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I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know wha

I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.

tapland 7y ago
I didn't know it was that bad. That couldn't scale to a small city =/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- once_inc 7y ago
  That is the price to pay for decentralization. That said, further optimizations will increase the number of transactions per block, and second layer solutions can scale bitcoin to a vastly larger size.
- trickstra 7y ago
  Don't listen to him. The whining about small blocks is just a narrative BCH folks want to push. Yes, it's true that currently bitcoin blockchain processes about 7 transanctions per second. But mempool is almost empty, 1sat/byte transactions go into next block - there really isn't any pressure to make blocks bigger right now. No emergency. And making blocks bigger comes with a big risk of spammers, so if we have other alternatives, we should take them. By the time people need much more than 7 transactions per second lightning will be fully usable, so there really isn't any problem.
  - varvar 7y ago
    Name checks out. No I don't think it's "just whining", and not everyone criticizing the obstructionist enforcement of small block size is part of the BCH team. Thats ridiculous. It's plain for everyone to see and converse about. Framing it as one team vs another is divisive and blocks honest conversations.
johndevor 7y ago
Lightning network solves this as do many other things (liquid sidechains)
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  Lightning Network is not peer to peer which is what most of us signed up for with bitcoin. I don’t want centralized middlemen and their channels, might as well use a bank at that point. Lightning Network isn’t simple and elegant, it is a convoluted mess. The peer to peer foundation of bitcoin is literally in the title of the white paper from Satoshi. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
  - corporate_shi11 7y ago
    Can you explain why you think it's a convoluted mess?
    - themagician 7y ago
      If you read the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network) it highlights it quite well under "commitment transactions." It takes something that is, in human terms, relatively simple and makes it so convoluted that it's hard to even follow.
      - pshc 7y ago
        Wikipedia is often notoriously convoluted for technical topics though. I read the Lightning paper and found it simple enough to understand (conceptually at least) how the channels are opened, updated, closed, and penalized. Of course the actual implementation is a more complicated and nuanced than what the paper covers.
        phillipsjk 7y ago
        Since you read the Lighting whitepaper, you know that an uncongested base-layer is assumed. The paper suggests something like 133MB blocks at scale.
CalmStorm 7y ago
With Segregated Witness (SegWit) enabled on July 21, 2017, the Bitcoin block size has been increased by approximately 1.6 - 2 times. So the TPS should be increased correspondingly.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
For comparison, Visa claims it can handle more than 65 thousand transaction messages per second: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan... > Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second. The small scale of bitcoin increases the cost of transactions, making it less useful as a currency and more useful as an investiment. Perhaps it was made this way by design.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- staplers 7y ago
  The creator actually suggested that it could scale fine if they increased the block size and mentioned future miner farms in 2010. However, it would make sense that exchanges and credit-card-like institutions would want to keep bitcoin unscalable for the foreseeable future and stall scalable development.
  - bathtub365 7y ago
    Do you have any evidence of this kind of collusion?
    - phillipsjk 7y ago
      Blockstream (Which funds Core developers) was funded by AXA Strategic Ventures with about $80Million in two rounds. Digital Currency Group, which has investment in a lot of Bitcoin companies has a controlling interest from MasterCard. That alone does not prove anything, but Bitcoin (BTC) failed to scale. When fees hit $50/transaction, with weeks long confirmation times, most companies backed by DGC failed to switch to the upgraded version of Bitcoin (BCH). This was despite BCH being a drop-in replacement, while Segregated Witness (the BTC upgrade) was not. Part of the reason nobody switched to BCH was a major marketing push to strip Bitcoin Cash of the name "Bitcoin", and to frame it as a "scam" with "air-dropped tokens" you can "claim". (It was just a direct blockchain copy at fork time). The truth is that BCH forked from BTC after 4 years of obstructionism. We forked just in time: because the huge transaction backlog on BTC happened within months of the fork. The result was an entirely predictable result of failing to scale.
ArchD 7y ago
Big blocks are probably easier to censor and harder to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks. Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison. Censorship-resistance and on-chain scaling are both good things, but one picks a priority. You or someone else can always go BCH if you like big blocks and the BTC devs are not going to stop you.
- lawn 7y ago
