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Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem. It's almost 10 years old, and they knew about blocksize bandwidth limitat

by 0wing 9y ago

Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem. It's almost 10 years old, and they knew about blocksize bandwidth limitations early on. Bitcoin used to have a variable blocksize that would accommodate increased usage, but at a certain point they set a hard limit at 1MB. Petty bickering and control of the main discussion forums by a very small group of people (owners of bitcointalk, moderators of /r/bitcoin and blockstream investors and marketing team) shifted the goal posts and gave talking points to divert the concerns over technical limitations and possible solutions with no real implementations for years. The proposed lightening network is based on an unsolved problem in computer science (routing optimization, LN thus maintains a map of all nodes be broadcast to all nodes), not to mention the LN design would rely heavily on centralized hubs of "liquidity providers" i.e. paypal style KYC payment processors - completely antithetical to the concept of "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash allowing online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution". LN conveniently favors large centralized liquidity provider payment hubs as the siphon for fees, which only becomes palatable when the alternative is excessive fees to miners on the underlying network. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-... and they've been claiming it's just around the corner since 2015: https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 Bitcoin is also not governed as a product, so incremental scaling improvements are left for the user to use, and not to forced by protocol. This is false. Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users. Bitcoin is suffering from a toxic cult like community, and questionable developer team. Other crypto-currencies are working on solving the issues while BTC is being sold off to fund LN investors.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago
> It's almost 10 years old In the world of science, that's nothing. > Bitcoin used to have a variable blocksize that would accommodate increased usage, but at a certain point they set a hard limit at 1MB. "They"? Who is this mystical "they"? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy Satoshi added the limit early on and defended it as a deterrent to spamming the network. > The proposed lightening network is an unsolved problem in computer science Nobody brought up the Lightning Network, but it seems like you have an axe to grind here. > This is false. Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users. I agree with this, I think Bitcoin governance has become overly political and increasingly territorial, with a cult-like worship of a sets of devs (and you belong in one cult or the other). That being said, I have great faith in the implementation of blockchain based contracts and currency overall, even if Bitcoin is just one step on the long chain of its evolution.
- Jasper_ 9y ago
  > In the world of science, that's nothing. The Apple App Store came out in June 2008, 9 years ago. From the fart buttons topping the charts, entire companies and business models have been found and Bitcoin is still stuck. They're not making progress.
- tptacek 9y ago
  In the world of computer science, 10 years is something like 3.3x the span of time between Altavista and Google. It's the span of time between the original spinning-hard-disk iPod and the iPhone 4S. It's approximately the time it took for AWS to go from zero to where it is today.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    But Bitcoin isn't a parallel to AWS. Bitcoin is a parallel to the first working implementation of virtualization.
    - 0wing 9y ago
      No, Bitcoin is a parallel to distributed computing and databases. PoW blockchains like Bitcoin only work by attempting to increase the capital cost of write access to the database. PoW blockchains purposefully waste as much computing power as possible and the transaction speed remains limited just the same even as computing power is added.
      - gizmo686 9y ago
        The compute power wasted is unrelated to the number of transactions. The only point of wasting the compute power is to be able to say that "this block has X compute backing it". If you do that, the security of bitcoin does not care how much is contained within the block.
- 0wing 9y ago
  Re: [PATCH] increase block size limit Satoshi October 04, 2010, 07:48:40 PM It can be phased in, like: if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete. When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...
gizmo686 9y ago
Lets say a bitcoin transaction takes 250 bytes on average. Visa processes 24,000 transactions per second. To scale to this level, the bitcoin blockchain would need to grow at a rate of about 5.7mb/s. This is a blocksize of about 3.3 gigabytes. Growing the blocksize is not a sustainable way to scale bitcoin. This is why people are saying that Bitcoin is still not a mature technology; the problems associated with scaling it are still unsolved problems of computer science.
- anonymous5133 9y ago
  Still, scaling by block size increase is still a legitimate way to scale. Right now we don't need visa level scaling. We simply need a little more room to keep transaction fees at a reasonable level. Luckily we have bitcoin cash that we can use that has higher capacity.
  - notsrg 9y ago
    Luckily you could use literally any other cryptocurrency that anyone isn't using to get fast tx's and low fees.
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  First, the 24,000 /s is the maximum throughput. The real number from visa themselves is about 2,000. Second, the Bitcoin unlimited team has already tested and demonstrated gigabyte blocks. That would be about 1.6MB per second. This is already achievable with a $12 per month VPS, far less than a single btc transaction.
  - gizmo686 9y ago
    Cool project. I found this [0] talk on the matter. I am still working through it, but it seems that with (somewhat optimized) current software they hit 10 minute propagation time at 1GB blocksize, with about 500tx/s (t=4549). EDIT: This experient is also still young. As of the November 2017 talk I linked, they were using 4-6 miner nodes, and a UTXO pool simmilar to the current network (to the point where the presented would not even give numbers for memory and disk IO because he viewed them as not relevent to what would really be seen). I submitted the linked talk to HN. Comments at [1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDF8bOEqXt4&feature=youtu.be&t=4079 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDF8bOEqXt4&feature=youtu.be... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012746
nlperguiy 9y ago
> This is false. What is false? Are you saying it is governed as a product? Incremental scaling improvements are research fun projects that are not being forced on developers (that are the users of bitcoin protocol). No one forced SegWit, I'm pretty sure Schnorr signatures will not be a hard fork too. Any kind of rational organization making a good product would get out of an extreme situation as this one is with a hard fork. Microsoft, probably the best example of how to do backwards compatibility, decided to force Win8 on everyone because, obviously, managing old software was an issue. Just like managing transactions with uncompressed keys is, yet there's still plenty of them being added to the chain today. Bitcoin is obviously a vehicle for intellectual stimulation first, Bitcoin as a product is out of the view. I mean, you have core developers optimizing validation code on CPU (who needs that thing to be 4x faster now, anyway?) and doing heavy refactoring for segwit, braintickling over schnorr for months, coming up with ways to do confidential transactions, doing bulletproofs to reduce the size of confidential transactions, doing prototypes of that research etc. There's obviously no long-term scaling solution in sight, this is all still very early research.
agorabinary 9y ago
1. LN works on testnet right now. 2. Bitcoin without LN isn't nearly worth its valuation, but bitcoin with LN is worth many times its current valuation so we're settled somewhere in the middle. 3. I'm inclined to trust Brahm Cohen more than your flawed analysis of LN routing: https://medium.com/@bramcohen/in-this-analysis-nodes-arent-bothering-to-make-sure-that-they-have-any-connections-at-all-1fba7115e61d https://medium.com/@bramcohen/in-this-analysis-nodes-arent-b...
- 0wing 9y ago
  1. If LN works to scale, it should be deployed. It's not, and has not for years. 2. You have absolutely no way to accurately verify or anticipate that claim. Feel free to provide a retort to my claim that Bitcoin is flawed from Satoshi's implementation and upon examination of the computer science and codebase behind BTC, the false equivalence to gold and store of value will fail as it becomes obsolete to something else. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15991762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15991762 3. Brahm Cohen is suggesting a prerequisite of 3 escrow deposits, which would require 6 transaction fees. This is a bizarre answer to the article he was responding to, as it fails to avoid the gravitation towards payment processor style hubs. Also there’s nothing wrong with long routes. They settle out in the middle just fine, despite the author’s dismissiveness to the possibility that they can. With Brahm's prerequisite, the LN will still be diverted towards the single large payment processor style hubs which can supply enough liquidity to open up routes and deposits with many other users. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
  - agorabinary 9y ago
    1. LN is not deployed because it is conservatively developed like all development in a space with $500B on the line. 2. My claim is simply that Bitcoin is worth significantly more with LN than without? You then take a more preliminary argument that Bitcoin is worthless to begin with, which is laughable. 3. 6 on-chain transaction fees that support millions of off-chain payments. And your hub argument is a feature of a distributed network itself, not of LN in particular. Say a "hub" emerges and starts charging fees. Market competition paired with efficient routing solves this easily. If you don't understand Brahm's argument, I suggest reading through it again. He's a pretty smart guy when it comes to distributed networks.

