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> The point of bitcoin is that everyone should have a copy of every transaction (excluding lightning network transactions). Is that the point of bitcoin? Sato

> The point of bitcoin is that everyone should have a copy of every transaction (excluding lightning network transactions). Is that the point of bitcoin? Satoshi said: > Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/ (He also didn't say anything about "lightning network transactions".) > If we all wants to store every transaction in the way the parent of my previous comment alluded to (increase block size), each of us will need our own mini server farm i.e. exponential storage growth. The BTC blockchain is currently 250 GB. If blocks had been 10 times bigger, the blockchain would still be less than 3 TB, and blocks would almost never be full, which would reduce transaction fees and help to onboard more users. I don't think that storing 3 TB of data requires a server farm.

gl00pp 7y ago
So 10 times (the current) 7 transactions per second = 70tps. And it needs 3TB?? Cmon, that's not lot of gain for a lot of loss of control by the average.
RustyRussell 7y ago
Except SPV as Satoshi described doesn't work, so the trade-off becomes "can users simply trust miners" to which the answer from experience is a resounding "no".
- lawn 7y ago
  For context, this is one of the main devs of the lightning network, who's furthering the propaganda that "miners cannot be trusted". Which is a pretty dumb thing to say, since it's the core security assumption for Bitcoin to work at all.
hnews_account_1 7y ago
> (He also didn't say anything about "lightning network transactions".) Correct. I'm not going by what Satoshi said, but by what development the bitcoin core team is aiming to create now. > If blocks had been 10 times bigger, the blockchain would still be less than 3 TB Correct. The aim of the project is to keep it as small as possible. 3 TB may not seem prohibitive today, but that's because there's hardly been any usage of the network compared to what the real world looks like. If bitcoin truly competed with Visa / Mastercard, both of those numbers will start looking a lot bigger. If the compressed version was 3TB, the bigger blocks version now becomes 30TB - suddenly far out of consumer grade storage for a normal person.
- dane-pgp 7y ago
  So you admit that increasing the block size by 10x would solve the current congestion/fees problem without needing the complexity and changed incentive structure of the Lightning network, and that bitcoin doesn't compete with Visa/Mastercard yet so it doesn't need a 30 TB blockchain (which would fit on two hard drives, which many consumers have). To give an analogy, it's like saying that there should be a law limiting people to only buying 5 books, because if there wasn't a limit then someone could buy a quadrillion books, which would require cutting down all the trees in the world. You're trying to prevent a problem that won't exist, by introducing a restriction that causes a very real problem instead.
  - hnews_account_1 7y ago
    > So you admit that increasing the block size by 10x would solve the current congestion/fees problem without needing the complexity and changed incentive structure of the Lightning network, I don't think so. That also requires a faster cycling of transactions than the current 10 minute round. But yes, obv a larger number of transactions can fit into the block so throughput will increase. > 30 TB blockchain (which would fit on two hard drives, which many consumers have) 1) I don't know if you understand who "consumers" are. 30 TB is far, faaaaaar away from what a normal consumer has. Most of us have a laptop at most and that limits us to 1 TB storage. I personally have a lot of cloud storage, but I'm not the average consumer. I'm highly tech savvy compared to the normal person. So go out and talk to people not in tech and see what their tech specs look like. If they can't match up to you, they still need to be able to process transactions. 2) I didn't say it doesn't need a 30TB blockchain. You're completely misunderstanding my point. I'm saying your glib observation of "oh it's 300GB now, it can scale up to 3TB if it's bigger" is highly ill informed. If you push it only 1 order of magnitude, you're going from 3TB to 30TB and it becomes untenable. Now instead if it was 10KB and scaled to 10MB, it obv makes no difference even with 3 orders of magnitude. 3) You're also not understanding the larger picture. If all transactions in history have to be stored in the blockchain, it requires scaling to become less than linear (or at max, linear) to keep up with consumer storage expectations. It doesn't matter what the size of the blockchain is now (as long as it's within say 1TB that the average consumer can access). It matters how big it gets when there are billions of transactions flowing through it every day. So by that account, even 250GB is a very big number because once we hit billions of transactions, unless the relationship is inverse exponential, we'll breach limits long before touching that point. > You're trying to prevent a problem that won't exist The problem that won't exist of billions of transactions passing through the blockchain? Possibly if we had off chain solutions, yes. Which we do in very early stages. If not, the problem is very very real.

gl00pp 7y ago

So 10 times (the current) 7 transactions per second = 70tps. And it needs 3TB?? Cmon, that's not lot of gain for a lot of loss of control by the average.