  > Big blocks are probably easier to censor Only if they get extremely big, and the clients cannot handle them. > to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks. These people should use light wallets or SPV wallets, which is what we already use on mobile phones. > Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison. Only Siths deal with absolutes. This is a false choice. Small blocks, and large fees, also have a centralizing effect on the network as small miners gets priced out as the transaction fees removes a larger fraction of their income. And miner decentralization is the most important type of centralization there is, because that's what provides censorship resistance and network security.
sunshinerag 7y ago
Lightning protocol addresses that. You can make millions of transactions per second [1]. Quite a lot of crypto sites are already supporting it and wallet support is increasing too [2]. [1] - https://lightning.network https://lightning.network [2] - https://blog.bitrefill.com/top-11-lightning-network-wallets-bitrefill-328b5465b1b4 https://blog.bitrefill.com/top-11-lightning-network-wallets-...
- ac29 7y ago
  Why is an additional layer of complexity an improvement? Why not make bitcoin blocks 10x larger and 10x more frequent? The argument that "only large entities will be able to keep up with that" doesn't really hold - thats the status quo already.
  - nullc 7y ago
    Why add TCP to IP or HTTP to TCP? It's sound engineering. Like in other systems by composing layers you can achieve the advantages of each component while addressing their costs, without creating insurmountable complexity... "have your cake and eat it too". Particularly, the central Bitcoin system is a global broadcast medium-- necessarily for its security. Global broadcast is inherently somewhat limited in its scalability (though less than some assume). Other layers effectively add "transaction switching" to Bitcoin, radically improving scalablity and performance with their own costs which are good trade-offs for their applications. As far as the status quo of traditional finance... If you're happy with the status quo! Use it! (I'm going to assume you don't mean the status quo of Bitcoin--because 28kb/sec isn't something only large entities can keep up with, it adds up over time-- but even cumulatively its managable) You could recreate the status quo of centralized finance with Bitcoin, but it wouldn't be obviously better: at least systems like visa and paypal are purpose build to do what they do. Bitcoin takes on a lot of costs and tradeoffs to achieve decenteralization. Bitcoin was created to be money that existed above and outside of the vulgarities of immediate human politics, just like how strong encryption made it effectively impossible for some sysadmin to just read your files based on some excuse. I think having that option in the world is extraordinarily valuable.
zallarak 7y ago
Clarifications (this comment perpetuates some common misconceptions): - A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction. - Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactions with how nation-states settle their central-bank ledgers with gold. Gold is the best comparison to Bitcoin because trading in hard gold is "final". Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash. As do bank transfers. All of these bubble down into interbank transfers that eventually settle on the base layer of central banks. So compared to shipping and securing gold, Bitcoin is quite cheap! * Pasted and modified from an earlier comment I made on HN.
- mathiasrw 7y ago
  > Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions Why not?
  - nemild 7y ago
    Compared to credit cards: - Bitcoin doesn't have chargebacks - Bitcoin's base protocol transaction throughput is low - There is a fixed cost per transaction (credit cards have low marginal costs for the credit card processor, and variable, percentage-based fees)
    - Nursie 7y ago
      There is an uncorrelated cost for every transaction, it's not exactly fixed.
  - ra5 7y ago
    From a slightly more nerdy perspective: Because these credit card companies have thousands of _their_ machines, in _their_ locations, running _their_ software, to meet _their_ standards. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is run god knows where, for god knows who (as rightfully intended of course), on god knows what software. Sadly speed is just naturally part of the tradeoff in this scenario.
cletus 7y ago
So having a “currency” (its not really; is an asset) being controlled by an unaccountable “Tony cabal of developers” instead of a central bank is better how exactly? I’ve never understood this argument.
- nullc 7y ago
  It's good you don't understand it, because it wouldn't be better. It be much worse, because as unaccountable as central banks can be they'd be more accountable than that. But that simply isn't how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin developers have no such authority. People with no special power beside respect and goodwill, write software on their own as they're free to do just are you're free to do. Other people voluntarily chose to run it. If people don't run it, it's completely inert. They cannot force anyone to run it. Subject to the limitations of public review, they cannot make hidden changes. The software has no automatic updates, and the developers have a long history of being extremely vigorously opposed to automatic updates. Because whatever effect the software has on the network could only be slowly realized as it's deployed (short of something like a crash bug or an RCE or similar) there is ample time