17 ms·

Serious question, why does HN seemt o be in favor of lightning over BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? LN has so many drawbacks. Have to always be

Serious question, why does HN seemt o be in favor of lightning over BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? LN has so many drawbacks. Have to always be online, need to hold hot walkets, need liquidity provided at both ends (kyc/aml)...

lawlessone 9y ago
> BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization. Increasing the block size doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem bigger. other "coins" with larger faster block sizes are already running into storage issues.
- gruez 9y ago
  >Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand edit: what's up with the downvotes? i'm providing a name to the phenomena and providing a wikipedia link to it.
  - osteele 9y ago
    > what's up with the downvotes? Maybe because you provided a link without summarizing it? (Just guessing — I thought your comment was sufficient, and I upvoted it. Also — I know it's policy not to discuss votes, but I'm also a fan of feedback loops that lead to desired behavior, and I don't see enough signal in this one.)
- osteele 9y ago
  > then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization Because having a bigger block size raises the barrier to being a miner. (CapEx and OpEx are both greater.) Imagine the other extreme: mining is so cheap that every phone, watch, and — oh let's just throw in every mouse and pigeon cortex — can be a miner. This is near one extreme of decentralization. That's unattainable[1], but it's an intuition hook for the fact that the more expensive you make mining, the more centralized it becomes. [1] IOTA tries to get closer to this. It makes a couple of changes from Bitcoin / Ethereum / etc. (1) IOTA uses a graph instead of a chain — this is why mining is cheaper, and low-powered IOT devices can mine. (2) IOTA uses homegrown cryptography, (EDIT: that has been proven exploitable multiple times), instead of reviewed standards. (2) isn't necessary for (1), nor does it help decentralization; it just seems to be an attached vanity project.
  - lawlessone 9y ago
    Iota is horrendous(they rolled their own crypto and its bad) and no IOT company will ever bother with it.
    - osteele 9y ago
      > Iota is horrendous(they rolled their own crypto and its bad) Yeah, I probably didn't emphasize this enough. In addition to last year's curl fiasco[1], and this year's email dump[2], there's now this unlucky-13 exploit[3]. > no IOT company will ever bother with it This would seem to follow, but [4] (partnership with Cisco, Samsung, and Volkswagen), if true, contradicts it. (I'm skeptical of IOTA partnership announcements because of last year's IOTA/Microsoft “partnership”[5].) [1] https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1908194b https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1... [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/networks/cryptographers-urge-users-and-researchers-to-abandon-iota-after-leaked-emails https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/networks/crypt... [3] http://blog.lekkertech.net/blog/2018/03/07/iota-signatures/ http://blog.lekkertech.net/blog/2018/03/07/iota-signatures/ [4] https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/630565/blockchain-network-iota-teams-up-cisco-volkswagen-others-data-marketplace/ https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/630565/blockchain-n... [5] https://cointelegraph.com/news/iota-clarifies-misleading-microsoft-quote-no-official-partnership https://cointelegraph.com/news/iota-clarifies-misleading-mic...
  - SnowProblem 9y ago
    If anyone can be a miner, then malware can be used to do a 51% attack. Something like that happened with Monero recently [1]. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/sites-are-using-your-browser-mine-crypto-it-could-be-good-thing/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/sites-are-using-your-brows...
    - wmf 9y ago
      Bitcoin is not vulnerable to botnets because it effectively requires ASICs.
- colordrops 9y ago
  > leading to centralization Repeating this propaganda over and over and over doesn't make it true. No centralization will occur with an increase in block size, as there will still be enough participants to prevent attacking the block chain. If what is meant by centralization is the reduction of people who can run nodes, then keeping the block size small also increases centralization by this definition, as there is a reduction in people who can afford to transact on the main chain. But when it comes to maintaining the core trustless network inherent in the bit coin algorithm, increasing block size does nothing to break its function. Stop with the propaganda.
