Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
I think it would be helpful if we could all *chill* and focus on the solid engineering necessary to make Bitcoin succeed. p. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:02 PM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China, or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not us. Because we have 50%+. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step function
I've been following the discussion of the block size limit and IMO it is clear that any constant block size limit is, as many have said before, just kicking the can down the road. My problem with the dynamic lower limit solution based on past blocks is that it doesn't account for usage spikes. I would like to propose another dynamic lower limit scheme: Let the block size limit be a function of the number of current transactions in the mempool. This way, bitcoin usage regulates the block size limit. I'm sorry i don't have the knowledge of the code base or time to make simulations on this kind of approach, but nevertheless I would like to leave it here for discussion or foster other ideas. cheers -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China, or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not us. Because we have 50%+. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
Two very valid and important points. Thank you for making these observations Peter. p. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:26 PM, Peter Todd p...@petertodd.org wrote: On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 06:42:05PM +0800, Pindar Wong wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. I'd rather think of mining as a responsibility than a right per se, but you're right in so far as it's competitive and self-correcting. It's important to remember that the service Bitcoin miners are providing us is *not* transaction validation, but rather decentralization. Validation is something every full node does already; there's no shortage of it. What's tricky is designing a Bitcoin protocol that creates the appropriate incentives for mining to remain decentralized, so we get good value for the large amount of money being sent to miners. I've often likened this task to building a robot to go to the grocery store to buy milk for you. If that robot doesn't have a nose, before long store owners are going to realise it can't tell the difference between unspoilt and spoilt milk, and you're going to get ripped off paying for a bunch of spoiled milk. Designing a Bitcoin protocol where we expect competition to result in smaller miners in more geographically decentralized places to get outcompeted by larger miners who are more geographically centralized gets us bad value for our money. Sure it's self-correcting, but not in a way that we want. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. Let's agree to disagree on this point. Note how that VPN, and likely VPS it's connected too, immediately adds another one or two points of failure to the whole system. Not only does this decrease reliability, it also decreases security by making attacks significantly easier - VPS security is orders of magnitude worse than the security of physical hardware. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 0e187b95a9159d04a3586dd4cbc068be88a3eafcb5b885f9 -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
WOW Way to burn your biggest adopters who put your transactions into the chain...what a douche. From: Mike Hearnmailto:m...@plan99.net Sent: 1/06/2015 8:15 PM To: Alex Mizrahimailto:alex.mizr...@gmail.com Cc: Bitcoin Devmailto:bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
I cannot believe why Gavin (who seems to have difficulty to spell my name correctly.) insists on his 20MB proposal regardless the community. BIP66 has been introduced for a long time and no one knows when the 95% goal can be met. This change to the block max size must take one year or more to be adopted. We should increase the limit and increase it now. 20MB is simply too big and too risky, sometimes we need compromise and push things forward. I agree with any solution lower than 10MB in its first two years. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:02 PM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China, or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not us. Because we have 50%+. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:02 PM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. If Western miners do not find a China-based VPN into China, or if Western pools do not manage to improve their connectivity to China, or run a node in China, it would be them to have higher orphans, not us. Because we have 50%+. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
Hi everyone, I'm a long-time lurker of this mailing list but it's the first time I post here, so first of all I'd like to thank all of the usual contributors for the great insights and technical discussions that can be found here. As this is such a momentous point in the history of Bitcoin, I'd just like to throw in my opinion too. First, I agree with Oliver Egginger's message that it's much more elegant to keep the numbers as powers of 2 rather than introducing somewhat arbitrary numbers like 20. This also makes it easier to count the level of support for what would be a clear spectrum of discrete levels (1, 2, 4, ... 32, 64, ..., infinite). If a temporary peace accord can be reached with a value like 8 or 16, this will buy us some time for both the user base to continue growing without hitting the limit and for newer technologies like the lightning network to be developed and tested. We will also see whether the relatively small increase causes any unexpected harm or whether (as I expect) everything continues to run smoothly. Personally, I'd like to see Bitcoin grow and become what I think most Bitcoin users like myself expect from it: that it should be a payment network directly accessible to people all over the world. In my opinion, it is the proposition of Bitcoin as a form of electronic money that additionally makes it a good store of value. I don't believe in the idea that it can exist as just some sort of digital gold for a geeky financial elite. And I haven't been persuaded by those who claim the scarcity of block space is an economic fundamental of Bitcoin either. It seems to me there's a lot of batty economic ideas being bandied about regarding the supposed long-term value of the cap without much justification. In this sense, my sympathies are with those who want to remove the maximum block size cap. This was after all the original idea, so it's not fair for the 1MB camp to claim that they're the ones preserving the essences of Bitcoin. But, anyway, I also think that a consensus at this point would be much better than a head-on confrontation between two incompatible pieces of software competing to gain the favour of a majority of exchanges and merchants. With this in mind, can't we accept the consensus that raising the hard-coded limit to a value like 8MB buys us a bit of time and should be at least palatable to everyone? This may not be what the staunch supporters of the 1MB limit want, but it's also not what I and others would want, so we're talking about finding some common ground here, and not about one side getting their way to the detriment or humiliation of the other. The problem with a compromise based on a one-off maximum-size increase, of course, is that we're just kicking the can down the road and the discussion will continue. It's not a solution I like, but how can we get people like say Greg Maxwell or Pieter Wuille to accept something more drastic? If they find a new maximum-size cap acceptable, then it could be a reasonable compromise. A new cap will let us test the situation and see how the Bitcoin environment reacts. The next time the discussion crops up (probably very soon, I know...), we may all have a better understanding of the implications. Ángel José Riesgo -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
