4 ms·

It isn't at all and it never was. The transactions being limited to 1MB every 10 minutes means that anyone that can watch a youtube video can run a node, or pay

It isn't at all and it never was. The transactions being limited to 1MB every 10 minutes means that anyone that can watch a youtube video can run a node, or pay $5 per month. This is a solution in search of a problem. Edit: Don't just downvote, tell me where I'm wrong. This same weird propaganda that running a node of 100KB/s worth of transactions is actually a problem has been going on for years.

RL_Quine 7y ago
Latency in the network is a big limitation. You can run a node at nearly dialup speed, but you'll be endlessly behind on the current state of the network and fairly useless at actually relaying that information to your peers. You really want to be able to process blocks in the order of a couple of hundred milliseconds, which is actually a hell of a lot of bandwidth at peak. In the worst case scenario (no pre-caching at all), 4MB of data in 100ms is 0.32Gbit, and that's not counting the TCP overhead and your actual processing of the data. The block size for Bitcoin is 4MB, not 1MB, too.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Where are you possibly getting that latency is a problem for 10 minutes in between blocks that miners are deciding? All a node needs to do is basic verification while sending out data. Anyone who has just synced with the chain can see that it takes less than a second per block. Where are your numbers coming from?
  - grapehut 7y ago
    He's conflating miner-concerns with general node ones. If you're running a miner, every millisecond is money. I operate nodes that takes up to like 20 seconds to get and validate a block (running no-mempool, and slow network/cpu) and it's absolutely no problem for my use case, which is pretty typical (accepting confirmed payments)
- lawn 7y ago
  > The block size for Bitcoin is 4MB, not 1MB, too. No it's not. Segwit introduced a new concept called block weight that's larger than 1MB, and in practice with normal transactions it gives around 1.4MB.
  - grapehut 7y ago
    You're both correct-ish. The constraint on blocks is that they must "weigh" less than 4 million units. Most of time blocks that weigh that much are going to be around 1.4MB (or what ever) but in an absolute worst case would be a size of 4MB by a specially crafted transaction
    - RL_Quine 7y ago
      You have to model for attack conditions.
      - andirk 7y ago
        Can you explain plz. Max is 4mb and it can handle that.
imtringued 7y ago
>This is a solution in search of a problem. The number of transactions you can fit in 1MB (or whatever the current limit is) is very limited. Right now the biggest challenge with cryptocurrencies is that they do not scale to large numbers of transactions per second. This had resulted in $10 transaction fees and long delays in the past. Companies like bitpay refused to process your transaction on Steam because the exchange rate has changed significantly by the time your transaction has been confirmed on the blockchain. So you ended up missing $0.5 on a $39 transaction. You can decide to transfer the missing amount and pay the $10 transaction fee again or you can get a refund and bitcoin deducts the $10 transaction fee from your refund while bitpay is sending it back. The end result? Steam stopped accepting Bitcoins and so did other companies that year. I'm sure the fees are low again because all the people who wanted to use Bitcoin for day to day transactions have left because no platform accepts bitcoin payments anymore and therefore only the speculators are left who rarely initiate transactions.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Cryptocurrencies can scale easily, bitcoin has been artificially limited by nonsense politics to make a secondary layer from a single company. Lots of other cryptocurrencies have gone above 1MB, there is nothing special about a data rate so low it can be done with international roaming cell phone data plans. Anyone can see through math, testing or common sense that the only thing resource intensive is mining.

RL_Quine 7y ago

Latency in the network is a big limitation. You can run a node at nearly dialup speed, but you'll be endlessly behind on the current state of the network and fairly useless at actually relaying that information to your peers. You really want to be able to process blocks in the order of a couple of hundred milliseconds, which is actually a hell of a lot of bandwidth at peak. In the worst case scenario (no pre-caching at all), 4MB of data in 100ms is 0.32Gbit, and that's not counting the TCP overhead and your actual processing of the data. The block size for Bitcoin is 4MB, not 1MB, too.

BubRoss 7y ago
Where are you possibly getting that latency is a problem for 10 minutes in between blocks that miners are deciding? All a node needs to do is basic verification while sending out data. Anyone who has just synced with the chain can see that it takes less than a second per block. Where are your numbers coming from?
- grapehut 7y ago
  He's conflating miner-concerns with general node ones. If you're running a miner, every millisecond is money. I operate nodes that takes up to like 20 seconds to get and validate a block (running no-mempool, and slow network/cpu) and it's absolutely no problem for my use case, which is pretty typical (accepting confirmed payments)
lawn 7y ago
> The block size for Bitcoin is 4MB, not 1MB, too. No it's not. Segwit introduced a new concept called block weight that's larger than 1MB, and in practice with normal transactions it gives around 1.4MB.
- grapehut 7y ago
  You're both correct-ish. The constraint on blocks is that they must "weigh" less than 4 million units. Most of time blocks that weigh that much are going to be around 1.4MB (or what ever) but in an absolute worst case would be a size of 4MB by a specially crafted transaction
  - RL_Quine 7y ago
    You have to model for attack conditions.
    - andirk 7y ago
      Can you explain plz. Max is 4mb and it can handle that.

imtringued 7y ago

>This is a solution in search of a problem. The number of transactions you can fit in 1MB (or whatever the current limit is) is very limited. Right now the biggest challenge with cryptocurrencies is that they do not scale to large numbers of transactions per second. This had resulted in $10 transaction fees and long delays in the past. Companies like bitpay refused to process your transaction on Steam because the exchange rate has changed significantly by the time your transaction has been confirmed on the blockchain. So you ended up missing $0.5 on a $39 transaction. You can decide to transfer the missing amount and pay the $10 transaction fee again or you can get a refund and bitcoin deducts the $10 transaction fee from your refund while bitpay is sending it back. The end result? Steam stopped accepting Bitcoins and so did other companies that year. I'm sure the fees are low again because all the people who wanted to use Bitcoin for day to day transactions have left because no platform accepts bitcoin payments anymore and therefore only the speculators are left who rarely initiate transactions.

BubRoss 7y ago
Cryptocurrencies can scale easily, bitcoin has been artificially limited by nonsense politics to make a secondary layer from a single company. Lots of other cryptocurrencies have gone above 1MB, there is nothing special about a data rate so low it can be done with international roaming cell phone data plans. Anyone can see through math, testing or common sense that the only thing resource intensive is mining.