  - eklitzke 9y ago
    I guess that's true based on your definition of "trustless". But I wouldn't consider a network where as a practical matter I have to rely on a small number of centralized servers for validation "trustless".
    - __blockcipher__ 9y ago
      lol, with lightning you have to rely on a small number of centralized payment hubs who will likely be strongarmed by the government into keeping tabs on transactions through KYC/AML laws. It completely breaks the fundamental and original usecase of bitcoin: peer to peer electronic cash. Now it's "first world speculator to first world speculator through intermediary financial institution electronic store-of-value". Doesn't roll of the tongue quite so well, does it? IMO, XMR and BCH are the current best options for transactions. BTC is being destroyed by people who hadn't even heard of it 5 years ago.
      - hahainternet 9y ago
        > lol, with lightning you have to rely on a small number of centralized payment hubs There is no requirement for this. This is FUD.
    - topranks 9y ago
      That is true. I guess my definition is as long as new players / players with different motives and agendas can join the fray, it is ok. So like I don't mind if we end up that you need at least $1million to become a miner, hell we are half way there anyway on both chains, I just mind if nobody can join, or if it goes to $1billion to be able to mine. LN seems like the ultimate in centralisation so as an alternative (while it might work,) it's a far inferior solution on that score.
- __blockcipher__ 9y ago
  I don't buy the increased centralization argument. It usually comes down to the problem of orphan blocks / block propagation, a problem which has been made significantly better over time. Even Satoshi was convinced that the block limit would be increased (it was only added for ddos protection reasons). He didn't even foresee the "block size debate" as an issue because it was never a debate. Of course the transaction throughput would be increased. He literally said "Bitcoin never really hits a scaling cap". Now, I'm not saying we should deify them or assume that they thought of every potential issue. But I think we should be very hesitant to deviate from their vision without an actual justification. I believe that the community has been poisoned by people who don't even understand the original vision. As soon as Bitcoin Core / Blockstream got involved after Satoshi left the scene, everything went to shit. Lightning is fundamentally an inferior user experience. You should be able to send money instantly without a third party. THAT was the point of bitcoin. Not to force people through a new type of financial institution (lightning hubs), solely to fix a manufactured fee problem.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    How is it instant? It takes 30 - 60 mins to have enough confirmations to be sure, and also pay a fee for miners to even take your transaction.
siwatanejo 9y ago
> need liquidity provided at both ends False. You can open a bidirectional payment channel where only one end deposits money at first. > (kyc/aml)... I'm sorry, how is KYC/AML related to any of these technical conversations? I don't get it.
Ajedi32 9y ago
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me personally I just don't like the approach of trying to solve the problem by throwing more disk space at it. It feels... inelegant, and probably unsustainable long term. Imagine for a minute a future where Bitcoin goes mainstream and needs to process ~2k transactions per second. (A reasonable estimate of the world's current credit card transaction rate, and 3 orders of magnitude more than Bitcoin's current max capacity.) Would that _really_ be possible to sustain just by raising the block size? Bitcoin's block chain is already 150 GB after only a decade, and if we drastically increase its rate of growth like that (by 3 orders of magnitude) the hardware requirements for even storing the full chain are gonna get ridiculous pretty fast. That's not to say that I think bigger blocks couldn't work, but I think if Bitcoin does go that route it then it will need to find a way to trim old blocks out of the chain without compromising security in any way. Otherwise there's a real possibility we might end up with a 100 TB chain on our hands within the next 10 years or so. (Assuming Bitcoin succeeds the way we might want it to.)
- lawlessone 9y ago
  If we keep bitcoin block sizes as they are or reasonable we can roughly predict how big the whole chain would be 100 years from now(im being very optimistic here.)
