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If proof of stake proves itself to actually work, Bitcoin will adopt it. Migrating a 200 billion dollar network to an untested PoW proposal would be irresponsib

If proof of stake proves itself to actually work, Bitcoin will adopt it. Migrating a 200 billion dollar network to an untested PoW proposal would be irresponsible. Arbitrarily increasing blocksize without addressing propagation delay and centralization impacts is also irresponsible. Bitcoin has been tirelessly working on the scaling problem in a responsible way. SegWit will allow up to 12t/s. Mimble Wimble and Schnorr Signatures will further compress transaction size and increase t/s to roughly 20t/s. All this without increasing propagation delay (increasing blocksize). Lightning network further reduces the number of onchain transactions necessary. Rootstock adds ethereum compatible smart contracts to bitcoin as a side chain. All these technologies responsibly scale Bitcoin. Your comment implies Bitcoin is stagnant which to me implies you don't know what you're talking about.

spookthesunset 9y ago
> If proof of stake proves itself to actually work, Bitcoin will adopt it. I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Bitcoin still is having a holy war about increasing the blocksize. One side effect of this whole deal is it shows that it is incredibly hard, if not possible, to change a decentralized system. By its very design, it will be all but impossible to make any breaking changes to bitcoin at this point. > Lightning network further reduces the number of onchain transactions necessary. Besides being complete vaporware, I do love how the solution to Bitcoin's scaling problems is to not use it...
- etr-strike 9y ago
  Lightning isn’t vaporware. Follow the project on github, they are very active. Better yet, watch the first lightning transaction happen on mainnet which occurred just last week: https://youtu.be/a73Gz3Tvx3k https://youtu.be/a73Gz3Tvx3k With regards to blocksize, the only reason it’s not widely embraced is because it’s known to directly impact propagation delay. One side couldn’t care less about centralization, the other side cares dearly. SegWit was activated, which compresses transaction size and doubles transactions per second without impacting propagation delay. Mimble Wimble and Schnorr signatures are coming soon, which are also soft forks and compress transaction size even further. There’s plenty of change happening that are all very intelligent scaling solutions. Big blocks are not intelligent nor difficult to implement.
  - Beejeepa 9y ago
    It's not only vaporware, it's uneconomical. That demo doesn't withdraw Bitcoin - it locks it up. Two transactions for every channel. Lightning Network is just another bank, a third party with fees.
    - gruez 9y ago
      >Lightning Network is just another bank, a third party with fees. source? afaik it's open source and it charges no fees.
    - etr-strike 9y ago
      Strange definition of vaporware you have, considering I just showed you lightning network operating across three different implementations of the protocol on the main bitcoin network.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    The lightning network is not a decentralized solution. It gives more power/trust to a few large exchanges.
    - theWatcher37 9y ago
      This is by design. If you break bitcoin, such that it’s only usable by large financial institutions, you completely remove the decentralized nature that made it attractive in the first place. Congratulations guys, you made the banks SWIFT 2.0. I’m sure they appreciate it very much.
    - etr-strike 9y ago
      How is allowing two parties to transact off chain, and settle up later on chain, not a decentralized solution?
      - jondubois 9y ago
        Because of the cost involved in setting up a channel. It's still not suitable for paying for a coffee or restaurant for example... Unless the cafe/restaurant happens to have an existing channel with an exchange that you yourself happen to also have a channel with; then you pay through that exchange... You can see how in this hypothetical word, it would be better to have fewer exchanges... More centralization.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  > I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Bitcoin still is having a holy war about increasing the blocksize. It doesn't matter - it can fork. And if the fork offers something compelling, it will get used. Even Bitcoin Cash, which is not (very) compelling, is now tradable more than most altcoins.
