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People like this shouldn't be leading a project that threatens to upend multi-trillion dollar institutions. If it weren't for his timidity, Bitcoin would have

People like this shouldn't be leading a project that threatens to upend multi-trillion dollar institutions. If it weren't for his timidity, Bitcoin would have hard forked in 2015 to raise the block size limit to allow for mass-adoption.

b10c 6y ago
There is no single leader in Bitcoin.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  He could have authorized the hard fork.
  - robjan 6y ago
    The miners are ultimately the ones who decide whether to fork or not.
    - jart 6y ago
      Miners can't change Bitcoin without the consent of full nodes, who run the core client. That's why SegWit2x didn't happen three years ago. All the miners supported it, because bigger blocks means bigger transaction fees. Full nodes and core devs didn't support it, because big blocks means you won't be able to run Bitcoin on PCs much longer and therefore centralized online service providers will control it.
      - nullc 6y ago
        FWIW bigger blocks actually mean much much smaller transaction fees, both in theory and practice. Though it's true some miners erroneously believed arguments otherwise. BCash, for example, some loopy "large block" clone of Bitcoin has only rarely had more than $1 in fees in blocks-- and not primarily because it has fewer transactions (though it does), but because there is no cause to pay more than negligible amounts when both capacity isn't scarce and mining isn't completely centralized. The result is that the BitcoinUnlimited (one of the BCash clients) "chief scientist" proposes that security must be paid for by perpetual inflation... and they've been moving towards abandoning Bitcoin's decentralized consensus-- e.g. bcash clients will no longer reorg so if there is a split deeper than a few blocks (caused by a network partition or a block race), their nodes will just split off into separate networks. Quite a mess.
        CryptoPunk 6y ago
        >>FWIW bigger blocks actually mean much much smaller transaction fees, both in theory and practice. Ethereum has larger transaction fees than Bitcoin right now, on a larger volume of transactions, so in practice, that is not true. The addressable market will necessarily shrink with too small blocks. Now of course when Bitcoin Cash launches, with most of the world unaware of it, it's not going to get as much as adoption, and by extension transaction fees, as Bitcoin, irrespective of its block size limit, so your comparison is inappropriate.
        nullc 6y ago
        Ethereum has a what is effectively a block size limit, which is limiting usage to pretty similarly to Bitcoin's and it is operating hard against it. ('volume' of transactions is not particularly comparable because the average bitcoin transaction now makes multiple payments in a single txn). Back in the past the issuer of Ethereum stated publicly that online money should not cost more than 5cts/txn... and yet here we are with $50 transactions there. BCash has not only fewer transaction in spite of tens of millions spent promoting it, but it has vastly lower fees per transaction. If its blocks were half full at 10x the current feerate (and many times larger than bitcoin blocks), its fee income would still be a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's-- and nowhere near enough to support even the extremely low level of security it currently has.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
      Miners were solidly behind a hard fork. Every major stakeholder group, minus the Core development team, was solidly for it.
      - nullc 6y ago
        That is simply not true. You can even look to the public markets, there were futures on each of these fork attempts and they traded at a tiny fraction of the price of Bitcoin.
        CryptoPunk 6y ago
        The majority of mining power signalled support for several attempts to do a hard fork to raise the block size limit: https://twitter.com/btcinchina/status/804163370043588608 https://twitter.com/btcinchina/status/804163370043588608 "3rd largest #bitcon #mining pool BW signal support for 8M blocksize, following the consensus from scaling conference." And another initiative: https://www.coindesk.com/btcchina-support-gives-bip-100-bitcoin-hashrate-majority https://www.coindesk.com/btcchina-support-gives-bip-100-bitc... "BTCChina Support Gives BIP 100 Bitcoin Hashrate Majority" >>there were futures on each of these fork attempts and they traded at a tiny fraction of the price of Bitcoin. The futures predicted the likelihood of the fork happening, not what percentage of miners supported them.
127 6y ago
Raising the block size is complete nonsense. It will simply kill of nodes and at best create increased transactions per block proportional to the block size increase. A very poor trade-off.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff. There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints, not computation, not storage and not bandwidth. The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it. It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap. Responding to the comment below: 1. You can prune spent transactions. Only the UTXO set needs to be stored, so you don't need to store 5 TB more each year. But even that wouldn't be prohibitively costly for thousands of hobbyists worldwide. So even if pruning wasn't an option - and it is - Bitcoin's censorship resistance would remain totally secure. 2. You can use checkpointing in initial sync up, instead of downloading the entire transaction history. The hash of the true chain is widely disseminated and Bitcoin nodes already use a form of checkpointing, where they skip validation for transactions before the checkpoint flag, to expedite Initial Blockchain Download.
  - 127 6y ago
    If you have to be a server farm to prune past 1 week, Bitcoin will no longer be decentralized and censorship resistant, losing its main point in the first place.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
      A single modern consumer-grade PC can validate 100X larger blocks in real time. The average web page these days is over 1 MB. The idea that you need to limit every once-in-every-10-minute block to 1 or 1.6 MB is not, from everything I can see, close to approaching a sound balancing of competing priorities.

b10c 6y ago

There is no single leader in Bitcoin.