[Bitcoin-development] soft-fork block size increase (extension blocks)
Hi Gavin Sorry for slow response broken threading - mailbox filled up only saw your response on archive. I do earnestly think opt-in block-size increases are politically cleaner (gives different people different sized blocks by their own volition without forcing a compromise) and less risky than hard forks. Particularly if a hard-fork were really provoked without clear and wide consensus - dragons lay there. Then ask the various wallet developer how long it would take them to update their software to support something like this, I don't think thats any particular concern, extension block payments are forwards and backwards compatible. Businesses who are keen to have more transactions, would make it their problem to implement in their wallet, or ask the wallet vendor/maintainer they're working with to do it. Nothing breaks if they dont use it. The people that have the need for it will work on it. Market at work. If it turns out they dont really have a need for it, just projected huge numbers for their business plan that say dont materialise, well no foul. and do some UI mockups of what the experience would look like for users. I am not a UX guy, but for example it might be appropriate for tipping services or other micropayments to use an extension block. Or small retail payments. They can choose what address they use. Merchants, integrators etc can do likewise. It gives plenty enough scope that people can work with useful trade-offs while others work on lightning. If there are two engineering solutions to a problem, one really simple, and one complex, why would you pick the complex one? Because the more complex one is safer, more flexible, more future proof and better for decentralisation (and so as a bonus and might actually get done without more months of argument as its less contentious because it gives users choice to opt-in). Bitcoin itself is complex, a central ledger is simpler but as we know uninteresting which is to say this is a security tradeoff. Obviously I do appreciate KISS as a design principle, and utility of incremental improvements, but this is a security trade-off we're discussing here. I am proposing a way to not weaken security, while getting what you think is important - access to more TPS with a higher centralisation tradeoff (for those who opt-in to it, rather than for everyone whether that tradeoff is strongly against their interests or not). The decentralisation metrics are getting worse, not better, see Greg Maxwell's comments http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/37vg8y/is_the_blockstream_company_the_reason_why_4_core/crqg381 This would not by those metrics be a good moment in history to make the situation worse. Especially if the complex solution has all of the problems of the simple one (20MB extension blocks are just as dangerous as 20MB main blocks, yes? If not, why not?) Not at all, thats the point. Bitcoin has a one-size fits all blocksize. People can pool mine the 8MB extension block, while solo or GBT mining the 1MB block. Thats more centralising than staying at 1MB (because to get the fees from the extension block some people without that kind of bandwidth are pool mining 8/9th of the lower security/decentralisation transactions. But its less centralising than a fixed blocksize of 9MB (1+8 for apples/apples) because realistically if those transactions are not spam, they would've happened offchain, and offchain until we get lightning like systems up, means central systems which are worse than the slight centralisation of 8MB blocks being single servers and prone to custody security failure. I think you made that point yourself in a recent post also. Sound good? ;) Seriously I think its the least bad idea I've heard on this topic. As an aside, a risk with using companies as a sounding board, is that you can get a misleading sense of consensus. Did they understand the tradeoff between security (decentralisation) and blocksize. Did they care? Do they represent users interests? Would they have voted instead for extension blocks if it was presented in similar terms? (I have to imagine they might have preferred extension blocks given the better story if you gloss over complexity and tradeoffs). Adam -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step
It's surprising to see a core dev going to the public to defend a proposal most other core devs disagree on, and then lobbying the Bitcoin ecosystem. I agree that it is a waste of time. Many agree. The Bitcoin ecosystem doesn't really need lobbying - my experience from talking to businesses and wallet developers months ago is they virtually all see raising capacity as a no brainer ... and some of them see this debate as despair-inducing insanity. What's happened here is that a small number of people have come to believe they have veto power over changes to Bitcoin, and they have also become *wildly* out of step with what the wider community wants. That cannot last. So, short of some sudden change of heart that lets us kick the can down the road a bit longer, a fork is inevitable. Just be glad it's Gavin driving this and not me ... or a faceless coalition of startups. Decentralization is the core of Bitcoin's security model and thus that's what gives Bitcoin its value. No. Usage is what gives Bitcoin value. It's kind of maddening that I have to point this out. Decentralisation is a means to an end. I first used Bitcoin in April 2009 and it was perfectly decentralised back then: every wallet was a full node and every computer was capable of mining. So if you believe what you just wrote, I guess Bitcoin's value has gone down every day since. On the other hand, if you believe the markets, Bitcoin's value has gone up. Apparently the question of what gives Bitcoin its value is a bit more complicated than that. : to incentive layer 2 and offchain solutions to scale Bitcoin : there are promising designs/solutions out there (LN, ChainDB, OtherCoin protocole, ...), but most don't get much attention, because there is right now no need for them. And, I am sure new solutions will be invented. I have seen this notion a few times. I would like to dispose of it right now. I am one of the wallet developers you would be trying to incentivise by letting Bitcoin break, and I say: get real. Developers are not some bottomless fountain of work that will spit out whatever you like for free if you twist their arms badly enough. The problems that incentivised the creation of Bitcoin existed for decades before Bitcoin was actually invented. Incentives are not enough. Someone has to actually do the work, too. All proposals on the table would: - Involve enormous amounts of effort from many different people - Be technically risky (read: we don't know if they would even work) - Not be Bitcoin The last point is important: people who got interested in Bitcoin and decided to devote their time to it might not feel the same way about some network of payment hubs or whatever today's fashion is. Faced with their work being broken by armchair developers on some mailing list, they might just say screw it and walk away completely. After all, as the arguments for these systems are not particularly logical, they might slave over hot keyboards for a year to support the Lightning Network or whatever and then discover that it's no longer the fashionable thing ... and that suddenly an even more convoluted design is being incentivised. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth is simply not true, but if you look at data points like http://www.netindex.com/upload/ which will show we are at least on the right track, but this is flawed still. The fact of the matter is these speed tests are done from local origin to local destination within the city, let alone the country ( see note about how these test are only conducted 300 miles within the server). and our current internet infrastructure is set up with CDNs for the web and media consumption. these data points can not and should not be used to model the connectivity of a peer to peer network. Uplink bandwidth is scarce is China and expensive, avg about $37 per 1mbps after 5, but this is not the real problem. the true issue lies in the ISP transparent proxy they run. this is not a problem isolated in just China, Thailand and various other countries in Asia like Lebanon. I have also heard in various IRCs that southern France also face this similar issue due to poor routing configurations they have that prevents connections to certain parts of the world, unsure if this is a mistake or a geopolitical by-product. As for your question earlier Gavin, from Dallas TX to a VPS in Shanghai on 上海电信/Shanghai telecom, which is capped at 5mbps the data results match my concerns, I've gotten low as 83 Kbits/sec and as high as 9.24 Mbits/sec. and other ranges in between, none are consistent. ping avg is about 250ms. The temporary solution I recommend again from earlier is MPTCP: http://www.multipath-tcp.org/ which allows you to multiple interfaces/networks for a single TCP connection, this is mainly developed for mobile3g/wifi transition but I found uses to improve bandwidth and connection stability on the go by combining a local wifi/ethernet connection with my 3g phone tether. this allows you to set up a middlebox somewhere, put shadowsocks server on it, and on your local machine you can route all TCP traffic over the shadow socks client and MPTCP will automatically pick the best path for upload and download. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 9:59 AM, Gavin Andresen gavinandre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:20 AM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: I cannot believe why Gavin (who seems to have difficulty to spell my name correctly.) insists on his 20MB proposal regardless the community. BIP66 has been introduced for a long time and no one knows when the 95% goal can be met. This change to the block max size must take one year or more to be adopted. We should increase the limit and increase it now. 20MB is simply too big and too risky, sometimes we need compromise and push things forward. I agree with any solution lower than 10MB in its first two years. Thanks, that's useful! What do other people think? Would starting at a max of 8 or 4 get consensus? Scaling up a little less than Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth predicts for the next 20 years? (I think predictability is REALLY important). I chose 20 because all of my testing shows it to be safe, and all of my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate the costs are reasonable. If consensus is 8 because more than order-of-magnitude increases are scary -- ok. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- *Yifu Guo* *Life is an everlasting self-improvement.* -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Alex Mizrahi alex.mizr...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, if you are on a slow network then you are at a (slight) disadvantage. So? Chun mentioned that his pool is on a slow network, and thus bigger blocks give it an disadvantage. (Orphan rate is proportional to block size.) You said that no, on contrary those who make big blocks have a disadvantage. And now you say that yes, this disadvantage exist. Did you just lie to Chun? Chun said that if somebody produced a big block it would take them at least 6 seconds to process it. He also said he has nodes outside the great firewall (We also use Aliyun and Linode cloud services for block propagation.). So I assumed that he was talking about the what if somebody produces a block that takes a long time to process attack -- which doesn't work (the attacker just increases their own orphan rate). If the whole network is creating blocks that takes everybody (except the person creating the blocks) six seconds to broadcast+validate, then the increase in orphan rate is spread out over the whole network. The network-wide orphan rate goes up, everybody suffers a little (fewer blocks created over time) until the next difficulty adjustment, then the difficulty drops, then everybody is back in the same boat. If it takes six seconds to validate because of limited bandwidth, then he should connect via Matt's fast relay network, which optimize new block announcements so they take a couple orders of magnitude less bandwidth. If it takes six seconds because he's trying to validate on a raspberry pi then he should buy a better validating machine, and/or help test the current pending pull requests to make validation faster (e.g. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5835 or https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6077 ). If Chun had six seconds of latency, and he can't pay for a lower-latency connection (or it is insanely expensive), then there's nothing he can do, he'll have to live with a higher orphan rate no matter the block size. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your turn. Then please enlighten me. You're unable to download block templates from a trusted node outside of the country because the bandwidth requirements are too high? Or due to some other problem? With respect to now it's your turn. Let's imagine the hard fork goes ahead. Let us assume that almost all exchanges, payment processors and other businesses go with larger blocks, but Chinese miners do not. Then you will mine coins that will not be recognised on trading platforms and cannot be sold. Your losses will be much larger than from orphans. This can happen *even* if Chinese miners who can't/won't scale up are 50% hashrate. SPV clients would need a forced checkpoint, which would be messy and undesirable, but it's technically feasible. The smaller side of the chain would cease to exist from the perspective of people actually trading coins. If your internet connectivity situation is really so poor that you cannot handle one or two megabits out of the country then you're hanging on by your fingernails anyway: your connection to the main internet could become completely unusable at any time. If that's really the case, it seems to me that Chinese Bitcoin is unsustainable and what you really need is a China-specific alt coin that can run entirely within the Chinese internet. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed alternatives to the 20MB step