for the public to review a new version -- even if they chose to ignore the open development process -- and sound the alarm against running it if they judge it to be adverse. If you don't like software put out by one developer, you can run software from another. You could create your own (or pay someone to do it) from scratch. You could run an old version. You could take a version you don't like and make modifications until you do... Moreover, the biggest community of developers in Bitcoin makes their software all free software, develops it on public lists/websites/irc channels, and has taken considerable efforts to maintain compatibility with other software specific to maximize your ability to choose to not run it without feeling too much conflict or hesitation-- You can happily go take Bitcoin 0.8 from 2013 or and years old copy of knots or a number of other forks or alternative implements... start it up and it will sync and come to consensus with the network. (I wouldn't necessarily recommend running something that old exposed to the internet-- due to vulnerabilities-- but you could and it would work fine.) I would say your freedom is like your freedom with free software, but it isn't quite: If almost everyone else chooses to run something incompatible you can still keep running your original, but you might find yourself on a separate currency from everyone else. Since money gains it's value from network effects you might fine that less than ideal. But that's the limit, and it's also why the Bitcoin community is cautious with incompatible changes-- essentially never having intentionally made one. Faults in version prior to 0.8 make them self-incompatible, unfortunately. If you want to run a version prior to 0.8 and come to consensus with the network today you'd have to patch a database handling bug in it. I think this is better. It's certainly very different properties than a trusted third party, and even if you're not sure it's clearly better-- perhaps you can agree that diversity and choice is useful and that you're better off for having the opportunity to use it should the need arise.
mathiasrw 7y ago
Never forget: The original protocol did not have the restrictions you are feeling. Letting volume be the main driver for payments to the network instead of fees (as it is today) scales much better. By that, I am stating that the hostage situation (as you describe it) has been introduced commit per commit. Well, in the end, its a battle of opinion because smaller blocks give other features to the chain, so it will be interesting to follow how the dynamics between volume, miners, businesses and users unfolds when the original protocol is reintroduced on the BSV chain the 4th of February.
- nullc 7y ago
  For readers, BSV is an Bitcoin clone created and promoted by Craig Wright. An austrialian man who fraudulently and without any evidence claims to be Bitcoin's creator and that BSV is his (Satoshi's) Vision (thus the name). Well not just 'not any evidence' -- he claimed to provide a cornucopia of "evidence" all of which turned out to be easily proven to be forgeries. Things like editing his old blog posts to insert mentions of bitcoin (archive.org shows they were added years later), or claimed "digital signatures" by satoshi which were just literally copies out of the blockchain, or trickeries of unsound cryptography ( https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81115/if-someone-wanted-to-pretend-to-be-satoshi-by-posting-a-fake-signature-to-defrau https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81115/if-someone... ). Unfortunately, the media loves a headline, and all too often doesn't care much about the facts. And cryptocurrency appeals to a diverse collection of people including many that are highly exploitable by Wright's bombastic approach, including a number of business leaders. Wright has a long personal history of fraud with numerous judgments in courts and administrative bodies against him. His Bitcoin related fraud appears to have begun with an R&D tax rebate scam where he claimed millions then attempted tens of millions in tax credits which he couldn't have possibly earned without spending hundreds of millions of dollars. To justify that he had hundreds of millions to spend, he claimed to be Bitcoin's creator. From there it appears to have evolved into an advanced fee fraud plus scammy cryptocurreny pump. Essentially he's been claiming that he owns a million bitcoin but it's locked in a trust and asking for investments that he'll repay or getting people to buy his crypocurrency which he assures them will go up in value when he 'dumps' his Bitcoin and uses the income to buy up BSV. Annoyingly, to pull of this scam he's and his representatives engaged in a massive campaign of harassment and fudding towards people involved in Bitcoin, particular developers and former developers like myself... lying about the history of Bitcoin, our activities in Bitcoin, etc. He even falsely accuses me of funding ISIS and other such nonsense (e.g. https://twitter.com/AldersonBSV/status/1199160142048063488 https://twitter.com/AldersonBSV/status/1199160142048063488 ). ... and generally just making a mess and turning a previously fun domain to work on into a frightening morass of attacks and threats from conspiracy filled crazy people or people pretending to be ones. By attacking the credibility of the people most able to call out his deceit he isolates his marks from the very people who would protect them. Walking over all this has clearly had a protective effect, but it doesn't save everyone.
