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While I agree that Segwit2x would have been good for BTC, it ultimately only kicks the can down the road a little bit. If BTC (or BCH) is going to be used at Vi

by davej 9y ago

While I agree that Segwit2x would have been good for BTC, it ultimately only kicks the can down the road a little bit. If BTC (or BCH) is going to be used at Visa/Mastercard scale then the transactions need to happen off-chain. The Lightning Network is the answer here, a lot of work still needs to be done though, particularly on the software side.

hrrsn 9y ago
This is the major (technical - plenty of political issues) problem I have with Bcash. It’s cheap and fast because transaction volumes, and price, are 10% of BTC, yet blocks are 1.5x the size (roughly, looking at a block explorer). As soon as they fill up, they’ll have the exact same problems down the line. Increasing the block size doesn’t scale long term and is a bandaid solution at best. BTC was fast and cheap when adoption was low.
- r1ch 9y ago
  Some of the blocks appear larger on Bitcoin Cash even though they have a lower transaction count because they contain transactions that are consolidating unspent outputs (example: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transaction/5254e22a6a5fc63f0dc171fbee250644d5b9db998b75e810378a2ec1e9ab930c https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transaction/5254e22a6a5f...). These kinds of transactions aren't feasible on the Bitcoin chain since the fees are prohibitive, so all those small unspent outputs remain in the UTXO set forever and are essentially unspendable. I'd also argue that increasing the block size scales fine as long as network speeds and storage continue to scale as they have been over the past years.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    I get it. You want litecoin. It has been around for years.
    - paulmd 9y ago
      The inability to clear dust on Bitcoin is a serious problem. It's fragmentation, for your money, that makes it impossible to spend (given the current fee structure, which has been defined as "normal" now that Bitcoin is "digital gold" rather than a transmission network). It's like every time you buy something, the change just disappears, and once a week you have to spend another $20 to sweep it up. This is not how currency is supposed to work, and it's been retconned as somehow being a good thing. Don't hate on me for stating the obvious here. Whatever happened to the "no fees" that advocates like Marc Andreesen were promoting circa-2014? https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/ https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/ (yeah, obviously false given the transaction fees paid to miners that have since become prominent when the blocks filled up)
- modeless 9y ago
  > they’ll have the exact same problems down the line But it could be years later; years in which other scaling solutions can be researched. If you only accept scaling solutions that can scale to infinity today, you will never accept a single one.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    I only accept solutions that don't affect decentralization.
    - dannyw 9y ago
      2 MB blocks (Bitcoin Classic) don't affect decentralization, if you support SegWit. SegWit blocks can be 4 MB, and that is 4 MB of data that has to be transmitted over the wire and stored unless you weaken your security model. In fact, SegWit negatively affects decentralization because it is much harder to build and maintain your wallet because of all of the complexity of SegWit, pushing people to crowd around existing solutions.
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        That's why it was such a compromise. In order to get the massive decentralization and privacy boost of the malleability fix that segwit provided, the blocksize increase was included to give the increase that the classic hard-fork suggested. And it was done as a soft-fork too, which means none of the 160,000+ bitcoin nodes needed to upgrade their software. And what happened? After they got exactly what they wanted with the doubling of capacity, they said "we want more" which demonstrated the entire exercise had nothing to do with blocksize, but about stealing the blockchain away from its users, and centralizing it in their data-centers. Which is why, months after the segwit implementation, the biggest and loudest people clamouring for a capacity increase for years, which includes bitpay, the subject of this thread, and coinbase, which has been an actively undermining the bitcoin developers for years, have not even implemented the blocksize increase. So much for blocksize being important.
        9y ago
- stale2002 9y ago
  Visa scale only requires gigabyte blocks. That's not doable today, but it is not TOO far off. And by the time adoption catches up, maybe the technology and bandwidth costs will be capable of supporting it. The blocksize does not need to increase forever. All it has to do is replace all of the world's financial transactions.
- asciimo 9y ago
  Why do some people call Bitcoin Cash "Bcash?" It seems to accompany critical statements. I'll assume you're not doing it to save 6 letters, because later you refer to Bitcoin as BTC. You could have saved more letters by referring to Bitcion Cash at BCH. Is this a campaign to rebrand Bitcoin Cash as something other than a Bitcoin fork?
  - ryebit 9y ago
    It's more a reaction to Bitcoin Cash officially insisting that it's the "real" bitcoin, and trying to actively misleading users by referring to BTC as "Bitcoin Core", creating a false parity to make it seem like they're both equal "forks" that bitcoin split into. I've tried to refer to them using the less loaded "BTC" and "BCH" symbols instead; but it's kindof getting tiring, hearing people insist "Bitcoin Cash is Satoshi's True Vision". It's like somebody starting a "Apple Phone LLC" and saying it's Steve Jobs' true vision, ignore that other "Apple" company.
    - anonymous5133 9y ago
      The difference is that you have to look at the attributes of each coin and see which one most likely reflects the white paper that satoshi himself wrote. He is talking about a P2P cash system, not a P2P gold system. Just because the first generation of bitcoin was the beginning doesn't mean it still reflects the original vision.
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        A peer, in bitcoin, is a node. If you don't run a node, or indeed if you can't run a node because of its resource requirements, you aren't a peer. Bitcoin : Peer-to-peer cash. You went right over the first part, and only talk about the second part, even though in the first part, the word 'peer' is used twice.
        theadamp 9y ago
        "The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate." - Satoshi Nakamoto https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306
- betoharres 9y ago
  since we are in a dev news, you can agree that fancy solutions tend to fail. Simplicity is the key
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    https://t4.ftcdn.net/jpg/00/01/72/17/240_F_1721760_5oY3RSyLMsldeW2HnfYZ5SKhgd9Nvn.jpg https://t4.ftcdn.net/jpg/00/01/72/17/240_F_1721760_5oY3RSyLM...
- anonymous5133 9y ago