  - colordrops 9y ago
    And if we stuck to horses we could have predict the fastest speed people could travel across the country in 100 years.
- dlubarov 9y ago
  Lightning Network isn't really a satisfying solution in my opinion. It means that Bitcoin will just be a low-capacity settlement layer, and regular purchases will need to use PayPal-like middlemen to avoid hefty fees. There are a few on-chain scaling solutions. One is Vitalik's approach to sharding. Payments would be split into debits and credits, and a credit transaction would include a Merkle proof showing that a bunch of validators on a different shard approved the corresponding debit. Double spending would be possible if you can corrupt a single shard, but users would be randomly bounced between shards to make that difficult. Another solution, which I think is very practical, is to make some protocol changes so that scalable full nodes can be run by a cluster of servers. Running a full node would become expensive, but most users would be fine with SPV clients + fraud proofs. See https://ethresear.ch/t/scaling-via-full-node-clusters/1358 https://ethresear.ch/t/scaling-via-full-node-clusters/1358
jgeerts 9y ago
If we ever want Bitcoin to evolve from a store of value to an actual payment method we have to come up with something that does at least better than VISA's 8000tx/s and that's just not solved with going from 7tx/s to Bitcoin Cash's ~62tx/s. We have to be able to compete with every payment method out there and we should be able to handle peak throughput during sales period. Another important factor is the 10 minutes confirmation time, nobody wants to wait for 10 minutes at the counter before they trust you walking out. We need something with instant verification and low fees and increasing the blocksize will never do that.
- brendanw 9y ago
  It exists. It is called nano: no fees and instant transactions through the block lattice. https://nano.org/en/whitepaper https://nano.org/en/whitepaper I am surprised more folks on HN are not familiar with nano considering it is one of the few teams in crypto with endorsements from familiar faces: Zack Shapiro on the core team (ex-Product Hunt), Garry Tan (YC, angel investor in Coinbase), and Charlie Lee (former director of engineering @ Coinbase).
  - tlrobinson 9y ago
    Nano and other non-linear/DAG chains are interesting, but it seems more difficult to reason about the consensus properties. Have any (neutral) 3rd parties done thorough analyses of them? I saw Charlie Lee's reddit post asking questions about Nano (https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/80c6fg/questions_about_nano_from_charlie_lee/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/80c6fg/questi...). Did he follow up with an endorsement?
    - danibx 9y ago
      Yep, he posted on twitter after the questions on reddit: https://twitter.com/satoshilite/status/968931625001140224?lang=en https://twitter.com/satoshilite/status/968931625001140224?la...
    - tobik999 9y ago
      Devs said they are researching for a audit company currently, but there will be a major change in the protocol pretty soon, so I guess it will be done afterwards.
tlrobinson 9y ago
In computer science terms, a block size increase is a O(n) solution to a O(n^2) problem (at least).
- colordrops 9y ago
  Except it's not. Disk space per dollar increases at a rate faster than linear.
  - tlrobinson 9y ago
    Does it? This graph looks sub-linear to me https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ There's also bandwidth and CPU costs. If any of those don't keep pace with transaction growth that's a centralizing force. Gavin Andresen actually has a decent summary of some of different "O(n^2)" arguments on his blog http://gavinandresen.ninja/are-bigger-blocks-dangerous http://gavinandresen.ninja/are-bigger-blocks-dangerous though I disagree with most of his conclusions. Regarding all of these, they may not be literally O(n^2) but they are certainly more than O(n) and they compound each other. His argument I disagree with most is the Metcalfe's Law one: > I’ve transacted with probably under 100 other people or companies in the five years I’ve been using Bitcoin; the demand for transactions scales up linearly with the number of people using it. As more people use Bitcoin then Gavin's personal demand for transactions would increase roughly linearly, but because there are more users the overall demand would increase quadratically. Or is he saying his transaction volume wouldn't increase even as more people accepted Bitcoin? I don't believe that.
wmf 9y ago
Lightning is cooler on HN because it's more complex.
