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This analysis is complete nonsense because it starts with assumptions that are entirely arbitrary and biased toward the argument of not scaling Bitcoin: >>Bitc

This analysis is complete nonsense because it starts with assumptions that are entirely arbitrary and biased toward the argument of not scaling Bitcoin: >>Bitcoin.org documents the minimum requirements for running a full node, however with the current state of technology, we must substantially lower these requirements so as to make running a full node as accessible as possible to even people in poorer countries No, people in poorer countries only need to be able to write transactions with their own private keys. You can easily find trusted sources of blockchain data, and even poll multiple sources to ensure you are not being fed false information by one source. If your government blocks access to all those sources with a national firewall, you can use a VPN, which is much easier than running a full node, to bypass it. What you don't want is people in poorer countries having to trust third parties with their private keys, which is exactly the result of limiting on-chain throughput so that the vast majority of people use trusted third parties to hold their digital currency and transact it on their behalf. If we take the assumption that only people who have enough bandwidth to stream Netflix 24 hours a day should be able to run a Bitcoin node, we get maximum allowable throughput at least 100X greater than today, and even that requirement is arbitrarily stringent, as Bitcoin could be distributed enough to be impossible to shut down with an even smaller percentage of the world population being capable of running a full node. The analysis also assumes that a user should be able to run a full node with 1. Computing resources they already own for their own personal computing needs. 2. By only utilizing 10% of those resources. Using a dedicated node, with computing resources that the user purchases and utilizes 100% for Bitcoin node operation, is ruled out, again arbitrarily for no reason that would be relevant to a global network attack scenario. Thus the analysis contains assumptions like this: >>But since most Bitcoin users are more affluent, for analysis of current Bitcoin I'll use a range of 250-500 GB for the 90th percentile users, and 500-2000 GB for the top 10%. Note that I'm using wide ranges because I'm less certain about these numbers. In reality, tens of millions of people could easily afford to purchase tens of TB of storage for running dedicated Bitcoin nodes, and tens of millions of people is easily enough to make shutting down or controlling the Bitcoin network impossible for any nation-state actor. So this assumption that Bitcoin nodes need to be able to run on machines with only 500 GB to 2 TB of storage, with only 10% of that, i.e. 50 GB to 200 GB, allocated to running a Bitcoin node, is absolutely absurd. And this is just storage, which the analysis assumes is okay to limit to the top 10% of the global population. For bandwidth, the analysis assumes that 90% of the world population, which includes some of the poorest people in the world, should have enough for running a full node. This idea that the lower classes in India should be running a Bitcoin full node, or else the Bitcoin network will somehow be jeopardized, would be comical if this weren't a serious attempt at swaying public opinion. Basically the analysis is implying that it's okay for it to cost $100 in fees to conduct a single Bitcoin transaction, which is out of reach for even the wealthy in rich countries, but that it is not okay that poor people in India not be able to run a Bitcoin full node on their own device - and let's not forget - while utilizing only 10% of their device's network resources. Just absurd.. To summarize, the analysis assumes that it should be possible to run a Bitcoin node using 10% of the typical personal computing resources of 90% of the world population, when in reality all Bitcoin needs to be shutdown and censorship proof is that it be possible to run a full node using something on order of 500% of the typical personal computing resources of the richest 1% of the world population, i.e. the richest 80 million people, who live in the developed world, given many of those people are willing to purchase dedicated hardware and bandwidth for running a Bitcoin full node, and many would do that if the network actually came under any threat of a coordinated global attack on the network. Considering all this, this analysis could easily be under-estimating how much Bitcoin could increase its throughput by a factor of 1,000X. It's a very disingenuous and biased analysis that obfuscates this fact by being loaded with analysis and data that 1. imply credibility and 2. hide and distract from these totally bogus starting assumptions. Finally, the analysis only considers a physical network attack. The political attack, of countries banning Bitcoin internally, and the best defenses against that, are not considered. In reality, the best defense against a political attack is allowing Bitcoin to scale by 100 or 1,000 times in throughput, to increase the proportion of the population that is economically dependent on the network, and would oppose attempts to politically attack it. And in reality, a political attack is much more likely, and dangerous, to the ability of cryptocurrency to fulfill its potential to financially empower the world's population, than a physical network attack.

