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> I had a passing interest, but completely lost it around 2017-ish, when BTC blocks started filling up. Yes, this was the last straw for a ton of people actual

by px43 3y ago

> I had a passing interest, but completely lost it around 2017-ish, when BTC blocks started filling up. Yes, this was the last straw for a ton of people actually interested in developing the technology, and it's when a lot of people moved their primary focus to Ethereum. In 2017, the Bitcoin developer community did a hard pivot away from "electronic cash" and towards this "store of value" obsession, where Bitcoin is meant to replace gold. This was an incredibly noisy and disruptive pivot that tore the community in half. These were the "Blocksize Wars", and I could rant for hours about them, but obviously not here. The thing is, Bitcoin up until that point was functioning very well as cash. Starting in 2013 I was regularly using it to buy coffee from coffee shops, and pay my bill at restaurants, and with literally a one line change it could have kept enabling the cash use case easily for another decade, and with maybe a 20 line change proposed by Jeff Garzik in 2015, it could have easily scaled forever. The focus on serving the financial industry over everyday users was a very deliberate one. It wasn't a bad move, tactically, just very disappointing.

nullc 3y ago
You're repeating a false narrative which was commercially financed in order to promote alternatives (ironically). Bitcoin absolutely is electronic cash. We've seen the alternative play out in forks that have become completely centralized as a result of ignoring the tradeoffs with the technology in use, and as a result have been undermined with "functionality" like confiscation transactions (transactions that let miners take any coins they choose). What bitcoin isn't is a paypal clone. That already exists and it's not of substantial value to the world to add another centralized high volume payments rail. It's absolutely fine that people also want to use it that way, but optimizing for that case can't come at the expense of the security properties that make Bitcoin interesting in the first place. Alternatives that make different tradeoffs do exist, and I think the results speak for themselves.
treyd 3y ago
> and with literally a one line change Except we know as software engineers that solutions to problems at scale are never that simple. The "just increase the block size limit bro" solution doesn't consider the externalities that increasing it would have on the network performance and decentralization. This is the same line of reasoning about this whole thread, compromising decentralization compromises the ability to use a credibly peer-to-peer (cash) system.
- JCharante 3y ago
  Changing from 1 MB every ten minutes to 8 MB every ten minutes is nothing
  - treyd 3y ago
    That's a huge change and putting it in domain specific terms obscures the implications. It changes the chain growth rate from up to ~52 gigabytes/yr to up to ~410 gigabytes/yr, it also means that the network takes 8 times as long to propagate blocks, which makes selfish mining attacks more viable, which weakens the game theory and adds a mining centralization force. Also consider that network bandwidth is a much more scarce resource for people in developing countries than it is for us in our first world country, and having a relatively-trustworthy payment system has a much greater relative utility for them than it would for us. And consider that full nodes don't only download blocks, they have to rebroadcast them to (ideally) at least 2 other nodes in order for blocks to even propagate at a decent rate. This is data that has to be kept by somebody forever, even if particular users run pruned nodes, and the best way to ensure that it's readily available for anyone to inspect is to limit how much of it there is. Since Bitcoin doesn't have state commitments, it's much less safe to use light clients, and increasing the bandwidth also shifts the balance more towards running light clients, compromising users' trust in the network. Making it more difficult to run fully verifying nodes like this is another centralization force. Also, you should read about induced demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
    - JCharante 3y ago
      1. People in developing countries aren't running nodes nor do they need to 2. Most people, even today, use light wallets. > Since Bitcoin doesn't have state commitments, it's much less safe to use light clients, and increasing the bandwidth also shifts the balance more towards running light clients, compromising users' trust in the network 3. Everybody except whales already uses light wallets. Even downloading the ledger in 2014 took a long long time. > And consider that full nodes don't only download blocks, they have to rebroadcast them to (ideally) at least 2 other nodes in order for blocks to even propagate at a decent rate. 4. Rebroadcasting 8MB is nothing > Making it more difficult to run fully verifying nodes like this is another centralization force. 5. Verification nodes aren't as important as miners and mining basically requires a lot of money put into ASICs so the system is already designed against the hobbyist enthusiast contributing to the network on their bedroom. > Also, you should read about induced demand. 6. What's the point of a system if it can't scale?
crotchfire 3y ago
A lot of the "pivot away from ... cash ... towards store of value" was legislated into place by AML/KYC idiocy. And IRS policies. If you're referring to the blocksize wars, you aren't looking at a long enough time horizon. No system can afford to keep settlement records of every transaction processed by VISA/Mastercard for the rest of eternity. In order for bitcoin to finish displacing existing payment systems some sort of off-chain settlement is unavoidable. Refusing to increase the blocksize forced people to start working on this instead of just kicking the can yet again. And hey, guess what, five years later I can use Lightning to upvote posts on https://stacker.news https://stacker.news (without even waiting for the next block to be mined!).

