9 ms·

In hindsight, I think most would agree it was a good idea to force the smarter scaling solutions rather than brute-force blocksize scaling (which sooner or late

In hindsight, I think most would agree it was a good idea to force the smarter scaling solutions rather than brute-force blocksize scaling (which sooner or later would have hit a ceiling anyways).

wmf 5y ago
The "smarter" scaling solutions still aren't here after years of waiting, fees are hitting all-time highs, and other chains can do >4,000 TPS on layer 1. So no, small blocks weren't and aren't a good idea.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  They are here, the publicly known nodes alone on lightning have 1.2+k BTC locked in [1], that's ignoring all the private channels which form the majority of the channels (private channels are the end-user channels which don't route transactions themselves and are not broadcast publicly). We have easy to use wallets [2], easy ways to run lightning nodes [3]. And if you look at the average transaction value, you can see that the blockchain itself is acting more of a settlement layer rather than "coffee transactions" as it should [4]. 1: https://1ml.com/ https://1ml.com/ 2: https://phoenix.acinq.co/ https://phoenix.acinq.co/ 3: https://getumbrel.com/ https://getumbrel.com/ 4: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-btc-xrp.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-btc-xr...
  - wmf 5y ago
    the blockchain itself is acting more of a settlement layer That is a sign of failure.
    - sennight 5y ago
      What is a sign of success, multicasting every transaction in the world and storing it on a public ledger? I don't remember that being in the white paper.
    - rawtxapp 5y ago
      Becoming the most trusted decentralized worldwide settlement layer is considered a failure now? Many of the cryptos that claim to scale to thousands of tps on layer 1 are all sacrificing decentralization to achieve it, at which point, I might as well use Paypal/Visa. There's no point in being able to scale to those levels in theory if in practice no one uses them.
      - riffraff 5y ago
        > Becoming the most trusted decentralized worldwide settlement layer is considered a failure now? it is, if the original goal was to be something else. If you start a marathon and stop to eat the greatest hot dog ever made, it wouldn't be considered a successful run, although you can say "but it was the best!" and be happy about it.
        hungryforcodes 5y ago
        Huh, so every startup thats ever pivoted -- including for example Instagram, AirBnB, and Twitter -- are failures huh? Interesting.
        xorcist 5y ago
        Not sure if it can be called a pivot when it was in the original release of the software. Payment channels aren't in the white paper but they were in the first public release and had dedicated opcodes. That first implementation wasn't very practical nor was it secure. The fact that modern payment channels are implemented with other opcodes may be a pivot in implementation but not in concept.
        dane-pgp 5y ago
        Startups have a duty to their shareholders to make money, whereas Bitcoin has at least a nominal duty to its inventor[0] and its whitepaper. There's nothing wrong, though, with someone taking the open source code and creating LightningCoin from it, though. That would be the equivalent of a pivot. [0] http://satoshinakamoto.me/2008/11/02/re-bitcoin-p2p-e-cash-paper/ http://satoshinakamoto.me/2008/11/02/re-bitcoin-p2p-e-cash-p...
    - rocqua 5y ago
      The nice thing about using blockchain for settlement is that (using lightning) you don't actually need to wait for the settlement to clear before you are certain you own funds.
    - vmception 5y ago
      Can you elaborate on your perspective? I must admit that I don't use layer2 solutions and many people that think they are, are not (ie. users of Polygon's Proof of Stake network instead of their Plasma network), but I appreciate the progress on those layer2 solutions and actively support the bridges to them
      - wmf 5y ago
        Layer 2 is more complex (pretty much by definition) but has no countervailing benefits compared to a scalable layer 1 chain.
- alwillis 5y ago
  fees are hitting all-time highs I just checked https://mempool.space https://mempool.space A low-priority transaction cost $2.36; medium is $4.39 and high is $7.48. To put this into context: you can send $10,000 worth of BTC anywhere in the world in an hour for $2.36 right now. A bank wire transfer for $10,000 is going to be at least $35; often it's more, depending on which country you're sending to and if you have to use an intermediate bank to get to the bank you're ultimately are attempting to reach. Bank holidays, weekends, etc. don't apply to bitcoin.
  - garmaine 5y ago
    My bank does those wires for free…
    - csomar 5y ago
      International SWIFT wires? What's your bank?
      - lhl 5y ago
        My Schwab account does international wires settled in USD or in a number of foreign currencies for free. (The official fee is $15 but it’s always been refunded for me.)
        argvargc 5y ago