cyphertruck 7y ago
If you read the bitcoin core release notes going back at least the past 5 years, and look at the road map, every release and every planned addition has improved scalability— many of them very significant improvements. The “bitcoin doesn’t scale” trope is a claim made by people who tried to take over bitcoin (Eg Roger Ver, Craig Wright, the S2X cabal) generally with their own personal benefit as the motive. Unfortunately, even here in HN, most commenters gave t been reading the release notes. But you should. Core is very accessible, and the release notes of bitcoin are the developer equivalent of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders.
- DagAgren 7y ago
  It is a claim also made by anyone who understands bitcoin. It just doesn't scale. This is a fact, no matter whether scammers also agree.
kain_niak 7y ago
No we are not. Lots of devs, miners and businesses got together and forked to BCH. The only thing holding up BTC price is Tether, it will fail and Ethereum and BCH will lead the space. The rest is pretty much bullshit because Ethereum and BCH together can almost do anything.
- ibz 7y ago
  How is Tether holding up BTC price? Can you elaborate?
rkagerer 7y ago
I agree with the desire to scale, but there are tradeoffs and I for one appreciate the mindfulness to chaindata growth rate.
chris123 7y ago
No, the block size must remain small. I just don't transactions and speed won't be handled on a second layer solution. people who think they want a bigger block size can go with Bitcoin cash or Gavin or whatever consortium was the fork and go with that. Good luck.
nighthawk24 7y ago
Bitcoin already scaled on the Bitcoin Cash chain all whilst Bitcoin Core dev payroll was taken over by Blockstream co and Chaincode Labs co who's vested interest lies in limiting the core protocol to sell side-chain tech. The market still trades BTC as Bitcoin because of the strong branding and censorship in various online communities. All that doesn't matter as P2P Electronic Cash is doing well on BCH.
- jobeirne 7y ago
  I am so glad Bitcoin Cash exists for people like you.
  - nighthawk24 7y ago
    Absolutely, there is no good reason for private entities who take over an open source project and limit it for private interests when a major chunk of people reject it.
    - nullc 7y ago
      The allegation of "take over" is both dishonest misinformation and a really abusive attack. The people you're accusing of taking Bitcoin over have been there essentially all along, -- long before you ever heard of it. The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have also been with Bitcoin all along: as a look into the history shows, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977347
      - nighthawk24 7y ago
        Sorry, the real attack was by the group led by Adam Back who himself dismissed Bitcoin initially before having a VC fund him to cater to his plan http://cashbleed.com/ http://cashbleed.com/ Following which scare tactics ensued which broke the block size increase agreements of 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit, that Bitcoin wouldn't survive a hardfork upgrade even though it had upgraded several times in the past. The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access when he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi and testing large block clients on the side. On-going abusive attacks when discussing about pros/cons of small blocks in r/Bitcoin and DDoS on large block nodes since Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin ABC.. The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have been there for a long time indeed, and we've come a long way with optimizing transactions and still keeping fees low while accessing the ledger via Bitcoin Cash VS forcing transactions to layer 2 side-chains via Bitcoin Core.
blueprint 7y ago
Yeah let's increase block size without a way to control the precedent of size increase so only a very select few groups have the compute power to mine. Yay centralization
leondavibe 7y ago
7tps would mean about 600 000 transactions a day Years ago BTC once managed 550 000 transactions in a 24 he period Now at best just over 400 000 So in reality it's more like 5 TPS
pokmon 7y ago
I never believed in bitcoin retrieval cos people around me told me it’s not possible. Sometimes last year I fell for a binary option scam which promised a higher return and I lost close to $97,000 worth of bitcoin, I felt so sad and devastated at the same time and lost all hope. Few months ago I read a lot reviewed on bitcoin site how digital currency had helped them recover there stolen bitcoin, as regards a recovery expert and genius so I contact his via his email cyberhackall, explained my ordeal how I was scammed and he promised to help me get all my bitcoin back to my greatest surprise I got all bitcoins recovered within 48 hours. Contact : CYBERHACKALL@GMAIL.COM OR TEXT/ WHTSAPP :+19086939476..
mrsnuffy 7y ago
"I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers..." No... we're not. There are bitcoin nodes which didn't follow the 1MB block size and "segwit" or "dsv" nonsense .... they just use the protocol rules from the original bitcoin. To say bitcoin scales just great is an understatement. It scales so well it will consume _everything_
BigBubbler 7y ago
The new "owners" of BTC will not let it grow. BTC was intentionally captured and development-centralized to stop it from being able to scale and become peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people.