- dbrgn 9y ago
  Complete vaporware? Uhm, no... https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-last-test-shows-bitcoin-scaling-solution-almost-ready/ https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-last-test-shows-bitcoin-s... There have even been successful atomic Bitcoin<->Litecoin cross-chain transactions with Lightning last month.
KirinDave 9y ago
I'll believe any of that will work when people don't cite Satoshi's holy insight as a reason why the block size shouldn't increase.
- etr-strike 9y ago
  It shouldn’t increase because simulations of increasing blocksize have demonstrated centralization. If we didn’t care about decentralization we’d just use a database.
  - yonatano 9y ago
    Could you point me to some sources that discuss simulation of the blockchain network? I would be interested to learn more.
    - etr-strike 9y ago
      Sure, here you go: http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23... Tl,dr: each additional kB in blocksize adds approximately 80ms of delay until the majority learns about a block.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    Why?
    - etr-strike 9y ago
      Why what? Why does increasing block size increase propagation delay? Here’s the research paper on it: http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23... Tl,dr: each additional kB after 1mb adds an additional 80ms in propagation delay. It’s not just bandwidth that’s the problem. Nodes need to validate the block, then communicate that block to other nodes who also need to validate. Big blockers are drinking Roger Ver koolaid. The man doesn’t even know how to program, yet has convinced an army of redditors he knows best.
rspeer 9y ago
20 entire transactions per second? Amazing! Who has ever heard of software that could do 20 things in a second?
- jwatte 9y ago
  What it does is not just arbitration things, but establish global consensus and an unalterable log of that consensus. If you've tried linking distributed Oracle databases between just a few different sites, you'd understand this has tons of failure cases and is, in fact, not a solved problem, even in the centralized world. (Bigtable probably gets the closest these days, if you want proprietary and not globally auditable.)
  - spookthesunset 9y ago
    > What it does is not just arbitration things, but establish global consensus and an unalterable log of that consensus. That is nice. But can I, and everybody else in the USA successfully use Bitcoin on Black Friday? According to the National Retail Foundation, in 2016 over 101 million people went out on black friday to buy something. If Bitcoin could somehow 10x its transaction rate to even 40 transactions per second (which it can't and probably never will) it would take almost 30 days to process every order. At its current rate of 4tps, you are looking at about 292 days--during which, according to Wolfram Alpha, Venus will have made 1.3 trips around the sun. So again, yeah, great job. Bitcoin solved some technical problem. Go team! But who gives a crap if some technical problem doesn't solve any real problem? Isn't that what we engineers exist to do? Solve real-world problems?
    - ryanlol 9y ago
      Do wire transfers solve no real problems? I do essentially all of my large transactions usinng bitcoin.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      Lightning Network protocol has reached v1.0 and they have demonstrated transacting real bitcoins instantaneously on youtube.
theWatcher37 9y ago
The lighting network completely undermines the entire purpose of bitcoin, and blockstreams seeming desire to sabotage bitcoin for daily use coincides suspiciously with their outside “investment”. If you read the original bitcoin white paper it is clearly evident that the purpose of bitcoin was as a currency. These insane fees, wait times, and rediculous technical decisions by core have made it such that bitcoin is becoming “bank coin” aka only used for settling between large groups and useless for individuals (unless you’re a speculator). This has to change
- vasilipupkin 9y ago