zionic 5y ago
In a just world this would be the top comment. Instead we have Bitcoin boomers asking if you’ve heard about their lord and savior lightning, which like Jesus is coming any day now!
- etherael 5y ago
  It's impossible to make people understand a truth they've already heavily invested in rejecting, no matter how obvious and unquestionable that truth is. More than any other thing in the world the BTC saga taught me that. Stupidity alone although a big part of it is simply inadequate to explain it wholly given just how stupid the BTC position actually is. Kids can grasp it and yet heavily invested fanatical professionals in the field cannot. It's sad.
billytetrud 5y ago
> This analysis is complete nonsense First of all, thank you for being pretty much the only person who actually wants to talk about the paper, and not something tangential : ) > assumptions that are entirely arbitrary and biased toward the argument of not scaling Bitcoin I do mention in the paper that the assumptions are up for debate, but I did try pretty hard to justify those assumptions so they are certainly not arbitrary. If by "biased" you mean that my conclusions are a factual result of my assumptions, then thank you. If by "biased" you mean that I decided what results I wanted to get, and then chose the assumptions based on that, I really would love a bit more benefit of the doubt. You don't know me, so its a bit strange for you to start accusing me of cooking the books on something I spend literally dozens if not hundreds of hours on. In any case, I agree that there are other assumptions that may make sense. There are other bottlenecks to growth than blockchain space, and so it should be considered how much blockchain space will allow bitcoin to grow as fast as we need it to grow (for whatever reason we'd want that). This will change over time. The more people adopt it, the more likely blockchain space will become a bottleneck that substantially slows adoption. But certainly it could be argued that right now we don't need 90% of the earth to be able to run a bitcoin node. I can absolutely see the argument for increasing the minimimum requirements in the assumptions to be much higher in the next 5 years, maybe even 10 years. But in 10 years, I think we'll want to make using bitcoin to its fullest capacity a lot more accessible. > What you don't want is people in poorer countries having to trust third parties with their private keys You absolutely have a point! Most people using custodial solutions that do batch things under the hood to get around scaling issues is certainly not a state we want to be in. It may happen anyway, even if we magically found infinite scalability, but we don't want it regardless. However at the same time, we don't want the rugged pulled out from under us: we don't want bitcoin's rules to be changed out from under us. Enough full nodes need to be out there to ensure that various attacks aren't possible on the network and that blocks that propagate are valid blocks. I think there is some sweet spot on both of those amounts. And I do think more discussion is needed around the assumptions we're making. I wrote this paper in part to start exactly such a discussion about the assumptions and what concrete targets we have for bitcoin in terms of these network demographics. What would you say is an acceptable percentage of the population using custodial systems like you're talking about? 10%? Less? What about: what's the percentage of the population that would be acceptable to run a full node? 10%? 