RE: going to the public: I started pushing privately for SOMETHING, ANYTHING to be done, or at the very least for there to be some coherent plan besides wait and see back in February. As for it being unhealthy for me to write the code that I think should be written and asking people to run it: Ok. What would you suggest I do? I believe scaling up is the number one priority right now. I think core devs SHOULD be taking time to solve it, because I think the uncertainty of how it will be solved (or if it will be solved) is bad for Bitcoin. I think working on things like fixing transaction malleability is great... but the reason to work on that is to enable smart contracts and all sorts of other interesting new uses of the blockchain. But if we're stuck with 1MB blocks then there won't be room for all of those interesting new uses on the blockchain. Others disagree, and have the advantage of status-quo : if nothing is done, they get what they want. Based on some comments I've seen, I think there is also concern that my own personal network/computer connection might not be able to handle more transaction volume. That is NOT a good reason to limit scalability, but I think it is clouding the judgement of many of the core contributors who started contributing as a spare-time hobby from their homes (where maybe they have crappy DSL connections). RE: decentralization: I think this is a red-herring. I'll quote something I said on reddit yesterday: I don't believe a 20MB max size will increase centralization to any significant degree. See http://gavinandresen.ninja/does-more-transactions-necessarily-mean-more-centralized and http://gavinandresen.ninja/are-bigger-blocks-better-for-bigger-miners And I think we will have a lot LESS centralization of payments via services like Coinbase (or hubs in some future StrawPay/Lightning network) if the bitcoin network can directly handle more payment volume. The centralization trade-offs seems very clear to me, and I think the big blocks mean more centralized arguments are either just wrong or are exaggerated or ignore the tradeoff with payment centralization (I think that is a lot more important for privacy and censorship resistance). RE: incentives for off-chain solutions: I'll quote myself again from http://gavinandresen.ninja/it-must-be-done-but-is-not-a-panacea : The “layer 2” services that are being built on top of the blockchain are absolutely necessary to get nearly instant real-time payments, micropayments and high volume machine-to-machine payments, to pick just three examples. The ten-minute settlement time of blocks on the network is not fast enough for those problems, and it will be the ten minute block interval that drives development of those off-chain innovations more than the total number of transactions supported. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 8:45 AM, Jérôme Legoupil jjlegou...@gmail.com wrote: If during the 1MB bumpy period something goes wrong, consensus among the community would be reached easily if necessary. That is the problem: this will be a frog in boiling water problem. I believe there will be no sudden crisis-- instead, transactions will just get increasingly unreliable and expensive, driving more and more people away from Bitcoin towards... I don't know what. Some less expensive, more reliable, probably more-centralized solution. The Gavin 20MB proposal is compromising Bitcoin's long-term security in an irreversible way, for gaining short-term better user experience. If by long-term security you mean will transaction fees be high enough to pay for enough hashing power to secure the network if there are bigger blocks I've written about that: http://gavinandresen.ninja/block-size-and-miner-fees-again If you mean something else, then please be specific. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:20 AM, Chun Wang 1240...@gmail.com wrote: I cannot believe why Gavin (who seems to have difficulty to spell my name correctly.) insists on his 20MB proposal regardless the community. BIP66 has been introduced for a long time and no one knows when the 95% goal can be met. This change to the block max size must take one year or more to be adopted. We should increase the limit and increase it now. 20MB is simply too big and too risky, sometimes we need compromise and push things forward. I agree with any solution lower than 10MB in its first two years. Thanks, that's useful! What do other people think? Would starting at a max of 8 or 4 get consensus? Scaling up a little less than Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth predicts for the next 20 years? (I think predictability is REALLY important). I chose 20 because all of my testing shows it to be safe, and all of my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate the costs are reasonable. If consensus is 8 because more than order-of-magnitude increases are scary -- ok. -- -- Gavin Andresen -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
I don't see this as an issue of sensitivity or not. Miners are businesses that sell a service to Bitcoin users - the service of ordering transactions chronologically. They aren't charities. If some miners can't provide the service Bitcoin users need any more, then OK, they should not/cannot mine. Lots of miners have come and gone since Bitcoin started as different technology generations came and went. That's just business. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] soft-fork block size increase (extension blocks)
Mike wrote: Businesses who are keen to have more transactions, would make it their problem to implement in their wallet, or ask the wallet vendor/maintainer they're working with to do it. Nothing breaks if they dont use it. I don't see how this is the case. If an exchange supports extension blocks and I withdraw from that to a wallet that doesn't, the money will never arrive from my perspective. Yet the exchange will claim they sent it and they will wash their hands of the matter. Disaster. To be clear in case you are missing part of the mechanism.: it is forward and backwards compatible meaning a 1MB address can receive payments from an 8MB address (at reduced security if it has software that doesnt understand it) and a 1MB address can pay an 8MB address by paying to an OP_TRUE that has meaning to the extension block nodes. A 1MB client wont even understand the difference between a 1MB and 8MB out payment. An 8MB client will understand and pay 1MB addresses in a different way (moving the coin back to the 1MB chain). So its opt-in and incrementally deployable. Exchanges could encourage their users to use wallets that support 8MB blocks, eg by charging a fee for 1MB transactions. If 1MB blocks experience significant fee pressure, this will be persuasive. Or they could chose not to and eat the cost. This is all normal market adoption of a new cheaper technical option (in this case with a tradeoff of reduced security/more centralisation for those opting in to it). Because the more complex one is safer, more flexible, more future proof and better for decentralisation I disagree with all of those points. I find Lightning/Stroem etc to be more dangerous, less flexible, and worse for decentralisation. I explain why here: Extension blocks lightning are unrelated things. While I understand the need for being practical, there is IMO, amongst engineering maxims something as far as being too pragmatic, dangerously pragmatic even. We cant do stuff in bitcoin that has bad carry costs, nor throw out the baby with the bathwater. The situation is just that we are facing a security vs volume tradeoff and different people will have different requirements and comfort zones. If I am not misremembering, I think you've sided typically with the huge block, big data center only end of the spectrum. What I am proposing empowers you to do experiments in that direction without getting into a requirements conflict with people who value more strongly the bitcoin properties arising from it being robustly decentralised. I am not sure personally where the blocksize discussion comes out - if it stays as is for a year, in a wait and see, reduce spam, see fee-pressure take effect as it has before, work on improving improve decentralisation metrics, relay latency, and do a blocksize increment to kick the can if-and-when it becomes necessary and in the mean-time try to do something more long-term ambitious about scale rather than volume. Bitcoin without scale improvements probably wont get the volume people would like. So scale is more important than volume; and security (decentralisation) is important too. To the extreme analogy we could fix scale tomorrow by throwing up a single high perf database, but then we'd break the security properties arising from decentralisation. We should improve both within an approximately safe envelope IMO. Adam -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
[Bitcoin-development] Why do we need a MAX_BLOCK_SIZE at all?