        "Free". In the case of any currency conversion - you'll likely be silently stung a single digit percentage during conversion. Check rates quoted on the final statement versus those prevailing at that time. For a few limited cases of going USD -> USD (in foreign jurisdiction), and the USD is not converted to anything else ever, there may be a net win. In all other cases (the majority), you, or the receiver will at some point be paying far more than the wire fee for any transfer over a grand or so.
        csomar 5y ago
- delaaxe 5y ago
  50,000 TPS for Solana
- keymone 5y ago
  > other chains can do >4,000 TPS on layer 1 read: other chains are centralized databases that have no business being blockchains in the first place and can be replaced by single mysql instance. the trick is not to have high TPS, bitcoin could have unlimited TPS too, it's just a single line of code change. the trick is to have a decentralized system that functions at saturation on commodity hardware. the conservative minds prevailed during scaling debate in 2015-2017, creating selection pressure for scaling solutions that optimize limited resource - chain space, rather than populist simplistic "solutions" pushed by cheap propaganda slogans like "we can do this much TPS!".
  - anonymouse008 5y ago
    > read: other chains are centralized databases that have no business being blockchains in the first place and can be replaced by single mysql instance. This, too, has been a thought of mine, but I'm not exactly sure how I would block diagram the 'locking' mechanism for the MySQL instance. I've come to believe the locking mechanism is the nonce produced to sufficient solution parameters that appears to use the difficulty of finding said solution as its defensibility. So how do you get the 'strength' of the miners throwing ExaHashes at a solution with a single instance? We could easily snapshot the DB and sign them, however, the point of failure is no longer in a 50% attack, but in losing said key... which intuitively feels far less secure? Curious to hear your thoughts
    - keymone 5y ago
      locking is needed to order transactions, mysql already has acid transactions. i use mysql metaphorically to describe a single centralized database protected by single entity that controls all the writes. we already have such payment systems: visa, mastercard, paypal, venmo, etc. blockchain and miners only make sense if you need and actually maintain decentralization. if you don't and/or can't - miners (and validators in PoS systems) are useless overhead.
      - anonymouse008 5y ago
        Thank you, I had never heard of ACID -- yeah, centralized vs. decentralized becomes fairly philosophical (eco vs. democratized arguments, etc). To build on the discussion, I'm more amazed at blockchain's capabilities as a cooperation engine outside of the normal channels. To that end, I'm really surprised we haven't seen significant attrition in the current legal system to smart contract systems. I guess the lack of adoption more highlights just how 'customized' a 'standard' contract or dispute is in the real world.
dannyw 5y ago
It's not black and white. Would 2MB blocks (and hence 10GB of disk space) be a worthy trade off? The problem I see is bitcoin devs refusing to be pragmatic. Segwit is just an accounting trick.
- rocqua 5y ago
  I believe the point of segwit is more than accounting. Essentially these signatures /spend-scripts are pruneable once the blocks they are in are old enough. After all, if a transaction had an invalid spend script, it would not have gotten 100 blocks worth of confirmations.
  - csomar 5y ago
    Bitcoin has checkpoints: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1797/what-are-checkpoints https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1797/what-are-ch... even for normal P2PK transactions.
    - nullc 5y ago
      Checkpoints don't do what you think they do. They only exist today as a mechanism to prevent nodes from being flooded by low difficulty fork blocks, forking off back before height 230k, because the initial difficulty of Bitcoin (2^32 hash operations per block) is too low relative to multiple TH/s asic mining devices.
      - keymone 5y ago
        is there any ongoing work to have utxo set commitments? if not - why?
        nullc 5y ago
        I'm not sure, I haven't been actively involved in development for a couple years. There were a couple distinct activities. One is the rolling utxo hashes, which has no major engineering hurdles, and can allow a compromised security "bootstrap from a utxo set". The other are schemes that allow nodes to not have the utxo set but still validate-- these have historically had unfavorable IO costs, and the bandwidth storage tradeoff hasn't seemed that appealing-- e.g. would you find reducing storage from 10 GB to 1MB but at a cost for increasing bandwidth 10x to be appealing? In some applications it would be, not others. I believe work related to both has been ongoing, however.
lawn 5y ago
In hindsight it should be obvious that these "smarter" scaling solutions have utterly failed to keep Bitcoin functioning as peer-to-peer electronic cash, like the original intention was.