50%? More? Maybe at some point I'll write another paper just on the different reasonable assumptions. > Using a dedicated node, with computing resources that the user purchases and utilizes 100% for Bitcoin node operation, is ruled out, again arbitrarily for no reason that would be relevant to a global network attack scenario. Again, not arbitrary. The reason I did that is to include normal people. Normal people aren't going to buy and set up a dedicated server for bitcoin. And what about a remove bitocin service? Well, that's just the service running bitcoin, its not the individual - so its no better than SPV. So yes, if we're ok with just say 5% or less of the population running bitcoin, we can remove the 10% capacity limit, but if its normal people - people don't like their machine running slowly all the time because bitcoin is chugging through the world's transactions. Most people just would switch to an SPV node. > tens of millions of people could easily afford to purchase tens of TB of storage for running dedicated Bitcoin nodes, and tens of millions of people is easily enough to make shutting down or controlling the Bitcoin network impossible for any nation-state actor. Well, yes, they could afford to. That isn't the question I'm concerned with. Its not about cost. Its about convenience. Will 10s of millions of people buy extra hardware just to run bitcoin? I would argue no, they won't. But yes, you're probably right that 10s of millions of people running PUBLIC full nodes is probably enough. My understanding is that we're at less than 1/1000th of that goal at the moment. Were we to make it easier for people to run public nodes (either via IPv6 or Tor or NAT hole punching), it would make it a lot easier to reach that goal. And I'm not saying we couldn't bring these requirements up eventually. Once we blast past 10 million public nodes, maybe we can re-evaluate. But as of right now, Bitcoin has a serious vulnerability to sybil attacks on public nodes. > all Bitcoin needs to be shutdown and censorship proof is that it be possible to run a full node using something on order of 500% of the typical personal computing resources of the richest 1% of the world population I certainly don't agree with that statement. It means 99% of people would need to run SPV nodes - which is currently not good. First of all, the World's 1% owns less than 50% of the wealth, so it would be a minority of the economic activity. Putting the majority of economic activity in SPV nodes would leave the system quite vulnerable in situations where a majority of hashpower hardforks to something dangerous or malicious. This isn't necessarily a 51% attack scenario. It could be a situation where miners misread the sentiment of users and choose badly, or where mistakes were made, or it could be a situation where it favors miners but not users, or a number of things like that that aren't a single colluding group. So I would say at very least, the majoritiy of economic activity should be using their own full nodes, and a vast majority is far safer. Perhaps this is 5% of the world. > The political attack, of countries banning Bitcoin internally, and the best defenses against that, are not considered. I'm curious what your analysis would be of that. > increase the proportion of the population that is economically dependent on the network I agree this would be a very helpful mitigation of political attacks in general. > much more likely This I'm not sure about. Yes political attacks are likely (and of course we've seen many of them already). However, political attacks that could succeed seem already quite unlikely. I would love to see your analysis of how likely one might be to succeed and what the network requirements would be to sufficiently mitigate that. And then the tradeoffs vs these other kinds of attacks could be compared.