Ok, I understand at least some of the reason that blocks have to be kept to a certain size. I get that blocks which are too big will be hard to propagate by relays. Miners will have more trouble uploading the large blocks to the network once they've found a hash. We need block size constraints to create a fee economy for the miners. But these all sound to me like issues that affect some, but not others. So it seems to me like it ought to be a configurable setting. We've already witnessed with last week's stress test that most miners aren't even creating 1MB blocks but are still using the software defaults of 730k. If there are configurable limits, why does there have to be a hard limit? Can't miners just use the configurable limit to decide what size blocks they can afford to and are thus willing to create? They could just as easily use that to create a fee economy. If the miners with the most hashpower are not willing to mine blocks larger than 1 or 2 megs, then they are able to slow down confirmations of transactions. It may take several blocks before a miner willing to include a particular transaction finds a block. This would actually force miners to compete with each other and find a block size naturally instead of having it forced on them by the protocol. Relays would be able to participate in that process by restricting the miners ability to propagate large blocks. You know, like what happens in a FREE MARKET economy, without burdensome regulation which can be manipulated through politics? Isn't that what's really happening right now? Different political factions with different agendas are fighting over how best to regulate the Bitcoin protocol. I know the limit was originally put in place to prevent spamming. But that was when we were mining with CPUs and just beginning to see the occasional GPU which could take control over the network and maliciously spam large blocks. But with ASIC mining now catching up to Moore's Law, that's not really an issue anymore. No one malicious entity can really just take over the network now without spending more money than it's worth -- and that's just going to get truer with time as hashpower continues to grow. And it's not like the hard limit really does anything anymore to prevent spamming. If a spammer wants to create thousands or millions of transactions, a hard limit on the block size isn't going to stop him.. He'll just fill up the mempool or UTXO database instead of someone's block database.. And block storage media is generally the cheapest storage.. I mean they could be written to tape and be just as valid as if they're stored in DRAM. Combine that with pruning, and block storage costs are almost a non-issue for anyone who isn't running an archival node. And can't relay nodes just configure a limit on the size of blocks they will relay? Sure they'd still need to download a big block occasionally, but that's not really that big a deal, and they're under no obligation to propagate it.. Even if it's a 2GB block, it'll get downloaded eventually. It's only if it gets to the point where the average home connection is too slow to keep up with the transaction block flow that there's any real issue there, and that would happen regardless of how big the blocks are. I personally would much prefer to see hardware limits act as the bottleneck than to introduce an artificial bottleneck into the protocol that has to be adjusted regularly. The software and protocol are TECHNICALLY capable of scaling to handle the world's entire transaction set. The real issue with scaling to this size is limitations on hardware, which are regulated by Moore's Law. Why do we need arbitrary soft limits? Why can't we allow Bitcoin to grow naturally within the ever increasing limits of our hardware? Is it because nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM? Am I missing something here? Is there some big reason that I'm overlooking why there has to be some hard-coded limit on the block size that affects the entire network and creates ongoing issues in the future? -- *James G. Phillips IV* https://plus.google.com/u/0/113107039501292625391/posts *Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals. -- David Ogilvy* *This message was created with 100% recycled electrons. Please think twice before printing.* -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] soft-fork block size increase (extension blocks)
(at reduced security if it has software that doesnt understand it) Well, yes. Isn't that rather key to the issue? Whereas by simply increasing the block size, SPV wallets don't care (same security and protocol as before) and fully validating wallets can be updated with a very small code change. A 1MB client wont even understand the difference between a 1MB and 8MB out payment. Let's say an old client makes a payment that only gets confirmed in an extension block. The wallet will think the payment is unconfirmed and show that to the user forever, no? Can you walk through the UX for each case? If I am not misremembering, I think you've sided typically with the huge block, big data center only end of the spectrum. It would be Satoshi, that argued that. I think there must be a communication issue here somewhere. I'm not sure how this meme has taken hold amongst you guys, as I am the guy who wrote the scalability page back in 2011: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability It says: *The core Bitcoin network can scale to much higher transaction rates than are seen today, assuming that nodes in the network are primarily running on high end servers rather than desktops. * By much higher rates I meant VISA scale and by high end server I meant high end by today's standards not tomorrows. There's a big difference between a datacenter and a single server! By definition a single server is not a datacenter, although it would be conventional to place it in one. But even with the most wildly optimistic growth imaginable, I couldn't foresee a time when you needed more than a single machine to keep up with the transaction stream. And we're not going to get to VISA scale any time soon: I don't think I've ever argued we will. If it does happen it would presumably be decades away. Again, short of some currently unimagined killer app. So I don't believe I've ever argued this, and honestly I kinda feel people are putting words in my mouth. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