  Everything is relative. The significant part is that increasing the block size steadily can scale to huge transaction volumes. Visa level transaction levels of around 2,000 TPS can be achieved with block size increases and higher end computer hardware. If we are talking visa level transaction volumes then the user base has to be at least 500 million users. If the userbase is that large then think of how many people would be willing to run full nodes. Not everyone but probably 10,000+. The current crypto ecosystem is probably a few million people across all coins. Also it is important to note that BTC could be like BCH at higher transaction levels if they increased the block size but that won't because of this lightning network idea. Which is what I don't get. You can increase the block size right NOW and work on the lightning network as well. Yet, they don't do that because the lightning network is everything and any other solution is not even considered. I used to also think that bigger blocks were always bad but that is simply not true. The original block size limit was purely implemented to stop spam when bitcoin's userbase was very low. Satoshi actually wanted to implement bigger blocks as the userbase grew. Bigger blocks is the not the long-term solution but it is a solution that we have right now that works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    > The significant part is that increasing the block size steadily 160,000+ bitcoin nodes are not interested in your centralization scheme, whether it is done 'steadily' or immediately.
    - rothbardrand 9y ago
      Unfortunately, pointing out the fact that this sort of faux scaling will lead to centralization is never going to be popular among the tech illiterates at this site who believe Roger Ver over listening to people who actually work on the bitcoin code.
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        It's kind of weird really. They think they can make reality go away because they make sockpuppets and try and force an outcome that will make them rich. By being really loud, and not really understanding how any of the technology works. All they do is copy paste things from people they think are smarter than them. Sadly, they are being played by much more experienced shysters and charlatans. Reckon it's mostly kids though.
tmp9876 9y ago
We could start using 'Side chains' today you might as well just create a bitcoin bank where everyone has an account hmmm hmm i mean a channel and all transactions can happen on your bank network and not on the blockchain. See i solved the problem. But first i need to convince everyone to use my side network, sooo if the main blockchain is like a stream what i need is for this stream to be blocked so that i can channel everyone to my side stream. Maybe i will call my bank blockstream.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  There is nothing stopping you creating your own super duper side chain if you think you have a better solution. It is open source after all.
  - anonymous5133 9y ago
    Yeah we already did, it is called bitcoin cash lol and it works. The hell with bitcoin's high fees, never again.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      paypal works too. I prefer to not record my payments with the chinese government though.
      - wolco 9y ago
        Why? I would be more worried about local governments
- wyager 9y ago
  This half-assed analogy falls apart under cursory examination; Lightning isn’t anything like a banking system because you have to trust banks and you don’t have to trust Lightning counterparties.
- AgentME 9y ago
  Payment channels and the lightning network aren't centralized; the users remain in control of their coins without counterparty risk. It's not like a "bitcoin bank" where they have to trust someone else to hold their coins for them. This is shitty FUD.
stale2002 9y ago
Visa level transaction scale only requires gigabyte sized blocks. We can't don't gigabyte blocks tomorrow, but that is within shooting distance. Bandwidth costs have gone down by 20% every year for the last 20 years. And they will continue to go down, making on chain scaling absolutely doable. Micro transactions will never work on a blockchain. But coffee transactions are definitely within shooting distance of possible.
elif 9y ago
It only kicks the can until you scale the remaining components to where it can scale: - the whitepaper itself solved the storage problem with old transaction pruning. - The block propagation and validation bandwidth requirements can be brought down 90%+ by canonically ordering transactions, memoizing transaction validation, and propagating only the block header and metadata. - the inefficiencies in the actual code are being worked out by Bitcoin unlimited's gigablock project among others.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  Ah BU. Affectionately known as fail-train #3. It was rejected for reasons that are clearly not evident to you, but rejected it remains. If you would only go and implement your gigablock altcoin and leave bitcoin development alone, that would be great.
paulmd 9y ago
> If BTC (or BCH) is going to be used at Visa/Mastercard scale then the transactions need to happen off-chain. The Lightning Network is the answer here There is a lot of technical complexity to this, and no real working proof at scale (AFAIK there is no production implementation even at a small scale). Lightning Network at scale will involve routing problems between coinholders analogous to a mesh network (or more realistically, FidoNet/UUnet) which risks centralization since those problems are not solved at scale in any fashion except hub-and-spoke/backbone. BGP is not an acceptable solution for LN since it involves a substantial degree of trust, and manual routing devolves into centralization.
- awemany 9y ago
  Not only that. The problem is that you can't just say "see I found a route A-D through B and C: ABCD" You actually have to be able to say: "See, I found a route A-D through B and C: ABCD and all nodes are sufficiently funded to execute the payment." And that's the big unsolved issue. Can you make an algorithm that will reliably do the latter while keeping the network decentralized? I think this is very hard, as the channel states between individual nodes will change for each payment, and that's entropy that somehow needs to be synchronized. Of course, simple centralized solutions like making B and C big enough ("banks") to deal succesfully with almost any payment are possible. But solving this problem is pretty damn hard, and I have yet to see a satisfying solution to this. Note that satisfying absolutely must include being decentralized. Because else, we can as well do the simple and sane thing and scale just on-chain, which also ensures that the miners get their fair share of the pie and makes it less likely that the bottom falls out because there's lots of layers, each taking a cut, to the system. Now, don't get me wrong: I am fine with LN and I think it might have good use in the micro/nano-payment space. Regular, simple payment channels (like BCH and BTC have since the beginning) might fully cover that use case as well. Who knows. In any case, LN as the (and the only) solution to scaling is not going to work out.