zionic 5y ago

In a just world this would be the top comment. Instead we have Bitcoin boomers asking if you’ve heard about their lord and savior lightning, which like Jesus is coming any day now!

etherael 5y ago
It's impossible to make people understand a truth they've already heavily invested in rejecting, no matter how obvious and unquestionable that truth is. More than any other thing in the world the BTC saga taught me that. Stupidity alone although a big part of it is simply inadequate to explain it wholly given just how stupid the BTC position actually is. Kids can grasp it and yet heavily invested fanatical professionals in the field cannot. It's sad.

billytetrud 5y ago

> This analysis is complete nonsense First of all, thank you for being pretty much the only person who actually wants to talk about the paper, and not something tangential : ) > assumptions that are entirely arbitrary and biased toward the argument of not scaling Bitcoin I do mention in the paper that the assumptions are up for debate, but I did try pretty hard to justify those assumptions so they are certainly not arbitrary. If by "biased" you mean that my conclusions are a factual result of my assumptions, then thank you. If by "biased" you mean that I decided what results I wanted to get, and then chose the assumptions based on that, I really would love a bit more benefit of the doubt. You don't know me, so its a bit strange for you to start accusing me of cooking the books on something I spend literally dozens if not hundreds of hours on. In any case, I agree that there are other assumptions that may make sense. There are other bottlenecks to growth than blockchain space, and so it should be considered how much blockchain space will allow bitcoin to grow as fast as we need it to grow (for whatever reason we'd want that). This will change over time. The more people adopt it, the more likely blockchain space will become a bottleneck that substantially slows adoption. But certainly it could be argued that right now we don't need 90% of the earth to be able to run a bitcoin node. I can absolutely see the argument for increasing the minimimum requirements in the assumptions to be much higher in the next 5 years, maybe even 10 years. But in 10 years, I think we'll want to make using bitcoin to its fullest capacity a lot more accessible. > What you don't want is people in poorer countries having to trust third parties with their private keys You absolutely have a point! Most people using custodial solutions that do batch things under the hood to get around scaling issues is certainly not a state we want to be in. It may happen anyway, even if we magically found infinite scalability, but we don't want it regardless. However at the same time, we don't want the rugged pulled out from under us: we don't want bitcoin's rules to be changed out from under us. Enough full nodes need to be out there to ensure that various attacks aren't possible on the network and that blocks that propagate are valid blocks. I think there is some sweet spot on both of those amounts. And I do think more discussion is needed around the assumptions we're making. I wrote this paper in part to start exactly such a discussion about the assumptions and what concrete targets we have for bitcoin in terms of these network demographics. What would you say is an acceptable percentage of the population using custodial systems like you're talking about? 10%? Less? What about: what's the percentage of the population that would be acceptable to run a full node? 10%? 50%? More? Maybe at some point I'll write another paper just on the different reasonable assumptions. > Using a dedicated node, with computing resources that the user purchases and utilizes 100% for Bitcoin node operation, is ruled out, again arbitrarily for no reason that would be relevant to a global network attack scenario. Again, not arbitrary. The reason I did that is to include normal people. Normal people aren't going to buy and set up a dedicated server for bitcoin. And what about a remove bitocin service? Well, that's just the service running bitcoin, its not the individual - so its no better than SPV. So yes, if we're ok with just say 5% or less of the population running bitcoin, we can remove the 10% capacity limit, but if its normal people - people don't like their machine running slowly all the time because bitcoin is chugging through the world's transactions. Most people just would switch to an SPV node. > tens of millions of people could easily afford to purchase tens of TB of storage for running dedicated Bitcoin nodes, and tens of millions of people is easily enough to make shutting down or controlling the Bitcoin network impossible for any nation-state actor. Well, yes, they could afford to. That isn't the question I'm concerned with. Its not about cost. Its about convenience. Will 10s of millions of people buy extra hardware just to run bitcoin? I would argue no, they won't. But yes, you're probably right that 10s of millions of people running PUBLIC full nodes is probably enough. My understanding is that we're at less than 1/1000th of that goal at the moment. Were we to make it easier for people to run public nodes (either via IPv6 or Tor or NAT hole punching), it would make it a lot easier to reach that goal. And I'm not saying we couldn't bring these requirements up eventually. Once we blast past 10 million public nodes, maybe we can re-evaluate. But as of right now, Bitcoin has a serious vulnerability to sybil attacks on public nodes. > all Bitcoin needs to be shutdown and censorship proof is that it be possible to run a full node using something on order of 500% of the typical personal computing resources of the richest 1% of the world population I certainly don't agree with that statement. It means 99% of people would need to run SPV nodes - which is currently not good. First of all, the World's 1% owns less than 50% of the wealth, so it would be a minority of the economic activity. Putting the majority of economic activity in SPV nodes would leave the system quite vulnerable in situations where a majority of hashpower hardforks to something dangerous or malicious. This isn't necessarily a 51% attack scenario. It could be a situation where miners misread the sentiment of users and choose badly, or where mistakes were made, or it could be a situation where it favors miners but not users, or a number of things like that that aren't a single colluding group. So I would say at very least, the majoritiy of economic activity should be using their own full nodes, and a vast majority is far safer. Perhaps this is 5% of the world. > The political attack, of countries banning Bitcoin internally, and the best defenses against that, are not considered. I'm curious what your analysis would be of that. > increase the proportion of the population that is economically dependent on the network I agree this would be a very helpful mitigation of political attacks in general. > much more likely This I'm not sure about. Yes political attacks are likely (and of course we've seen many of them already). However, political attacks that could succeed seem already quite unlikely. I would love to see your analysis of how likely one might be to succeed and what the network requirements would be to sufficiently mitigate that. And then the tradeoffs vs these other kinds of attacks could be compared.