colordrops 9y ago
Also a system so complicated almost no one understands how it works.
Sir_Substance 9y ago
BCH's approach would eventually centralize the network. Remember that at least one of these blocks is generated every 10 minutes, and more than one might be flying around during a chain split. Remember also that nodes do actually need to iterate over all the transactions in the block to check they are valid when they receive a new block. Proof of stake prevents malicious actors from wasting CPU/DiskIO on full nodes with spam attacks, but the transactions in a block with PoS signature still need to be validated, ideally before the next block arrives. Originally with the 1MB block, there were quite a lot of full bitcoin nodes running on raspberry PI's under peoples desks in places with really shitty internet. Segwit kinda-sorta actually increased the block size from 1MB to up to 4MB. 16% of Malaysia gets internet slower than 256kbps. Running a bitcoin node today takes up ~20% of a connections total bandwidth in these places. Increase the block size to 20MB, and it will not be possible to run a node in some areas of Malaysia, because 20MB/10min is too fast for the connection. At 20MB of transactions per 10 minutes it's also possible that the diskIO on a gen-1 Raspberry PI using a cheap SD card might not be enough to scan and validate every transaction in an incoming block. Remember that a node might have to scan very far back in the blockchain to find the last time an unspent output was interacted with. I'm not sure how big a block has to be before that IO overhead starts eliminating entry-level hardware. But you don't actually get much for increasing to 20MB blocks. Another poster said that bcash going from 1MB to 8MB blocks increased the throughput from 7tx/s to 62tx/s. Lets take that as gospel, assuming that's 1MB blocks vs 8MB blocks, and extrapolate like madmen. To get to that posters desired 7,000tx/s "Visa scale", we'd need blocks of around...1GB. That's 13.3mbps 24/7. Now most of Australia and the USA can't host a full node, and that's before we start talking not just about disk IO but even hard drive space. If new blocks are being created at the rate of 1 Gigabyte per 10 minutes, you'll need to provision 4 terabytes of new storage every month to compete with Visa. Look, short version is this: scaling by increasing the block size eventually ends in performance requirements that force datacenter scale hardware requirements. If bcash ever reaches that point, it will have lost the decentralized, censorship resistant attributes that make cryptocurrencies valuable in the first. If your cryptocurrency isn't decentralized, you might as well use a bank. There's better regulation and much less uncertainty in being a customer of a bank. So anyway, the Lightning network developers think that LN provides a better scaling solution. Maybe they're right. If they're not, someone will try something else. Maybe there's no solution that can scale to Visa scale, we just don't know. But bigger blocks is definitely not that solution.
tboyd47 9y ago
I tend to think raising the block size to improve throughput is like adding another lane to a busy highway. It's an expensive road upgrade that won't relieve congestion, but just add more commuters by increasing the number of cars. Along that analogy, LN is more like carpooling. More commuters, same number of cars, no changes required to the roads. It's a cheaper upgrade that achieves the same effect in a different way.
- __blockcipher__ 9y ago
  False analogy. In terms of throughput the analogy is good, but you neglected that lightning breaks how bitcoin works. You need to get permission from a centralized lightning hub to transact. Also, high fees (which blockstream vocally is in favor of) increase UTXO bloat by preventing consolidation
  - Geee 9y ago
    Not true. You can still use normal permissionless transactions, and start a hub without a permission. I was also worried about hubs getting too much power, but Lightning just takes all 'busy' paths (such as exchanges and payment providers) to their own roads. If a path is getting busier on mainnet, it is more economical to move it to Lightning. It doesn't favor centralization beyond what naturally happens (some places are busier). If there's someone with too much power, it's always possible to make another hub. It's kind of natural path-finding. I think hubs will be strongly geographical when people start using Bitcoin on their local purchases. Big stores don't also want to give Lightning fees to anyone so they set up their own hub. Also, when the bulk of transactions moves to Lightning, the mainnet fees will become much lower.

