5 ms·

A trivial solution would be to increase the block size, but unfortunately Bitcoin Core developers refuse to do it, under the pretext that it will "increase cent

by mrb 9y ago

A trivial solution would be to increase the block size, but unfortunately Bitcoin Core developers refuse to do it, under the pretext that it will "increase centralization". In reality, a reasonable (2-4×) increase wouldn't. The amortized cost of running a full node able to support 2-4 times larger blocks is only $5 per month (http://blog.zorinaq.com/full-node-on-5-dollars/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/full-node-on-5-dollars/). The block propagation delay has also largely been solved with Compact Blocks which transmit a nominal 1MB block in ~20kB. Also, at least 2 on-chain scaling technologies are being developed that would easily let us increase block sizes: UTXO commitment sets can reduce long-term blockchain storage by 50×, and Graphene reduces the size of a 1MB broadcasted block by another order of magnitude, down to ~2kB.

nadaviv 9y ago
We've already got a 2x block-size/capacity increase in the form of SegWit. > increase the block size, but unfortunately Bitcoin Core developers refuse to do it This is simply untrue.
- alanfalcon 9y ago
  That’s not true at all in practice. If it were then we’d be seeing 2x as many transactions confirming after SegWit went live (we’re not).
  - warbiscuit 9y ago
    Segwit was a soft-fork upgrade. It only takes effect if you move to a Segwit compatible wallet and send from there. Which tells me people don't actually care enough, or they'd be doing that. Which makes me wonder about the validity of the majority of the complaints.
    - Daishiman 9y ago
      Maybe because nobody's using Bitcoin as a currency and it's all speculation. Currencies actually get used for transactions...
      - phaemon 9y ago
        That's an interesting theory, considering this story is about someone using Bitcoin for a transaction. EDIT: it's Friday, be nicer me
      - warbiscuit 9y ago
        That doesn't fit. Per bitinfocharts.com the coin with the highest txn rate is Ethereum, followed closely by Bitcoin. The others are far behind. I'd say it's seeing a lot of use.
  - nadaviv 9y ago
    The capacity was increased (more than doubled). Now its a matter of utilizing this new capacity by upgrading to SegWit-supporting wallets. Note that upgrading your own wallet to SegWit immediately saves you about 50% on mining fees, regardless of whether other network participants upgraded or not.
- cryptodogemoon 9y ago
  What? The core developers (employed by Blockstream) have intentionally kept the block size at 1MB in order to support the product they're attempting to develop (lightening network layers) which lets them facilitate federated payment processors siphoning fees out. It's a red herring to claim larger blocks increase centralization when it's just data storage. Drives are cheap. Centralization already happened once sha256 ASIC hardware was produced enmasse, preventing normal users from earning block rewards. The Bitcoin devs are lost in political dogmas, rather than improving the software for users. Thankfully there's alternative iterations.
  - johnvonneumann 9y ago
    Mate, please, stop with the Blockstream FUD. Blockstream make up only 20% of commits on Bitcoin. Find another strawman. There is not a 1MB limit, the limit was lifted with the implementation of segwit, as it changed the counting mechanism to weight instead of size, as a result, you can now push upto 3.7MB worth of tx into a block. Your proposition is wrong and people like you who constantly spout it should be called out and shamed like the fucking charlatans that you are. Blockstream has no financial interest in having Segwit, LN or anything else implemented. They have DEFENSIVE patents against the technology to stop trolls from holding up the development process. Please, locate yourself to Google Patents and search for Blockstream, then consult their Open Patents disclosure for further confirmation that you are wrong and have taken the bait of companies who have an interest in deriding the current decisions of Core. Core is implementing a variety of changes in the future that will put many