5 ms·

On-chain scaling is not sustainable. If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would mak

On-chain scaling is not sustainable. If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments. About "adopting" and increasing block size. I think most developers agree that we would need to increase it at some point, but I believe core Bitcoin developers refusing to do it to accelerate real scalability solution (e.g. Lightning Network). After we have a working scaling solution we might see increase in block size to lower fees and increase throughput.

xiphias 9y ago
Segregated Witness was increasing the block size, but the trivial block size increase that Bitcoin Cash was doing was not a scalable solution because the old transaction message format had a quadratic worst case processing time. The problem with it is that Bitcoin adaption is extremely fast (10x last year), and securely implementing and testing all these scalability solutions take years.
erentz 9y ago
Not sure why you and the other person mentioning lightning have been downvoted. I’ve noticed increasingly it’s not possible to have reasonable discussion about bitcoin on hacker news. It seems the folks from /r/btc have found this place.
- jv22222 9y ago
  Yes, agreed, it’s fucking irritating.
- 0wing 9y ago
  Please explain how the Lightning Network developers solve an unsolved NP-Hard problem in computer science regarding routing? [1] The Lightning Network design is exactly what the first sentence of Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper seeks to avoid - payment processor middlemen. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [2] The LN design was chosen as a solution by certain investors who want to extract fees as payment hub liquidity providers. LN can't solve the TSP without either publishing a map of all nodes and routes, or having all nodes broadcasts to all nodes. The former significantly reduces decentralization and further removes the "electronic cash" aspect requiring payment processor hubs, while the latter will suffer from latency/scaling issues/DDoS susceptibility. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem [2] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
  - tananaev 9y ago
    Personally I don't really mind having a few main hubs because Lightning Network allows trust-less payments. Your hub can never steal your money. It's guaranteed by math and Bitcoin network itself. Lightning Network might not be perfect solution, but it is a solution to scaling problem. Increasing block size is certainly not a long term solution.
    - aiCeivi9 9y ago
      > Your hub can never steal your money But it can keep coins that remain in them until the channel expires and for usable channels it will be at least a month or two. So some amount of trust is required. Also, unless I don't know about something, wallet software needs to store additional data for LN to work that can't be just reconstructed from private key/paper wallet.
      - keymone 9y ago
        what incentive does a hub have to do that? it's easy to accuse a hub in doing that but it's trivial for a hub to prove they aren't. if it is ever proven that hub holds on to somebody's channel - the hub loses reputation and customers.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    Fiestly, LN routing is actually closer to a shortest-path problem than the TSP. Secondly, even if it was the TSP, you don't need to 100% solve it in order to have a working system. How do you think actual travelling salesmen can exist? They just pick a good enough route, nobody is checking whether they picked the perfect route, and nobody cares.
    - 0wing 9y ago
      Either the Lightning Network has found a solution to the routing problem which the entire internet has relied upon since 1989 [1], or the LN marketing is disingenuous and the actual implementation will be nothing more than an excuse to extract wealth to centralized payment processor hubs, further distancing Bitcoin from the main design of electronic cash: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/05/31/net-of-insecurity-part-2/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/05/31/net-of-...