In hindsight, I think most would agree it was a good idea to force the smarter scaling solutions rather than brute-force blocksize scaling (which sooner or later would have hit a ceiling anyways).

wmf 5y ago

The "smarter" scaling solutions still aren't here after years of waiting, fees are hitting all-time highs, and other chains can do >4,000 TPS on layer 1. So no, small blocks weren't and aren't a good idea.

rawtxapp 5y ago
They are here, the publicly known nodes alone on lightning have 1.2+k BTC locked in [1], that's ignoring all the private channels which form the majority of the channels (private channels are the end-user channels which don't route transactions themselves and are not broadcast publicly). We have easy to use wallets [2], easy ways to run lightning nodes [3]. And if you look at the average transaction value, you can see that the blockchain itself is acting more of a settlement layer rather than "coffee transactions" as it should [4]. 1: https://1ml.com/ https://1ml.com/ 2: https://phoenix.acinq.co/ https://phoenix.acinq.co/ 3: https://getumbrel.com/ https://getumbrel.com/ 4: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-btc-xrp.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-btc-xr...
- wmf 5y ago
  the blockchain itself is acting more of a settlement layer That is a sign of failure.
  - sennight 5y ago
    What is a sign of success, multicasting every transaction in the world and storing it on a public ledger? I don't remember that being in the white paper.
  - rawtxapp 5y ago
    Becoming the most trusted decentralized worldwide settlement layer is considered a failure now? Many of the cryptos that claim to scale to thousands of tps on layer 1 are all sacrificing decentralization to achieve it, at which point, I might as well use Paypal/Visa. There's no point in being able to scale to those levels in theory if in practice no one uses them.
    - riffraff 5y ago
      > Becoming the most trusted decentralized worldwide settlement layer is considered a failure now? it is, if the original goal was to be something else. If you start a marathon and stop to eat the greatest hot dog ever made, it wouldn't be considered a successful run, although you can say "but it was the best!" and be happy about it.
      - hungryforcodes 5y ago
        Huh, so every startup thats ever pivoted -- including for example Instagram, AirBnB, and Twitter -- are failures huh? Interesting.
        xorcist 5y ago
        Not sure if it can be called a pivot when it was in the original release of the software. Payment channels aren't in the white paper but they were in the first public release and had dedicated opcodes. That first implementation wasn't very practical nor was it secure. The fact that modern payment channels are implemented with other opcodes may be a pivot in implementation but not in concept.
        dane-pgp 5y ago
        Startups have a duty to their shareholders to make money, whereas Bitcoin has at least a nominal duty to its inventor[0] and its whitepaper. There's nothing wrong, though, with someone taking the open source code and creating LightningCoin from it, though. That would be the equivalent of a pivot. [0] http://satoshinakamoto.me/2008/11/02/re-bitcoin-p2p-e-cash-paper/ http://satoshinakamoto.me/2008/11/02/re-bitcoin-p2p-e-cash-p...
  - rocqua 5y ago
    The nice thing about using blockchain for settlement is that (using lightning) you don't actually need to wait for the settlement to clear before you are certain you own funds.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Can you elaborate on your perspective? I must admit that I don't use layer2 solutions and many people that think they are, are not (ie. users of Polygon's Proof of Stake network instead of their Plasma network), but I appreciate the progress on those layer2 solutions and actively support the bridges to them
    - wmf 5y ago
      Layer 2 is more complex (pretty much by definition) but has no countervailing benefits compared to a scalable layer 1 chain.
alwillis 5y ago
fees are hitting all-time highs I just checked https://mempool.space https://mempool.space A low-priority transaction cost $2.36; medium is $4.39 and high is $7.48. To put this into context: you can send $10,000 worth of BTC anywhere in the world in an hour for $2.36 right now. A bank wire transfer for $10,000 is going to be at least $35; often it's more, depending on which country you're sending to and if you have to use an intermediate bank to get to the bank you're ultimately are attempting to reach. Bank holidays, weekends, etc. don't apply to bitcoin.
- garmaine 5y ago
  My bank does those wires for free…
  - csomar 5y ago
    International SWIFT wires? What's your bank?
    - lhl 5y ago
      My Schwab account does international wires settled in USD or in a number of foreign currencies for free. (The official fee is $15 but it’s always been refunded for me.)
      - argvargc 5y ago
        "Free". In the case of any currency conversion - you'll likely be silently stung a single digit percentage during conversion. Check rates quoted on the final statement versus those prevailing at that time. For a few limited cases of going USD -> USD (in foreign jurisdiction), and the USD is not converted to anything else ever, there may be a net win. In all other cases (the majority), you, or the receiver will at some point be paying far more than the wire fee for any transfer over a grand or so.
        csomar 5y ago
delaaxe 5y ago
50,000 TPS for Solana
keymone 5y ago
> other chains can do >4,000 TPS on layer 1 read: other chains are centralized databases that have no business being blockchains in the first place and can be replaced by single mysql instance. the trick is not to have high TPS, bitcoin could have unlimited TPS too, it's just a single line of code change. the trick is to have a decentralized system that functions at saturation on commodity hardware. the conservative minds prevailed during scaling debate in 2015-2017, creating selection pressure for scaling solutions that optimize limited resource - chain space, rather than populist simplistic "solutions" pushed by cheap propaganda slogans like "we can do this much TPS!".
- anonymouse008 5y ago
  > read: other chains are centralized databases that have no business being blockchains in the first place and can be replaced by single mysql instance. This, too, has been a thought of mine, but I'm not exactly sure how I would block diagram the 'locking' mechanism for the MySQL instance. I've come to believe the locking mechanism is the nonce produced to sufficient solution parameters that appears to use the difficulty of finding said solution as its defensibility. So how do you get the 'strength' of the miners throwing ExaHashes at a solution with a single instance? We could easily snapshot the DB and sign them, however, the point of failure is no longer in a 50% attack, but in losing said key... which intuitively feels far less secure? Curious to hear your thoughts
  - keymone 5y ago
    locking is needed to order transactions, mysql already has acid transactions. i use mysql metaphorically to describe a single centralized database protected by single entity that controls all the writes. we already have such payment systems: visa, mastercard, paypal, venmo, etc. blockchain and miners only make sense if you need and actually maintain decentralization. if you don't and/or can't - miners (and validators in PoS systems) are useless overhead.
    - anonymouse008 5y ago
      Thank you, I had never heard of ACID -- yeah, centralized vs. decentralized becomes fairly philosophical (eco vs. democratized arguments, etc). To build on the discussion, I'm more amazed at blockchain's capabilities as a cooperation engine outside of the normal channels. To that end, I'm really surprised we haven't seen significant attrition in the current legal system to smart contract systems. I guess the lack of adoption more highlights just how 'customized' a 'standard' contract or dispute is in the real world.