tapland 7y ago

I didn't know it was that bad. That couldn't scale to a small city =/

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
once_inc 7y ago
That is the price to pay for decentralization. That said, further optimizations will increase the number of transactions per block, and second layer solutions can scale bitcoin to a vastly larger size.
trickstra 7y ago
Don't listen to him. The whining about small blocks is just a narrative BCH folks want to push. Yes, it's true that currently bitcoin blockchain processes about 7 transanctions per second. But mempool is almost empty, 1sat/byte transactions go into next block - there really isn't any pressure to make blocks bigger right now. No emergency. And making blocks bigger comes with a big risk of spammers, so if we have other alternatives, we should take them. By the time people need much more than 7 transactions per second lightning will be fully usable, so there really isn't any problem.
- varvar 7y ago
  Name checks out. No I don't think it's "just whining", and not everyone criticizing the obstructionist enforcement of small block size is part of the BCH team. Thats ridiculous. It's plain for everyone to see and converse about. Framing it as one team vs another is divisive and blocks honest conversations.

johndevor 7y ago

Lightning network solves this as do many other things (liquid sidechains)

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Lightning Network is not peer to peer which is what most of us signed up for with bitcoin. I don’t want centralized middlemen and their channels, might as well use a bank at that point. Lightning Network isn’t simple and elegant, it is a convoluted mess. The peer to peer foundation of bitcoin is literally in the title of the white paper from Satoshi. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- corporate_shi11 7y ago
  Can you explain why you think it's a convoluted mess?
  - themagician 7y ago
    If you read the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network) it highlights it quite well under "commitment transactions." It takes something that is, in human terms, relatively simple and makes it so convoluted that it's hard to even follow.
    - pshc 7y ago
      Wikipedia is often notoriously convoluted for technical topics though. I read the Lightning paper and found it simple enough to understand (conceptually at least) how the channels are opened, updated, closed, and penalized. Of course the actual implementation is a more complicated and nuanced than what the paper covers.
      - phillipsjk 7y ago
        Since you read the Lighting whitepaper, you know that an uncongested base-layer is assumed. The paper suggests something like 133MB blocks at scale.

CalmStorm 7y ago

With Segregated Witness (SegWit) enabled on July 21, 2017, the Bitcoin block size has been increased by approximately 1.6 - 2 times. So the TPS should be increased correspondingly.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

For comparison, Visa claims it can handle more than 65 thousand transaction messages per second: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan... > Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second. The small scale of bitcoin increases the cost of transactions, making it less useful as a currency and more useful as an investiment. Perhaps it was made this way by design.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
staplers 7y ago
The creator actually suggested that it could scale fine if they increased the block size and mentioned future miner farms in 2010. However, it would make sense that exchanges and credit-card-like institutions would want to keep bitcoin unscalable for the foreseeable future and stall scalable development.
- bathtub365 7y ago
  Do you have any evidence of this kind of collusion?
  - phillipsjk 7y ago
    Blockstream (Which funds Core developers) was funded by AXA Strategic Ventures with about $80Million in two rounds. Digital Currency Group, which has investment in a lot of Bitcoin companies has a controlling interest from MasterCard. That alone does not prove anything, but Bitcoin (BTC) failed to scale. When fees hit $50/transaction, with weeks long confirmation times, most companies backed by DGC failed to switch to the upgraded version of Bitcoin (BCH). This was despite BCH being a drop-in replacement, while Segregated Witness (the BTC upgrade) was not. Part of the reason nobody switched to BCH was a major marketing push to strip Bitcoin Cash of the name "Bitcoin", and to frame it as a "scam" with "air-dropped tokens" you can "claim". (It was just a direct blockchain copy at fork time). The truth is that BCH forked from BTC after 4 years of obstructionism. We forked just in time: because the huge transaction backlog on BTC happened within months of the fork. The result was an entirely predictable result of failing to scale.

