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Seems you’ve bought into Roger Ver’s snake oil. 1mb limit isn’t stupid, it’s what creates the fee market which makes spamming the blockchain very costly and kee

Seems you’ve bought into Roger Ver’s snake oil. 1mb limit isn’t stupid, it’s what creates the fee market which makes spamming the blockchain very costly and keeps blockchain size in check. Already you wouldn’t be able to sync the ethereum chain from genesis block, I can still do that on raspberry pi node in less than two weeks. Whether the limit should be upped is still a question up for debate but the reason it wasn’t yet is because there was no consensus about it and contentious hardforks are dangerous.

cowpig 9y ago
> Seems you’ve bought into Roger Ver’s snake oil. I've heard this a few times online despite not really knowing anything about Roger Ver. I am capable of coming to logical conclusions on my own. > 1mb limit isn’t stupid, it’s what creates the fee market which makes spamming the blockchain very costly and keeps blockchain size in check. Very costly in the sense that an individual Bitcoin transaction curently costs about $20, an order of magnitude more than my bank transfers cost. > Already you wouldn’t be able to sync the ethereum chain from genesis block, I can still do that on raspberry pi node in less than two weeks. I literally synced the Ethereum chain on my laptop last weekend. > Whether the limit should be upped is still a question up for debate This is only true if you are using the phrase "up for debate" in the sense that smoking being bad for you is up for debate, or that we should do something about climate change is up for debate, or that net neutrality is up for debate: there are powerful self-interested actors for whom the obvious conclusion is expensive.
- keymone 9y ago
  > Very costly in the sense that an individual Bitcoin transaction curently costs about $20 you've cherry-picked the exact point in time when due to various factors ("civil war" between bitcoin and bitcoin cash supporters, propaganda campaigns, price rally) transaction fees are at their peak. if you look at the graph - https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#all https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#all you'll realize that for majority of this year transaction fees were well below 50c. this is what happens if you blindly believe the echo chamber. besides, i'm not convinved all and every transaction belong on the chain. chain provides bunch of very strong guarantees that no other system in the world provides - it's ridiculous to claim that those guarantees are not worth anything. > I literally synced the Ethereum chain on my laptop last weekend. lol, nope. let me guess, `geth --fast`? well, i suggest you go read up on what `--fast` means. i challenge you to try syncing from the genesis block. > This is only true if you are using the phrase "up for debate" in the sense that smoking being bad for you is up for debate no, it is literally up for debate. there is a multitude of bottlenecks involved in having a healthy blockchain and a network around it, they are all affected by bumping the blocksize in non-trivial ways through secondary and tertiary effects. and it's not even obvious we can handle the primary effect of growing blockchain and utxo set - that quite literally leads to centralization of full nodes via making it prohibitively expensive to run it which runs against one of the core tenets of bitcoin itself.
  - cowpig 9y ago
    > you've cherry-picked the exact point in time... I picked this number because it's what I paid yesterday > lol, nope. let me guess, `geth --fast`? well, i suggest you go read up on what `--fast` means. i challenge you to try syncing from the genesis block. I used Parity, and instead of suggesting I "go read up on" something I already understand, maybe you'd be more convincing if you made an argument as to why the difference should matter (it doesn't). > bunch of broad, abstract claims I can't argue with any of those because you didn't provide any reasoning or facts to address.
    - keymone 9y ago
      > I picked this number because it's what I paid yesterday right, so you got unlucky and now you're sad, i get it. just don't start misrepresenting what's actually happening. > the rest there is plenty written on both scaling and checkpointing/snapshotting, seems you've picked your side, don't see the point spending my sunday evening convincing you of anything. time will tell.
      - ericb 9y ago
        > there is plenty written on both scaling and checkpointing/snapshotting, Not the op, but I'd be interested in seeing sources. I haven't made up my mind.
UncleMeat 9y ago
Does it really keep the blockchain size in check? Either storage costs shrink at an exponential rate, in which case the block size basically doesn't matter at all, or they don't, in which case the blockchain will eventually grow too large anyway.
- Laforet 9y ago
  The SegWit2X non-debate is never really about keeping the blockchain size (i.e. transactional history) in check as that could be reconstructed relatively easily on demand. However the UTXO set (list of all unspent transaction outputs) has to be kept small because every incoming transaction has to be validated against this ~3GB data set that has been growing by several hundred megabytes per year. Ideally this database should be kept in memory for maximum efficiency but RAM is expensive, so a elaborate cache scheme had to be developed to make sure that nodes remain functional on low power hardware with limited memory and I/O which in turn limits the number of SPV clients each node could serve. Thus on-chain transactions has to be kept to the minimum to slow the growth of UTXOs and SegWit provides some incentive for people to consolidate dust outputs despite fee pressure. So far this strategy has not been working. Ethereum does not have this limitation because balances are kept in individual accounts, thus the requirement for global consistency is a lot lower.
  - sobani 9y ago
    You can get 4GB of RAM for less than $100.[0] That doesn't seem so expensive to me. [0] https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=4+gb+ddr4+memory&ignorear=0&N=-1&isNodeId=1 https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&D...
    - Laforet 9y ago
      It is a lot for embedded and mobile devices, even the ability to address 4GB memory adds to the cost of processor. Right now full history nodes on phones are a pipe dream, and people who run full nodes on raspberry pis are actually degrading the performance of the network by adding a tonne of slow nodes with 1GB memory or less. In the long run the UTXO set will always grow because of lost keys and dust amounts worth less than the fees to move them, yet it is politically unacceptable nor practical to drop any of these from the consensus, so the problem will only get worse. It is, of course, not a problem if you think SPV wallets are the way forward, but this view has been stigmatised as "centralisation" so it also leads to no real solutions.