dannyw 5y ago

It's not black and white. Would 2MB blocks (and hence 10GB of disk space) be a worthy trade off? The problem I see is bitcoin devs refusing to be pragmatic. Segwit is just an accounting trick.

rocqua 5y ago
I believe the point of segwit is more than accounting. Essentially these signatures /spend-scripts are pruneable once the blocks they are in are old enough. After all, if a transaction had an invalid spend script, it would not have gotten 100 blocks worth of confirmations.
- csomar 5y ago
  Bitcoin has checkpoints: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1797/what-are-checkpoints https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1797/what-are-ch... even for normal P2PK transactions.
  - nullc 5y ago
    Checkpoints don't do what you think they do. They only exist today as a mechanism to prevent nodes from being flooded by low difficulty fork blocks, forking off back before height 230k, because the initial difficulty of Bitcoin (2^32 hash operations per block) is too low relative to multiple TH/s asic mining devices.
    - keymone 5y ago
      is there any ongoing work to have utxo set commitments? if not - why?
      - nullc 5y ago
        I'm not sure, I haven't been actively involved in development for a couple years. There were a couple distinct activities. One is the rolling utxo hashes, which has no major engineering hurdles, and can allow a compromised security "bootstrap from a utxo set". The other are schemes that allow nodes to not have the utxo set but still validate-- these have historically had unfavorable IO costs, and the bandwidth storage tradeoff hasn't seemed that appealing-- e.g. would you find reducing storage from 10 GB to 1MB but at a cost for increasing bandwidth 10x to be appealing? In some applications it would be, not others. I believe work related to both has been ongoing, however.

lawn 5y ago

In hindsight it should be obvious that these "smarter" scaling solutions have utterly failed to keep Bitcoin functioning as peer-to-peer electronic cash, like the original intention was.