5 ms·

The current bitcoin blocksize is limited to 1mb. This means, on average, only 1mb worth of transactions can be written to the ledger. With that 1mb we save th

The current bitcoin blocksize is limited to 1mb. This means, on average, only 1mb worth of transactions can be written to the ledger. With that 1mb we save thousands of transactions. When you pay a transaction fee you are essentially bidding on your data being written to the ledger every 10 minutes. You are correct that the more people bidding, the higher we can expect the price to be. There is however no technical reason we should limit the blocksize to 1mb. We could have 10mb or even 100mb blocksizes easily. Realistically a 100mb block would be large enough to handle all transaction data our species currently generates. The transaction fee is a considerable portion of miner's revenue. Miners ultimately are responsibility for making changes to the bitcoin protocol. I think it's unlikely bitcoin miners will vote for a higher blocksize because it will cause short term decreases in revenue. However, they are missing a potential boon from the Jevons paradox -- the cheaper a resource becomes to use the more of the resource we use. So in summary, it's not really a technical limit to have a high transaction volume but we aren't likely to see it from the current big coins.

tommica 3y ago
Does not seem to be a sustainable solution: if the amount of microtranfers increase, the blocksize is going to be an issue again
- gamepsys 3y ago
  The number of real time electronic transactions is virtually guaranteed to increase. This is not only a big problem now, it's becoming a bigger problem over time. I consider the unwillingness of the bitcoin network to increase blocksize to be a critical flaw. Edit: The problem is not 100mb is too small for the future. The problem is that just like we cannot go from 1mb to 100mb today, we would have no ability to go from 100mb to 1000mb when needed.
  - epolanski 3y ago
    Yet bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin were able to sway what later become to be known as Bitcoin Cash into the wrong fork.
downWidOutaFite 3y ago
That was the reason for the fork of Bitcoin Cash, and indeed BCH blocks are bigger and fees are much smaller. But BTC is still inexplicably way more popular.
- epolanski 3y ago
  Value of technology is not why people aggregate towards Bitcoin. Otherwise it would've been long superseded by other chains. Bitcoiners still arguing about the solidity of the network guaranteed by so much mining, yet virtually all the mining is in the hands of few specialized operations all knowing each other (so it's not really decentralized) and despite Ethereum proving new protocol to be a valid and safe alternative. None of Bitcoin cultists at the end of the day understood that it wasn't about algorithms nor computers, but consensus among people. And that consensus voted to have Bitcoin, the oldest and least technologically developed chain to be the "store of value" of cryptocurrencies.
stickfigure 3y ago
> Realistically a 100mb block would be large enough to handle all transaction data our species currently generates. Nonsense. With the current block size and average transaction size, the bitcoin network processes ~7 transactions per second. A 100X increase in block size gets you to 700 transactions per second. A quick google says global credit card transactions currently average more than 21,000 per second. You're still almost two orders of magnitude off, and that's just existing credit card transactions.
- gamepsys 3y ago
  Maybe my global transaction number is off. I'm not sure if the blockchain algo would have other bottlenecks when at 10gb blocks which is the size it would need to grow in order to accommodate 70k/sec. Certainly storage and network transfer is sufficient enough. It seems pretty feasible to process 16.67 MBps of data even on inefficient algorithms.
  - stickfigure 3y ago
    With 10G blocks @ ~144 block per day, that's almost 1.5 TB per day. The complete blockchain is currently about half a TB. According to bitcoin technology experts, a network of Full Nodes is more secure than a network of Partial Nodes. Right now almost anyone can run a Full Node. If you make the blockchain grow by 1.5 TB per day, only big corporations will be able to run Full Nodes. So no, existing storage and network transfer is not sufficient for large block sizes, at least not for the current way we validate BTC transactions. I assume if there was a good technology fix for the full/partial node issue, it would have been implemented already.
- cchance 3y ago
  Why are you comparing this to bitcoin, bitcoin was never meant to be a fast network lol it was to be a network for cash to sit in "digital gold"... Other networks were designed for speed and others are working on it (etherum with layer 2 networks, and more speed focused networks, for instance as was mentioned Nano was doing 1200-1500tps years ago, with plans for increases not sure if thtey eer went further. The problem is crypto has a few solid real projects and a billion loud useless scam/spam projects that make the idea of "crypto" look like its all trash, finding the networks that actually have something to really give to the world is hard.

tommica 3y ago

Does not seem to be a sustainable solution: if the amount of microtranfers increase, the blocksize is going to be an issue again

gamepsys 3y ago
The number of real time electronic transactions is virtually guaranteed to increase. This is not only a big problem now, it's becoming a bigger problem over time. I consider the unwillingness of the bitcoin network to increase blocksize to be a critical flaw. Edit: The problem is not 100mb is too small for the future. The problem is that just like we cannot go from 1mb to 100mb today, we would have no ability to go from 100mb to 1000mb when needed.
- epolanski 3y ago
  Yet bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin were able to sway what later become to be known as Bitcoin Cash into the wrong fork.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago

That was the reason for the fork of Bitcoin Cash, and indeed BCH blocks are bigger and fees are much smaller. But BTC is still inexplicably way more popular.

epolanski 3y ago
Value of technology is not why people aggregate towards Bitcoin. Otherwise it would've been long superseded by other chains. Bitcoiners still arguing about the solidity of the network guaranteed by so much mining, yet virtually all the mining is in the hands of few specialized operations all knowing each other (so it's not really decentralized) and despite Ethereum proving new protocol to be a valid and safe alternative. None of Bitcoin cultists at the end of the day understood that it wasn't about algorithms nor computers, but consensus among people. And that consensus voted to have Bitcoin, the oldest and least technologically developed chain to be the "store of value" of cryptocurrencies.

stickfigure 3y ago

> Realistically a 100mb block would be large enough to handle all transaction data our species currently generates. Nonsense. With the current block size and average transaction size, the bitcoin network processes ~7 transactions per second. A 100X increase in block size gets you to 700 transactions per second. A quick google says global credit card transactions currently average more than 21,000 per second. You're still almost two orders of magnitude off, and that's just existing credit card transactions.

gamepsys 3y ago
Maybe my global transaction number is off. I'm not sure if the blockchain algo would have other bottlenecks when at 10gb blocks which is the size it would need to grow in order to accommodate 70k/sec. Certainly storage and network transfer is sufficient enough. It seems pretty feasible to process 16.67 MBps of data even on inefficient algorithms.
- stickfigure 3y ago
  With 10G blocks @ ~144 block per day, that's almost 1.5 TB per day. The complete blockchain is currently about half a TB. According to bitcoin technology experts, a network of Full Nodes is more secure than a network of Partial Nodes. Right now almost anyone can run a Full Node. If you make the blockchain grow by 1.5 TB per day, only big corporations will be able to run Full Nodes. So no, existing storage and network transfer is not sufficient for large block sizes, at least not for the current way we validate BTC transactions. I assume if there was a good technology fix for the full/partial node issue, it would have been implemented already.
cchance 3y ago
Why are you comparing this to bitcoin, bitcoin was never meant to be a fast network lol it was to be a network for cash to sit in "digital gold"... Other networks were designed for speed and others are working on it (etherum with layer 2 networks, and more speed focused networks, for instance as was mentioned Nano was doing 1200-1500tps years ago, with plans for increases not sure if thtey eer went further. The problem is crypto has a few solid real projects and a billion loud useless scam/spam projects that make the idea of "crypto" look like its all trash, finding the networks that actually have something to really give to the world is hard.