lawlessone 9y ago

> BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization. Increasing the block size doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem bigger. other "coins" with larger faster block sizes are already running into storage issues.

gruez 9y ago
>Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand edit: what's up with the downvotes? i'm providing a name to the phenomena and providing a wikipedia link to it.
- osteele 9y ago
  > what's up with the downvotes? Maybe because you provided a link without summarizing it? (Just guessing — I thought your comment was sufficient, and I upvoted it. Also — I know it's policy not to discuss votes, but I'm also a fan of feedback loops that lead to desired behavior, and I don't see enough signal in this one.)
osteele 9y ago
> then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization Because having a bigger block size raises the barrier to being a miner. (CapEx and OpEx are both greater.) Imagine the other extreme: mining is so cheap that every phone, watch, and — oh let's just throw in every mouse and pigeon cortex — can be a miner. This is near one extreme of decentralization. That's unattainable[1], but it's an intuition hook for the fact that the more expensive you make mining, the more centralized it becomes. [1] IOTA tries to get closer to this. It makes a couple of changes from Bitcoin / Ethereum / etc. (1) IOTA uses a graph instead of a chain — this is why mining is cheaper, and low-powered IOT devices can mine. (2) IOTA uses homegrown cryptography, (EDIT: that has been proven exploitable multiple times), instead of reviewed standards. (2) isn't necessary for (1), nor does it help decentralization; it just seems to be an attached vanity project.
- lawlessone 9y ago
  Iota is horrendous(they rolled their own crypto and its bad) and no IOT company will ever bother with it.
  - osteele 9y ago
    > Iota is horrendous(they rolled their own crypto and its bad) Yeah, I probably didn't emphasize this enough. In addition to last year's curl fiasco[1], and this year's email dump[2], there's now this unlucky-13 exploit[3]. > no IOT company will ever bother with it This would seem to follow, but [4] (partnership with Cisco, Samsung, and Volkswagen), if true, contradicts it. (I'm skeptical of IOTA partnership announcements because of last year's IOTA/Microsoft “partnership”[5].) [1] https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1908194b https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1... [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/networks/cryptographers-urge-users-and-researchers-to-abandon-iota-after-leaked-emails https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/networks/crypt... [3] http://blog.lekkertech.net/blog/2018/03/07/iota-signatures/ http://blog.lekkertech.net/blog/2018/03/07/iota-signatures/ [4] https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/630565/blockchain-network-iota-teams-up-cisco-volkswagen-others-data-marketplace/ https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/630565/blockchain-n... [5] https://cointelegraph.com/news/iota-clarifies-misleading-microsoft-quote-no-official-partnership https://cointelegraph.com/news/iota-clarifies-misleading-mic...
- SnowProblem 9y ago
  If anyone can be a miner, then malware can be used to do a 51% attack. Something like that happened with Monero recently [1]. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/sites-are-using-your-browser-mine-crypto-it-could-be-good-thing/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/sites-are-using-your-brows...
  - wmf 9y ago
    Bitcoin is not vulnerable to botnets because it effectively requires ASICs.
colordrops 9y ago
> leading to centralization Repeating this propaganda over and over and over doesn't make it true. No centralization will occur with an increase in block size, as there will still be enough participants to prevent attacking the block chain. If what is meant by centralization is the reduction of people who can run nodes, then keeping the block size small also increases centralization by this definition, as there is a reduction in people who can afford to transact on the main chain. But when it comes to maintaining the core trustless network inherent in the bit coin algorithm, increasing block size does nothing to break its function. Stop with the propaganda.
- eklitzke 9y ago
  I guess that's true based on your definition of "trustless". But I wouldn't consider a network where as a practical matter I have to rely on a small number of centralized servers for validation "trustless".
  - __blockcipher__ 9y ago
    lol, with lightning you have to rely on a small number of centralized payment hubs who will likely be strongarmed by the government into keeping tabs on transactions through KYC/AML laws. It completely breaks the fundamental and original usecase of bitcoin: peer to peer electronic cash. Now it's "first world speculator to first world speculator through intermediary financial institution electronic store-of-value". Doesn't roll of the tongue quite so well, does it? IMO, XMR and BCH are the current best options for transactions. BTC is being destroyed by people who hadn't even heard of it 5 years ago.
    - hahainternet 9y ago
      > lol, with lightning you have to rely on a small number of centralized payment hubs There is no requirement for this. This is FUD.
  - topranks 9y ago
    That is true. I guess my definition is as long as new players / players with different motives and agendas can join the fray, it is ok. So like I don't mind if we end up that you need at least $1million to become a miner, hell we are half way there anyway on both chains, I just mind if nobody can join, or if it goes to $1billion to be able to mine. LN seems like the ultimate in centralisation so as an alternative (while it might work,) it's a far inferior solution on that score.
__blockcipher__ 9y ago
I don't buy the increased centralization argument. It usually comes down to the problem of orphan blocks / block propagation, a problem which has been made significantly better over time. Even Satoshi was convinced that the block limit would be increased (it was only added for ddos protection reasons). He didn't even foresee the "block size debate" as an issue because it was never a debate. Of course the transaction throughput would be increased. He literally said "Bitcoin never really hits a scaling cap". Now, I'm not saying we should deify them or assume that they thought of every potential issue. But I think we should be very hesitant to deviate from their vision without an actual justification. I believe that the community has been poisoned by people who don't even understand the original vision. As soon as Bitcoin Core / Blockstream got involved after Satoshi left the scene, everything went to shit. Lightning is fundamentally an inferior user experience. You should be able to send money instantly without a third party. THAT was the point of bitcoin. Not to force people through a new type of financial institution (lightning hubs), solely to fix a manufactured fee problem.
- EGreg 9y ago
  How is it instant? It takes 30 - 60 mins to have enough confirmations to be sure, and also pay a fee for miners to even take your transaction.

siwatanejo 9y ago

> need liquidity provided at both ends False. You can open a bidirectional payment channel where only one end deposits money at first. > (kyc/aml)... I'm sorry, how is KYC/AML related to any of these technical conversations? I don't get it.