by davej 9y ago

hrrsn 9y ago

This is the major (technical - plenty of political issues) problem I have with Bcash. It’s cheap and fast because transaction volumes, and price, are 10% of BTC, yet blocks are 1.5x the size (roughly, looking at a block explorer). As soon as they fill up, they’ll have the exact same problems down the line. Increasing the block size doesn’t scale long term and is a bandaid solution at best. BTC was fast and cheap when adoption was low.

r1ch 9y ago
Some of the blocks appear larger on Bitcoin Cash even though they have a lower transaction count because they contain transactions that are consolidating unspent outputs (example: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transaction/5254e22a6a5fc63f0dc171fbee250644d5b9db998b75e810378a2ec1e9ab930c https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transaction/5254e22a6a5f...). These kinds of transactions aren't feasible on the Bitcoin chain since the fees are prohibitive, so all those small unspent outputs remain in the UTXO set forever and are essentially unspendable. I'd also argue that increasing the block size scales fine as long as network speeds and storage continue to scale as they have been over the past years.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  I get it. You want litecoin. It has been around for years.
  - paulmd 9y ago
    The inability to clear dust on Bitcoin is a serious problem. It's fragmentation, for your money, that makes it impossible to spend (given the current fee structure, which has been defined as "normal" now that Bitcoin is "digital gold" rather than a transmission network). It's like every time you buy something, the change just disappears, and once a week you have to spend another $20 to sweep it up. This is not how currency is supposed to work, and it's been retconned as somehow being a good thing. Don't hate on me for stating the obvious here. Whatever happened to the "no fees" that advocates like Marc Andreesen were promoting circa-2014? https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/ https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/ (yeah, obviously false given the transaction fees paid to miners that have since become prominent when the blocks filled up)
modeless 9y ago
> they’ll have the exact same problems down the line But it could be years later; years in which other scaling solutions can be researched. If you only accept scaling solutions that can scale to infinity today, you will never accept a single one.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  I only accept solutions that don't affect decentralization.
  - dannyw 9y ago
    2 MB blocks (Bitcoin Classic) don't affect decentralization, if you support SegWit. SegWit blocks can be 4 MB, and that is 4 MB of data that has to be transmitted over the wire and stored unless you weaken your security model. In fact, SegWit negatively affects decentralization because it is much harder to build and maintain your wallet because of all of the complexity of SegWit, pushing people to crowd around existing solutions.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      That's why it was such a compromise. In order to get the massive decentralization and privacy boost of the malleability fix that segwit provided, the blocksize increase was included to give the increase that the classic hard-fork suggested. And it was done as a soft-fork too, which means none of the 160,000+ bitcoin nodes needed to upgrade their software. And what happened? After they got exactly what they wanted with the doubling of capacity, they said "we want more" which demonstrated the entire exercise had nothing to do with blocksize, but about stealing the blockchain away from its users, and centralizing it in their data-centers. Which is why, months after the segwit implementation, the biggest and loudest people clamouring for a capacity increase for years, which includes bitpay, the subject of this thread, and coinbase, which has been an actively undermining the bitcoin developers for years, have not even implemented the blocksize increase. So much for blocksize being important.
      - 9y ago
stale2002 9y ago
Visa scale only requires gigabyte blocks. That's not doable today, but it is not TOO far off. And by the time adoption catches up, maybe the technology and bandwidth costs will be capable of supporting it. The blocksize does not need to increase forever. All it has to do is replace all of the world's financial transactions.
asciimo 9y ago