By reversing Mike's language to the reality of the situation I had hoped people would realize how abjectly ignorant and insensitive his statement was. I am sorry to those in the community if they misunderstood my post. I thought it was obvious that it was sarcasm where I do not seriously believe particular participants should be excluded. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 3:06 AM, Thy Shizzle thyshiz...@outlook.com wrote: Doesn't mean you should build something that says fuck you to the companies that have invested in farms of ASICS. To say Oh yea if they can't mine it how we want stuff 'em is naive. I get decentralisation, but don't dis incentivise mining. If miners are telling you that you're going to hurt them, esp. Miners that combined hold 50% hashing power, why would you say too bad so sad? Why not just start stripping bitcoin out of adopters wallets? Same thing. -- From: Warren Togami Jr. wtog...@gmail.com Sent: 1/06/2015 10:30 PM Cc: Bitcoin Dev bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements Whilst it would be nice if miners in *outside* China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in *outside* China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall *TO THE MAJORITY OF THE HASHRATE* and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 12:13 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 09:01:49PM +0100, Roy Badami wrote: What do other people think? Would starting at a max of 8 or 4 get consensus? Scaling up a little less than Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth predicts for the next 20 years? (I think predictability is REALLY important). TL;DR: Personally I'm in favour of doing something relatively uncontroversial (say, a simple increase in the block size to something in the 4-8GB range) with no further increases without a further hard fork. And the other bit I should have added to my TL;DR: If we end up spending a significant proportion of the next 20 years discussing the then _next_ hard fork, that's a *good* thing, not a *bad* thing. Hard forks need to become, if not entirely routine, then certainly less scary. A sequence of (relatively) uncontroversial hard forks over time is way more likely to gain consensus than a single hard fork that attempts to set a schedule for block size increases out to 2035. IMHO. I'm not sure how relevent Nielsen's Law really is. The only relevent data points Nielsen has really boil down to a law about how the speed of his cable modem connection has changed during the period 1998-2014. Interesting though that is, it's not hugely relevent to bandwidth-intensive operations like running a full node. The problem is he's only looking at the actual speed of his connection in Mbps, not the amount of data usage in GB/month that his provider permits - and there's no particular reason to expect that both of those two figures follow the same curve. In particular, we're more interested in the cost of backhaul and IP transit (which is what drives the GB/month figure) than we are in improvements in DOCSIS technology, which have little relevence to node operators even on cable modem, and none to any other kind of full node operator, be it on DSL or in a datacentre. More importantly, I also think a scheduled ramp up is an unnecessary complication. Why do we need to commit now to future block size increases perhaps years into the future? I'd rather schedule an uncontroversial hard fork now (if such thing is possible) even if there's a very real expectation - even an assumption - that by the time the fork has taken place, it's already time to start discussing the next one. Any curve or schedule of increases that stretches years into the future is inevitably going to be controversial - and more so the further into the future it stretches - simply because the uncertainties around the Bitcoin landscape are going to be greater the further ahead we look. If a simple increase from 1GB to 4GB or 8GB will solve the problem for now, why not do that? Yes, it's quite likely we'll have to do it again, but we'll be able to make that decision in the light of the 2016 or 2017 landscape and can again make a simple, hopefully uncontroversial, increase in the limit at that time. So, with the proviso that I think this is all bike shedding, if I had to pick my favourite colour for the bike shed, it would be to schedule a hard fork that increases the 1GB limit (to something in the 4-8GB range) but with no further increases without a further hard fork. Personally I think trying to pick the best value of the 2035 block size now is about as foolish as trying to understand now the economics of Bitcoin mining many halvings hence. NB: this is not saying that I think we shouldn't go above 8GB in the relatively foreseeable future; quite the contrary, I strongly expect that we will. I just don't see the need to pick the 2020 block size now when we can easily make a far better informed decision as to the 2020 block size in 2018 or even 2019. As to knowing what the block size is going to be for the next 20 years being REALLY important? 100% disagree. I also think it's impossible, because even if you manage to get consensus on a block size increase schedule that stretches out to 2035 (and my prediction is you won't) the reality is that that block size schedule will have been modified by a future hard fork long before we get to 2035. What I personally think is REALLY important is that the Bitcoin community demonstrates an ability to react appropriately to changing requirements and conditions - and we'll only be able to react to those conditions when we know what they are! My expectation is that there will be several (hopefully _relatively_ uncontroversial) scheduled hard forks between now and 2035, and each of those will be discussed in suitable detail before being agreed. And that's as it should be. roy -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
I did wonder what the post actually meant, I recommend appending /s after sarcasm so it's clear. Lots gets lost in text. But I agree with you btw his response was not particularly tactful. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:19 PM, Warren Togami Jr. wtog...@gmail.com wrote: By reversing Mike's language to the reality of the situation I had hoped people would realize how abjectly ignorant and insensitive his statement was. I am sorry to those in the community if they misunderstood my post. I thought it was obvious that it was sarcasm where I do not seriously believe particular participants should be excluded. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 3:06 AM, Thy Shizzle thyshiz...@outlook.com wrote: Doesn't mean you should build something that says fuck you to the companies that have invested in farms of ASICS. To say Oh yea if they can't mine it how we want stuff 'em is naive. I get decentralisation, but don't dis incentivise mining. If miners are telling you that you're going to hurt them, esp. Miners that combined hold 50% hashing power, why would you say too bad so sad? Why not just start stripping bitcoin out of adopters wallets? Same thing. -- From: Warren Togami Jr. wtog...@gmail.com Sent: 1/06/2015 10:30 PM Cc: Bitcoin Dev bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements Whilst it would be nice if miners in *outside* China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in *outside* China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall *TO THE MAJORITY OF THE HASHRATE* and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 12:13 AM, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever regardless of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent right to mine if they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial amounts of bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted then OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a node on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements
So lets rephrase that and say instead more correctly it is the job of miners (collectively) to be well connected globally - and indeed there are incentivised to be or they tend to receive blocks at higher latency and so are at increased risk of orphans. And miner groups with good block latency in-group and high hashrate are definitionally the well connected, so the cost of getting good connectivity to high hashrate groups is naturally borne by people outside of those groups. Or thats the incentive anyway. Adam On 1 June 2015 at 19:30, Mike Hearn m...@plan99.net wrote: I don't see this as an issue of sensitivity or not. Miners are businesses that sell a service to Bitcoin users - the service of ordering transactions chronologically. They aren't charities. If some miners can't provide the service Bitcoin users need any more, then OK, they should not/cannot mine. Lots of miners have come and gone since Bitcoin started as different technology generations came and went. That's just business. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