ArchD 7y ago

Big blocks are probably easier to censor and harder to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks. Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison. Censorship-resistance and on-chain scaling are both good things, but one picks a priority. You or someone else can always go BCH if you like big blocks and the BTC devs are not going to stop you.

lawn 7y ago
> Big blocks are probably easier to censor Only if they get extremely big, and the clients cannot handle them. > to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks. These people should use light wallets or SPV wallets, which is what we already use on mobile phones. > Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison. Only Siths deal with absolutes. This is a false choice. Small blocks, and large fees, also have a centralizing effect on the network as small miners gets priced out as the transaction fees removes a larger fraction of their income. And miner decentralization is the most important type of centralization there is, because that's what provides censorship resistance and network security.

sunshinerag 7y ago

Lightning protocol addresses that. You can make millions of transactions per second [1]. Quite a lot of crypto sites are already supporting it and wallet support is increasing too [2]. [1] - https://lightning.network https://lightning.network [2] - https://blog.bitrefill.com/top-11-lightning-network-wallets-bitrefill-328b5465b1b4 https://blog.bitrefill.com/top-11-lightning-network-wallets-...

ac29 7y ago
Why is an additional layer of complexity an improvement? Why not make bitcoin blocks 10x larger and 10x more frequent? The argument that "only large entities will be able to keep up with that" doesn't really hold - thats the status quo already.
- nullc 7y ago
  Why add TCP to IP or HTTP to TCP? It's sound engineering. Like in other systems by composing layers you can achieve the advantages of each component while addressing their costs, without creating insurmountable complexity... "have your cake and eat it too". Particularly, the central Bitcoin system is a global broadcast medium-- necessarily for its security. Global broadcast is inherently somewhat limited in its scalability (though less than some assume). Other layers effectively add "transaction switching" to Bitcoin, radically improving scalablity and performance with their own costs which are good trade-offs for their applications. As far as the status quo of traditional finance... If you're happy with the status quo! Use it! (I'm going to assume you don't mean the status quo of Bitcoin--because 28kb/sec isn't something only large entities can keep up with, it adds up over time-- but even cumulatively its managable) You could recreate the status quo of centralized finance with Bitcoin, but it wouldn't be obviously better: at least systems like visa and paypal are purpose build to do what they do. Bitcoin takes on a lot of costs and tradeoffs to achieve decenteralization. Bitcoin was created to be money that existed above and outside of the vulgarities of immediate human politics, just like how strong encryption made it effectively impossible for some sysadmin to just read your files based on some excuse. I think having that option in the world is extraordinarily valuable.

zallarak 7y ago

Clarifications (this comment perpetuates some common misconceptions): - A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction. - Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactions with how nation-states settle their central-bank ledgers with gold. Gold is the best comparison to Bitcoin because trading in hard gold is "final". Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash. As do bank transfers. All of these bubble down into interbank transfers that eventually settle on the base layer of central banks. So compared to shipping and securing gold, Bitcoin is quite cheap! * Pasted and modified from an earlier comment I made on HN.

mathiasrw 7y ago
> Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions Why not?
- nemild 7y ago
  Compared to credit cards: - Bitcoin doesn't have chargebacks - Bitcoin's base protocol transaction throughput is low - There is a fixed cost per transaction (credit cards have low marginal costs for the credit card processor, and variable, percentage-based fees)
  - Nursie 7y ago
    There is an uncorrelated cost for every transaction, it's not exactly fixed.
- ra5 7y ago
  From a slightly more nerdy perspective: Because these credit card companies have thousands of _their_ machines, in _their_ locations, running _their_ software, to meet _their_ standards. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is run god knows where, for god knows who (as rightfully intended of course), on god knows what software. Sadly speed is just naturally part of the tradeoff in this scenario.

cletus 7y ago

So having a “currency” (its not really; is an asset) being controlled by an unaccountable “Tony cabal of developers” instead of a central bank is better how exactly? I’ve never understood this argument.