Why do some people call Bitcoin Cash "Bcash?" It seems to accompany critical statements. I'll assume you're not doing it to save 6 letters, because later you refer to Bitcoin as BTC. You could have saved more letters by referring to Bitcion Cash at BCH. Is this a campaign to rebrand Bitcoin Cash as something other than a Bitcoin fork?
- ryebit 9y ago
  It's more a reaction to Bitcoin Cash officially insisting that it's the "real" bitcoin, and trying to actively misleading users by referring to BTC as "Bitcoin Core", creating a false parity to make it seem like they're both equal "forks" that bitcoin split into. I've tried to refer to them using the less loaded "BTC" and "BCH" symbols instead; but it's kindof getting tiring, hearing people insist "Bitcoin Cash is Satoshi's True Vision". It's like somebody starting a "Apple Phone LLC" and saying it's Steve Jobs' true vision, ignore that other "Apple" company.
  - anonymous5133 9y ago
    The difference is that you have to look at the attributes of each coin and see which one most likely reflects the white paper that satoshi himself wrote. He is talking about a P2P cash system, not a P2P gold system. Just because the first generation of bitcoin was the beginning doesn't mean it still reflects the original vision.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      A peer, in bitcoin, is a node. If you don't run a node, or indeed if you can't run a node because of its resource requirements, you aren't a peer. Bitcoin : Peer-to-peer cash. You went right over the first part, and only talk about the second part, even though in the first part, the word 'peer' is used twice.
      - theadamp 9y ago
        "The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate." - Satoshi Nakamoto https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306
betoharres 9y ago
since we are in a dev news, you can agree that fancy solutions tend to fail. Simplicity is the key
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  https://t4.ftcdn.net/jpg/00/01/72/17/240_F_1721760_5oY3RSyLMsldeW2HnfYZ5SKhgd9Nvn.jpg https://t4.ftcdn.net/jpg/00/01/72/17/240_F_1721760_5oY3RSyLM...
anonymous5133 9y ago
Everything is relative. The significant part is that increasing the block size steadily can scale to huge transaction volumes. Visa level transaction levels of around 2,000 TPS can be achieved with block size increases and higher end computer hardware. If we are talking visa level transaction volumes then the user base has to be at least 500 million users. If the userbase is that large then think of how many people would be willing to run full nodes. Not everyone but probably 10,000+. The current crypto ecosystem is probably a few million people across all coins. Also it is important to note that BTC could be like BCH at higher transaction levels if they increased the block size but that won't because of this lightning network idea. Which is what I don't get. You can increase the block size right NOW and work on the lightning network as well. Yet, they don't do that because the lightning network is everything and any other solution is not even considered. I used to also think that bigger blocks were always bad but that is simply not true. The original block size limit was purely implemented to stop spam when bitcoin's userbase was very low. Satoshi actually wanted to implement bigger blocks as the userbase grew. Bigger blocks is the not the long-term solution but it is a solution that we have right now that works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  > The significant part is that increasing the block size steadily 160,000+ bitcoin nodes are not interested in your centralization scheme, whether it is done 'steadily' or immediately.
  - rothbardrand 9y ago
    Unfortunately, pointing out the fact that this sort of faux scaling will lead to centralization is never going to be popular among the tech illiterates at this site who believe Roger Ver over listening to people who actually work on the bitcoin code.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      It's kind of weird really. They think they can make reality go away because they make sockpuppets and try and force an outcome that will make them rich. By being really loud, and not really understanding how any of the technology works. All they do is copy paste things from people they think are smarter than them. Sadly, they are being played by much more experienced shysters and charlatans. Reckon it's mostly kids though.