[Bitcoin-development] We are filling most blocks right now - Let's change the max blocksize default
We seem to be experiencing bursts of high transaction rate right now. https://blockchain.info/ shows nearly all blocks full. We should increase the default max block size to 1MB to give us more space where we see the 731MB blocks, as we don’t want to be limited by those who don’t bother to change the settings from the default, and thus probably aren’t paying attention to this whole discussion. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] [BIP draft] Consensus-enforced transaction replacement signalled via sequence numbers
I see, so OP_SEQUENCEVERIFY will have a value pushed on the stack right before, and then check that the input spending the prevout has nSequence corresponds to at least the sequence specified by the stack value. Good idea! Keeps the script code from depending on external chain specific data, which is nice. Hopefully we can repurpose one of the OP_NOPs for CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY and one for OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY. Very complementary. Best, Stephen On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 12:16 AM, Mark Friedenbach m...@friedenbach.org wrote: You are correct! I am maintaining a 'checksequenceverify' branch in my git repository as well, an OP_RCLTV using sequence numbers: https://github.com/maaku/bitcoin/tree/checksequenceverify Most of the interesting use cases for relative lock-time require an RCLTV opcode. What is interesting about this architecture is that it possible to cleanly separate the relative lock-time (sequence numbers) from the RCLTV opcode (OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY) both in concept and in implementation. Like CLTV, the CSV opcode only checks transaction data and requires no contextual knowledge about block headers, a weakness of the other RCLTV proposals that violate the clean separation between libscript and libconsensus. In a similar way, this BIP proposal only touches the transaction validation logic without any impact to script. I would like to propose an additional BIP covering the CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY opcode and its enabling applications. But, well, one thing at a time. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 8:45 PM, Stephen Morse stephencalebmo...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Mark, Overall, I like this idea in every way except for one: unless I am missing something, we may still need an OP_RCLTV even with this being implemented. In use cases such as micropayment channels where the funds are locked up by multiple parties, the enforcement of the relative locktime can be done by the first-signing party. So, while your solution would probably work in cases like this, where multiple signing parties are involved, there may be other, seen or unforeseen, use cases that require putting the relative locktime right into the spending contract (the scriptPubKey itself). When there is only one signer, there's nothing that enforces using an nSequence and nVersion=2 that would prevent spending the output until a certain time. I hope this is received as constructive criticism, I do think this is an innovative idea. In my view, though, it seems to be less fully-featured than just repurposing an OP_NOP to create OP_RCLTV. The benefits are obviously that it saves transaction space by repurposing unused space, and would likely work for most cases where an OP_RCLTV would be needed. Best, Stephen On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 9:49 PM, Mark Friedenbach m...@friedenbach.org wrote: I have written a reference implementation and BIP draft for a soft-fork change to the consensus-enforced behaviour of sequence numbers for the purpose of supporting transaction replacement via per-input relative lock-times. This proposal was previously discussed on the mailing list in the following thread: http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34146752/ In short summary, this proposal seeks to enable safe transaction replacement by re-purposing the nSequence field of a transaction input to be a consensus-enforced relative lock-time. The advantages of this approach is that it makes use of the full range of the 32-bit sequence number which until now has rarely been used for anything other than a boolean control over absolute nLockTime, and it does so in a way that is semantically compatible with the originally envisioned use of sequence numbers for fast mempool transaction replacement. The disadvantages are that external constraints often prevent the full range of sequence numbers from being used when interpreted as a relative lock-time, and re-purposing nSequence as a relative lock-time precludes its use in other contexts. The latter point has been partially addressed by having the relative lock-time semantics be enforced only if the most-significant bit of nSequence is set. This preserves 31 bits for alternative use when relative lock-times are not required. The BIP draft can be found at the following gist: https://gist.github.com/maaku/be15629fe64618b14f5a The reference implementation is available at the following git repository: https://github.com/maaku/bitcoin/tree/sequencenumbers I request that the BIP editor please assign a BIP number for this work. Sincerely, Mark Friedenbach -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Meta suggestions for this block size debate
I second this, I don't have time to read the large number of emails generated every day from the block size debate. A summary of the various positions and arguments would be extremely helpful. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 11:02 PM, gabe appleton gapplet...@gmail.com wrote: Also, can we try to get a wiki page for the debate? That way we could condense the information as much as possible. I'll be willing to assist if the page gets approval. On Jun 1, 2015 6:41 PM, Mats Henricson m...@henricson.se wrote: Hi! My fingers have been itching many times now, this debate drives me nuts. I just wish all posters could follow two simple principles: 1. Read up. Yes. All of what has been written. Yes, it will take many hours. But if you're rehashing what other smarter people have said over and over before, you're wasting hundreds of peoples time. Please don't. 2. Be helpful. Suggest alternatives. Just cristizising is just destructive. If you want no change, then say so. Mats -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] [BIP draft] Consensus-enforced transaction replacement signalled via sequence numbers