CryptoPunk 6y ago
He could have authorized the hard fork.
- robjan 6y ago
  The miners are ultimately the ones who decide whether to fork or not.
  - jart 6y ago
    Miners can't change Bitcoin without the consent of full nodes, who run the core client. That's why SegWit2x didn't happen three years ago. All the miners supported it, because bigger blocks means bigger transaction fees. Full nodes and core devs didn't support it, because big blocks means you won't be able to run Bitcoin on PCs much longer and therefore centralized online service providers will control it.
    - nullc 6y ago
      FWIW bigger blocks actually mean much much smaller transaction fees, both in theory and practice. Though it's true some miners erroneously believed arguments otherwise. BCash, for example, some loopy "large block" clone of Bitcoin has only rarely had more than $1 in fees in blocks-- and not primarily because it has fewer transactions (though it does), but because there is no cause to pay more than negligible amounts when both capacity isn't scarce and mining isn't completely centralized. The result is that the BitcoinUnlimited (one of the BCash clients) "chief scientist" proposes that security must be paid for by perpetual inflation... and they've been moving towards abandoning Bitcoin's decentralized consensus-- e.g. bcash clients will no longer reorg so if there is a split deeper than a few blocks (caused by a network partition or a block race), their nodes will just split off into separate networks. Quite a mess.
      - CryptoPunk 6y ago
        >>FWIW bigger blocks actually mean much much smaller transaction fees, both in theory and practice. Ethereum has larger transaction fees than Bitcoin right now, on a larger volume of transactions, so in practice, that is not true. The addressable market will necessarily shrink with too small blocks. Now of course when Bitcoin Cash launches, with most of the world unaware of it, it's not going to get as much as adoption, and by extension transaction fees, as Bitcoin, irrespective of its block size limit, so your comparison is inappropriate.
        nullc 6y ago
        Ethereum has a what is effectively a block size limit, which is limiting usage to pretty similarly to Bitcoin's and it is operating hard against it. ('volume' of transactions is not particularly comparable because the average bitcoin transaction now makes multiple payments in a single txn). Back in the past the issuer of Ethereum stated publicly that online money should not cost more than 5cts/txn... and yet here we are with $50 transactions there. BCash has not only fewer transaction in spite of tens of millions spent promoting it, but it has vastly lower fees per transaction. If its blocks were half full at 10x the current feerate (and many times larger than bitcoin blocks), its fee income would still be a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's-- and nowhere near enough to support even the extremely low level of security it currently has.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    Miners were solidly behind a hard fork. Every major stakeholder group, minus the Core development team, was solidly for it.
    - nullc 6y ago
      That is simply not true. You can even look to the public markets, there were futures on each of these fork attempts and they traded at a tiny fraction of the price of Bitcoin.
      - CryptoPunk 6y ago
        The majority of mining power signalled support for several attempts to do a hard fork to raise the block size limit: https://twitter.com/btcinchina/status/804163370043588608 https://twitter.com/btcinchina/status/804163370043588608 "3rd largest #bitcon #mining pool BW signal support for 8M blocksize, following the consensus from scaling conference." And another initiative: https://www.coindesk.com/btcchina-support-gives-bip-100-bitcoin-hashrate-majority https://www.coindesk.com/btcchina-support-gives-bip-100-bitc... "BTCChina Support Gives BIP 100 Bitcoin Hashrate Majority" >>there were futures on each of these fork attempts and they traded at a tiny fraction of the price of Bitcoin. The futures predicted the likelihood of the fork happening, not what percentage of miners supported them.

127 6y ago

Raising the block size is complete nonsense. It will simply kill of nodes and at best create increased transactions per block proportional to the block size increase. A very poor trade-off.

CryptoPunk 6y ago
Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff. There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints, not computation, not storage and not bandwidth. The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it. It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap. Responding to the comment below: 1. You can prune spent transactions. Only the UTXO set needs to be stored, so you don't need to store 5 TB more each year. But even that wouldn't be prohibitively costly for thousands of hobbyists worldwide. So even if pruning wasn't an option - and it is - Bitcoin's censorship resistance would remain totally secure. 2. You can use checkpointing in initial sync up, instead of downloading the entire transaction history. The hash of the true chain is widely disseminated and Bitcoin nodes already use a form of checkpointing, where they skip validation for transactions before the checkpoint flag, to expedite Initial Blockchain Download.
- 127 6y ago
  If you have to be a server farm to prune past 1 week, Bitcoin will no longer be decentralized and censorship resistant, losing its main point in the first place.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    A single modern consumer-grade PC can validate 100X larger blocks in real time. The average web page these days is over 1 MB. The idea that you need to limit every once-in-every-10-minute block to 1 or 1.6 MB is not, from everything I can see, close to approaching a sound balancing of competing priorities.