nullc 7y ago
It's good you don't understand it, because it wouldn't be better. It be much worse, because as unaccountable as central banks can be they'd be more accountable than that. But that simply isn't how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin developers have no such authority. People with no special power beside respect and goodwill, write software on their own as they're free to do just are you're free to do. Other people voluntarily chose to run it. If people don't run it, it's completely inert. They cannot force anyone to run it. Subject to the limitations of public review, they cannot make hidden changes. The software has no automatic updates, and the developers have a long history of being extremely vigorously opposed to automatic updates. Because whatever effect the software has on the network could only be slowly realized as it's deployed (short of something like a crash bug or an RCE or similar) there is ample time for the public to review a new version -- even if they chose to ignore the open development process -- and sound the alarm against running it if they judge it to be adverse. If you don't like software put out by one developer, you can run software from another. You could create your own (or pay someone to do it) from scratch. You could run an old version. You could take a version you don't like and make modifications until you do... Moreover, the biggest community of developers in Bitcoin makes their software all free software, develops it on public lists/websites/irc channels, and has taken considerable efforts to maintain compatibility with other software specific to maximize your ability to choose to not run it without feeling too much conflict or hesitation-- You can happily go take Bitcoin 0.8 from 2013 or and years old copy of knots or a number of other forks or alternative implements... start it up and it will sync and come to consensus with the network. (I wouldn't necessarily recommend running something that old exposed to the internet-- due to vulnerabilities-- but you could and it would work fine.) I would say your freedom is like your freedom with free software, but it isn't quite: If almost everyone else chooses to run something incompatible you can still keep running your original, but you might find yourself on a separate currency from everyone else. Since money gains it's value from network effects you might fine that less than ideal. But that's the limit, and it's also why the Bitcoin community is cautious with incompatible changes-- essentially never having intentionally made one. Faults in version prior to 0.8 make them self-incompatible, unfortunately. If you want to run a version prior to 0.8 and come to consensus with the network today you'd have to patch a database handling bug in it. I think this is better. It's certainly very different properties than a trusted third party, and even if you're not sure it's clearly better-- perhaps you can agree that diversity and choice is useful and that you're better off for having the opportunity to use it should the need arise.

mathiasrw 7y ago

Never forget: The original protocol did not have the restrictions you are feeling. Letting volume be the main driver for payments to the network instead of fees (as it is today) scales much better. By that, I am stating that the hostage situation (as you describe it) has been introduced commit per commit. Well, in the end, its a battle of opinion because smaller blocks give other features to the chain, so it will be interesting to follow how the dynamics between volume, miners, businesses and users unfolds when the original protocol is reintroduced on the BSV chain the 4th of February.

nullc 7y ago
For readers, BSV is an Bitcoin clone created and promoted by Craig Wright. An austrialian man who fraudulently and without any evidence claims to be Bitcoin's creator and that BSV is his (Satoshi's) Vision (thus the name). Well not just 'not any evidence' -- he claimed to provide a cornucopia of "evidence" all of which turned out to be easily proven to be forgeries. Things like editing his old blog posts to insert mentions of bitcoin (archive.org shows they were added years later), or claimed "digital signatures" by satoshi which were just literally copies out of the blockchain, or trickeries of unsound cryptography ( https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81115/if-someone-wanted-to-pretend-to-be-satoshi-by-posting-a-fake-signature-to-defrau https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81115/if-someone... ). Unfortunately, the media loves a headline, and all too often doesn't care much about the facts. And cryptocurrency appeals to a diverse collection of people including many that are highly exploitable by Wright's bombastic approach, including a number of business leaders. Wright has a long personal history of fraud with numerous judgments in courts and administrative bodies against him. His Bitcoin related fraud appears to have begun with an R&D tax rebate scam where he claimed millions then attempted tens of millions in tax credits which he couldn't have possibly earned without spending hundreds of millions of dollars. To justify that he had hundreds of millions to spend, he claimed to be Bitcoin's creator. From there it appears to have evolved into an advanced fee fraud plus scammy cryptocurreny pump. Essentially he's been claiming that he owns a million bitcoin but it's locked in a trust and asking for investments that he'll repay or getting people to buy his crypocurrency which he assures them will go up in value when he 'dumps' his Bitcoin and uses the income to buy up BSV. Annoyingly, to pull of this scam he's and his representatives engaged in a massive campaign of harassment and fudding towards people involved in Bitcoin, particular developers and former developers like myself... lying about the history of Bitcoin, our activities in Bitcoin, etc. He even falsely accuses me of funding ISIS and other such nonsense (e.g. https://twitter.com/AldersonBSV/status/1199160142048063488 https://twitter.com/AldersonBSV/status/1199160142048063488 ). ... and generally just making a mess and turning a previously fun domain to work on into a frightening morass of attacks and threats from conspiracy filled crazy people or people pretending to be ones. By attacking the credibility of the people most able to call out his deceit he isolates his marks from the very people who would protect them. Walking over all this has clearly had a protective effect, but it doesn't save everyone.