by 0wing 9y ago

Karrot_Kream 9y ago

> It's almost 10 years old In the world of science, that's nothing. > Bitcoin used to have a variable blocksize that would accommodate increased usage, but at a certain point they set a hard limit at 1MB. "They"? Who is this mystical "they"? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy Satoshi added the limit early on and defended it as a deterrent to spamming the network. > The proposed lightening network is an unsolved problem in computer science Nobody brought up the Lightning Network, but it seems like you have an axe to grind here. > This is false. Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users. I agree with this, I think Bitcoin governance has become overly political and increasingly territorial, with a cult-like worship of a sets of devs (and you belong in one cult or the other). That being said, I have great faith in the implementation of blockchain based contracts and currency overall, even if Bitcoin is just one step on the long chain of its evolution.

Jasper_ 9y ago
> In the world of science, that's nothing. The Apple App Store came out in June 2008, 9 years ago. From the fart buttons topping the charts, entire companies and business models have been found and Bitcoin is still stuck. They're not making progress.
tptacek 9y ago
In the world of computer science, 10 years is something like 3.3x the span of time between Altavista and Google. It's the span of time between the original spinning-hard-disk iPod and the iPhone 4S. It's approximately the time it took for AWS to go from zero to where it is today.
- jstanley 9y ago
  But Bitcoin isn't a parallel to AWS. Bitcoin is a parallel to the first working implementation of virtualization.
  - 0wing 9y ago
    No, Bitcoin is a parallel to distributed computing and databases. PoW blockchains like Bitcoin only work by attempting to increase the capital cost of write access to the database. PoW blockchains purposefully waste as much computing power as possible and the transaction speed remains limited just the same even as computing power is added.
    - gizmo686 9y ago
      The compute power wasted is unrelated to the number of transactions. The only point of wasting the compute power is to be able to say that "this block has X compute backing it". If you do that, the security of bitcoin does not care how much is contained within the block.
0wing 9y ago
Re: [PATCH] increase block size limit Satoshi October 04, 2010, 07:48:40 PM It can be phased in, like: if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete. When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...