  I am not sure why it matters what the original purpose was. It seems that current consensus of bitcoin is to be a competitor to gold for store of value. there may be other cryptocurrencies that act more like currencies
  - lawn 9y ago
    > It seems that current consensus of bitcoin is to be a competitor to gold for store of value. Only made by the incompetent/corrupt developers. Regular users just don't want to pay outrageous fees.
    - vasilipupkin 9y ago
      what outrageous fees? you can send a billion dollars for 10 bucks.
      - oarsinsync 9y ago
        I'd be surprised if you weren't aware that the fee isn't proportional to the amount being transacted. A $10 fee on a $10 transaction is outrageous.
        vasilipupkin 9y ago
        right, but you can set the fee to 20 cents, if you are willing to wait for a confirm
PaulRobinson 9y ago
PoS will never be adopted by Bitcoin. The mining pools that have invested in PoW won't allow it. Every attempt to date to improve transaction rates on BTC have been hampered by a small group of developers who have a vested interest in it not scaling for reasons explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/informative_btc_vs_bch_articles/dl8v4lp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/info... Bitcoin won't get any of the improvements you hope it will because there is too much money vested in keeping it exactly how it is today.
- etr-strike 9y ago
  SegWit was activated. Lightning is working. Mimble Wimble and Schnorr signatures are in development. I understand big blockers are upset they didn’t get their way. They need to understand the reason big blocks don’t have consensus is that they increase propagation delays and propagation delays leads to centralization. Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues. Also, miners don’t determine consensus rules. If PoS works, another UASF initiative will arise and everyone running a node can decide the new PoW scheme. The fact that you don’t understand this leads me to believe you don’t have a good understanding of the technology yet.
  - lawn 9y ago
    You should realize block propagation is largely a solved problem using xthin, compact block and graphene. We could scale to 1GB and propagation would not be an issue. > Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues. Their strategy of stalling for the last couple of years is the least intelligent approach they could have taken. > Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues. Yes they do, that's the point of Bitcoin. > If PoS works, another UASF initiative will arise and everyone running a node can decide the new PoW scheme You mean if PoS works they can fork and use their altcoin. > The fact that you don’t understand this leads me to believe you don’t have a good understanding of the technology yet. The fact that you don't understand this leads me to believe you're either a Core shill or you have been seduced by their pretty words. The whitepaper makes all this clear.
tr4cefl0w 9y ago
Couldn’t have said better.
martindevans 9y ago
Is there a good place to start reading about all of these scaling proposals, and maybe keep up to date on new ones as they emerge? Failing that, got any good links to papers/blogposts about the ones you mentioned?
CodeWriter23 9y ago
12 or 20 transactions per second? Let me regale you with a story from my youth... Once upon a time, it was 1985 and I worked at a company that developed a “Transaction Processor”. A multiprocessor CP/M system, with a “4th Generation” integrated app development language, a data store with an mathematician-optimized b-tree indexing system, paired with the fastest 120MB drives we could find through a series of phone calls and sample evaluations. It would be considered a proto-server by today’s standards. We were so proud at Comdex, bragging about 60 t/s to anyone passing by. We had a gentleman visit our booth from one of the big 4 airlines. He asked us what we were going to do to get to 1800 t/s, because that was the load requirement for the reservation system he and his division were tasked with creating, deploying and maintaining. I’m fairly certain a currency system needs to scale beyond what a single airline needs in terms of transactions per second.
nikolay 9y ago
So, you pretty much admitted that Bitcoin is unfit and outside of the fact that many people are vested in it, a new project would be a better idea unless we're emotionally and financially tied to the prehistoric thing.