cowpig 9y ago

> Seems you’ve bought into Roger Ver’s snake oil. I've heard this a few times online despite not really knowing anything about Roger Ver. I am capable of coming to logical conclusions on my own. > 1mb limit isn’t stupid, it’s what creates the fee market which makes spamming the blockchain very costly and keeps blockchain size in check. Very costly in the sense that an individual Bitcoin transaction curently costs about $20, an order of magnitude more than my bank transfers cost. > Already you wouldn’t be able to sync the ethereum chain from genesis block, I can still do that on raspberry pi node in less than two weeks. I literally synced the Ethereum chain on my laptop last weekend. > Whether the limit should be upped is still a question up for debate This is only true if you are using the phrase "up for debate" in the sense that smoking being bad for you is up for debate, or that we should do something about climate change is up for debate, or that net neutrality is up for debate: there are powerful self-interested actors for whom the obvious conclusion is expensive.

keymone 9y ago
> Very costly in the sense that an individual Bitcoin transaction curently costs about $20 you've cherry-picked the exact point in time when due to various factors ("civil war" between bitcoin and bitcoin cash supporters, propaganda campaigns, price rally) transaction fees are at their peak. if you look at the graph - https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#all https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#all you'll realize that for majority of this year transaction fees were well below 50c. this is what happens if you blindly believe the echo chamber. besides, i'm not convinved all and every transaction belong on the chain. chain provides bunch of very strong guarantees that no other system in the world provides - it's ridiculous to claim that those guarantees are not worth anything. > I literally synced the Ethereum chain on my laptop last weekend. lol, nope. let me guess, `geth --fast`? well, i suggest you go read up on what `--fast` means. i challenge you to try syncing from the genesis block. > This is only true if you are using the phrase "up for debate" in the sense that smoking being bad for you is up for debate no, it is literally up for debate. there is a multitude of bottlenecks involved in having a healthy blockchain and a network around it, they are all affected by bumping the blocksize in non-trivial ways through secondary and tertiary effects. and it's not even obvious we can handle the primary effect of growing blockchain and utxo set - that quite literally leads to centralization of full nodes via making it prohibitively expensive to run it which runs against one of the core tenets of bitcoin itself.
- cowpig 9y ago
  > you've cherry-picked the exact point in time... I picked this number because it's what I paid yesterday > lol, nope. let me guess, `geth --fast`? well, i suggest you go read up on what `--fast` means. i challenge you to try syncing from the genesis block. I used Parity, and instead of suggesting I "go read up on" something I already understand, maybe you'd be more convincing if you made an argument as to why the difference should matter (it doesn't). > bunch of broad, abstract claims I can't argue with any of those because you didn't provide any reasoning or facts to address.
  - keymone 9y ago
    > I picked this number because it's what I paid yesterday right, so you got unlucky and now you're sad, i get it. just don't start misrepresenting what's actually happening. > the rest there is plenty written on both scaling and checkpointing/snapshotting, seems you've picked your side, don't see the point spending my sunday evening convincing you of anything. time will tell.
    - ericb 9y ago
      > there is plenty written on both scaling and checkpointing/snapshotting, Not the op, but I'd be interested in seeing sources. I haven't made up my mind.

UncleMeat 9y ago

Does it really keep the blockchain size in check? Either storage costs shrink at an exponential rate, in which case the block size basically doesn't matter at all, or they don't, in which case the blockchain will eventually grow too large anyway.

Laforet 9y ago
The SegWit2X non-debate is never really about keeping the blockchain size (i.e. transactional history) in check as that could be reconstructed relatively easily on demand. However the UTXO set (list of all unspent transaction outputs) has to be kept small because every incoming transaction has to be validated against this ~3GB data set that has been growing by several hundred megabytes per year. Ideally this database should be kept in memory for maximum efficiency but RAM is expensive, so a elaborate cache scheme had to be developed to make sure that nodes remain functional on low power hardware with limited memory and I/O which in turn limits the number of SPV clients each node could serve. Thus on-chain transactions has to be kept to the minimum to slow the growth of UTXOs and SegWit provides some incentive for people to consolidate dust outputs despite fee pressure. So far this strategy has not been working. Ethereum does not have this limitation because balances are kept in individual accounts, thus the requirement for global consistency is a lot lower.
- sobani 9y ago
  You can get 4GB of RAM for less than $100.[0] That doesn't seem so expensive to me. [0] https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=4+gb+ddr4+memory&ignorear=0&N=-1&isNodeId=1 https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&D...
  - Laforet 9y ago
    It is a lot for embedded and mobile devices, even the ability to address 4GB memory adds to the cost of processor. Right now full history nodes on phones are a pipe dream, and people who run full nodes on raspberry pis are actually degrading the performance of the network by adding a tonne of slow nodes with 1GB memory or less. In the long run the UTXO set will always grow because of lost keys and dust amounts worth less than the fees to move them, yet it is politically unacceptable nor practical to drop any of these from the consensus, so the problem will only get worse. It is, of course, not a problem if you think SPV wallets are the way forward, but this view has been stigmatised as "centralisation" so it also leads to no real solutions.