businesses against Core out of business. Cross chain atomic swaps = exchanges More private transactions = anyone doing blockchain analysis (lolgarzik) Lightning Network = miners and anyone who processes transactions. The most painful part of your opinion is that you can't extrapolate network rules and see that in the next 2 years, rewards are going to half, meaning that if we drop TX fees now, it will make it even harder to pull miners back. By implementing a simple situation for on-chain settlement, miners still make decent returns down the line. Please, if you have any interest in Bitcoin, and have any decent brain about you, call people like this out for being the corporate sockpuppets they really are.
    - ericb 9y ago
makomk 9y ago
There's no such thing as a trivial change to the bitcoin consensus rules, especially when that change requires everyone to upgrade their software at once on pain of financial loss. We're talking something that's never been done before in the entire history of Bitcoin. Also, running a full Bitcoin node on a machine with a spinning rust disk and a relatively small amount of RAM is going to be hell - especially if that disk is heavily shared - because it has to do a lot of random reads from the chain state DB in order to retrieve outputs referenced by the transactions, with the number of reads scaling linearly with the block size. I think some of this may be skipped during the initial block download these days, but you can hit 1 minute plus per block easily just with the existing block size limit. It looks like the hosting provider he chose has some kind of SSD cache of unspecified size which might have helped, if everything fitted in it.
- hendzen 9y ago
  > There's no such thing as a trivial change to the bitcoin consensus rules, especially when that change requires everyone to upgrade their software at once on pain of financial loss. We're talking something that's never been done before in the entire history of Bitcoin. You mean... like this? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
  - makomk 9y ago
    No, not like that. Technically that only required a supermajority of miners to install the fixed version (and everyone to stop trading temporarily, but there wasn't much of that going on back then anyway). This would be harder because it really would require everyone to upgrade. BIP50 is probably closer; that did require everyone to upgrade over a relatively short timespan or work around the issue by changing a setting, ironically enough due to a latent bug triggered by increasing block size closer to the maximum 1MB.
  - johnchristopher 9y ago
    From the link: > The bad transaction no longer exists for people using the longest chain. Therefore, the bitcoins created by it do not exist either. While the transaction does not exist anymore, the 0.5 BTC that was consumed by it does. It appears to have come from a faucet and has not been used since.[7] Wait... so if you wait long enough then old transactions disappear ? I thought the whole blockchain could allow anyone to track every transactions ?
CPLX 9y ago
And here I was thinking a trivial solution would be to pay using US dollars instead of bitcoin. I guess I don't understand technology.
Rallerbabs 9y ago
This is typical bcash spindoctoring. It's not due to Bitcoin fees. It's due to BitPay's ridiculous fee mechanics. Bitcoin works perfectly well when the mempool isn't being logjammed by 1-satoshi transaction spammers, in a misguided attempt to make bcash overtake Bitcoin. Sometimes, the obvious solution isn't the right one. Bigger blocks means more bandwidth is needed for blocks found by miners, which are transmitted across the whole network. Our infrastructure isn't growing as fast as Bitcoin is. Ergo, on-chain scaling doesn't work. Scaling can only realistically be done off-chain. When in doubt, consult our boy Andreas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecPrwqjbGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecPrwqjbGw There is no block size big enough that it will prevent transaction spammers from logjamming the mempool. Big blocks are not in any way, shape or form a solution to any problem. Sorry, bcash supporters... Big blocks don't scale. Full stop.