by px43 3y ago

nullc 3y ago

You're repeating a false narrative which was commercially financed in order to promote alternatives (ironically). Bitcoin absolutely is electronic cash. We've seen the alternative play out in forks that have become completely centralized as a result of ignoring the tradeoffs with the technology in use, and as a result have been undermined with "functionality" like confiscation transactions (transactions that let miners take any coins they choose). What bitcoin isn't is a paypal clone. That already exists and it's not of substantial value to the world to add another centralized high volume payments rail. It's absolutely fine that people also want to use it that way, but optimizing for that case can't come at the expense of the security properties that make Bitcoin interesting in the first place. Alternatives that make different tradeoffs do exist, and I think the results speak for themselves.

treyd 3y ago

> and with literally a one line change Except we know as software engineers that solutions to problems at scale are never that simple. The "just increase the block size limit bro" solution doesn't consider the externalities that increasing it would have on the network performance and decentralization. This is the same line of reasoning about this whole thread, compromising decentralization compromises the ability to use a credibly peer-to-peer (cash) system.

JCharante 3y ago
Changing from 1 MB every ten minutes to 8 MB every ten minutes is nothing
- treyd 3y ago
  That's a huge change and putting it in domain specific terms obscures the implications. It changes the chain growth rate from up to ~52 gigabytes/yr to up to ~410 gigabytes/yr, it also means that the network takes 8 times as long to propagate blocks, which makes selfish mining attacks more viable, which weakens the game theory and adds a mining centralization force. Also consider that network bandwidth is a much more scarce resource for people in developing countries than it is for us in our first world country, and having a relatively-trustworthy payment system has a much greater relative utility for them than it would for us. And consider that full nodes don't only download blocks, they have to rebroadcast them to (ideally) at least 2 other nodes in order for blocks to even propagate at a decent rate. This is data that has to be kept by somebody forever, even if particular users run pruned nodes, and the best way to ensure that it's readily available for anyone to inspect is to limit how much of it there is. Since Bitcoin doesn't have state commitments, it's much less safe to use light clients, and increasing the bandwidth also shifts the balance more towards running light clients, compromising users' trust in the network. Making it more difficult to run fully verifying nodes like this is another centralization force. Also, you should read about induced demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
  - JCharante 3y ago
    1. People in developing countries aren't running nodes nor do they need to 2. Most people, even today, use light wallets. > Since Bitcoin doesn't have state commitments, it's much less safe to use light clients, and increasing the bandwidth also shifts the balance more towards running light clients, compromising users' trust in the network 3. Everybody except whales already uses light wallets. Even downloading the ledger in 2014 took a long long time. > And consider that full nodes don't only download blocks, they have to rebroadcast them to (ideally) at least 2 other nodes in order for blocks to even propagate at a decent rate. 4. Rebroadcasting 8MB is nothing > Making it more difficult to run fully verifying nodes like this is another centralization force. 5. Verification nodes aren't as important as miners and mining basically requires a lot of money put into ASICs so the system is already designed against the hobbyist enthusiast contributing to the network on their bedroom. > Also, you should read about induced demand. 6. What's the point of a system if it can't scale?

crotchfire 3y ago

A lot of the "pivot away from ... cash ... towards store of value" was legislated into place by AML/KYC idiocy. And IRS policies. If you're referring to the blocksize wars, you aren't looking at a long enough time horizon. No system can afford to keep settlement records of every transaction processed by VISA/Mastercard for the rest of eternity. In order for bitcoin to finish displacing existing payment systems some sort of off-chain settlement is unavoidable. Refusing to increase the blocksize forced people to start working on this instead of just kicking the can yet again. And hey, guess what, five years later I can use Lightning to upvote posts on https://stacker.news https://stacker.news (without even waiting for the next block to be mined!).