spookthesunset 9y ago

> If proof of stake proves itself to actually work, Bitcoin will adopt it. I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Bitcoin still is having a holy war about increasing the blocksize. One side effect of this whole deal is it shows that it is incredibly hard, if not possible, to change a decentralized system. By its very design, it will be all but impossible to make any breaking changes to bitcoin at this point. > Lightning network further reduces the number of onchain transactions necessary. Besides being complete vaporware, I do love how the solution to Bitcoin's scaling problems is to not use it...

etr-strike 9y ago
Lightning isn’t vaporware. Follow the project on github, they are very active. Better yet, watch the first lightning transaction happen on mainnet which occurred just last week: https://youtu.be/a73Gz3Tvx3k https://youtu.be/a73Gz3Tvx3k With regards to blocksize, the only reason it’s not widely embraced is because it’s known to directly impact propagation delay. One side couldn’t care less about centralization, the other side cares dearly. SegWit was activated, which compresses transaction size and doubles transactions per second without impacting propagation delay. Mimble Wimble and Schnorr signatures are coming soon, which are also soft forks and compress transaction size even further. There’s plenty of change happening that are all very intelligent scaling solutions. Big blocks are not intelligent nor difficult to implement.
- Beejeepa 9y ago
  It's not only vaporware, it's uneconomical. That demo doesn't withdraw Bitcoin - it locks it up. Two transactions for every channel. Lightning Network is just another bank, a third party with fees.
  - gruez 9y ago
    >Lightning Network is just another bank, a third party with fees. source? afaik it's open source and it charges no fees.
  - etr-strike 9y ago
    Strange definition of vaporware you have, considering I just showed you lightning network operating across three different implementations of the protocol on the main bitcoin network.
- jondubois 9y ago
  The lightning network is not a decentralized solution. It gives more power/trust to a few large exchanges.
  - theWatcher37 9y ago
    This is by design. If you break bitcoin, such that it’s only usable by large financial institutions, you completely remove the decentralized nature that made it attractive in the first place. Congratulations guys, you made the banks SWIFT 2.0. I’m sure they appreciate it very much.
  - etr-strike 9y ago
    How is allowing two parties to transact off chain, and settle up later on chain, not a decentralized solution?
    - jondubois 9y ago
      Because of the cost involved in setting up a channel. It's still not suitable for paying for a coffee or restaurant for example... Unless the cafe/restaurant happens to have an existing channel with an exchange that you yourself happen to also have a channel with; then you pay through that exchange... You can see how in this hypothetical word, it would be better to have fewer exchanges... More centralization.
akvadrako 9y ago
> I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Bitcoin still is having a holy war about increasing the blocksize. It doesn't matter - it can fork. And if the fork offers something compelling, it will get used. Even Bitcoin Cash, which is not (very) compelling, is now tradable more than most altcoins.
dbrgn 9y ago
Complete vaporware? Uhm, no... https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-last-test-shows-bitcoin-scaling-solution-almost-ready/ https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-last-test-shows-bitcoin-s... There have even been successful atomic Bitcoin<->Litecoin cross-chain transactions with Lightning last month.

KirinDave 9y ago

I'll believe any of that will work when people don't cite Satoshi's holy insight as a reason why the block size shouldn't increase.

etr-strike 9y ago
It shouldn’t increase because simulations of increasing blocksize have demonstrated centralization. If we didn’t care about decentralization we’d just use a database.
- yonatano 9y ago
  Could you point me to some sources that discuss simulation of the blockchain network? I would be interested to learn more.
  - etr-strike 9y ago
    Sure, here you go: http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23... Tl,dr: each additional kB in blocksize adds approximately 80ms of delay until the majority learns about a block.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  Why?
  - etr-strike 9y ago
    Why what? Why does increasing block size increase propagation delay? Here’s the research paper on it: http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23... Tl,dr: each additional kB after 1mb adds an additional 80ms in propagation delay. It’s not just bandwidth that’s the problem. Nodes need to validate the block, then communicate that block to other nodes who also need to validate. Big blockers are drinking Roger Ver koolaid. The man doesn’t even know how to program, yet has convinced an army of redditors he knows best.

rspeer 9y ago

20 entire transactions per second? Amazing! Who has ever heard of software that could do 20 things in a second?

jwatte 9y ago
What it does is not just arbitration things, but establish global consensus and an unalterable log of that consensus. If you've tried linking distributed Oracle databases between just a few different sites, you'd understand this has tons of failure cases and is, in fact, not a solved problem, even in the centralized world. (Bigtable probably gets the closest these days, if you want proprietary and not globally auditable.)
- spookthesunset 9y ago
  > What it does is not just arbitration things, but establish global consensus and an unalterable log of that consensus. That is nice. But can I, and everybody else in the USA successfully use Bitcoin on Black Friday? According to the National Retail Foundation, in 2016 over 101 million people went out on black friday to buy something. If Bitcoin could somehow 10x its transaction rate to even 40 transactions per second (which it can't and probably never will) it would take almost 30 days to process every order. At its current rate of 4tps, you are looking at about 292 days--during which, according to Wolfram Alpha, Venus will have made 1.3 trips around the sun. So again, yeah, great job. Bitcoin solved some technical problem. Go team! But who gives a crap if some technical problem doesn't solve any real problem? Isn't that what we engineers exist to do? Solve real-world problems?
  - ryanlol 9y ago
    Do wire transfers solve no real problems? I do essentially all of my large transactions usinng bitcoin.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    Lightning Network protocol has reached v1.0 and they have demonstrated transacting real bitcoins instantaneously on youtube.