by mrb 9y ago

nadaviv 9y ago

We've already got a 2x block-size/capacity increase in the form of SegWit. > increase the block size, but unfortunately Bitcoin Core developers refuse to do it This is simply untrue.

alanfalcon 9y ago
That’s not true at all in practice. If it were then we’d be seeing 2x as many transactions confirming after SegWit went live (we’re not).
- warbiscuit 9y ago
  Segwit was a soft-fork upgrade. It only takes effect if you move to a Segwit compatible wallet and send from there. Which tells me people don't actually care enough, or they'd be doing that. Which makes me wonder about the validity of the majority of the complaints.
  - Daishiman 9y ago
    Maybe because nobody's using Bitcoin as a currency and it's all speculation. Currencies actually get used for transactions...
    - phaemon 9y ago
      That's an interesting theory, considering this story is about someone using Bitcoin for a transaction. EDIT: it's Friday, be nicer me
    - warbiscuit 9y ago
      That doesn't fit. Per bitinfocharts.com the coin with the highest txn rate is Ethereum, followed closely by Bitcoin. The others are far behind. I'd say it's seeing a lot of use.
- nadaviv 9y ago
  The capacity was increased (more than doubled). Now its a matter of utilizing this new capacity by upgrading to SegWit-supporting wallets. Note that upgrading your own wallet to SegWit immediately saves you about 50% on mining fees, regardless of whether other network participants upgraded or not.
cryptodogemoon 9y ago
What? The core developers (employed by Blockstream) have intentionally kept the block size at 1MB in order to support the product they're attempting to develop (lightening network layers) which lets them facilitate federated payment processors siphoning fees out. It's a red herring to claim larger blocks increase centralization when it's just data storage. Drives are cheap. Centralization already happened once sha256 ASIC hardware was produced enmasse, preventing normal users from earning block rewards. The Bitcoin devs are lost in political dogmas, rather than improving the software for users. Thankfully there's alternative iterations.
- johnvonneumann 9y ago
  Mate, please, stop with the Blockstream FUD. Blockstream make up only 20% of commits on Bitcoin. Find another strawman. There is not a 1MB limit, the limit was lifted with the implementation of segwit, as it changed the counting mechanism to weight instead of size, as a result, you can now push upto 3.7MB worth of tx into a block. Your proposition is wrong and people like you who constantly spout it should be called out and shamed like the fucking charlatans that you are. Blockstream has no financial interest in having Segwit, LN or anything else implemented. They have DEFENSIVE patents against the technology to stop trolls from holding up the development process. Please, locate yourself to Google Patents and search for Blockstream, then consult their Open Patents disclosure for further confirmation that you are wrong and have taken the bait of companies who have an interest in deriding the current decisions of Core. Core is implementing a variety of changes in the future that will put many businesses against Core out of business. Cross chain atomic swaps = exchanges More private transactions = anyone doing blockchain analysis (lolgarzik) Lightning Network = miners and anyone who processes transactions. The most painful part of your opinion is that you can't extrapolate network rules and see that in the next 2 years, rewards are going to half, meaning that if we drop TX fees now, it will make it even harder to pull miners back. By implementing a simple situation for on-chain settlement, miners still make decent returns down the line. Please, if you have any interest in Bitcoin, and have any decent brain about you, call people like this out for being the corporate sockpuppets they really are.
  - ericb 9y ago

makomk 9y ago

There's no such thing as a trivial change to the bitcoin consensus rules, especially when that change requires everyone to upgrade their software at once on pain of financial loss. We're talking something that's never been done before in the entire history of Bitcoin. Also, running a full Bitcoin node on a machine with a spinning rust disk and a relatively small amount of RAM is going to be hell - especially if that disk is heavily shared - because it has to do a lot of random reads from the chain state DB in order to retrieve outputs referenced by the transactions, with the number of reads scaling linearly with the block size. I think some of this may be skipped during the initial block download these days, but you can hit 1 minute plus per block easily just with the existing block size limit. It looks like the hosting provider he chose has some kind of SSD cache of unspecified size which might have helped, if everything fitted in it.

hendzen 9y ago
> There's no such thing as a trivial change to the bitcoin consensus rules, especially when that change requires everyone to upgrade their software at once on pain of financial loss. We're talking something that's never been done before in the entire history of Bitcoin. You mean... like this? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
- makomk 9y ago
  No, not like that. Technically that only required a supermajority of miners to install the fixed version (and everyone to stop trading temporarily, but there wasn't much of that going on back then anyway). This would be harder because it really would require everyone to upgrade. BIP50 is probably closer; that did require everyone to upgrade over a relatively short timespan or work around the issue by changing a setting, ironically enough due to a latent bug triggered by increasing block size closer to the maximum 1MB.
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  From the link: > The bad transaction no longer exists for people using the longest chain. Therefore, the bitcoins created by it do not exist either. While the transaction does not exist anymore, the 0.5 BTC that was consumed by it does. It appears to have come from a faucet and has not been used since.[7] Wait... so if you wait long enough then old transactions disappear ? I thought the whole blockchain could allow anyone to track every transactions ?

CPLX 9y ago

And here I was thinking a trivial solution would be to pay using US dollars instead of bitcoin. I guess I don't understand technology.

Rallerbabs 9y ago

This is typical bcash spindoctoring. It's not due to Bitcoin fees. It's due to BitPay's ridiculous fee mechanics. Bitcoin works perfectly well when the mempool isn't being logjammed by 1-satoshi transaction spammers, in a misguided attempt to make bcash overtake Bitcoin. Sometimes, the obvious solution isn't the right one. Bigger blocks means more bandwidth is needed for blocks found by miners, which are transmitted across the whole network. Our infrastructure isn't growing as fast as Bitcoin is. Ergo, on-chain scaling doesn't work. Scaling can only realistically be done off-chain. When in doubt, consult our boy Andreas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecPrwqjbGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecPrwqjbGw There is no block size big enough that it will prevent transaction spammers from logjamming the mempool. Big blocks are not in any way, shape or form a solution to any problem. Sorry, bcash supporters... Big blocks don't scale. Full stop.