It was abysmal. https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-fork-too-far-87d6e57a4179 https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-... It also decreases the security of the network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoFb3mcxluY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoFb3mcxluY > Had this been a success it would have signaled the transfer of control of Bitcoin from the many developers and contributors to corporate banking and wall street interests. it would have been the end of decentralized crypto network open to many and the start of a corporate controlled network open to only a few. Now who's pushing conspiracy theories?
- wol_ 9y ago
  so countless bitcoin developers acting in their own self interest is somehow a sign of a Blockstream takeover, but handful of people that got together to decide on the fate of a fork with idiot one developer is business as usual. you'd have to be a moron to believe that. an article from Dec 2016 in no way disproves the reality of today. a huge amount of value has entered the network, fees are low and the number of transaction per block have increased, segwit adoption is increasing and the community is strongly in favor. I don't know this jaqen dufus, and and Rizun is an incompetent fool. The 'chief scientist' has no clout and his BU software was complete failure and joke in a long line of takeover attempts and subversions including classic and others. segwit is the most thoroughly reviewed code that's ever been written, a vulnerability in SSL was revealed and patched as a result of this work but if you don't like segwit please use BCH instead, lol.