tmp9876 9y ago

We could start using 'Side chains' today you might as well just create a bitcoin bank where everyone has an account hmmm hmm i mean a channel and all transactions can happen on your bank network and not on the blockchain. See i solved the problem. But first i need to convince everyone to use my side network, sooo if the main blockchain is like a stream what i need is for this stream to be blocked so that i can channel everyone to my side stream. Maybe i will call my bank blockstream.

Frogolocalypse 9y ago
There is nothing stopping you creating your own super duper side chain if you think you have a better solution. It is open source after all.
- anonymous5133 9y ago
  Yeah we already did, it is called bitcoin cash lol and it works. The hell with bitcoin's high fees, never again.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    paypal works too. I prefer to not record my payments with the chinese government though.
    - wolco 9y ago
      Why? I would be more worried about local governments
wyager 9y ago
This half-assed analogy falls apart under cursory examination; Lightning isn’t anything like a banking system because you have to trust banks and you don’t have to trust Lightning counterparties.
AgentME 9y ago
Payment channels and the lightning network aren't centralized; the users remain in control of their coins without counterparty risk. It's not like a "bitcoin bank" where they have to trust someone else to hold their coins for them. This is shitty FUD.

stale2002 9y ago

Visa level transaction scale only requires gigabyte sized blocks. We can't don't gigabyte blocks tomorrow, but that is within shooting distance. Bandwidth costs have gone down by 20% every year for the last 20 years. And they will continue to go down, making on chain scaling absolutely doable. Micro transactions will never work on a blockchain. But coffee transactions are definitely within shooting distance of possible.

elif 9y ago

It only kicks the can until you scale the remaining components to where it can scale: - the whitepaper itself solved the storage problem with old transaction pruning. - The block propagation and validation bandwidth requirements can be brought down 90%+ by canonically ordering transactions, memoizing transaction validation, and propagating only the block header and metadata. - the inefficiencies in the actual code are being worked out by Bitcoin unlimited's gigablock project among others.

Frogolocalypse 9y ago
Ah BU. Affectionately known as fail-train #3. It was rejected for reasons that are clearly not evident to you, but rejected it remains. If you would only go and implement your gigablock altcoin and leave bitcoin development alone, that would be great.

paulmd 9y ago

> If BTC (or BCH) is going to be used at Visa/Mastercard scale then the transactions need to happen off-chain. The Lightning Network is the answer here There is a lot of technical complexity to this, and no real working proof at scale (AFAIK there is no production implementation even at a small scale). Lightning Network at scale will involve routing problems between coinholders analogous to a mesh network (or more realistically, FidoNet/UUnet) which risks centralization since those problems are not solved at scale in any fashion except hub-and-spoke/backbone. BGP is not an acceptable solution for LN since it involves a substantial degree of trust, and manual routing devolves into centralization.

awemany 9y ago
Not only that. The problem is that you can't just say "see I found a route A-D through B and C: ABCD" You actually have to be able to say: "See, I found a route A-D through B and C: ABCD and all nodes are sufficiently funded to execute the payment." And that's the big unsolved issue. Can you make an algorithm that will reliably do the latter while keeping the network decentralized? I think this is very hard, as the channel states between individual nodes will change for each payment, and that's entropy that somehow needs to be synchronized. Of course, simple centralized solutions like making B and C big enough ("banks") to deal succesfully with almost any payment are possible. But solving this problem is pretty damn hard, and I have yet to see a satisfying solution to this. Note that satisfying absolutely must include being decentralized. Because else, we can as well do the simple and sane thing and scale just on-chain, which also ensures that the miners get their fair share of the pie and makes it less likely that the bottom falls out because there's lots of layers, each taking a cut, to the system. Now, don't get me wrong: I am fine with LN and I think it might have good use in the micro/nano-payment space. Regular, simple payment channels (like BCH and BTC have since the beginning) might fully cover that use case as well. Who knows. In any case, LN as the (and the only) solution to scaling is not going to work out.