Ajedi32 9y ago

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me personally I just don't like the approach of trying to solve the problem by throwing more disk space at it. It feels... inelegant, and probably unsustainable long term. Imagine for a minute a future where Bitcoin goes mainstream and needs to process ~2k transactions per second. (A reasonable estimate of the world's current credit card transaction rate, and 3 orders of magnitude more than Bitcoin's current max capacity.) Would that _really_ be possible to sustain just by raising the block size? Bitcoin's block chain is already 150 GB after only a decade, and if we drastically increase its rate of growth like that (by 3 orders of magnitude) the hardware requirements for even storing the full chain are gonna get ridiculous pretty fast. That's not to say that I think bigger blocks couldn't work, but I think if Bitcoin does go that route it then it will need to find a way to trim old blocks out of the chain without compromising security in any way. Otherwise there's a real possibility we might end up with a 100 TB chain on our hands within the next 10 years or so. (Assuming Bitcoin succeeds the way we might want it to.)

lawlessone 9y ago
If we keep bitcoin block sizes as they are or reasonable we can roughly predict how big the whole chain would be 100 years from now(im being very optimistic here.)
- colordrops 9y ago
  And if we stuck to horses we could have predict the fastest speed people could travel across the country in 100 years.
dlubarov 9y ago
Lightning Network isn't really a satisfying solution in my opinion. It means that Bitcoin will just be a low-capacity settlement layer, and regular purchases will need to use PayPal-like middlemen to avoid hefty fees. There are a few on-chain scaling solutions. One is Vitalik's approach to sharding. Payments would be split into debits and credits, and a credit transaction would include a Merkle proof showing that a bunch of validators on a different shard approved the corresponding debit. Double spending would be possible if you can corrupt a single shard, but users would be randomly bounced between shards to make that difficult. Another solution, which I think is very practical, is to make some protocol changes so that scalable full nodes can be run by a cluster of servers. Running a full node would become expensive, but most users would be fine with SPV clients + fraud proofs. See https://ethresear.ch/t/scaling-via-full-node-clusters/1358 https://ethresear.ch/t/scaling-via-full-node-clusters/1358

jgeerts 9y ago

If we ever want Bitcoin to evolve from a store of value to an actual payment method we have to come up with something that does at least better than VISA's 8000tx/s and that's just not solved with going from 7tx/s to Bitcoin Cash's ~62tx/s. We have to be able to compete with every payment method out there and we should be able to handle peak throughput during sales period. Another important factor is the 10 minutes confirmation time, nobody wants to wait for 10 minutes at the counter before they trust you walking out. We need something with instant verification and low fees and increasing the blocksize will never do that.

brendanw 9y ago
It exists. It is called nano: no fees and instant transactions through the block lattice. https://nano.org/en/whitepaper https://nano.org/en/whitepaper I am surprised more folks on HN are not familiar with nano considering it is one of the few teams in crypto with endorsements from familiar faces: Zack Shapiro on the core team (ex-Product Hunt), Garry Tan (YC, angel investor in Coinbase), and Charlie Lee (former director of engineering @ Coinbase).
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  Nano and other non-linear/DAG chains are interesting, but it seems more difficult to reason about the consensus properties. Have any (neutral) 3rd parties done thorough analyses of them? I saw Charlie Lee's reddit post asking questions about Nano (https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/80c6fg/questions_about_nano_from_charlie_lee/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/80c6fg/questi...). Did he follow up with an endorsement?
  - danibx 9y ago
    Yep, he posted on twitter after the questions on reddit: https://twitter.com/satoshilite/status/968931625001140224?lang=en https://twitter.com/satoshilite/status/968931625001140224?la...
  - tobik999 9y ago
    Devs said they are researching for a audit company currently, but there will be a major change in the protocol pretty soon, so I guess it will be done afterwards.

tlrobinson 9y ago

In computer science terms, a block size increase is a O(n) solution to a O(n^2) problem (at least).

colordrops 9y ago
Except it's not. Disk space per dollar increases at a rate faster than linear.
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  Does it? This graph looks sub-linear to me https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ There's also bandwidth and CPU costs. If any of those don't keep pace with transaction growth that's a centralizing force. Gavin Andresen actually has a decent summary of some of different "O(n^2)" arguments on his blog http://gavinandresen.ninja/are-bigger-blocks-dangerous http://gavinandresen.ninja/are-bigger-blocks-dangerous though I disagree with most of his conclusions. Regarding all of these, they may not be literally O(n^2) but they are certainly more than O(n) and they compound each other. His argument I disagree with most is the Metcalfe's Law one: > I’ve transacted with probably under 100 other people or companies in the five years I’ve been using Bitcoin; the demand for transactions scales up linearly with the number of people using it. As more people use Bitcoin then Gavin's personal demand for transactions would increase roughly linearly, but because there are more users the overall demand would increase quadratically. Or is he saying his transaction volume wouldn't increase even as more people accepted Bitcoin? I don't believe that.

wmf 9y ago

Lightning is cooler on HN because it's more complex.

colordrops 9y ago

Also a system so complicated almost no one understands how it works.