theWatcher37 9y ago

The lighting network completely undermines the entire purpose of bitcoin, and blockstreams seeming desire to sabotage bitcoin for daily use coincides suspiciously with their outside “investment”. If you read the original bitcoin white paper it is clearly evident that the purpose of bitcoin was as a currency. These insane fees, wait times, and rediculous technical decisions by core have made it such that bitcoin is becoming “bank coin” aka only used for settling between large groups and useless for individuals (unless you’re a speculator). This has to change

vasilipupkin 9y ago
I am not sure why it matters what the original purpose was. It seems that current consensus of bitcoin is to be a competitor to gold for store of value. there may be other cryptocurrencies that act more like currencies
- lawn 9y ago
  > It seems that current consensus of bitcoin is to be a competitor to gold for store of value. Only made by the incompetent/corrupt developers. Regular users just don't want to pay outrageous fees.
  - vasilipupkin 9y ago
    what outrageous fees? you can send a billion dollars for 10 bucks.
    - oarsinsync 9y ago
      I'd be surprised if you weren't aware that the fee isn't proportional to the amount being transacted. A $10 fee on a $10 transaction is outrageous.
      - vasilipupkin 9y ago
        right, but you can set the fee to 20 cents, if you are willing to wait for a confirm

PaulRobinson 9y ago

PoS will never be adopted by Bitcoin. The mining pools that have invested in PoW won't allow it. Every attempt to date to improve transaction rates on BTC have been hampered by a small group of developers who have a vested interest in it not scaling for reasons explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/informative_btc_vs_bch_articles/dl8v4lp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/info... Bitcoin won't get any of the improvements you hope it will because there is too much money vested in keeping it exactly how it is today.

etr-strike 9y ago
SegWit was activated. Lightning is working. Mimble Wimble and Schnorr signatures are in development. I understand big blockers are upset they didn’t get their way. They need to understand the reason big blocks don’t have consensus is that they increase propagation delays and propagation delays leads to centralization. Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues. Also, miners don’t determine consensus rules. If PoS works, another UASF initiative will arise and everyone running a node can decide the new PoW scheme. The fact that you don’t understand this leads me to believe you don’t have a good understanding of the technology yet.
- lawn 9y ago
  You should realize block propagation is largely a solved problem using xthin, compact block and graphene. We could scale to 1GB and propagation would not be an issue. > Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues. Their strategy of stalling for the last couple of years is the least intelligent approach they could have taken. > Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues. Yes they do, that's the point of Bitcoin. > If PoS works, another UASF initiative will arise and everyone running a node can decide the new PoW scheme You mean if PoS works they can fork and use their altcoin. > The fact that you don’t understand this leads me to believe you don’t have a good understanding of the technology yet. The fact that you don't understand this leads me to believe you're either a Core shill or you have been seduced by their pretty words. The whitepaper makes all this clear.

tr4cefl0w 9y ago

Couldn’t have said better.

martindevans 9y ago

Is there a good place to start reading about all of these scaling proposals, and maybe keep up to date on new ones as they emerge? Failing that, got any good links to papers/blogposts about the ones you mentioned?

CodeWriter23 9y ago

12 or 20 transactions per second? Let me regale you with a story from my youth... Once upon a time, it was 1985 and I worked at a company that developed a “Transaction Processor”. A multiprocessor CP/M system, with a “4th Generation” integrated app development language, a data store with an mathematician-optimized b-tree indexing system, paired with the fastest 120MB drives we could find through a series of phone calls and sample evaluations. It would be considered a proto-server by today’s standards. We were so proud at Comdex, bragging about 60 t/s to anyone passing by. We had a gentleman visit our booth from one of the big 4 airlines. He asked us what we were going to do to get to 1800 t/s, because that was the load requirement for the reservation system he and his division were tasked with creating, deploying and maintaining. I’m fairly certain a currency system needs to scale beyond what a single airline needs in terms of transactions per second.

nikolay 9y ago

So, you pretty much admitted that Bitcoin is unfit and outside of the fact that many people are vested in it, a new project would be a better idea unless we're emotionally and financially tied to the prehistoric thing.