- GenericsMotors 9y ago
  > Not sure why you and the other person mentioning lightning have been downvoted. Because it's a ridiculous proposition. Just opening and closing a channel will require a transaction on-chain, with the accompanying fees. And if someone sends you coins, you can only spend them if there's a route to whoever you want to pay, otherwise you have to close the channel....and again pay the damn fee. Lastly: it's not even a network. A network implies that there are multiple connected nodes, and AFAIK the number of merchants using LN in production is exactly zero.
mrb 9y ago
Actually there is a great way to scale on-chain: UTXO Set Commitment allows nodes to simply discard unnecessary blockchain data (in a way not too dissimilar to classic "pruning"). The data set maintained by nodes would basically grow linearly with the UTXO Set instead of the number of txns. Eg. right now it would cut 150GB down to 3GB. Sadly it seems under-researched.
- wereHamster 9y ago
  utxo set is one issue with large number of transactions. The far bigger is the big block size you would need for visa-level transaction numbers (1GB / 10min was mentioned). And it's not only an issue for end-users (can't run a bitcoin client on your phone, you'd burn through your data within a couple days), but also for miners. They'd be far more likely to mine on top of an old block, leading to stale blocks. There was a talk a while ago how the bitcoin developers improved the propagation of new blocks within the network and it basically eliminated stale blocks (at least for a while).
  - cornedor 9y ago
    ISP’s have to move all that bandwidth as well. Netflix has servers on ISP level where they pay for i’d imagine, I don’t think that there is a way to do that with Bitcoin’s data.
  - mrb 9y ago
    «issue for end-users» It's not really an issue. End-users always have the possibility of running in SPV mode where they don't download full blocks. «They'd be far more likely to mine on top of an old block» Not really. First of all, a 1GB block today would be transmitted in typically only ~12-15MB thanks to Compact Blocks (6 bytes per txn ID). Graphene would cut this down to 3-5 MB (http://forensics.cs.umass.edu/graphene/ http://forensics.cs.umass.edu/graphene/). Secondly, with current software and current hardware, we can still bump the block size ~100× while keeping the block verification time low enough that it's still workable. Then with software optimizations and another few years of technical hardware and network bandwidth improvements, we can get another 10×.
lumberingjack 9y ago
1gb is not that big now and bandwidth is getting uped all the time for free.
lmm 9y ago
> If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments. The whole blockchain is already "centralized" in that sense - almost all mining happens in a small number of large mining pools. 1GB every 10 minutes doesn't sound so bad. Random users probably won't run full chains on their desktops, sure, but the option's available if they want to (in distinct contrast to Lightning). Third-party service providers could run full chains and sell validation against the full chain as a service, in a competitive free market - you don't need anyone's permission to run the full chain, so if prices get high or service gets bad then another provider can enter the market.
- anthonybsd 9y ago
  That's 52 petabytes a year, half an exabyte after 10 years. We are talking about approaching Google datacenter scale on ...every...single....bitcoin node. No matter how optimistic your future storage capacity projections are this is simply not scalable.
ericb 9y ago
Bitcoin, over the long haul, becomes impossible without checkpointing. Eventually an eternally growing stream of data, becomes too large to transmit and store. Raising the block size just changes the rate.