cyphertruck 7y ago

If you read the bitcoin core release notes going back at least the past 5 years, and look at the road map, every release and every planned addition has improved scalability— many of them very significant improvements. The “bitcoin doesn’t scale” trope is a claim made by people who tried to take over bitcoin (Eg Roger Ver, Craig Wright, the S2X cabal) generally with their own personal benefit as the motive. Unfortunately, even here in HN, most commenters gave t been reading the release notes. But you should. Core is very accessible, and the release notes of bitcoin are the developer equivalent of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders.

DagAgren 7y ago
It is a claim also made by anyone who understands bitcoin. It just doesn't scale. This is a fact, no matter whether scammers also agree.

kain_niak 7y ago

No we are not. Lots of devs, miners and businesses got together and forked to BCH. The only thing holding up BTC price is Tether, it will fail and Ethereum and BCH will lead the space. The rest is pretty much bullshit because Ethereum and BCH together can almost do anything.

ibz 7y ago
How is Tether holding up BTC price? Can you elaborate?

rkagerer 7y ago

I agree with the desire to scale, but there are tradeoffs and I for one appreciate the mindfulness to chaindata growth rate.

chris123 7y ago

No, the block size must remain small. I just don't transactions and speed won't be handled on a second layer solution. people who think they want a bigger block size can go with Bitcoin cash or Gavin or whatever consortium was the fork and go with that. Good luck.

nighthawk24 7y ago

Bitcoin already scaled on the Bitcoin Cash chain all whilst Bitcoin Core dev payroll was taken over by Blockstream co and Chaincode Labs co who's vested interest lies in limiting the core protocol to sell side-chain tech. The market still trades BTC as Bitcoin because of the strong branding and censorship in various online communities. All that doesn't matter as P2P Electronic Cash is doing well on BCH.

jobeirne 7y ago
I am so glad Bitcoin Cash exists for people like you.
- nighthawk24 7y ago
  Absolutely, there is no good reason for private entities who take over an open source project and limit it for private interests when a major chunk of people reject it.
  - nullc 7y ago
    The allegation of "take over" is both dishonest misinformation and a really abusive attack. The people you're accusing of taking Bitcoin over have been there essentially all along, -- long before you ever heard of it. The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have also been with Bitcoin all along: as a look into the history shows, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977347
    - nighthawk24 7y ago
      Sorry, the real attack was by the group led by Adam Back who himself dismissed Bitcoin initially before having a VC fund him to cater to his plan http://cashbleed.com/ http://cashbleed.com/ Following which scare tactics ensued which broke the block size increase agreements of 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit, that Bitcoin wouldn't survive a hardfork upgrade even though it had upgraded several times in the past. The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access when he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi and testing large block clients on the side. On-going abusive attacks when discussing about pros/cons of small blocks in r/Bitcoin and DDoS on large block nodes since Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin ABC.. The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have been there for a long time indeed, and we've come a long way with optimizing transactions and still keeping fees low while accessing the ledger via Bitcoin Cash VS forcing transactions to layer 2 side-chains via Bitcoin Core.

blueprint 7y ago

Yeah let's increase block size without a way to control the precedent of size increase so only a very select few groups have the compute power to mine. Yay centralization

leondavibe 7y ago

7tps would mean about 600 000 transactions a day Years ago BTC once managed 550 000 transactions in a 24 he period Now at best just over 400 000 So in reality it's more like 5 TPS

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mrsnuffy 7y ago

"I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers..." No... we're not. There are bitcoin nodes which didn't follow the 1MB block size and "segwit" or "dsv" nonsense .... they just use the protocol rules from the original bitcoin. To say bitcoin scales just great is an understatement. It scales so well it will consume _everything_

BigBubbler 7y ago

The new "owners" of BTC will not let it grow. BTC was intentionally captured and development-centralized to stop it from being able to scale and become peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people.