Hi Mark, Overall, I like this idea in every way except for one: unless I am missing something, we may still need an OP_RCLTV even with this being implemented. In use cases such as micropayment channels where the funds are locked up by multiple parties, the enforcement of the relative locktime can be done by the first-signing party. So, while your solution would probably work in cases like this, where multiple signing parties are involved, there may be other, seen or unforeseen, use cases that require putting the relative locktime right into the spending contract (the scriptPubKey itself). When there is only one signer, there's nothing that enforces using an nSequence and nVersion=2 that would prevent spending the output until a certain time. I hope this is received as constructive criticism, I do think this is an innovative idea. In my view, though, it seems to be less fully-featured than just repurposing an OP_NOP to create OP_RCLTV. The benefits are obviously that it saves transaction space by repurposing unused space, and would likely work for most cases where an OP_RCLTV would be needed. Best, Stephen On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 9:49 PM, Mark Friedenbach m...@friedenbach.org wrote: I have written a reference implementation and BIP draft for a soft-fork change to the consensus-enforced behaviour of sequence numbers for the purpose of supporting transaction replacement via per-input relative lock-times. This proposal was previously discussed on the mailing list in the following thread: http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34146752/ In short summary, this proposal seeks to enable safe transaction replacement by re-purposing the nSequence field of a transaction input to be a consensus-enforced relative lock-time. The advantages of this approach is that it makes use of the full range of the 32-bit sequence number which until now has rarely been used for anything other than a boolean control over absolute nLockTime, and it does so in a way that is semantically compatible with the originally envisioned use of sequence numbers for fast mempool transaction replacement. The disadvantages are that external constraints often prevent the full range of sequence numbers from being used when interpreted as a relative lock-time, and re-purposing nSequence as a relative lock-time precludes its use in other contexts. The latter point has been partially addressed by having the relative lock-time semantics be enforced only if the most-significant bit of nSequence is set. This preserves 31 bits for alternative use when relative lock-times are not required. The BIP draft can be found at the following gist: https://gist.github.com/maaku/be15629fe64618b14f5a The reference implementation is available at the following git repository: https://github.com/maaku/bitcoin/tree/sequencenumbers I request that the BIP editor please assign a BIP number for this work. Sincerely, Mark Friedenbach -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] soft-fork block size increase (extension blocks)
On 6/1/2015 10:21 AM, Adam Back wrote: if it stays as is for a year, in a wait and see, reduce spam, see fee-pressure take effect as it has before, work on improving improve decentralisation metrics, relay latency, and do a blocksize increment to kick the can if-and-when it becomes necessary and in the mean-time try to do something more long-term ambitious about scale rather than volume. What's your estimate of the lead time required to kick the can, if-and-when it becomes necessary? The other time-series I've seen all plot an average block size. That's misleading, because there's a distribution of block sizes. If you bin by retarget interval and plot every single block, you get this http://i.imgur.com/5Gfh9CW.png The max block size has clearly been in play for 8 months already. -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
[Bitcoin-development] [BIP draft] Consensus-enforced transaction replacement signalled via sequence numbers
I have written a reference implementation and BIP draft for a soft-fork change to the consensus-enforced behaviour of sequence numbers for the purpose of supporting transaction replacement via per-input relative lock-times. This proposal was previously discussed on the mailing list in the following thread: http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34146752/ In short summary, this proposal seeks to enable safe transaction replacement by re-purposing the nSequence field of a transaction input to be a consensus-enforced relative lock-time. The advantages of this approach is that it makes use of the full range of the 32-bit sequence number which until now has rarely been used for anything other than a boolean control over absolute nLockTime, and it does so in a way that is semantically compatible with the originally envisioned use of sequence numbers for fast mempool transaction replacement. The disadvantages are that external constraints often prevent the full range of sequence numbers from being used when interpreted as a relative lock-time, and re-purposing nSequence as a relative lock-time precludes its use in other contexts. The latter point has been partially addressed by having the relative lock-time semantics be enforced only if the most-significant bit of nSequence is set. This preserves 31 bits for alternative use when relative lock-times are not required. The BIP draft can be found at the following gist: https://gist.github.com/maaku/be15629fe64618b14f5a The reference implementation is available at the following git repository: https://github.com/maaku/bitcoin/tree/sequencenumbers I request that the BIP editor please assign a BIP number for this work. Sincerely, Mark Friedenbach -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Meta suggestions for this block size debate
I don't have permission to create a page. If someone else does, I'll happily get a framework started. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Ethan Heilman eth...@gmail.com wrote: I second this, I don't have time to read the large number of emails generated every day from the block size debate. A summary of the various positions and arguments would be extremely helpful. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 11:02 PM, gabe appleton gapplet...@gmail.com wrote: Also, can we try to get a wiki page for the debate? That way we could condense the information as much as possible. I'll be willing to assist if the page gets approval. On Jun 1, 2015 6:41 PM, Mats Henricson m...@henricson.se wrote: Hi! My fingers have been itching many times now, this debate drives me nuts. I just wish all posters could follow two simple principles: 1. Read up. Yes. All of what has been written. Yes, it will take many hours. But if you're rehashing what other smarter people have said over and over before, you're wasting hundreds of peoples time. Please don't. 2. Be helpful. Suggest alternatives. Just cristizising is just destructive. If you want no change, then say so. Mats -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] Meta suggestions for this block size debate
Also, can we try to get a wiki page for the debate? That way we could condense the information as much as possible. I'll be willing to assist if the page gets approval. On Jun 1, 2015 6:41 PM, Mats Henricson m...@henricson.se wrote: Hi! My fingers have been itching many times now, this debate drives me nuts. I just wish all posters could follow two simple principles: 1. Read up. Yes. All of what has been written. Yes, it will take many hours. But if you're rehashing what other smarter people have said over and over before, you're wasting hundreds of peoples time. Please don't. 2. Be helpful. Suggest alternatives. Just cristizising is just destructive. If you want no change, then say so. Mats -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