RustyRussell 7y ago

Except SPV as Satoshi described doesn't work, so the trade-off becomes "can users simply trust miners" to which the answer from experience is a resounding "no".

lawn 7y ago
For context, this is one of the main devs of the lightning network, who's furthering the propaganda that "miners cannot be trusted". Which is a pretty dumb thing to say, since it's the core security assumption for Bitcoin to work at all.

hnews_account_1 7y ago

> (He also didn't say anything about "lightning network transactions".) Correct. I'm not going by what Satoshi said, but by what development the bitcoin core team is aiming to create now. > If blocks had been 10 times bigger, the blockchain would still be less than 3 TB Correct. The aim of the project is to keep it as small as possible. 3 TB may not seem prohibitive today, but that's because there's hardly been any usage of the network compared to what the real world looks like. If bitcoin truly competed with Visa / Mastercard, both of those numbers will start looking a lot bigger. If the compressed version was 3TB, the bigger blocks version now becomes 30TB - suddenly far out of consumer grade storage for a normal person.

dane-pgp 7y ago
So you admit that increasing the block size by 10x would solve the current congestion/fees problem without needing the complexity and changed incentive structure of the Lightning network, and that bitcoin doesn't compete with Visa/Mastercard yet so it doesn't need a 30 TB blockchain (which would fit on two hard drives, which many consumers have). To give an analogy, it's like saying that there should be a law limiting people to only buying 5 books, because if there wasn't a limit then someone could buy a quadrillion books, which would require cutting down all the trees in the world. You're trying to prevent a problem that won't exist, by introducing a restriction that causes a very real problem instead.
- hnews_account_1 7y ago
  > So you admit that increasing the block size by 10x would solve the current congestion/fees problem without needing the complexity and changed incentive structure of the Lightning network, I don't think so. That also requires a faster cycling of transactions than the current 10 minute round. But yes, obv a larger number of transactions can fit into the block so throughput will increase. > 30 TB blockchain (which would fit on two hard drives, which many consumers have) 1) I don't know if you understand who "consumers" are. 30 TB is far, faaaaaar away from what a normal consumer has. Most of us have a laptop at most and that limits us to 1 TB storage. I personally have a lot of cloud storage, but I'm not the average consumer. I'm highly tech savvy compared to the normal person. So go out and talk to people not in tech and see what their tech specs look like. If they can't match up to you, they still need to be able to process transactions. 2) I didn't say it doesn't need a 30TB blockchain. You're completely misunderstanding my point. I'm saying your glib observation of "oh it's 300GB now, it can scale up to 3TB if it's bigger" is highly ill informed. If you push it only 1 order of magnitude, you're going from 3TB to 30TB and it becomes untenable. Now instead if it was 10KB and scaled to 10MB, it obv makes no difference even with 3 orders of magnitude. 3) You're also not understanding the larger picture. If all transactions in history have to be stored in the blockchain, it requires scaling to become less than linear (or at max, linear) to keep up with consumer storage expectations. It doesn't matter what the size of the blockchain is now (as long as it's within say 1TB that the average consumer can access). It matters how big it gets when there are billions of transactions flowing through it every day. So by that account, even 250GB is a very big number because once we hit billions of transactions, unless the relationship is inverse exponential, we'll breach limits long before touching that point. > You're trying to prevent a problem that won't exist The problem that won't exist of billions of transactions passing through the blockchain? Possibly if we had off chain solutions, yes. Which we do in very early stages. If not, the problem is very very real.