Sir_Substance 9y ago

BCH's approach would eventually centralize the network. Remember that at least one of these blocks is generated every 10 minutes, and more than one might be flying around during a chain split. Remember also that nodes do actually need to iterate over all the transactions in the block to check they are valid when they receive a new block. Proof of stake prevents malicious actors from wasting CPU/DiskIO on full nodes with spam attacks, but the transactions in a block with PoS signature still need to be validated, ideally before the next block arrives. Originally with the 1MB block, there were quite a lot of full bitcoin nodes running on raspberry PI's under peoples desks in places with really shitty internet. Segwit kinda-sorta actually increased the block size from 1MB to up to 4MB. 16% of Malaysia gets internet slower than 256kbps. Running a bitcoin node today takes up ~20% of a connections total bandwidth in these places. Increase the block size to 20MB, and it will not be possible to run a node in some areas of Malaysia, because 20MB/10min is too fast for the connection. At 20MB of transactions per 10 minutes it's also possible that the diskIO on a gen-1 Raspberry PI using a cheap SD card might not be enough to scan and validate every transaction in an incoming block. Remember that a node might have to scan very far back in the blockchain to find the last time an unspent output was interacted with. I'm not sure how big a block has to be before that IO overhead starts eliminating entry-level hardware. But you don't actually get much for increasing to 20MB blocks. Another poster said that bcash going from 1MB to 8MB blocks increased the throughput from 7tx/s to 62tx/s. Lets take that as gospel, assuming that's 1MB blocks vs 8MB blocks, and extrapolate like madmen. To get to that posters desired 7,000tx/s "Visa scale", we'd need blocks of around...1GB. That's 13.3mbps 24/7. Now most of Australia and the USA can't host a full node, and that's before we start talking not just about disk IO but even hard drive space. If new blocks are being created at the rate of 1 Gigabyte per 10 minutes, you'll need to provision 4 terabytes of new storage every month to compete with Visa. Look, short version is this: scaling by increasing the block size eventually ends in performance requirements that force datacenter scale hardware requirements. If bcash ever reaches that point, it will have lost the decentralized, censorship resistant attributes that make cryptocurrencies valuable in the first. If your cryptocurrency isn't decentralized, you might as well use a bank. There's better regulation and much less uncertainty in being a customer of a bank. So anyway, the Lightning network developers think that LN provides a better scaling solution. Maybe they're right. If they're not, someone will try something else. Maybe there's no solution that can scale to Visa scale, we just don't know. But bigger blocks is definitely not that solution.

tboyd47 9y ago

I tend to think raising the block size to improve throughput is like adding another lane to a busy highway. It's an expensive road upgrade that won't relieve congestion, but just add more commuters by increasing the number of cars. Along that analogy, LN is more like carpooling. More commuters, same number of cars, no changes required to the roads. It's a cheaper upgrade that achieves the same effect in a different way.

__blockcipher__ 9y ago
False analogy. In terms of throughput the analogy is good, but you neglected that lightning breaks how bitcoin works. You need to get permission from a centralized lightning hub to transact. Also, high fees (which blockstream vocally is in favor of) increase UTXO bloat by preventing consolidation
- Geee 9y ago
  Not true. You can still use normal permissionless transactions, and start a hub without a permission. I was also worried about hubs getting too much power, but Lightning just takes all 'busy' paths (such as exchanges and payment providers) to their own roads. If a path is getting busier on mainnet, it is more economical to move it to Lightning. It doesn't favor centralization beyond what naturally happens (some places are busier). If there's someone with too much power, it's always possible to make another hub. It's kind of natural path-finding. I think hubs will be strongly geographical when people start using Bitcoin on their local purchases. Big stores don't also want to give Lightning fees to anyone so they set up their own hub. Also, when the bulk of transactions moves to Lightning, the mainnet fees will become much lower.