gizmo686 9y ago

Lets say a bitcoin transaction takes 250 bytes on average. Visa processes 24,000 transactions per second. To scale to this level, the bitcoin blockchain would need to grow at a rate of about 5.7mb/s. This is a blocksize of about 3.3 gigabytes. Growing the blocksize is not a sustainable way to scale bitcoin. This is why people are saying that Bitcoin is still not a mature technology; the problems associated with scaling it are still unsolved problems of computer science.

anonymous5133 9y ago
Still, scaling by block size increase is still a legitimate way to scale. Right now we don't need visa level scaling. We simply need a little more room to keep transaction fees at a reasonable level. Luckily we have bitcoin cash that we can use that has higher capacity.
- notsrg 9y ago
  Luckily you could use literally any other cryptocurrency that anyone isn't using to get fast tx's and low fees.
CyberDildonics 9y ago
First, the 24,000 /s is the maximum throughput. The real number from visa themselves is about 2,000. Second, the Bitcoin unlimited team has already tested and demonstrated gigabyte blocks. That would be about 1.6MB per second. This is already achievable with a $12 per month VPS, far less than a single btc transaction.
- gizmo686 9y ago
  Cool project. I found this [0] talk on the matter. I am still working through it, but it seems that with (somewhat optimized) current software they hit 10 minute propagation time at 1GB blocksize, with about 500tx/s (t=4549). EDIT: This experient is also still young. As of the November 2017 talk I linked, they were using 4-6 miner nodes, and a UTXO pool simmilar to the current network (to the point where the presented would not even give numbers for memory and disk IO because he viewed them as not relevent to what would really be seen). I submitted the linked talk to HN. Comments at [1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDF8bOEqXt4&feature=youtu.be&t=4079 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDF8bOEqXt4&feature=youtu.be... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012746

nlperguiy 9y ago

> This is false. What is false? Are you saying it is governed as a product? Incremental scaling improvements are research fun projects that are not being forced on developers (that are the users of bitcoin protocol). No one forced SegWit, I'm pretty sure Schnorr signatures will not be a hard fork too. Any kind of rational organization making a good product would get out of an extreme situation as this one is with a hard fork. Microsoft, probably the best example of how to do backwards compatibility, decided to force Win8 on everyone because, obviously, managing old software was an issue. Just like managing transactions with uncompressed keys is, yet there's still plenty of them being added to the chain today. Bitcoin is obviously a vehicle for intellectual stimulation first, Bitcoin as a product is out of the view. I mean, you have core developers optimizing validation code on CPU (who needs that thing to be 4x faster now, anyway?) and doing heavy refactoring for segwit, braintickling over schnorr for months, coming up with ways to do confidential transactions, doing bulletproofs to reduce the size of confidential transactions, doing prototypes of that research etc. There's obviously no long-term scaling solution in sight, this is all still very early research.

agorabinary 9y ago

1. LN works on testnet right now. 2. Bitcoin without LN isn't nearly worth its valuation, but bitcoin with LN is worth many times its current valuation so we're settled somewhere in the middle. 3. I'm inclined to trust Brahm Cohen more than your flawed analysis of LN routing: https://medium.com/@bramcohen/in-this-analysis-nodes-arent-bothering-to-make-sure-that-they-have-any-connections-at-all-1fba7115e61d https://medium.com/@bramcohen/in-this-analysis-nodes-arent-b...

0wing 9y ago
1. If LN works to scale, it should be deployed. It's not, and has not for years. 2. You have absolutely no way to accurately verify or anticipate that claim. Feel free to provide a retort to my claim that Bitcoin is flawed from Satoshi's implementation and upon examination of the computer science and codebase behind BTC, the false equivalence to gold and store of value will fail as it becomes obsolete to something else. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15991762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15991762 3. Brahm Cohen is suggesting a prerequisite of 3 escrow deposits, which would require 6 transaction fees. This is a bizarre answer to the article he was responding to, as it fails to avoid the gravitation towards payment processor style hubs. Also there’s nothing wrong with long routes. They settle out in the middle just fine, despite the author’s dismissiveness to the possibility that they can. With Brahm's prerequisite, the LN will still be diverted towards the single large payment processor style hubs which can supply enough liquidity to open up routes and deposits with many other users. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
- agorabinary 9y ago
  1. LN is not deployed because it is conservatively developed like all development in a space with $500B on the line. 2. My claim is simply that Bitcoin is worth significantly more with LN than without? You then take a more preliminary argument that Bitcoin is worthless to begin with, which is laughable. 3. 6 on-chain transaction fees that support millions of off-chain payments. And your hub argument is a feature of a distributed network itself, not of LN in particular. Say a "hub" emerges and starts charging fees. Market competition paired with efficient routing solves this easily. If you don't understand Brahm's argument, I suggest reading through it again. He's a pretty smart guy when it comes to distributed networks.