xiphias 9y ago

Segregated Witness was increasing the block size, but the trivial block size increase that Bitcoin Cash was doing was not a scalable solution because the old transaction message format had a quadratic worst case processing time. The problem with it is that Bitcoin adaption is extremely fast (10x last year), and securely implementing and testing all these scalability solutions take years.

erentz 9y ago

Not sure why you and the other person mentioning lightning have been downvoted. I’ve noticed increasingly it’s not possible to have reasonable discussion about bitcoin on hacker news. It seems the folks from /r/btc have found this place.

jv22222 9y ago
Yes, agreed, it’s fucking irritating.
0wing 9y ago
Please explain how the Lightning Network developers solve an unsolved NP-Hard problem in computer science regarding routing? [1] The Lightning Network design is exactly what the first sentence of Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper seeks to avoid - payment processor middlemen. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [2] The LN design was chosen as a solution by certain investors who want to extract fees as payment hub liquidity providers. LN can't solve the TSP without either publishing a map of all nodes and routes, or having all nodes broadcasts to all nodes. The former significantly reduces decentralization and further removes the "electronic cash" aspect requiring payment processor hubs, while the latter will suffer from latency/scaling issues/DDoS susceptibility. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem [2] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- tananaev 9y ago
  Personally I don't really mind having a few main hubs because Lightning Network allows trust-less payments. Your hub can never steal your money. It's guaranteed by math and Bitcoin network itself. Lightning Network might not be perfect solution, but it is a solution to scaling problem. Increasing block size is certainly not a long term solution.
  - aiCeivi9 9y ago
    > Your hub can never steal your money But it can keep coins that remain in them until the channel expires and for usable channels it will be at least a month or two. So some amount of trust is required. Also, unless I don't know about something, wallet software needs to store additional data for LN to work that can't be just reconstructed from private key/paper wallet.
    - keymone 9y ago
      what incentive does a hub have to do that? it's easy to accuse a hub in doing that but it's trivial for a hub to prove they aren't. if it is ever proven that hub holds on to somebody's channel - the hub loses reputation and customers.
- jstanley 9y ago
  Fiestly, LN routing is actually closer to a shortest-path problem than the TSP. Secondly, even if it was the TSP, you don't need to 100% solve it in order to have a working system. How do you think actual travelling salesmen can exist? They just pick a good enough route, nobody is checking whether they picked the perfect route, and nobody cares.
  - 0wing 9y ago
    Either the Lightning Network has found a solution to the routing problem which the entire internet has relied upon since 1989 [1], or the LN marketing is disingenuous and the actual implementation will be nothing more than an excuse to extract wealth to centralized payment processor hubs, further distancing Bitcoin from the main design of electronic cash: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/05/31/net-of-insecurity-part-2/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/05/31/net-of-...
GenericsMotors 9y ago
> Not sure why you and the other person mentioning lightning have been downvoted. Because it's a ridiculous proposition. Just opening and closing a channel will require a transaction on-chain, with the accompanying fees. And if someone sends you coins, you can only spend them if there's a route to whoever you want to pay, otherwise you have to close the channel....and again pay the damn fee. Lastly: it's not even a network. A network implies that there are multiple connected nodes, and AFAIK the number of merchants using LN in production is exactly zero.

mrb 9y ago

Actually there is a great way to scale on-chain: UTXO Set Commitment allows nodes to simply discard unnecessary blockchain data (in a way not too dissimilar to classic "pruning"). The data set maintained by nodes would basically grow linearly with the UTXO Set instead of the number of txns. Eg. right now it would cut 150GB down to 3GB. Sadly it seems under-researched.

wereHamster 9y ago
utxo set is one issue with large number of transactions. The far bigger is the big block size you would need for visa-level transaction numbers (1GB / 10min was mentioned). And it's not only an issue for end-users (can't run a bitcoin client on your phone, you'd burn through your data within a couple days), but also for miners. They'd be far more likely to mine on top of an old block, leading to stale blocks. There was a talk a while ago how the bitcoin developers improved the propagation of new blocks within the network and it basically eliminated stale blocks (at least for a while).
- cornedor 9y ago
  ISP’s have to move all that bandwidth as well. Netflix has servers on ISP level where they pay for i’d imagine, I don’t think that there is a way to do that with Bitcoin’s data.
- mrb 9y ago
  «issue for end-users» It's not really an issue. End-users always have the possibility of running in SPV mode where they don't download full blocks. «They'd be far more likely to mine on top of an old block» Not really. First of all, a 1GB block today would be transmitted in typically only ~12-15MB thanks to Compact Blocks (6 bytes per txn ID). Graphene would cut this down to 3-5 MB (http://forensics.cs.umass.edu/graphene/ http://forensics.cs.umass.edu/graphene/). Secondly, with current software and current hardware, we can still bump the block size ~100× while keeping the block verification time low enough that it's still workable. Then with software optimizations and another few years of technical hardware and network bandwidth improvements, we can get another 10×.

lumberingjack 9y ago

1gb is not that big now and bandwidth is getting uped all the time for free.

lmm 9y ago

> If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments. The whole blockchain is already "centralized" in that sense - almost all mining happens in a small number of large mining pools. 1GB every 10 minutes doesn't sound so bad. Random users probably won't run full chains on their desktops, sure, but the option's available if they want to (in distinct contrast to Lightning). Third-party service providers could run full chains and sell validation against the full chain as a service, in a competitive free market - you don't need anyone's permission to run the full chain, so if prices get high or service gets bad then another provider can enter the market.

anthonybsd 9y ago
That's 52 petabytes a year, half an exabyte after 10 years. We are talking about approaching Google datacenter scale on ...every...single....bitcoin node. No matter how optimistic your future storage capacity projections are this is simply not scalable.

ericb 9y ago

Bitcoin, over the long haul, becomes impossible without checkpointing. Eventually an eternally growing stream of data, becomes too large to transmit and store. Raising the block size just changes the rate.